THE FORUM ON FAITH

Green Sins?

2008-04-14T11:16:00.003-04:00

April 22 is Earth Day.

I remember the first Earth Day when I was a young adolescent and Boy Scout. We pulled a red, Radio Flyer wagon around our neighborhood collecting newspapers that our fathers helped us take to a recycling location. In return, our county government planted dogwood trees along a major route in the community.

Recycling was actually a rather popular activity in the county. We had neither public nor private curbside garbage service and on Saturday mornings citizens loaded their garbage cans in the back of their station wagons or in their car trunks and took all their rubbish to a public school parking lot where county garbage trucks waited. You had to dump it yourself into the chomping, mechanical maw of the truck and then you could put newspapers in a walk-in dumpster. No matter who you were, rich or poor, this was how you had to get rid of your trash and recycling was part of the deal. It was quite a community gathering.

Sometime in the 1980’s we seem to have lost interest in do-it-yourself environmentalism. We went for more powerful automobiles at the expense of fuel efficiency. We began to recycle less and consume more disposable goods and power- whatever the cost. Today, the lessons of financial conservatism and frugality learned during the great depression are unknown to generations of young Americans.

What role does religion play in all this?

At one time, the social philosophy known as the “Protestant Work Ethic” taught that prosperity is a sign of God’s favor on account of an individual’s personal righteousness. While we still adhere to the importance of work ethic, religious Americans don’t often see prosperity as a sign of righteousness any more. But at the same time, many Americans don’t hold the old time religion view of personal sin either. A common view now is that we are all basically good people who are misled into bad choices. It’s a kind of therapeutic view of human sinfulness.

So, the Vatican, not the expected spokesman for Reformed Protestantism, is getting tough on sin.

They’re even getting tough on environmental sin. In March, Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti listed some “new” sins during a newspaper interview in Rome. Among the social sins on the Vatican’s updated list are: stem cell research involving embryo destruction, human cloning, and ecological offenses. It isn’t exactly clear what environmental sins are from the Reuters report of this story, but apparently they are generally classified as acts that cause harm to the environment and therefore threaten the human race.

The question is: in a global culture in which people decreasingly define human nature as sinful, will the Vatican proclamation have any impact at all on the faithful?

Why Won't Jesus Take Me To Heaven?

2008-04-04T11:26:00.005-04:00

At age forty, I left corporate America to follow the call to ministry.

I was well educated, having been steeped in a refined broth of rationalism and critical reasoning, read all the appropriate European authors, perched my fanny on the erudite ruins at Delphi, and stumbled wide-eyed through Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem holocaust memorial. I was experienced as a world traveler who had skied the Alps, gone elbow to elbow with Chinese businessmen for platefuls of ugly fish in Kuala Lumpur restaurants, and lived amongst the “lost Woodstock generation” who shuffled around the west side of Greenwich Village in their Birkenstocks, avoiding exposure to the sun. I was even married with three young kids, the youngest a mumbo-jumbo yacking, couscous tossing extrovert.

I was ready for anything and knew it. What’s more, I knew that I knew it.

In seminary, professors work hard to relieve students of all their goofball, folkloric misconceptions about why and what we believe. They teach you that the Bible doesn’t really say what you think it says unless you’ve personally translated the old papyrus scrolls from the original Greek or Hebrew for yourself, dissected the grammar, and consulted all the scholars who’ve spent devoted and low paid lifetimes figuring out things like whether Paul actually wrote the letter to the Ephesians or if it was written by a follower or even an impostor.

Now I was really ready, theologically and Biblically locked and loaded.

And then began my hospital pastoral care rotation, clinical field work that could burn the corn-based wax shine off Helen of Troy’s golden apple. This is where you face the test of learning whether you can render all that theological and Biblical understanding into something meaningful in people’s lives. People who don’t care about the Greek or the Hebrew or the authorship of the letter to the Ephesians.

People who just want some answers.

The nurse administrator who ran the desk on the blood and organ diseases floor was sharp as a tack. Her smooth, perfect skin was somewhere between the color of maple syrup and green tea and her eyes never quite rose above the horizon of her reading glasses. She could see people like me coming before we’d even driven into the parking garage or waived our newly laminated security badges for the first time. She could eradicate that waxy shine from your golden apple faster than battery acid.

I introduced myself and asked for a patient list.

“Whatcha bring me?” she monotoned without looking up from her paperwork. There were several lists sitting on her desk.

“I, I beg your pardon? I’m sorry. Do you mean some kind of authorization or something?”

“I mean a muffin or a latte or something. But you don’t appear to have anything like that. Do you? No treat, no list.”

I stammered something unintelligible as she took a long drag off a diet soda.

“Go down this hall to room 41. Start there and work back. Pay attention.” She finished these gruff instructions by skewing her lower jaw slightly sideways and poking her tongue against her molars in a kind of disgusted way. I started down the hall.

Something I didn’t know about a diabetes patient on welfare is that either the person has feet or doesn’t and entering room 41, I immediately noticed that the sheets at the foot of the bed were curiously flat up to the knees. I swallowed and stepped forward to greet Irene with some sort of empathy not found in the doctrines of either Calvin or Luther. I was trying not to gaff and say something stupid like “How are you feeling?” or “I’m the chaplain today, is there something I can do for you?”

I spoke her name and asked where she was from. I asked about her family. I asked about her home and how she had gotten to the hospital. I asked when she might be released. I asked anything I could in order to avoid talking about her medical condition and her missing limbs. She was eighty-nine and lived in a small town in the mountains north of our city, had no children, a brother in a distant state, and no other family.

After a while, I asked if she wished to pray.

“No,” she mumbled weakly, taking long, slow breaths every couple of words. “It’s too late for prayer. I just want to know something. I want you to tell me something chaplain, pastor, whoever you are.”

“Okay,” I responded quietly, reluctantly.

“I just want to know why I’m still here. I’m sick and not gonna get better. Been in here three times this year. All they can do is amputate again.”

I said I was sorry and that she was probably still in the hospital because the doctors still had some hope.

“Those doctors don’t have hope. They’ve got walls full of degrees and microscopes and clean white jackets but they’ve got no hope. Anyway, I don’t want to know why I’m still in the hospital.”

Her eyes moistened and streams of tears silently slid down the sides of her ashen face and into her matted, white hair as she lay flat on her back.

“I want to know what only you can tell me, chaplain, pastor. What you have to tell me. I want to know why Jesus is leavin’ me here this way. Why won’t he just take me to heaven today, to be with my Mama?”

On Faith and the Environment

2008-03-27T11:14:00.006-04:00

Warmer days with longer periods of sunlight have been distracting my kids from homework lately and I can’t really blame them. But, Spring weather hasn’t distracted my attention from the price of gasoline or how quickly it drains out of my Volvo wagon at a paltry 17 miles per gallon around town.

According to the business magazine Forbes (www.forbesautos.com), one burned gallon of gas translates to 20lbs of CO2, a greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. So, driving just the U.S. average of 15,000 miles in a year makes me personally responsible for over 17,647lbs of carbon dioxide. You can figure your particular carbon footprint at www.epa.gov/greenvehicles.

Let’s see: 15,000 miles divided by 22mpg (average fuel efficiency according to Department of Transportation statisticians based on 55% city and 45% highway miles) times 20lbs per gallon times 247 million U.S. passenger vehicles. Well, you do the math.

Of course, maybe you’re a global warming skeptic. Maybe you think that a single cold winter disproves long term, statistical data. Some would-be debunkers of human contributions to warming even cite, as primary causes, clinically immeasurable, naturally occurring events such as volcanoes and flatulence from bovine and teenage boys.

On the other side of the argument, practical observers in business have concluded otherwise.

John Hofmeister has taken a pro environment stand as President of Shell Oil’s North American operations. In a Charlie Rose interview (see the video at www.charlierose.com), Hofmeister affirmed his industry observation that human efforts do significantly impact on global warming based on the amount of carbon emitted each year and the scientifically calculable effect per ton of carbon in the atmosphere.

Ray Anderson, Chairman of flooring maker Interface, Inc., has been guiding his company toward a goal of zero negative environmental impact for decades. Disgusted by the sheer amount of waste and rate of extraction of carbon resources, Anderson has innovated to drastically reduce waste, use fewer raw materials and decrease emissions from manufacturing. Anderson’s personal commitment even includes the swapping of out his executive luxury vehicle for a compact hybrid.

Are these guys are just kooks? If so, they’re highly successful kooks. Interface gross sales in 2006 were just over $1 billion and Shell USA revenues topped $26 billion. These are not tie dye wearing granola munchers but savvy industrialists whose agendas are productivity, efficiency, return on equity, profit margins, and shareholder value.

That said, Anderson has a serious indictment of the religious community.

In his book, Mid-Course Correction (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2000), Anderson stated that he was turned off by the church specifically because, in his experience, its views did not support environmental reality. It’s true that the environment has been a divisive, hot potato issue for the religious community in the last decade but if you want to make value choices informed by faith, environmental concern need not be a dilemma.

Simply put, human beings have a mandate from God to be stewards of creation.

Creation’s problem isn’t the debate between evolution and the book of Genesis, but our dismissal of inconvenient Biblical truths like God’s absolute claim over all of it. However it got here, we think it’s our creation, not God’s. We’ve got the mineral rights, the surface rights, and the air rights too.

Well God has made us many promises, but has never given away the farm.

The famous line in the first chapter of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over… every living thing that moves upon the earth” is not a license to freely exploit natural resources for profit. It’s a gracious provision of sustenance. Moreover, we Christians should re-acquaint ourselves with Leviticus 25:23/24 which commands: “… the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land.”

You don’t have to be a tie dye wearing, granola muncher or liberal theologian to make ethical value choices about the environment. Just read your Bible thoroughly. All of it.

21st Century Spirituality

2008-03-07T18:01:00.003-05:00

One of the biggest changes in American religious life in the last 100 years is the decline in mainline church attendance and the tremendous increase in non-traditional religious worship groups.

Maybe that’s not so astonishing. After all, society has clearly fragmented compared to other times of social stability. Our consumption based economy thrives on impulsive searches for consumer satisfaction in everything from fast food to music to sources of news and opinion. Religion is based on voluntary associations, which means that in our society impulse driven desire for gratifying participatory events is as strong in religious trends as it is in any other.

Out there in that consumer satisfaction based environment of religious options there seems to be a surging interest in spirituality. Like other forms of impulsive consumption, this new spirituality has more to do with personal emotional and psychological nurture and empowerment than traditional spirituality which emphasized a self-emptying discipleship.

So what are the essential tenets of this new spirituality? Is there any place for traditional Christian characteristics such as confession of sin or grace, or salvation through Christ or revelation through scripture and liturgy?
What’s the relationship between God and a 21st century spiritualist? Has God become the big, Zen master therapist in the sky?

What do you want from your religious associations and practices? Are you seeking enlightenment? A community where you feel included? A bridge over troubled water?

What's it all about?

I Beg Your Pardon

2007-09-19T09:50:00.001-04:00

1 Timothy 1:12-17

Presenting Engagement: Confess What?!
The Psalm reading in the Presbyterian lectionary for today would seem rather harsh to many people. It’s the kind of condemnation that a lot of people feel is an effort of the church to make good people feel guilty about themselves. It’s the kind of condemnation that drives some people away from church entirely and drives some churches to dump that depressing prayer of confession entirely.

I’m talking about Psalm 14.

It begins like this:
Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.[i]

Well what are we to make of that? Surely there is someone who is good. Surely there is at least one person who has done no abominable deeds. Surely somebody out there truly seeks after God.

I know that I do.

And I know that you do too.

We’re good people, you and I. Aren’t we?

After all we’re here in church today and that makes us good people, doesn’t it? At least that must mean that we are not the ones saying: “There is no God.” I didn’t do any deliberate harm to anyone on the way here and that too makes me good, doesn’t it? I haven’t coveted anybody’s anything or taken the Lord’s name in vain or murdered or stolen or littered or even forgotten to make up my bed today and all that makes me a good person. Doesn’t it?

Well that’s what many people think to themselves about themselves. So when they come to the moment for silent prayer in the prayer of confession, they shift in their pews uncomfortably. They shuffle their feet or pick at their fingernails because they can’t think of anything to pray.

A Canon on the clergy staff at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London remarked that in some baptism services in the Anglican tradition where people are asked if they “repent of sins that separate us from God and neighbour,” you could actually perceive the mental calisthenics that people were doing just to think of something they’d done wrong so that they could feel appropriately penitent at that particular moment when such a feeling was required of them by church ceremony.[ii]

But conjuring up an appropriately contrite feeling or accepting layer upon layer of guilt until you just want to jump off a cliff, is not what confession is all about.

It’s about mercy.

The Canon from St. Paul’s went on to describe what church confession does and what it does is first acknowledge the fact that we human beings commit sin. It is simply our nature. Second, confession describes how “sin is manifest: through negligence, weakness, through our own deliberate fault.” It’s not just what we do but what we don’t do as well. It’s not just what we say but also what we think. Murder is obviously a sin, but so is hatred.[iii]

When it comes to confessing, we’ve all got a story to tell. We’ve all got a reason to ask God for mercy.

Biblical Context: What’s going on?
In this letter to Timothy that we read today, the writer tells his own story. He talks about his own need for mercy.

“I was a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. I had acted ignorantly in unbelief.”[iv]

This writer is acknowledging his sins in word and thought, his sins in deeds, his sins in ignorance and negligence, his sins in weakness, and in deliberate fault. It’s all there.

This letter is referred to as one of the Pastoral Epistles which includes both letters to Timothy and the letter to Titus. Now traditionally, these were thought to have been written by the Apostle Paul late in his ministry. But more recent scholars have recognized that the theology expressed in the Pastorals conflicts with theology of Paul in letters that we are sure Paul wrote like Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians.

Much of the content of 1st Timothy relates to conflicts in the church and how those conflicts should be dealt with. But these conflicts were about disruptions to a church organization that saw itself with a long term role in society. Paul, however, thought the end of time was near and was interested in the church in the short term rather than in the long term.

So who wrote these letters and what can we do with them?

Perhaps it was someone in the Pauline tradition some years after Paul’s death by which time everybody realized that the end of the age was a bit farther off than Paul or any other of the Apostles had expected. In that situation, Paul’s proteges had to resolve long term church issues that Paul hadn’t imagined. And yet, they sought to resolve those issues under the authority and the name of Paul.

And when it came to confession of sin, they used a version of Paul’s story.

You remember that Paul was a Jewish zealot who persecuted the Christian church but was at the same time righteous in terms of the Torah law. In other words, he kept the Commandments and the other laws of Moses and followed the teachings of the prophets. In terms of Judaism, he was definitely not a blasphemer. He was not someone who needed mercy for committing sin under the Hebrew traditions.

But something changed- he was converted. This paul now testifies about his need for mercy. His persecution of the Christians made him a man of violence. His denial of the divinity of Christ made him a blasphemer. This writer from the school of Paul or in the style of Paul, tells Paul’s story in order to provide a personal example.

He is an example of the human capacity for sin and he is an example of the human need for mercy.

In effect, this writer is saying: “I was the biggest sinner around. My need for mercy was tremendous. I sinned against God by blaspheming. I sinned against other people through my violent ways. I even sinned when I didn’t realize I was sinnin g because I was ignorant of the fact that what I was doing was wrong because I did not believe in Christ Jesus.”

Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
But the writer is saying one thing more. He is saying: “If I was the biggest sinner around and God had mercy on me then God will show mercy on anyone. No one was less deserving of mercy and more in need of mercy than I was and yet the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.”

This story makes Paul into an example but it does not make Paul into a hero. Paul isn’t some triumphant banner carrier for Christ in a righteous army of faithful Christians. Paul was judged. Paul was found guilty of his blasphemy and his violence and his ignorant unbelief. The amazing thing is that Paul still received mercy.

That’s what makes this passage so amazing. Paul didn’t get a free pass. He was judged and he still received mercy. He was given a reprieve even though he was sinful. He was strengthened by Christ even though he was sinful.

The story of this Paul is not about conjuring up an appropriately contrite feeling or accepting layer upon layer of guilt until he just wanted to jump off a cliff. The story of this Paul is about receiving mercy.

The whole gospel is about receiving mercy.

Christ Jesus is about receiving mercy.

And so this passage from 1st Timothy includes the wonderful doxology that we often use as our assurance of pardon: “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”

It’s all about receiving mercy.

Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
I think that many people who dislike the Christian concept of confession of sin only see confession as the laying on of guilt.

For them, sin is like a stack of clammy pancakes that have sat out on the plate too long and have grown cold. The stack grows taller and taller. The syrup gets stickier and stickier until the pancakes become a plateful of inedible, unappealing mush. The eater’s appetite disolves and they are driven away from the table.

That clammy stack of guilt is all they see and so they’re driven away from church and driven away from Christ because they think the judgement will be too much for them. They think they will be put down by God and will become unable to see themselves positively in the future.

That’s unfortunate because then they miss the part about mercy. They don’t see that confession to God leads to mercy from God. They don’t see that mercy from God changes their relationship with other people for the better and changes how they see themselves for the better.

But I think that group is actually a minority.

The majority are people who dislike the Christian concept of confession of sin because they don’t think they have sinned. When it comes time for the silent confession they are the ones shifting around in their pew uncomfortably. Not only can they not think of anything they’ve done wrong lately but they think of sins as deliberate acts of felonious significance. Sin is murder or theft or road rage or animal abuse or fraud, something you go to court for and maybe even something you go to jail for. And since they have not done anything of that magnitude, these folks don’t think that they have done anything that requires forgiveness from God or anybody else for that matter.

In essence, these are kind of like the people described in Psalm 14 who say in their hearts that there is no God. The idea in the Psalm is not just that some people disavow the existence of God. It’s not just that some people deny the possibility of God. We call that atheism. No these people act as if there is no God. They act as if there is no need for God’s mercy, no need for God.

This kind of atheism has more to do with how people behave rather than what they believe. We call this “practical atheism.”[v] It’s a kind of autonomy in which people judge for themselves whether or not their deeds require repentence. If you can decide something like that for yourself, then you obviously don’t need God. If you can decide for yourself what the law is and whether or not you’ve broken that law, then you have no need either for God’s judgement or God’s mercy.

But here’s the universal truth that we try to deny all our lives: the Psalm says that when the Lord looks down on humankind, there is no one who seeks God.

We all think we can make up our own index of right and wrong. At times, we all think we have nothing to confess.

Conclusion: What’s the Point?
That is why the example of the Pauline writer in 1st Timothy is so important.

Paul was a preacher and teacher and evangelist who was widely known and respected in the first century Christian communities of Greece and Rome. His example could lead others to re-evaluate their own lives. His story could lead others to re-examine their own stories. His willingness to confess his sinfulness and tell of the mercy he had received from God could lead others to confess and receive mercy.

We don’t seem to get many church or civic leaders who confess freely and honestly and tell their stories unless they’ve done some great wrong and have gotten caught. Occasionally, some television evangelist does something sensational that undermines his credibility and cries publicly about his guilt- and gets a boost in ratings and advertising dollars.

But there are very few religious leaders who make an example of the sinfulness of their everyday live in both words and thoughts, in deeds and in deeds left undone.

So we use the example of ourselves, for ourselves. We make our confession aloud together to take responsibility for what we do as a society and we bow our heads to make our individual confessions directly to God.

And then the minister tells us that God has heard our confession and that we are forgiven.

We learn that the saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners and we are grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord who has strengthened us and appointed us to his service. AMEN.

[i] Psalm 14: 1-3.
[ii] http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=97.
[iii] ibid.
[iv] 1 Timothy1:12-13
[v] Cousar, Gaventa, McCann, Newsome. Texts For Preaching. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 510.

Sabbath Chores

2007-09-04T12:16:00.000-04:00

Luke 13:10-17

Presenting Engagement: Sunday rules.
As a kid, I would spend about a month at my grandparents’ home every summer and every Sunday afternoon we’d go over to the next county to visit other folks in the family. They lived in a village of less than a thousand people nestled in the shadow of a low mountain range bordering a long Tennessee Valley Authority lake.

Still in church clothes, the grown ups would sit in green, straight back rockers on the front porch and talk about local gossip and wayward family members. I, still in church clothes, would sit on the front porch floor, pretty bored, playing with a toy car or I could shuffle down the privet-lined, gravel lane that ran from the house to the intersection with the main road down next to the court house. There were no buildings between the house and the corner so you could see the back of the court house as plain as day. And there in back of that building was a large sort of yard where men lounged all afternoon on summer Sundays.

Once I asked who those men were who always lounged there and I learned a major distinction about the front and back of any rural court house. The men who loitered in front of the court house, slicing chunks of tobacco from plugs of Reynolds Natural Leaf were citizens in good standing while the men who loitered in the fenced-in yard behind the building, slicing similar chunks from identical plugs of Reynolds Natural Leaf, were convicts. It seemed by definition, the rule was that good folks got to have their tobacco in front of the hall of justice but the desperados had to go around back.

Rules. Rules. Rules.

You can’t get away from the rules, no matter where you are or how you live or what day of the week it is and Sunday was a day when the rules were applied more enthusiastically than all the other days of the week.

In Fact, this indolent, summer time ritual of visiting the kin on Sunday afternoon was chocked full of rules. There were rules about what you could wear, where you could go, how grimy you could get, how noisy and boisterous you could be around adults. Of course life wasn’t any less strict for those adults because they weren’t allowed to do their work on Sunday and none of the adults I knew played golf because the local Baptists thought it was somehow related to dancing.

But not working on Sunday simply for the reason that it was Sunday made very little sense to me as a child. In other words, the “causistry” of Sunday sabbath regulations did not appear rational to my kid-sized brain.

So I eventually asked my grandfather about why the preacher worked on Sunday. Well, it seemed the preacher had a special sanction. I asked who was down at the T V A on Sunday making sure that the big dam didn’t burst and flood the town. It seemed that people called engineers had a special sanction too. Doctors had special sanction if there was an emergency and of course farmers had really special sanctions or else the splotched Guernsey dairy cattle would bloat all up and the pigs and chickens would die of thirst or starvation. The people with the biggest sanction of all on Sundays were moms and wives because without them, well without them all the men and boys would have starved including the farmers, doctors, engineers, preachers, and even court house jail guards. Not a pretty picture.

So, it seems only natural that if all these kinds of mere mortals get sanctions to work on Sabbath then Jesus of Nazareth ought to get a sanction too! But the synagogue leaders did not see things with the clarity of a child.

Their causistry was obscure, but rules were rules.

Biblical Context: Jesus’ controversy.
Now, when it came to the matter of how religious practices were mediated in Hebrew society Jesus was precocious as a child and confrontational as an adult. You recall how he was already unsettling the religious establishment as a twelve year old asking those embarassingly insightful questions to the Jerusalem temple elders. As minister who is the parent of a teenager, I know how that goes. It can be frustrating to say the least!

And as he became older, Jesus continued to speak truth. In fact, you could say he was a religious activist who had so many confrontations with religious leaders over the three years of his preaching and healing ministry that his activism ultimately was the presenting argument for putting him on the cross to die.

Part of that activism was that he never seemed to go along with the established causistry of religious regulations. In fact, he thought the religious establishment had gotten it all wrong and were misleading the people.

It wasn’t that Jesus disrespected human authority; it was that he respected God’s sovereign authority above all.

So there he was in one of the local synagogues one Sabbath day, teaching as a rabbi normally would. A woman entered with a crippling ailment that caused her back to bow right over so that she could not even stand up straight. Anyone with even a touch of osteo arthritis can understand exactly what she was going through.

Jesus saw her plight and unburdened her. Did you notice how Luke presents Jesus’ statement? “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”[i]

Set free! Liberated! This claim is a direct, metaphorical reference to the Egyptian exodus when God set the Israelites free from slavery to the Pharaohs. Now Jesus has set this woman free from bondage to her crippling ailment.

But the synagogue leader did not think it was right to do miracles on the Sabbath because this leader, standing there in the same room with Jesus, spoke disparagingly about Jesus’ act of healing.

The description in the gospel makes the synagogue leader sound like a politician who is disgruntled over another politician’s stance in a debate. If you watch those debates, have you noticed how the candidates put eachother down without making honest eye contact with each other? They look at the debate moderator and the television camera but avoid looking at the person they are attempting to belittle with their answer. The strategy is to get the crowd on their side and make their opponent seem totally unworthy of recognition.

That is just what this particular synagogue leader wanted. He was outraged that Jesus the rabbi had come into the synagogue and healed someone on the Sabbath so instead of glaring at that rabbi, the leader addressed the crowd who were assembled there and quoted the Ten Commandments. “Don’t come in here on the Sabbath and expect to be healed and don’t follow anyone who does work on the Sabbath,” he’s saying.

But Jesus of Nazareth did not play to the crowd. He responded directly to the synagogue leader, looking him directly in the eye and saying: “You hypocrites!”[ii] Perhaps noting that special sanction for farmers, Jesus pointed out how even the oxen and donkeys get watered on the Sabbath. Wasn’t that work? Didn’t the synagogue leader do this work on the Sabbath too? And here was this Hebrew woman, a spiritual descendent of Abraham, a family member of God’s chosen people. Was her liberation less valuable than the watering of a donkey or an ox?

Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
The resources of Hollywood could probably turn this exchange between Jesus and the synagogue leader into a cinematic blockbuster. It has all you could ask for: pathos, moral outrage, a hero who sticks up for the little person against the hard-hearted establishment. All that stuff that makes a great movie moment is right here in this gospel account by Luke.

There are actually two things going on in this story. First, this is a didactic moment, a teaching moment.

What Jesus was teaching that day was that scrupulous adherence to the letter of the Torah law[iii] pointed out a moral fallacy. It pointed out how these hypocritical people were so stuck in the rut of scriptural absolutism that they missed the fact that healing this woman was more righteous than ignoring her on account of the Sabbath.

Healing is divine work. Jesus was teaching the crowd and the leaders that doing God’s work takes place every single day of the week. Rest from your profit making labors on the Sabbath but don’t ever rest from your divine chores.

It is particularly significant that this woman’s crippling illness was thought to be the work of Satan. In the scriptures, we find that any debilitation was considered caused by evil spirits and so if you were leperous or crippled or bleeding from sores that would not close, you were ostracized from healthy society. No one would eat with you or touch you or befriend you in any way.

The healing of this woman was more than physical healing. Jesus was liberating her from a severe illness and at the same time he was reconciling her with her people, her kin, the other descendents of Abraham in that place. God’s will is the reconciliation and restoration of people each and every day of the week.

First, this is a didactic moment. Second, Jesus was a prophet and this is a prophetic moment.

The prophecy here is that the Kingdom of God is constantly breaking into this everyday world that we live in. This world thinks in terms of the concrete rather than the abstract. This world wants quantifiable performance results and test scores and metric analysis and church growth figures.

But the kingdom of God does not operate on these human terms. You can’t measure reconciliation. You can’t pick up a handful of restoration and put it in a test tube, fire up a bunson burner under it and find out at what temperature it boils.

Jesus’ prophecy tells me that the Kingdom of God is not found in the absolutism of doctrine. It is found in loving my neighbor as myself. It is found in the divine chores of liberation and healing. If I bury my head in the absolutism of the Sabbath regulations and don’t do my divine chores, then the Kingdom of God might pass right by me and I will have missed it.

Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
I think it is often very difficult to parse God’s will in the Bible because much of scripture relates to the particular rather than the general. We look for universal truth in stories of particular situations in particular lives thousands of years ago. So it may be disconcerting and confusing when we come across a text like this one today because this particular story of this particular situation seems to contradict the particular divine commandment to observe the Sabbath that comes from another particular story a thousand years earlier.

The German scholar, Gunther Bornkamm wrote that Jesus’ offense in the synagogue that day was not an offense against the Sabbath itself. Jesus’ offence was against “Sabbath causistry” developed to excrutiating exactitude by a pedantic religious hierarchy.[iv] In other words, the commandment to observe the Sabbath wasn’t what Jesus objected to. He objected to the social custom that had been developed around the commandment. He objected to the fact that that social custom had obscured the original relevance of the Sabbath.

It is oh so easy to venture forth into a noble cause only to find that after time has passed we have forgotten our original intent, lost the original relevance of our endeavor. And when that happens, all we have left is a hollow ritual.

I think we can find this in any number of places in our lives. Perhaps we have turned lively and meaningful celebrations into routine procedures. We might have turned precious relationships into wooden associations. We might have turned interesting work into weekday routines just for the sake of a paycheck.

When that happens, it is unfortunate.

But when those rare moments happen in which the presence of the Kingdom of God flashes by and we miss it because we were too busy performing fossilized traditions out of some short sighted sense of formality, well that is more than unfortunate. It is isolating and hope denying.

Conclusion: What’s the Point?
Jesus Christ is our best hope in life and in death. Don’t miss his presence and lose that hope. Be watchful for signs that the Kingdom of God is present. You’ll know it when you see it.

You’ll know it when someone goes out of their way to do a senseless act of kindness for someone else.

You’ll know it when someone forgives someone else even though they are not obligated to.

You’ll know it when old enemies make peace.

You’ll know it when someone gives their time to tutor a child or visit a shut in or welcomes a stranger into the church or begins a recycling program or speaks some unpopular truth.

You might just see it while you’re sitting on the front porch in a green straight backed rocker conversing with your family on a Sunday afternoon in the summer in your church clothes.

For heaven’s sake, don’t miss it! Amen.

[i] Luke 13:12
[ii] Luke 13:15
[iii] Exodus 20:9 & Deuteronomy 5:13
[iv] Bornkamm, Gunther. Jesus of Nazareth, 3rd edition, (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 97.

Endurance In The Race Of Life

2007-08-19T15:11:00.000-04:00

Hebrews 11:29-12:2

Presenting Engagement: The race as metaphor for life.
Every Fourth of July, the Atlanta Track Club hosts a ten kilometer footrace down Peachtree Road in the center of Atlanta. They’ve been putting on this race for over three decades and the 2007 race attracted 60,000 runners.

When you register for this race, you have to predict how long it will take you to run the race based on your record in other equally long races or in previous Peachtree races. Runners receive a placement number to pin on the front of their shirts and the first two digits of that number indicate which section you are eligible to start from. You can understand that if, based on your speed, you are runner 59,999 then you are going to be at the back of a very long group of participants!

I have personally never been in a group any closer to the front than halfway and it takes ages to even get up to the starting line. So there you stand, shaking loose the muscles in your calves and thighs and arms, stretching your back and stomach muscles for maybe twenty to forty minutes. It’s hard to stay loose and it’s even harder to stay focused. There are spectators on the curb and spectators peering out of hotel windows overhead. The loudspeaker up ahead announces the start of faster groups. The excitement climbs. You want to get going.

Finally you begin trudging forward with stunted steps. You are packed like a sardine with hundreds of other anxious sardines beside you, behind you, ahead of you. Two hundred yards to the starting line. One hundred yards. Fifty yards. Twenty five yards.

Finally you reach the line. The race officials call out. Radio stations broadcast live some kind of thumping, heart pumping, heavy jamming music. A starter pistol barks.

So off you go into the July sunshine. You’ll have stretches where the road descends and other points where you’ll encounter places with names like “heartbreak hill.” You’ll get leg weary. You’ll get thirsty but you won’t want to drink for fear of stomach cramps. You’ll get hot. And close to the finish you’ll slow back down to a stutter step as thousands of runners attempt to navigate two narrow chutes at the finish line. Finally, if you’ve made it all the way, you will flow out into the broad expanse of Piedmont park.

You did it. Or at least some of you did it. The reward, the big pay off? It’s a T shirt and a popsicle and the knowledge that you made it all the way.

How did you make it through to the end? What got you from the pre-start warm up and anticipation to finish line?

I can tell you from experience that the thing that keeps you going through it all is the support of spectators. It’s a far bigger reward than either the Tshirt or the popsicle! They cheer. They wave banners. You see people you know standing on the sidewalk and they call out your name. Even if they don’t know you they yell: “looking great!” or “you’re gonna make it!” or “way to go!”

All in all, this race, in fact any race, is a great metaphor for life itself. We all need the encouragement of others to make it from pre-start to finish. We all need those cheering hollers and smiling faces to bouy us up in times of distress and heartache and illness and grief and loneliness.

We need a community and if we have a faith community that is strong and loving, then perhaps we can live strong lives no matter what life throws at us.

Biblical Context: What's going on?
The scripture lesson today talks about just such a community of faith.

The reading is from a portion of the New Testament known as the Letter to the Hebrews. It was added to the cannon, which is the body of scripture that we speak of as the Bible, in the 4th century specifically because it was thought to have been written by the Apostle Paul. Scholars after that time, however, decided it wasn’t written by Paul. They also don’t think it was written to Jewish Christians as the title implies. And there’s no greeting at the beginning that would have been standard in an epistle so it probably isn’t even a letter either.

Now, with all that contradictory scholarship you might wonder why this “letter” stayed in the Biblical cannon and why it continued to be keep its title. But then, Hebrews is a difficult text to get to know. It’s one of those texts that defies any attempt to read it simplistically or literally because if you read it that way you will come away with some very dark considerations about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism that contrast very strongly with the teachings of the Gospels.

The basic theology of this “letter” is that Christianity is superior to and supercedes Judaism. It proclaims that the Old Testament is inadequate testimony to the powerful redemption of God. It claims that God’s covenant with Abraham is an inadequate revelation of God. It claims that the faithful patriarchs of the Old Testament could not achieve salvation without Christ no matter how faithful they were.

Hebrews was very likely a sermon written late in the first century and sent out to be read to various congregations. At that time persecution of Christians was widespread and there was a strong impulse among new converts to either abandon this persecuted religion or fly under the official radar of the Roman governors by claiming that they were Jewish instead of Christian. It’s the same God, after all. Isn’t it?

This sermon intends to dissuade these frightened congregations from leaving the faith by specifically demonstrating the superiority of Christianity.

This was an age when the apocalypse- the end of time- was expected to occur at any moment. So the writer of Hebrews wanted to show that being faithful to Christ was the only way to be certain of immortality. The writer says: “Look, if you convert to Judaism then you are abandoning true salvation in Christ for a mere foreshadowing of salvation through the law of Moses. If you accept life under the flawed covenant of Abraham then you are giving up on the true covenant in Christ which promises resurrection from death.”

It’s a powerfully written argument heard by a frightened and imperilled group of believers whose new found faith was tenuous and susceptible to threats from Roman authorities.

Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
The section we read today tells of the mighty deeds that Old Testament heroes performed because of their faith in God. These are impressive accounts. Gideon, David, Samson, the prophet Samuel. Through their faith they were able to “conquer kingdoms, administer justice, obtain promises, quench raging fire.” The Jewish martyrs described in the Maccabean writings suffered mocking and torture, and even endured excruciating death at the hands of stone throwing mobs and sadistic Roman soldiers. The faith of these heroes was powerful and they were steadfast in their beliefs even in the face of torture and death.

This is a strong testimony of what faith can do. When we read this, we’re set up to admire these heroes and count them as lion hearted role models. We understand that. We accept it and we’re ready to imitate those role models. But then the writer twists the narrative around and tells us something that is inteded to make us see that no matter how faithful these heroes were, their achievements were imperfect because they did not know Christ.

The writer says: “Yet all these… did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.”

What in the world can that mean? Just when we get scripture figured out there’s something that throws us of course again.

The answer lies in the claim that our faith is different than the faith of these Old Testament heroes because we have the revelation of Christ and we have Christ’s death on the cross that gives us salvation. It’s a fine point of theology but it says that since Christ’s covenant is perfect and Christ’s revelation is perfect and since Christ’s saving death is perfect then our faith in Christ fulfills the imperfect faith of the patriarchs and martyrs who lived before Christ.

Our faith in Christ fulfills the faith of our Old Testament ancestors.

Our faith in the possibility of eternal life through Jesus Christ brings eternal life to our Old Testament ancestors.

And yet, this writer also calls all those Old Testament ancestors a “great cloud of witnesses.” It’s as if two things are happening at once.

On the one hand, our faith is making perfect the faith of those who came before us. On the other hand, those who came before us, the witnesses who surround us, were the pioneers in faith whose mighty acts of heroism made our own faith possible.

We fulfill them but we need to stand on their shoulders to claim that fulfillment for ourselves.

Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
I think that as we go through life’s experiences, as we run the race of life, we tend to think of ourselves in that good old American way: we think of ourselves as lone pioneers forging our way through the challenges of the wilderness, combating the storms and floods and wild animals, climbing over the lofty mountain passes. And like those early pioneers we sometimes we think God is on our side because we stand for what is morally right and our successes prove how right we are. Conversely, we sometimes think God is against us when we meet catastrophic setbacks.

But actually, we’ve got that all wrong. That traditional folklore promotes a false reality.

First of all, God is on our side because God loves us and not just because of the moral talk that we talk. And more than that, God does not stop loving us just because we fail to walk our talk. That’s what divine forgiveness is all about as long as we are honest about our human nature and the human capacity for moral failure.

Second, if God loves us despite our human nature, then God can never be against us. God is never the cause of our setbacks.

Third, we are not the pioneers that we think we are. Behind every Horatio Alger story of a self made man there is some un-named and unacknowledged individual who gave that self made man a crucial opportunity. In every Peachtree Road Race, there are volunteers who hand out unlimited cups of water to hot and dry and thirsty participants. Every mile there is someone who shouts to thousands of anonymous runners: “Come on. You can do it. I have confidence in you!”

There is a great cloud of witnesses around us at all times urging us on. They have travelled the road we travel. They know the challenges we face. They have faced persecution. They have faced illness and loneliness and grief. They have fought cancer. They have lost loved ones and they have cried with joy over photographs of new babies. They have loved life.

You are not alone.

You stand on the shoulders of those witnesses to claim your triumphs and by boosting you up, they fulfill their own triumphant destinies. The joy is twofold. It is the joy of completing the race as well as the joy of helping others to complete their own race.

This is a joy that we can never find on our own. This shared triumph is far more glorious than any single handed achievment because it is the achievment of a whole community.

Conclusion: What’s the Point?
Whatever else the writer of this “letter” to the Hebrews is telling us, he is telling us that Christian believers have something unique that sustains us for the long race of life.

We have the community which is a great cloud of witnesses who have prepared the way for us and who urge us on to the finish line.

And we have faith in the enduring presence of Christ Jesus who is the true pioneer in faith and leader in this race of life. Christ Jesus, who faithfully suffered on the cross for our sake, gave us a salvation that is the ultimate encouragement for us. Christ Jesus is the ultimate proof of God’s love for us.

With God’s love, we are capable of any good thing. AMEN.

Unfinished Business

2007-08-06T17:21:00.000-04:00

Revelation 21:1-7

Presenting Engagement: life and plans cut short.
Imagine yourself travelling along your life’s journey, working to live out your life’s plans, to live out your hopes and dreams, when suddenly some catastrophic interruption occurs that dashes all those plans, curtails all those hopes and dreams!

I thought about that this week when the interstate bridge over the Mississippi River fell during heavy traffic between Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.

Dozens of automobiles and several busses were travelling on to some particular destination when tragedy struck. They were going home from work. They were going home from school trips. They were going home from summer vacations or just setting off on vacations. They were taxi drivers delivering passengers, truck drivers delivering goods. They were social wokrers going out to help improve the lives of others. Some were simply folks going on an errand on the other side of town.

There were all these people who’s lives were interrupted by catastrophe that resulted in disabling injury or even death. Plans delayed indefinitely. Plans disrupted permanently. Business that now goes unfinished. Busy people in busy moments of play or work or chores whose hopes and dreams for the years to come collapsed with the concrete slabs of a highway bridge, smashing into a swirling river bottom sixty feet below.

I don’t know if the most distressing part of it all is the death and injury or the unfulfilled plans of the accident victims.

Of course, this tragedy reminds me of a number of other disasters involving lives lost during travel. I think of the morbid tragedy of the Titanic. Of airplane incidents. I recall a classmate who perished on an airpalne the summer after our seventh grade year. I recall a college classmate who drowned during a whitewater rafting trip. And we can never forget the victims of 9/11, those who were just arriving at work in the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon and those who had boarded early morning flights on business trips or personal travel. All lives cut short in the middle of plans, hopes and dreams.

The most famous story of such a disaster is probably Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The novel was written in 1927 and was made into a popular movie by the director Quentin Tarrentino several years ago.

Wilder’s novel tells about a fictional bridge collapse in Peru in 1714 in which five people perish. This bridge had been regarded as the finest and most “high tech” bridge in the entire country yet it fell carrying these five people, all on their way to specific destinations, filfilling prescious life plans. Five people living out their hopes and dreams. Five people caught in the middle of their life journeys. Five people whose plans were cut short by disaster.

When asked about the purpose intended in this plot, Wilder revealed that it was a question: is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?[i] In other words, is there some supernatural agent of fate that assigns us each a destiny that we can’t know? Or are we in control?

And that’s really a basic question of life, isn’t it?

I mean, here we are making great plans, hoping and dreaming wonderful things off in the future or working hard to complete dreams and plans that we’ve already imagined and when tragedy strikes from some source outside of our own control we inevitably ask: who controls our destiny? Are our lives just some board game that we play out to fill the time but which ultimately has no purpose at all?

Is the course of life just as Shakespeare described it in the play Hamlet? You know that famous soliloquy where Hamlet says:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Do our dreams signify nothing? Why bother dreaming? Why make any plans at all? Is the invisible hands that controls our fate the hand of God?

Biblical Context: new things.
Now, the Revelation of John is a daunting and even frightening book of the Bible. In parts, God sounds exactly like a deity that exercises supreme power, forestalling all our hopes and dreams, snatching us out of the prime of life or taking us away from our loved ones when God considers the timing to be appropriate.

This apocalyptic vision of John is hard for us to understand in 2007, so many centuries after it was written, so many centuries after the conditions that this prophet John saw all around him. But we misunderstand Biblical prophecy if we assume that the writer was speaking specifically to us, a future audience, about specific conditions that exist long after his times and about which he knew nothing.

So the first thing we have to do is put this prophecy into historical context and that context is an era of persecution of Christians.

In the Greco-Roman world of the late first century, religion was more pluralistic than it is today. There were many authorized gods but chief among them was the Roman Emperor. The authorities considered Christianity to be a criminal conspiracy because Christians exclusively worshipped one God and that god was neither the Emperor nor any of the other divinities in the Roman pantheon. After Rome burned in the year 64, Emperor Nero carried out a state sponsored persecution and for decades afterwards Roman governors executed Christians by political order for refusing to worship those validated gods.

Fearful Christians were even encouraged to turn in their Christian neighbors in return for leniency. All Christians had to walk a very fine line between giving lip service to Rome and living as people of faith.

These were the times in which John lived. Not only were there rumors of Nero’s return, but Christians were being seduced by this pagan culture and failing in their loyalty to Christ and Christ’s revelation.

John was likely an itinerant preacher of Jewish origin, a Jewish convert to Christianity who personally knew the seven congregations to whom he wrote. As a prophet, he wanted to warn these congregations about an apocalyptic retribution against both the pagan seducers and the disloyal, seduced Christians. He wanted to warn them about this very real act of God that might begin at any moment.

John’s predecessors in the rich Hebrew prophetic tradition were visionaries like Ezekiel and Daniel who lived during the time of Babylonian exile and forecast a similar destruction of God’s enemies. For them, Babylon was the archtype of all God’s enemies. Gog and Magog were names Ezekiel gave to nations that tried to usurp, seduce, and consume the Hebrew followers of God. [ii]

So what was John speaking about? John borrows from the visions in his prophetic tradition. And even though John’s revelation reads as a continuous, chronological epic, it is very likely that he compiled separate visions of his own and others into this prophetic account.

Like Daniel and Ezekiel, John refers to Babylon and John’s new Babylon is Rome. But Babylon is more than just a symbol of an evil state, it’s the state of evil. Babylon is the Dark Side, the perennial, cosmic evil empire. This prophecy is cosmic in proportions because while Rome may be the enemy in the late first century, John is claiming that there will always be a Babylon in the life of Christ’s church.

In such violent times, John wants to give the congregations of the seven churches more than a warning not to be seduced into accepting a culture that contradicts Christ’s message. John is giving them, and us, a message of comfort to cling to in times of persecution.

Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, if John was speaking to first century Christians, how could his prophecy possibly apply to us?

The thing is that you don’t have to see an apocalyptic vision to appreciate the conflict between Christ’s message of love and the destructive influences of our own times that cause unhappiness, lost identity, and even tragedy.

It isn’t hard to find cultural acceptance of violence as a way of life.

It isn’t hard to recognize the power of elitism that devalues the humanity of those who look or live or speak differently than we do.

It isn’t hard to feel the pull of advertising and marketing that says that a bigger house or a more luxurious car or some other commercial consumption will bring us true happiness.

It isn’t hard to hear the loud, self-righteous voices of narrow moralism or jingoistic patriotism.

In order to make some use of John’s message, you don’t have to see the world in terms of some dualistic struggle between good and evil.

All you have to do is simply consider the world just as it is and compare it to the vision of a new heaven and new earth where God dwells among us and where the river of life refreshes the human spirit.

Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
We go about our lives in this present world, a world filled with tragic possibilities. We go about the business of our hopes and dreams in a world filled with events that cut short our plans. Bridges collapse. Airplanes crash. Automobiles collide. Crime, terrorism, mean spiritedness, racism, cancer, war, infirmity, floods, fires- all these things rob us of robust and precious dreams. These are possibilities in the world as it is.

When confronted with some terrifying, life ending disaster different people will reach different conclusions. Some percentage of the population will claim to see the hand of God in human tragedy. They will say that God is exacting vengace and retribution for personal sins or that God whimsically selects one family to be destroyed by a tornado while sparing another family two doors away. The heavy hand of God is even perceived in the single death of a loved one at any age, death that does not occur from some catastrophic public event.

These people say God takes people out of the midst of life for God’s own mysterious purpose. These people say God has a time and place for the death of every individual and that God will either do the dirty work or will not interfere to save us. There is nothing we can do about it and our plans count for very little.

Theologically, I strongly disagree with that conclusion. And the prophet John disagrees with that conclusion also.

Despite John’s dire warning about divine retribution for false Christians, his revelation is a wonderfully hopeful vision. John agrees with the claim of the great prophet Isaiah. This God, who delivered the Jews out of Egypt, who organized a rabble in the desert of Sinai and gave them a land of promise, this God who raised Christ Jesus from the dead, this God is always doing wonderful new things in our lives. [iii]

John’s vision offers a message of hope and comfort that when we are torn away from this present world a new heaven and a new earth will be revealed. A new thing will be done before our eyes and God will dwell among us, nourishing us with new life.

Conclusion: what’s the point?
Is this just a dream, a far fetched hallucination?

Is it a quaint story that satisfies simple minds?

All who hear John’s revelation must answer these questions for themselves based on faith. It’s up to you. But I know this.

Life matters. Hope abounds in the new things God is doing every day and every step of our journey.

Life counts for something. Hopes and dreams are relevant and worthwhile and life has a purpose even if our plans are cut short by the tragic possibilities of this present world.

Maybe there is a direction and meaning in human life beyond the individual’s own will. Maybe a terrorist’s plot, the failure to inspect and repair a bridge, the failure to prevent a levy from breaking, the failure of a drunk driver to act responsibly, the helter skelter path of a tornado, maybe all these things are the supernatural intervention of inscrutible fate. And yet, life would indeed matter very little if the end of life were not met with a new heaven and a new earth.

Life matters. Hope abounds. Glory be to God. AMEN.

[i] http://www.tcnj.edu/~wilder/works/bridge.html
[ii] Ezekiel 38-39
[iii] Isaiah 43:18-19

Radical Acts of Forgiveness

2007-07-16T23:46:00.000-04:00

Leviticus 25: 10 ff

Presenting Engagement: defying gravity
I want to tell you the stories of two Catholic churches this morning.

One is about the broad, octagonal dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in Florence, Italy built in the 1430’s. The contractor on the job was the sculptor, mathmatician, architect, and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi who had the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

The remarkable thing is that Brunelleschi figured out how to use interlocking brickwork to eliminate any requirement for framework underneath the dome to keep it from collapsing into the cathedral during construction. This had never been done before and all the while that Brunelleschi was performing this feat of gravity defying engineering, everyone except his patron thought his math was flat wrong and that he was a complete lunatic and perhaps a heretic whose work would fail in total embarassment. Cosimo was even thrown into prison for bad government and treason over this.

Well, popular opinion and conventional wisdom were wrong. The dome was successful and on the ceiling at the highest point, the Grand Duke commissioned a stunning fresco mural of the last judgment. There’s certainly no doubt about which side of Christ he thought his reprobate enemies and doubters sat.

In the second story, it seems the legal defense costs of the contemporary Catholic church’s child abuse scandals have been so great that some Archdiocese have filed for bankruptcy and sold churches buildings to secular interests.

Pews, stained glass windows, pulpits, and even marble altars have been sold or donated to other churches. In one church recently, the mortar between the polished marble altar and the wall was chipped away and when the altar was removed, workers found that the concrete in the wall behind it was crumbling and fragmented and frail. In other words, the beautiful polished marble that was shown to God covered up a frail framework that was the body of the building.

Why tell these two stories?

Well the point of the first tale is that in order to find truth, we have to look up because that’s where God is. I don’t mean that we have to believe God lives in some mystical realm above the sky that Greek philosophers called “heaven;” it’s that we have to go above and beyond our humanistic, earth-bound world where vision and imagination are enslaved to the bondage of gravity.

But when Brunelleschi and de’ Medici did that they found out that looking up can be a radical act that not only defies gravity but also defies the frightened voices of conventional wisdom and popular opinion.

You know those voices. They’re the ones that say what’s possible and what’s impossible, what’s true and what isn’t true whenever you dare to be different.

The second tale reminds me of Paul’s comment to the Corinthian church that we have the treasure of the glory of God stored in clay jars- which are our bodies.[i]

You see, we can polish up our external surfaces all we wish and offer God our gleaming faces, but behind that marble is a frail, flawed, and crumbling structure-a clay jar. We have got to be honest about the human condition. We’ve got to know ourselves as both polished marble and crumbling concrete even though those same frightened voices urge us to ignore our weaknesses and just polish that marble a little more.

Those voices say: You can find truth in the gleam of the marble’s surface. But if you really don’t like the image that you see reflected in the polished marble then just shop around for different image.

One commentator, cleverer than I am, recently inferred that in our market driven world, where value is whatever appeals to consumer wants and desires, our search for truth could just as easily happen in the aisles of Home Depot as anywhere else.[ii]

Well, today’s scripture readings show that we do need to look above and beyond ourselves to find an indespensible characteristic of God that we need to imitate in our own lives. That characteristic is merciful forgiveness and these verses give us a particular language to talk about mercy and forgiveness and a particular way of thinking about our relationship with God.

Biblical Context: the laws of redemption
That relationship is all about a redeeming God and the command to be a redeeming people.

This 25th chapter of Leviticus decrees a year called Jubilee. That is the 50th year: the year following seven times seven years and during Jubilee, all debts are essentially cancelled.

Every seventh year is also a time of release. For instance, the Hebrews must let the earth lie fallow, which is an act of releasing the land back to God. The earth’s burden of debt to the landowner in terms of yielding produce is cancelled. Every seventh and every fiftieth year financial debts and debts of servitude are also cancelled within the community of Israel.

In the meantime, there is a redemptive social mechanism, a means of redeeming debts and redeming relatives who are in servitude. If any member of a family falls into debt and has to sell off a parcel of land or a house in order to get out of debt, a kinsmen must buy the parcel back and redeem the debt. No land may be sold in perpetuity.

If your kinsman goes into debt and falls on hard times you must take in him and his family to live with you and you may not lend family members money at interest or make a profit off of their hard times. Relatives who bind themselves over to their kin under a term of indentured service may not be treated like slaves and must be released from indenture in the Jubilee year. If a Hebrew falls into servitude to a foreigner, a relative should redeem that person by paying off the debt to the foreigner.

These are all holy practices not decided by some selfless group decision or democratic referendum or inspired by either conventional wisdom or by popular opinion.

No. They are commands of God that originate above and beyond human instinct.

Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, what is the purpose of all this language about redeeming and redemption? It must be important because these instructions also appear in the book of Deuteronomy which was organized by a completely different editor than Leviticus[iii] and they appear even earlier in Exodus, which was composed by still another editor.[iv]

First of all, the God of Moses considers all land to be God’s, and we are tenants on God’s earth. We cannot lay claim to land that is owned by our master.

Second, and more importantly, the social practice of redeeming debts originates in God’s redemption of the Hebrews from servitude to the Egyptian Pharaohs. Redemption is the practice of a community that has been redeemed.

In the history of the Middle East, this redemptive act of the God of Moses is radical for its place and time. The rivals of the God of Moses were Pharaohs and carved idols and not one of them was forgiving or capable of deliverance.

And since the characteristics a community reflect what that community worships, the people who worshipped these other gods were also unforgiving.

Only the community that worshipped the God of Moses had the language and practice of forgiveness. The Hebrew verb for God’s action of redeeming the Hebrews from Egypt describes the act of a protective kinsman, someone who protects the family and keeps it together. God is a protector who redeems people and forgives debts for the good of God’s family.[v]

So when the people of Israel continued this godly practice of redemption, they were doing like Filippo Brunelleschi. They were going against the grain of conventional social practice. They were doing something other societies didn’t do. They were looking above and beyond the polished marble to find inspiration and so 1280 years before Christ the Israelites found that mercy was a characteristic of God.

Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
What does this mean for us nearly 3,300 years later as we attempt to be a Christian community surrounded by the confusing and often misleading voices of conventional wisdom and popular opinion?

Well for one thing, Christianity still confesses that forgiveness originates with God. It comes from above and beyond our human experience and imagination.

This is a radical confession that defies the voices that tell us that everything we need to know can be found in the polished marble of human invention.

Did you know that if you tour the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. or the Field Museum in Chicago or the American Museum of Natural History in New York, you will be challenged to find any exhibit on the development of the human capacity for forgiveness.

Oh yes, you’ll see all manner of displays about human progress. You’ll find things on technological invention, on the development of group coordination in hunting, and even the evolution of organized community structure.

But nothing about the development of a human concept of mercy. Nothing on cancellation of financial debt as a moral virtue. Nothing about the refusal to hold grudges or seek vengence. Nothing about refusal to exploit people in servitude or economic duress.[vi]

Redemption is a religious concept, a gift from God.

But we contemporary Christians claim this 3300 year old solidarity with those Hebrews who were redeemed from Egypt and followed social practices of redemption that set them apart from the conventional wisdom and popular opinion of their times.

We do this whenever we pray the prayer the Lord’s Prayer that we learned in Matthew and in Luke.[vii] When we pray: “forgive us our debt as we also have forgiven our debtors,” we refer directly to the Torah practices of redemption.

When we pray these words, we claim kinship with the historical family of God that asks for God’s intervening, redeeming hand on behalf of ourselves and the community as a whole.

We also claim kinship with early Christians who have used this prayer as liturgy for over 1,907 years.

By the end of the first century, an order of instruction has was used by early Christians, called the Didache (didah-kee), and which organized worship and liturgical practices that affect every aspect of living- inside and outside of church. It was intended to ensure the formation of a particularly Christ-led community which acted quite differently from neighboring communities. Among the instructions of the Didache was the charge to say the Lord’s Prayer three times each day.

The point is that when we practice redemption by asking for our debts to be forgiven and by forgiving our debtors, we are making a radical and unconventional confession that truth is revealed by God rather than by the marketplace of conventional wisdom and popular opinion.

You may not think of yourself as a radical.

In fact that idea might just conjur up all sorts of images that you really don’t want to be associated with! But the word, radical, has to do with going to the origin or the roots. A radical in math is an expression that is the root of another numerical expression.

If you are a radical, you are someone who tries to get to the roots of things and for Christian radicals, the roots are the word of God rather than the frightened voice of social convention.

Conclusion: what’s the point?
So be a radical. Look up above and beyond your earthly experience to find the truth which is that we need mercy. This is a truth will not collapse on top of you.

Be a radical and pray for the redeeming of your own personal debts and for the debts we incur as a society.

Be a radical and forgive the social debts which are owed to you.

Be a radical and don’t hold a grudge or store up ill will in your heart.

Be a radical and wage peace instead of aggravating hatred in your community.

Be a radical and practice Godly acts of mercy rather than exploitation.

Be a radical and get back to the origins of your Christian faith because there, among those radical, counter-cultural origins you will find the kingdom of God.

And when you find the kingdom of God, you will find hope.

AMEN.

[i] 2 Corinthians 4:7.
[ii] Apologies to David Holmberg. “On Language.” The New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2007.
[iii] Deuteronomy 15: 1-11.
[iv] Exodus 21:1-11
[v] Walter Brueggemann. Theology of the Old Testament. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp 174, 175.
[vi] Walter Brueggemann. “Always in the Shadow of Empire.” Michael Budde & Robert Brimlow, eds. The Church as Counterculture. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), p 45.
[vii] Matthew 6:10-14; Luke 11:2-4.

Joy and the Lively God

2007-07-02T11:18:00.000-04:00

Exodus 20:1-21; Matthew 22:34-40

Presenting Engagement: gathered people.
When we speak of a gathering of Christian believers, we often say we are called to be together as a community. And we do things in worship that give evidence of our calling to be this community. We pray together. We recite our creeds together. We listen to or read scripture together. We gather together for the Lord’s Supper. As the hymn goes: “we gather together to receive the Lord’s blessing.”

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the creation stories in Genesis is to point out that the true order of things lies in the fact that we do not exist for some human purpose but for God’s purpose. We exist for God’s joy and we find our own joy in that divine joy.

So, when we gather to worship, our worship practices make God come alive in our community and we begin to figure out the true order of things through God’s liveliness among us.

Now, let your mind wander to a scene thousands of years ago. You are a community gathered around a campfire out in the open at night or perhaps gathered together for a meal. Someone in your group is speaking, narrating stories about the history of your community. Everyone is here- from young ones to venerated old ones and you are all listening to the story teller.

There’s a theme in the tale and it’s a theme that is larger than any human or natural event no matter how dramatic or catastrophic. This theme ties together all those human events and natural events and interprets them. It’s a theme that is larger, that goes beyond, that transcends human experience and it gives meaning to the community’s experience. It’s a theme that shows how every person in your community’s entire history has been called to a similar gathering and called to listen to the tale.

It’s a story that actually molds a community out of a rabble of isolated, wandering people.

And as this tale unfolds, you hear about the God who lives at the center of your lives and your world interacting with you in mundane events, during great harvests and meager ones. And sometimes you hear the narrator speak of God’s powerful intrusions in your community’s life.

These are larger than life moments when God is assertive for some particular purpose that becomes part of the foundation of your community’s history. Sometimes that purpose is some intimate transaction that sanctifies your community’s relationship with God like the making of a covenant or liberating your people from oppression and captivity.

And sometimes that purpose is a little scary and threatening. Sometimes it’s a display of power and sovereignty that is not negotiable and announces an unavoidable claim that your community belongs to this God and not to any other.

It’s easy to hear about those powerful and conclude that your God is either/or. Either a loving, mutuality-seeking, miracle-working God or a wrathful, legalistic, rigid God. But doing that would split the character of your God into two competing divinities and it would polarize your community into two different camps with each one following a different version of God.

The fact is that all of these powerful intrusions unify your community in faith and demonstrate that God is both loving and sovereign.

God’s giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai is one of those powerful intrusions that can easily divide the Christian community.

Biblical Context: what is going on in the text?
Now fast forward to today. Today, we read the printed word in books and computers all by ourselves and for ourselves. And we read this scriptural testimony about God in our own native language, in whatever current vocabulary fits our personal life-styles. We are a techno-savvy society with an economy based on consumer preferences rather than seasonal human need and a belief in the uninhibited political right to exercise individual free will.

Did you know that out of the 50,000 or so years theat human beings have had spoken language, the concept of the person as a distinct and autonomous individual, has only been around for 400 years? That means that for 49,600 years, human beings did not understand themselves as anything other than as part of a whole. Community today is simply a group of individuals who choose to come together… or not.

So how can we ever hope to relate to the witness of that bronze age tribe gathered around the campfire whose ideas of what community looks like are so very different from ours? And how can we ever hope to understand the single connection between them and us which is this nearly 4000 year old belief in God?

Well, the campfire witness we’ve read this morning lies squarely in the period of Israel’s oral rather than written history.

We all know that God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai and that it sets down numerous requirements for every aspect of Hebrew life together: for worshipping, for eating, for farming, and a host of other things. We know the ten commandments in Exodus best, but the Torah is more than that.

The second Torah reference we read is the testing of Jesus by Pharisees who ask him a theological question. According to Matthew’s gospel they want to trip him up by asking, in the academic and rhetorical manner of their day: which commandment out of all those laws covered in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy is the most important?

For the average Hebrew, that is a tall order. The entire Torah is important. How can you boil down the whole of the Torah into just one or two elements?

Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
We tend to think about history cinematically. We picture a great movie scene about Moses receiving the law in the mists and smoke of Mount Sinai and returning to the Hebrews with this glorious revelation of God. Charlton Heston is Moses and Edward G. Robinson is Aaron. We see thunder and lightning in tecnicolor from a variety of camera angles. We spectators take in all the action as concrete fact brought to us through the eyewitness of that camera lens.

But understanding the Torah in its entirety, as the Pharisees knew, is not simple or literal. If it were literal, their question would have been a no brainer for even the least theologically knowledgable Jew. Their question wouldn’t trip up anyone.

Consider the 13th commandment which forbids murder.[i] Under the Torah laws of restitution, we learn that you can murder a thief breaking in to your dwelling if the killing occurs at night.[ii] This isn’t a matter of self defence but a matter of the thief paying with his life for his act.

Or consider the dietary laws which roused such controversy between Paul and Peter, James, and the rest of the Jerusalem church when Paul claimed that converted gentiles did not have to obey Torah restrictions on eating or circumcision.[iii] In Leviticus, the Torah forbids the eating of any animal that dies “of itself.”[iv] But in Deuteronomy, we find that such unclean food as this can be sold to non-Hebrews because they are not the holy people of God.[v]

So it’s helpful to admit that the Old Testament as we read it is a version of a version of a translation of a translation. We are not watching an eye witness video of events. And when we read the New Testament, we read an English translation of a Latin or Greek version of another Greek version of original documents written by people with various degrees of literacy who recorded oral accounts. Jesus spoke neither Hebrew nor Greek, but Aramaic. Few of us read the Bible in any of those languages.

In fact, the Old Testament is an edited fusion of several different written records based on oral tradition and each record has a distinct social purpose for formulating the history of Israel in a particular perspective.

One record, written around 950 BC, is a royal chronicle from a Judean perspective in which all the peoples of the earth are related in distant kinship and begins with the second story of creation.[vi] When this writer recorded the 10 commandments in Exodus 34, he did not include the matter of God’s having rested on the seventh day as the reason for keeping the Sabbath on the seventh day.[vii] That’s because the second story of creation (Genesis 2) doesn’t number the days of God’s work.

The next source dates from about 850 BC, after the break-up of the unified Israel into the northern and southern kingdoms.[viii] It is written from the northern perspective and has a more populist oriented agenda. This chronicler gave us the version of the 10 commandments we read today and later in Exodus 24 shows his antipithy toward monarchs and dynastic rulers by having Moses sprinkle all the gathered Hebrews with sacred blood to seal them all in God’s covenant. The Judean account has only Moses and the priests being sealed in the covenant. [ix]

Around 620 BC, yet another source revised a copy of the Judean Torah which was found during repairs on the Temple in Jerusalem.[x] This revision is known as Deuteronomy which is Greek deutero-nomas for second giving of the law . This source was a reformer purifying worship customs, showing God as a nationalistic deity, and proclaiming Jerusalem as the only holy ground for worshipping that God.[xi]

Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
We could go on and on disecting the various sources and contradictions of the biblical witness. But our purpose today is not to try to disprove the Torah’s value or authenticity. Our purpose is to put it into some kind of perspective that we can draw something out of that has meaning.

We need to find in the Torah something that connects us to those people gathered around the campfire. Something that is useful when we celebrate our common belief in the one living God: Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.

When we look at the final version of the fused compilation of Old Testament sources edited, organized, and formatted into high literary style by Hebrew priests in Babylonian exile, it’s easy to read the Torah as simply a legalistic code of ethics that cannot be subjected to critical scrutiny. It’s easy to see the ten commandments as our national standard of right and wrong for individuals and to judge others as unpatriotic if they disagree with that opinion. It’s easy to subordinate this religious witness and make it serve some social or political purpose.

But when we do that, two things happen that devalue God and devalue God’s word to us.

The first is that when we use the Bible to support a human goal we are making God relevant for our lives and not making our lives relevant for God. We are cutting ourselves off from God’s joy and replace it with momentary satisfaction.

The second thing is that when we make the Torah a rigid legalism interpreted only through our contemporary social concepts and individualism, we cut ourselves off from any historical connection to our forefathers in faith. We break apart that precious link to those bronze age people gathered around the fire listening to the stories and making God lively in their midst.

Conclusion: what’s the point?
In both those cases we fail to understand that the Torah tells us the true order of things and instructs us about God’s ways and so we make God a lifeless, remote symbol with no ability to give meaning to our lives.

The word Torah actually comes from the Hebrew verb “yarah-“ which means to instruct. We are instructed in God’s ways that by practicing them sets us apart from all others who do not believe in God. Jesus affirms this when he says: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[xii]

In the true order of things we are created beings who owe supreme allegiance to a divine being bigger than ourselves and beyond our making. Jesus affirms this when he says: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”[xiii]

So I say, let us reconnect with our kinsmen so distant in time and view the Torah as that imaginative liturgical practice of ancient Israel.

Let us join in that ancient practice that makes God lively in our midst and brings us true joy.

Let us join in that ancient practice that affirms God’s lively and eternal faithfulness which is our only true salvation in a dramatic life of both plentiful harvests and meager ones.

AMEN.

[i] Ex 20:13.
[ii] Ex 22:2x.
[iii] Galatians 2.
[iv] Lev 11:39.
[v] Deut 14:21.
[vi] This is the Yahwist source which uses the name Yahweh for God.
[vii] J. S. Spong. Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), p 46.
[viii] This is the Elohist source which uses the name Elohim for God.
[ix] Spong, pp 47, 49.
[x] 2 Kings 22.
[xi] Spong, p 51.
[xii] Mt 22:39.
[xiii] Mt 22:37.

INCARNATING THE BIBLE

2007-06-20T10:49:00.000-04:00

Luke 24:28-35

Presenting Engagement: the emerging church.
I recently read a description of the Bible that said this: “If you look at a window, you see fly specks, dust, the crack where Junior’s Frisbee hit it. If you look through a window, you see the world beyond.[i]

Now, in one way, that description talks about the window and in another way it talks about the person who uses the window. I found that just after reading a discussion of the religious movement called the Emerging Church and together these two readings made me consider how we think about practicing Christianity, how we make God real in our lives.

In the language of the Bible, they made me think about how we incarnate the word of God.

This Emerging Church movement is a big subject of discussion these days. Some like it and some can’t stand it. This Emerging Church movement defies definition, although many people do try to define it.

It’s not a church or a denomination. It isn’t only a non-tradtional, inter-active, media oriented worship practice. It isn’t only an emotions and senses based religious exercise that goes beyond the mind and appeals to the heart. It isn’t only about making Christ’s church relevent in popular culture. It isn’t only a way of getting more teenagers and young adults excited about attending church or enticing people into worship who normally think of church as a boring, Sunday morning chore that encroaches on their scarce and precious free time.

The emerging church is holistic. That means, it is a bubbling stew pot filled with many different elements; things that pertain to the era that we live in right now rather than the era that we used to live in just a few years ago.

In the modern era that has now ended, life was governed by reason and predictibility. In this postmodern era, people see that rational predictibility as a false premise. The world isn’t rational; it’s chaotic and random. In a rational world, people don’t deliberately fly airplanes into large office buildings and kill thousands of innocent folks. In a rational world, people don’t get terminal illnesses even though they take care of their bodies or have devastating car accidents even though they drive safely.

Oh no. Unreasonably random and chaotic events occur in our lives.

To a postmodernist, what counts in life is what is authentic and what is genuine even if it’s not rational. The 17th century scientist Isaac Newton has been replaced with the 20th century artist Andy Warhol or maybe even somebody more current than Warhol that I’m just not hip enough to know about.

This is really an important subject, this Emerging Church, because it challenges the traditional paradigm of how we do church. That is: it challenges the customary practices of our religious experience and our traditional religious point of view. It challenges how we incarnate the word of God. And that’s probably a good thing. After all, we may be nicknamed the “frozen chosen,” but one of our basic, organizing principles as Presbyterians is the credo: reformed and always being reformed.

But it seems to me that the really important question about reforming religious customs has nothing to do with the style of the worship service. The really important question is: what do we think about ourselves in terms of God when we worship God? What do we think about ourselves in terms of God?

Because what really matters, what is truly essential, is our relationship with that window over there that we look through in order to see the world.

You see, it doesn’t essentially matter what songs we sing; that is a matter of taste. When we pray it doesn’t matter whether we kneel, bow, or look upward with our hands raised toward the heavens. It doesn’t really matter whether we sit in oak pews or cross legged in a circle on the floor; that is a matter of preference and arthritis. It doesn’t matter if we have no candles or if we have a thousand pots of incense burning with the aroma of peach-mango-grapefruit-chutney salsa. All of that is a matter of style and some styles appeal to some folks and not to other folks.

But the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the window that we look through. I’ll say it again: the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the window that we look through.

And that revelation is not a matter of style or preference because the Triune God whom we worship is the eternal other- the eternal “not-us”, the eternally faithful, the constant moral center of the universe whose mysteries we try to understand and make happen in our lives every time we use the window to see the world.

And the most important thing we do to build our relationship with that window, to build our relationship with the mystery of the revelation in Christ, the most important exercise we do in church is celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

Biblical Context: what is going on in the text?
We read this morning about the revelation of God in Jesus Christ in a tavern in Emmaus. We read how two Christ followers, one anonymous and one named Cleopas, recognized Jesus as he blessed and broke bread. It wasn’t a matter of chance that their moment of revelation came in that re-creation of the last supper. It wasn’t just coincidence that their eyes were opened with the act of receiving the Bread of Life. It was Easter, the day of Jesus’ ressurection and according to Luke Jesus’ was revealing himself to lots of people.

What’s really interesting here is that this moment came after a hot and dusty seven mile hike from Jerusalem to this village of Emmaus. It happened right smack in the middle of several disturbing, random, and chaotic days in the lives of Jesus’ followers. I’ve been to Jerusalem in late march and I can tell you that it is truly hot and dusty even at the time of Easter. The walk would have been slow and they would have been thirsty but so much had happened in the previous few days that these two men had a lot to talk about.

During that hike they were joined by a stranger. It was Jesus and they did not know him. But they walked together all the way and talked about the meaning of the crucifixion and the resurrection as they walked. Three people walking along a dry road talking about religion in their random and chaotic experience.

And of course, after they recognized Jesus, hindsight set in like quick drying cement. “Oh, I had a feeling all along that man was not just another traveller. He knew something. He, he was somebody holy and I felt it in my heart. It wasn’t rational but my senses picked up on something and I just couldn’t put my finger on it.”

They were so excited about their experience that they walked all the way back down that dusty road in the twilight just to tell the eleven disciples all about it.

Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
Well, this was no dream. It was an authentic, genuine experience for Cleopus and his companion recorded by Luke in his gospel. And as Luke writes in the preface of his work, that gospel was intended to be an orderly account of events set down after a thorough investigation. Luke was a doctor after all, so I’m sure his method of investigation was rational and scientific.

How Presbyterian.

But there are things Luke does not record. Things that would be recorded if they were significant or if they were relevent to an accurate statement of events. What doctor does not document everything, every symptom and every fact, every important thing that has to do with a medical investigation?

So the things Luke leaves out must not matter in terms of what the story is all about.

The name of Cleopus’ friend did not matter. The name of the owner of the tavern where they stopped did not matter. The kind of bread did not matter. How the bread tasted or how it had been baked did not matter. It’s shape did not matter. The method of breaking the bread did not matter. It did not matter whether they were all standing up, lying down, or doing handstands. Those things did not matter.

What mattered was the revelation that came through the breaking of bread. What mattered was the relationship that ocurred when the eyes of those two were opened and they began to see the world through an entirely new windowpane.

Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
There are many things about popular religious movements that are simply a matter of style. That’s just fine even though these styles are very often not my preference. But my preference doesn’t matter.

There are many things about these new, postmodern movements that I completely agree with. I agree that for too long the traditional church and especially the evangelical church has emphasized the next world. That is: focussed on getting people into heaven and nurturing the internal spirit of the faithful while ignoring Christ’s mission to the poor, the dispirited, to the socially and economically exiled. Ignoring the Kingdom of God in this world.

I agree with the Emerging Church’s emphasis on community. Worshipping God is not an exercise meant to build one person’s individual relationship with God without involving other people. But then the idea that Christianity is a community endeavor is certainly not new. The Austrian- Jewish theologian Martin Buber wrote in 1923 that we can only recognize God through others.[ii] And the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was matryred for his resistance to Adolph Hitler, wrote in 1938: “Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ.”[iii]

But what about this sacrament of the Lord’s Supper? What about this breaking of bread and drinking of the cup? What about this partaking of the new covenant in Christ Jesus?

Is this fellowship with Christ through the Holy Spirit something that we can agree or disagree about doing?

Is it a component of worship that is no more or less important than any other component?

Is it something that we can do away with if we think it is a boring chore or a rigid, humdrum ritual that is irrelevant in the chaotic world where we live our lives?

Is it something that we can de-emphasize if it doesn’t seem authentic or if it seems too deeply theological?

Conclusion: What’s the Point?
In our society, we tend to make up our own rules. We have short attention spans and want to be entertained. We often see the world as we something we can mold and shape for ourselves, adding or subtracting bits of philosophy according to according to what we like and don’t like. We call it freedom.

But I think that freedom has made us weary as a people. It’s made us weary in spirit.

I think it’s made us feel that life offers nothing that we can count on.
That freedom has split many of us apart. It has added to the random chaos that frustrates us and challenges our efforts to be fathers and mothers, to be children, to be communities, to be congregations, and to live meaningful lives.

Sometimes, some folks just give up and accept what ever is comforting no matter how isolating or unhealthy or misleading that temporary comfort might be. Back in the 1960’s, the popular phrase from the Woodstock generation was: “tune out and turn on.”

But Jesus calls all those who are weary and heavy laden. That is part of our salvation.

You see, God is the eternal other- the eternal “not-us” and the revelation of God is something that exists outside of us. It confounds all our attempts to change the parts we don’t like. It is patient when we are easily distracted or turn toward immediate gratification.

This revelation of God in Christ is a gift of something permanent in our lives that saves us from spiritual weariness.

The revelation of God in Christ is something that brings us together.

Despite the sins of the church as a human organization over the centuries, the revelation of God in Christ is something that human beings cannot manipulate.

We can look through the window but, despite Junior’s Frisbee cracks, we cannot change the characteristics of the window no matter hard we try. We can incarnate the word of God in our lives, make it real in our lives but we can never change the word of God with our lives.

Thank God!

Never forget that you were called to faith through your baptism. And you are called to the Lord’s table even now, today. Come joyfully to this table and recognize Jesus in the breaking of bread right now, right here on this hot and dusty road through your life.
AMEN.

[i] Frederich Buechner. Listening to Your Life. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p 159.
[ii] This is the concept commonly known by the English title of Buber’s work: I And Thou.
[iii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer. J. Doberstein, transl. Life Together. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1954), p 21.

THE VALUES OF POWER

2007-06-11T11:20:00.000-04:00

Presenting Engagement: the wheel o’ wisdom.
In a variety store, on a shelf stockpiled with eye catching nic-nacs, somewhere between the rubber chickens and the spring loaded packs of gum that snap your finger when you try to extract a juicy stick, somewhere in there I happened upon a rather unusual spiritual resource one day.

In this age of sophisticated electronic gizmos, its low tech simplicity caught my eye. It’s just a wheel centered on top of another wheel and as you rotate the top wheel an arrow points to labels along the perimeter of the bottom wheel. Windows display various attributes of the subject that you have selected by the positioning of the arrow. The title of this nifty cardboard object is: “Wheel O’ Wisdom” and it describes itself as a tool for choosing one’s religion, a guide for the savvy convert.

Say you want to find out if a particular sect is for you. Don’t get crow’s feet wrinkling your brow pondering deep thoughts about what all it would mean for your life. Just point the arrow and read the description, the drawbacks and the perks. Read about the accessories you’ll need. In one particular window labelled “potential new friends” you can find out how many card carrying members there are.

Take the Protestant religion for instance. Actually, I didn’t know before that Protestantism is a distinct religion rather than a branch of the Christian religion. The wheel describes Catholicism as the original Christianity.

But Protestantism is described with a two sentence summary of the Reformation. You learn that faith and grace are enough for salvation plus you can commune with God without an intermediary. For accessories, you’ll need a Bible on your night stand and a pro-Jesus bumper sticker. The drawbacks are that Protestantism is easily confused with de-spiritualized Christmas consumerism. The perks are that this is a mainstream religion that is part of the social power structure with flexible worship practices. If you join this group you can take the moral high road and will gain 465 million new friends.

Of all the thirty religions listed on the Wheel O’ Wisdom, the other one that grabbed my attention most was Consumerism. It’s described as a belief that one can be fulfilled by consuming and that self-worth is defined by economic value. Drawbacks include the fact that overused credit leads to spiritual bankruptcy. The perks are that there are few rules and plenty of toys for folks with ample disposable income. This is the religion that Protestantism can lapse into when it becomes de-spiritualized.

But that de-spiritualized religion sounds an awful lot like the social philosophy of many people- even Christians, whether they are Protestants or followers of that original Christianity.

Well, that’s very interesting but you’re wondering what all that has to do with a first century centurion and Jesus’ healing of a slave. Aren’t you?

Biblical Context: what is going on in the text?
We’ve read today how Jesus healed a Roman centurion’s slave because of the centurion’s faith. But what is this story is really all about? Let’s look deeper into the details.

In the Greco-Roman society of the first century, patronage was the order of the day. Clients supported the power of their patrons and patrons rewarded the loyalty of clients with material benefits. Our centurion occupied a particular rung in a very precise social order. He was a client of elite Romans farther up the ladder and below him were clients of his own.

Centurion was the rank of an officer who comanded one hundred soldiers so he was a middle level patron in the big picture but in his small, garrison town of Capernaum he probably wielded significant power. The Jewish elders who formed the delegation were his clients and in return for their loyalty this patron built them a synagogue.

The remarkable thing about this centurion is that without ever having met Jesus, without even being a Jew himself, he understood that Jesus was a powerful figure. And having recognized him as a figure of power, the centurion placed Jesus within the patron/client social order well ahead of himself.

In the first century this would have been scandalous.

So why does Luke give us this narrative with all the details? Why does Luke tell of the centurion’s remarkable act through the social setting of patronage?

Matthew relates a shorter version of the same tale but without all the social details.

He speaks of the centurion’s unquestioned military power and how when he orders something it happens. Matthew’s centurion seems to have faith that Jesus has the same power to produce an immediate, obedient affect in healing the slave.

Matthew’s account sets this absolute faith of a Roman over against the lack of faith Jesus has found in Israel among people of his own faith tradition. Matthew concludes with strong conviction that the gentiles are the ones who have faith and will inherit the kingdom of God. Matthew emphasizes that the Hebrews will never believe that Jesus is the Messiah.

But I think Luke is emphasizing something different, something less obvious, something more subtle, something a lot more significant. Luke is telling us something about faith and the value and values of power.

Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
One of the more intriguing aspects of scripture is that God’s truth is often presented as a reversal of what the reader expects or perhaps considers normal.
What makes the Bible so enduring is that these reversals still work thousands of years after oral accounts of divine witness were first handed down. That means that human nature has remained consistent for thousands of years because what readers expect and what readers consider socially normal has remained consistent over all that time.

Truth can still be recognized just as it was in the first century.

And the truth-revealing reversal in this gospel reading is the scandal of the centurion giving up power to someone who should be considered a client according to the social order of the day.

Jesus might be a powerful Jewish healer but he is still a Jew. He is still a subject of the Roman military occupation of the Eastern Mediterranean. He might be more powerful than the Jewish elders of Capernaum but not more powerful than the least Roman soldier.

But the centurion seems to realize that Jesus is not just another local Israelite who wields some kind of local political or social power. Jesus’ power is other worldly. Jesus commands supernatural events. Jesus has the ability to heal. Jesus commands unclean spirits to depart from people and they depart. Jesus commands the cleansing of lepers and they become clean. Jesus forgives the sins of a paralytic and the man gets up and walks.

In the face of this other worldly power, the centurion understands a truth about the value of his own power. His own power in the chain of patron/client has strict limits and cannot heal anyone. It can’t do anything supernatural. It can’t do anything miraculous. It can build a synagogue or a church or a civic center but it can’t get you into heaven.

When it comes to saving the life of his servant the centurion’s power has absolutely no value at all.

The centurion recognizes the truth that Jesus’ power is the only power that has value and so the centurion lowers himself in esteem before the Hebrew prophet. “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof… only speak the word and my servant will be healed.”

Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
The limits of power are a hard truth to comprehend and maybe harder to accept.

Remember the meeting between Jesus and the wealthy young man who wanted to know how to inherit eternal life? The young man had kept all the commandments since childhood and yet he went away sadly because he realized he could not do the one thing that was required. He could not give up his wealth.[i]

He could not give up the very thing that gave his life value and meaning. The very thing that gave him high standing in the patron/client social order. Yet the thing this young man cherished most had nothing to do with faith in God and his personal righteousness in terms of obeying the ten commandments was not enough to gain him eternal life.

The societies that the Roman centurion and the wealthy young Jew lived in were separated by ethnicity and religion but they had great similarity. Both societies placed power and status as the center of value.

The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr talked about centers of value in religious societies and church congregations. He said that the center of value is the thing that is worshipped above all other things. He showed how religious people can claim to worship God and yet actually emphasize other elements of their culture more.

It’s important to identify what thing occupies the center of value in our own lives.

It’s an important question because it’s so very easy to live our lives according to centers of value that have only limited power. The power to command people. The power to accumulate material possessions. The power to build things or tear things down.

Sometimes we even label these centers of value with the title of “God.”

That’s what I like about the simple little cardboard wheel. By offering descriptions, perks, and drawbacks of various religious philosophies, the wheel identifies the value of each one as it is defined by our society. It defines religions based on relative centers of value.

If you value self-fulfillment through material consumption then consumerism is for you. If you value rational pragmatism and self-determined moral rules then atheism could be your thing. If you choose your religion because you value friendships above all else then without a doubt Islam offers the most value for you. It has over a billion and one quarter members.

It’s a big, wide world out there and there are lots of social and religious choices.

Conclusion: What’s the Point?
But before you spin the wheel and make your choice, consider one thing. Consider the truth that the centurion realized.

Human power is severely limited.

It cannot change your life. All the technology and science in the world cannot heal your spirit. Human power cannot forgive your sins or bring you peace. No power from this world can do any of those things.

Only the power of God in Christ can do that.

And what must we give up in order to feel the affect of this power in our lives?

Well, Jesus does not ask us to give up everything of this world. He is not asking us to live impoverished lives or become a hermit. He is not asking us to abandon joy or put aside human relationships or beauty crafted by a human hand.

He only asks us to put the things of this world second.

And that is exactly where things of this world belong because the power of God does something unique. It imparts to us certain divine values by empowering the human spirit.

It empowers spiritual health and spiritual prosperity.

It empowers goodness, kindness, and mercy.

It empowers joy and human fulfillment.

It empowers the love that binds wounds and quells human divisiveness. It spans the divide of hatred.

The power of the love of God through Jesus is the one thing we human beings cannot manufacture or engineer and yet it’s the one thing we cannot live without.

So today, right now, let us resolve to value the power of God’s love over all other things in our lives. And let us resolve to live with joy as disciples of Christ Jesus.

AMEN.

[i] Luke 18:18-30; Matthew 19:16-30

Easter Deliverance: The Critical Event

2007-05-30T16:30:00.000-04:00

Mark 16:1-8

Presenting Engagement: two sides of Easter.
When I was growing up, the Easter Sunday service always wound up with a peeling of bells and the hymn which begins: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

The writer of the lyrics, Julia Ward Howe, was inspired by the words of Jeremiah 25:30 which reads- “He will thunder from his holy dwelling and roar mightily against His land. He will shout like those who tread the grapes, shout against all who live on earth.”

Now, those are not very Easter-like sentiments! They don’t sound much like affirmation of God’s love in Jesus.

But actually, Julia Ward Howe transformed Jeremiah’s words into an expression of the triumph of God. It’s divine glory that’s on the march! God’s truth and righteousness are transfiguring us all in the glory of Christ!

One particular verse even seems to challenge us: “He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat. Oh be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet! Our God is marching on!”

That’s straight out of Matthew 25 in the section known as The Judgment of the Gentiles. These are the verses where the righteous ones don’t remember ever feeding or giving drink to Jesus or clothing or welcoming or caring for Jesus. But he responds: “truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”[i]

I think we need that challenge of Christ to balance out the image of God’s glorious triumph and victory at Easter.

It is so easy to go from the praises and hosanna’s of Palm Sunday straight to the peeling of bells on Easter Sunday. It’s so easy to stand beside the parade route with arms held high, praising God, rejoicing in God’s mighty deed of resurrection. And it’s so easy to believe that the victory parade is all that Easter is about.

But there is no better time than Easter morning to ask ourselves how well we meet Christ’s challenge every day. There’s no better morning to discover how jubilant are our feet.

If we were strictly a praising and triumphant church we could just glance in passing at the Last Supper and the sharing of Jesus’ sacred blood in the cup of wine. We might only uses our peripheral vision to notice the sleeping disciples and the arrest of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. We could very easily allow Jesus’ agonizing death on the cross, his dry mouth sticky with sour wine, the humiliating abandonment by his closest disciples, the tear streaked cheeks of his mother- we could simply make these images and feelings into momentary shadows on an otherwise cloudless spring day.

I don’t know what religion that “all praise and all victory all the time” is but according to Mark’s gospel, it is not Christianity.

According to Mark, Christian discipleship has a cost that points directly back to the cross.

The Gospel of Mark makes it clear that you can’t get from Palm Sunday to Easter without lingering in the shadow of the cross of Jesus.

Biblical Context: what is going on in the text?
Listen now to the whole story again and think about how it makes you feel.

At nine in the morning on Friday, after spitting on him, beating his head with a stick, and forcing him to struggle through the streets of Jerusalem under the weight of the heavy cross, the centurions crucified Jesus of Nazareth. At noon the sky went black and at three Jesus cried out to God: “Why have you forsaken me?” The crowd thought he was calling Elijah and ridiculed him again. Then in this cursed, shameful moment he breathed his final, mortal breath.

A group of three women watched this moment some distance away from the cross. They had followed Jesus to Jerusalem from the Galilee region and had looked after him wherever he went. They were now clutched together in sadness and dismay. They were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.

Friday was also the day of Preparation for the sabbath and so in the evening a prominent Hebrew citizen known as Joseph of Arimathea went to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to ask for possession of Jesus’ body for burial. Pilate, who had been wrist deep in the trials and crucifixion of Jesus, was surpirised by the request since he didn’t even know Jesus had already died. But after some double checking with the centurions Pilate granted Joseph’s request. So Joseph had Jesus’ body removed from the cross, wrapped in linen and placed in a tomb that had been hewn out of solid rock. Then a boulder was rolled across the tomb entrance. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James stood beside Joseph during the entire burial.

Now because the sabbath was quickly approaching, Jesus had been buried quickly, without proper annointing and cleaning. But once the sabbath was finished the two Mary’s returned to the tomb to perform this custom. It was early on the first day of the week, meaning Sunday, and they brought Salome along as well. Remember that these three had stood together watching Jesus pass out of this world and two of them had witnessed the burial. The three friends had supported each other through every step of this strange journey.

Now they were concerned that the boulder would be too heavy to move and there would be no one at the tomb to help them. They tentatively approached the tomb, arm in arm. Imagine the looks on their faces when they found that the boulder had already been removed! They never expected something like this! Who in the world could have been there before them? No one would have entered the tomb over the sabbath. That would have violated the divine law itself. Had grave robbers been there? Had Roman soldiers removed the body to prevent Jesus from becoming a popular martyr?

Then imagine the faces of these three women as they walked into the open tomb and found, not Jesus’ body, but a strangely dressed young man! He was calmly sitting right over there to one side telling them that Jesus had been raised from the dead and had left the tomb! He must have seen their expressions because he said to them: “Oh, don’t be alarmed. Just go now; go back and tell Peter that Jesus is going on to Galilee before everyone else.”

“Don’t be alarmed,” the angel had said.

Don’t be alarmed?!

They couldn’t help being alarmed. They were so overcome with fright and awe that they huddled together. They backed out of the tomb together and the minute they were clear of the place they all turned and ran away and kept quiet about this entire encounter.

Trembling and astonishment gripped them and they were too frightened to say anything to anyone.

Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, how did this narrative make you feel? Do you feel like ringing any bells? Did the ending meet your expectations or leave you hanging?

It’s common to feel that this tale is unfinished. It’s common to feel like your expectations have been twisted all around. But then, Mark’s entire gospel is all about expectations that get upset, turned inside out, twisted all around.

You would expect Jesus to be glad when he miraculously heals someone and they call him Lord, but he isn’t. He keeps swearing people to silence and seems to want his identity kept secret- it’s called the messianic secret. You would expect Jesus’ disciples to understand who he is and to stick by him in his hour of greatest need but they do not. You would expect that the angel’s news of Jesus’ resurrection would cause these women to run joyously to tell the others. But they flee in fear instead.

Well if this ending doesn’t present the image of Easter that you want or expect or enjoy, there are two additional variations in Mark’s gospel that you can choose from. The shorter ending, about a paragraph long, claims that the women did pass along the angel’s message quickly as they were commanded.

In the longer ending, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and when she tells what she’s seen, no one believes her. Jesus later appears to two other disciples as they walk in the country and no one believes their story either. Then Jesus appears to the primary eleven disciples, scorns their disbelief, and sends them out into the world to proclaim the good news. After commissioning the disciples, Jesus ascends into heaven and the disciples disperse. Everyone ends up right where we think they ought to end up.

Even though these endings offer greater closure, neither is considered historically part of Mark’s gospel. They were perhaps added a hundred years after the Easter event precisely because no one in the early church ever liked Mark’s ending.

So why would Mark tell the most important story of the Bible in such an inconclusive way?

Maybe his real ending was simply torn from the scroll that he wrote the gospel on.

Or maybe Mark ends the gospel this way to tell us that Easter is not just about triumphant joy.

Maybe Mark is telling his Christian community not to base their faith on something as superficial as a triumphant Easter without the agony of Good Friday.

Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
Maybe Mark is telling us that we’ve got to see this moment of fear and trembling at the empty tomb as THE critical moment- THE defining moment of faith for Christians.

After all, this is the very moment that we’ve been building up to through out Lent. This is our moment of deliverence and everything that has come before now was only a preparation for this moment.

And when a critical moment occurs in your life, in my life, it can be startling. It can be awe-some. It can cause your feet not to be jubilant. It can make you stammer and not know what to say.

But like the women who hear the words of the angel, we stand at this point of critical decision. In literary terms, they are the devices that draw us into the plot. We feel what they feel. We think as they think.

What will they do next? What will we do? How will we respond to Christ’s call to discipleship?

What does the good news of Jesus’ resurrection mean for you? For these faithful women, Jesus’ resurrection brings extreme tension and I believe it is no different for us.

In one sense we can ask ourselves if we will be disciples like Abraham who journey in covenant with God for a purpose larger than ourselves- for a blessing which passes through us but is not solely for our own sake. Like Joseph, will we show mercy to others rather than seek revenge even when they mean to harm us, and through mercy gather a community committed to the love of God and neighbor? Will we take stock of our true selves, ask for God’s forgiveness and accept the grace found only in Christ Jesus?

These are the challenges of discipleship.

In another sense, Mark’s ending of the Easter story makes us carry with us the vivid images of Jesus’ agony, despair, and doubt on the cross even as we hear the good news of his resurrection. The shadow of the cross makes our faith stronger on Easter because in our own wilderness moments of despair and doubt, we know that our savior has felt what we feel and that he is truly with us- even to the end of the age.

This is the reassurance of Christ.

Conclusion: what’s the Point?
The challenges of discipleship and the reassurance of Christ.

You see, I like the cliff hanger ending in Mark because it puts me in this uncomfortable place where the reassurance is not separate from the challenge. Christianity is not about a happy ending served up on a silver platter. It’s about a journey with reassurance in one of your pockets and challenge in the other. You have to deal with this tension to be a Christian. We have to constantly reassess our expectations of God and God’s expectations of us.

This confrontational, fragmented ending in Mark’s gospel makes that clear.

So go! Go from this critical moment of your life.

Go sing triumphant hymns and ring all the bells you can find. Believe the good news of Easter and join the parade with jubilant feet. Believe the fulfillment of God’s promise and be a joyful and challenged disciple of our risen Lord, Christ Jesus!

AMEN.

[i] Matthew 25:34-40

Magi In The City: A Tale of Epiphany

2007-05-30T14:59:00.000-04:00

Matthew 2:1-12

Samuel walked into my office adjacent to the sanctuary, a little bit down. The city was adorned to the hilt with Christmas regalia on every light post, in every store window, and on every house. Christmas festivals with seasonal choirs of school children were mysteriously popping out of thin air. Even the most bah-humbugiest, the grinchiest, the most gotta-see-it-to-believe it people I knew- they were all caught up in the season.

Even Mr. Hooey, the 85 year old curmudgeon up at the end of our street whose rare contributions to public conversation were limited to complaints about the dangerous loitering of neighborhood boys (who were in reality as good as gold and were only discussing whose front yard would host the next touch football scrimmage). Yes, even crusty old Mr. Hooey stopped me in the middle of walking the dog one morning to say how great the Douglas Fir and Holly wreath with pomegranates looked on our front door. It seemed that everyone in town, including the neighborhood grouch, was excited.

Everyone except Samuel.

“I just can’t seem to get into the spirit of the season,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked as pastorally as possible.

“Well it doesn’t seem like anybody thinks Christmas is really about Christ and so I just don’t get the point. It’s about store advertisements and mall Santa Clauses and crowded roads and people cursing each other over parking spaces and completing last minute deadlines before the office shuts down ‘til January. Maybe we’d be better off just skipping this commercial Christmas thing, have a simple church service and then start celebrating New Year’s; take a little trip to a warm beach to relax and then just get on with it.”

“Get on with what?”

“You know, get on with the next thing in life - the next year, the next work deadline, the next day of school for the kids, the next tax period, the next trip to the grocery store or the gas station.”

“Tell me,” I probed. “What do you think would have to happen in order for you to get into the Christmas spirit?”

The frustration dammed up in Samuel erupted: “It would take an act of God for me to get into the Christmas spirit!”

“Sam, I… I don’t mean to get all theological and deep,” I tried to say as humbly as possible “but, technically speaking…”

“Stop. I know where you’re going. You’re going to say: Christmas is an act of God. Yes, I get that. I understand what Christmas is supposed to be all about. But it isn’t about that really. At least it doesn’t seem to be about that at all from where I’m standing.”

I called on the all the resources of all my theological experience and training. “Maybe, in order for you to get into the Christmas spirit you need to find God somewhere in all that stuff going on out there that seems to have nothing to do with God.”

“Huh?”

“Do you remember the journey of the three Magi?” I asked. “I always liked the T. S. Eliot poem about it because it starts out talking about how daunting the journey was: ‘A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey…’ You can really feel it. The camel drivers threatened to leave if they didn’t get more pay for the trip, and the townspeople were hostile in villages they passed through, and tavern keepers were thieves, and there was a lack of fire and adequate shelter in the desert.[i] Think of the doubts and longing for family and luxury back home, and…and no room service!

“Then, near the end of their journey, there were false leads about where the baby was actually lying and Herod Antipas tried to trick them into participating in his appalling political intrigues. So much clutter, distraction, obfuscation, misinformation, disinformation. It’s incredible that they found Jesus at all. But what a fantastic revelation they had, despite all their tribulation.

“They were gentiles, after all, who theologically represented all gentiles. They followed the light of that star until they arrived at the location of the Jewish messiah and in the very moment of their epiphany- of their revelation, of finding that infant- Jesus became the messiah of Jews and gentiles alike. Maybe your experience is an updated version of their experience. It’s everybody’s faith journey. It’s everybody’s epiphany.”

“You’re right, you know,” Samuel replied somberly. “I can’t find God anywhere in any of these Christmas preparations and hooplah. Even my kid’s choir recital here at church seemed to be more of an opportunity for the parents to ooh and aah than a worship event.”

As the pastor, that last comment smarted a bit so I retorted rather crisply, “Not to be cliché about it but you really should go look for the baby Jesus. Start now. If you find Jesus, you’ll find God too.”

Samuel was undeterred. “But I thought God is coming to us - as Jesus. That’s part of the whole problem. I keep expecting God to show up and it just doesn’t happen. The FedEx guy shows up. The power bill shows up. The lawn crew shows up to clean up the leaves that show up on the grass. Why hasn’t God showed up?”

I tried one last time. “Here’s the thing,” I pronounced bluntly and a little peeved. “The world is a bundle of complicated contradictions. If you want a simplistic life with superficial answers then you go ahead and live that way but don’t complain when such one dimensional faith lets you down. Alternatively, if you go meditate in the undisturbed solitude of some Himalayan mountain top, it may just rain on your well developed theories and high minded spiritual insights so that your thoughts just dissolve into a muddled mess like chalk drawings on a wet sidewalk.

“Think of the billions of molecules out there full of atoms, neutrons, electrons, protons. Stable and unstable. Unstable ones decaying into some other arrangement in order to become stable. Particles firing off randomly because of some microscopic chain reaction, pinging against your skin, your heart, your head, your brain, your consciousness. Ping. Ping. Ping.

“Your job is to find God in the middle of all that; not necessarily so that you can make sense of all those contradictions remorselessly pinging away at you or make them go away. They’re not going to go away. Go find God in order to liberate some little spark of divine truth within your consciousness, within your personal understanding of life that allows you to see beyond the material distractions so you can make something healthy and hopeful and joyous out of the human condition.

“Take the journey. Find Jesus: find the Father; find the Holy Spirit. Be the Magi, Sam. Be the Magi.”

Several days later I received an email from Samuel. He was still unsuccessful. “No sightings,” he wrote. “Have stared into every passing face at the mall, on the street, at a soup kitchen. No Jesus. No Father. No Holy Spirit. No nothin’. Seems like God would come out of seclusion at least once a year so those of us who believe could feel like we believe in something rather than nothing. Not asking for miracles, just some reassurance. Just a little sign maybe. God can do anything, right?!”

I immediately tapped out a response and fired my own set of pinging electrons through the wireless internet link. “Sam- Most of us get our images of God from what we learned in childhood rather than discerning things for ourselves as our brains develop, so I can understand how you might think God would magically appear at special times and leave little motivational tokens. God’s collection of inspirational sayings. But the Holy Trinity is not some kind of tooth fairy who shows up and leaves fifty cents under your pillow and the Bible isn’t a fortune cookie. Besides, Jesus is probably right under your very nose.”

During the week before Christmas, Samuel sent another email with an attached newspaper account of a car accident somewhere in a nearby county. His email said: “This guy found a Jesus, but it’s not the real Jesus. Still, it’s the popular Jesus.”

The article told of a man who was delivering his teenage nephew home after an evening basketball practice. As they cruised down the dark country road talking about the team’s chances for the upcoming season, they drove right past the side road to the farm where the boy lived without noticing. Still talking, they drove on another hundred yards and came up on an intersection before realizing where they were. Amid the boy’s shouts of surprise, the uncle slammed on the brakes, skidded, and crashed through a fence in the front yard of a house.

The car rumbled to a halt but not before it had forcefully intruded on a wooden nativity scene. Mary and Joseph got tossed callously aside and plastic donkeys and sheep were upended into very ungraceful poses. Worst of all, the baby Jesus bounced straight up in the air, out of his manger and landed face down on the windshield of the car, staring directly at the driver. The uncle was charged with failure to stop at an intersection and reckless endangerment of a minor.

At last it was Christmas Eve. We had a wild and joyous 5pm children’s service complete with traditional howls from impatient infants with water logged diapers. At 9pm, we had a solemn, candle light service of prayers and hymns and anthems- deeply spiritual and moving. Afterwards Samuel pulled me aside in one corner of the Narthex.

“I’ve been on a pilgrimage all week,” he whispered. “Been hitting every live nativity display in town.”

“Have you found the real Jesus?” I whispered back.

“Not yet. Most of them are really hokey. I mean some red haired guy with a pasted on beard trying to look like a Palestinian Jew named Joseph. And his blonde, lily-white trophy wife faking Mary, but fiddling with her tennis bracelet.”

“Maybe Mary played tennis,” I quipped.

“Cut it out. Anyway there’s a couple more that end just after midnight tonight and I’m going to check them out now.”

“Be the Magi, Sam,” I said in parting. He gave me a silent, blank look.

The next day my cell phone rang and ruing the fact that I had left it on during the one day of the year that I thought I really deserved some peace and quiet, I flipped it open to hear Samuel’s exuberant voice.

“I found him! I found Jesus!”

“The real Jesus?” I queried.

“Yep, the real Jesus! Oh he wasn’t there in body or anything like that, but he was there just the same. I could tell.”

It turned out that just before midnight, Samuel had driven up to a little church in the middle of the city that had become dwarfed by years of growth from the surrounding commercial property. There was a small array of people clumped together in the foggy, cool night as traffic noises broke in from the street.

“It was really kind of strange,” Samuel related. “Thought it was going to be a total waste of time. People just standing around talking, not even paying attention to the nativity scene- not taking it seriously. I wondered why they even bothered to come out. At least the Mary and Joseph were kind of realistic. Mary was probably about 16, dark hair, pimples. Joseph looked about 19 or 20, long hair, scraggly, three day old beard. Then there were these dwarf livestock. Couple of cows the size of Golden Retrievers and a miniature goat and a donkey same size as the cow. A shepherd with a golf towel wrapped around his head and cinched up with what looked like a nylon dog collar was holding the donkey and off to one side three guys with gold painted plastic crowns and burgundy tablecloths draped over their shoulders stood by a short camel that kept belching. I think one of them is a big shot local banker.

“And little kids who were clearly up too late for their age kept crossing the parking lot to the church and coming back with cookies and hot chocolate. There was a small, really smoky fire burning in one of those brass fire bowls straight of a catalogue. A loud speaker screwed to the side of the plywood stall suddenly started barking out the Christmas narrative while the actors mimed their parts. Right in the middle of the whole thing a fire truck screams down the street interrupting everything and I thought I’d had it. I was done. This wasn’t the real thing and the real Jesus just wasn’t going to show up this year.

“But before I could turn to go, I noticed some little tow head boy, maybe seven or eight, cut right across the path of the Magi and the camel. He was holding a Styrofoam cup of cider awkwardly away from his body so it wouldn’t spill and smiling- really proud of himself for having the cider. Didn’t even notice the Magi or the action in the nativity scene. His mom waved at him to hush and he smiled even bigger and gave her the thumbs up.

“I don’t know what happened, but right then I realized Jesus was there. It was like a light went off. All those people just doing their thing with that nativity play going on right under their noses. Just going about their business, not taking anything seriously except mundane achievements and creature comforts like getting some cider and a cookie. And tragedy screaming down the street like a fire truck, tearing a hole right through the whole holy moment.”

“Did you have an epiphany?” I interjected.

“Yeah, whatever,” Samuel blurted back. “It was that kid and his goofy grin. It was like Jesus was in his smile. All this distracting stuff was going on, all these particles pinging around, and Jesus was smack in the middle of it in a smile. And if Jesus was in a smile then he had to be happy that we were all there just doing what we were doing. No judgment of our distractedness. Just gladness about our participation in the moment.

“The thing is, God doesn’t just show up once a year to do a magic trick. Listen, you want my advice? You’ve got to tackle that journey the Magi took because it’s the participating that makes Jesus real; that’s where God becomes real to us. The minute that kid smiled, I realized the nativity play wasn’t just the actors and the narrator. It was them and everybody else standing there plus the miniature animals and the folks pumping gas at the filling station next door and the tired woman at the bus stop who just wanted to go home.

“I guess it really was one of those epiphanies. Well, gotta go. The wife’s got a fever but still wants a roaring fire in the fireplace and the kids want help putting toys together and the dog needs a walk and the in-laws will be here in an hour. But it’s all good.”

“You liberated the truth that was in you all along,” I confirmed.
“Yeah,” said Samuel. “It’s the truth alright.”

[i] Thomas Stearns Elliot, Journey of the Magi.

Ruth's Beautiful Faith

2007-05-29T23:24:00.000-04:00

Ruth 1:6-18

Engaging Image: lost letters of lost souls.

I don’t know if you happened to see the Associated Press news story this week about a grocery bag full of letters that was found washing up on the beach near Atlantic City, New Jersey. It seems that a father and son who were fishing on the beach noticed this plastic bag, opened it, and found around 300 letters addressed to a Jersey City, NJ Baptist minister and marked “altar.”

The minister died several years ago at an advanced age and mysteriously this collection of letters ended up in the ocean over 100 miles away. Most were unopened.

Each writer hoped that his or her letter would be prayed over in a kind of prayer of supplication. Some of them dated back to 1973 and while a few writers asked for divine intervention in some matter like a lottery ticket, most were scribed in anguished ink.

There was a convict claiming innocence who desired liberation and the embrace of his family. Another was from a woman who suspected her boyfriend of abusing her young daughter. One woman prayed that the father of her soon to be born child would fall in love with her so they could marry and form a complete circle of family.

These were truly lost letters of lost souls who put their total confidence in the intervening action of a divinity they could not see or touch.

This story reminded me of the prayer practice of this congregation and many others in which specific concerns are given voice, specific children of God spoken for, specific anguish raised to God in the gathering of a worshipping community. Surely God Almighty already knows of these things, has already peered into all of our hearts, has laid a hand on our foreheads and gathered our thoughts.

A rationalist might interject that vocalizing our concerns is an entirely superstitious and irrelevant act. And yet there is something especially sacred about this practice of naming the pain of those among us in worship.

It is a beautiful practice. It is a confident practice. It is a practice of faith in the power and engagement of a god that we cannot see. As the writer of Hebrews declared, it is faith in what is unseen rather than in what is seen. It is like the faith of Ruth. It’s that beautiful faith of Ruth.

Application of Text: What’s happening inside the text?

Think about Ruth and Naomi trudging out of a land of tragedy into a land of uncertain peril. They live in a time when women have the social standing of property. They live in a society in which paternalistic patronage and the solid relationship to a clan and a tribe meant the difference between life and a destitute, certain death without identity.

With their husbands dead, Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah stand little chance of survival. So Naomi strikes out for Israel where her clan resides. Ruth and Orpah begin to follow her, but Naomi recognizes that going to Israel puts these Moabite women in even greater danger. Their families and clans are in Moab. Custom dictates that they should stay there.

Orpah, whose name translates as “back of the neck,” turns away to find her father’s people. Her name predestines and foretells her action and her adherence to the tangible and familiar social custom. She’s the obedient one.

Ruth, however, clings to Naomi and will not leave despite all urging and reasoning. By loyally staying with Naomi, Ruth puts her faith in what is intangible. She sacrifices the tangible and familiar in her life.

But what is she sacrificing the familiar for? Why would she possibly do it? What is to be gained? Her sacrifice is for the sake of companionship with Naomi. For the sake of something that has little benefit for herself. Ruth’s act is a selfless act of love drawn out of her own moment of despair and desperation.

Listener Context: How is the text beautiful?

You might say that Ruth’s devotion is certainly commendable and perhaps even noble, but how is it beautiful?

On one hand, the literary style of the story is beautiful. The symmetry is beautiful. Naomi has two daughters in law and their decisions are symmetrically opposite: one decides to stay in Moab while the other decides to leave with Naomi.

In the narrative that follows, Naomi and Ruth become an odd pairing on the road. Naomi, a foreigner in Moab traveling home. Ruth, a foreigner in Israel traveling away from home. How strange that in this perilous moment Naomi and Ruth remain symmetrically divergent according to their ethnicity even though they swap ethnic standing in society as their location changes.

This kind of stylistic organization is the beauty that the Greek philosophers described in the order and harmony of physical relationships. It’s the beauty of Greek architecture, its spacing and dimension and proportion. For them, beauty was the harmony of the designed function of every thing in the cosmos and the conformity of every thing to its designed purpose.

For us, it’s the harmonious order and proportion of the created world. It’s God’s organization of the light and the darkness in Genesis, the separation of the waters and the dry land. It’s the rotation of the planets in specific relation to one another. It’s the ebb and flow of the tide, the progression of the seasons, the cycle of life and death in nature. We’re struck by this beauty in our hearts, our feeling senses, our emotions.

But there is another kind of beauty in this story. We find it in Ruth’s speech of self-sacrificing loyalty to Naomi. It’s not the literary style in her prose. It’s not a matter of the eloquence of her vocabulary. Instead it is her benevolence toward Naomi that is expressed in that speech that we find beautiful:

“Where you go, I will go.
Where you lodge, I will lodge.
Your God will be my God.
Where you die, I will die.”

The beauty of what Ruth does is different from the objective beauty of the harmonious functioning of the order of things. It’s more than that. It’s more subjective than objective because it requires a decision.

Ruth knows that returning to her people, like Orpah, is the course that will benefit her the most. But she doesn’t do it and by stepping outside of her own best interests, she beautifully transcends herself. Her choice transcends her own security, her own sense of identity as a Moabite woman, transcends her own fear of going to live in a country where she will be considered an outcast.

This disposition to transcend herself for the benefit of someone else is real beauty because Ruth makes a moral decision that goes beyond the natural order. Goes beyond the designed harmony of natural relationships.

Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?

It’s a beauty we don’t usually see in daily life where people seem to be so caught up in protecting their own best interests. Where people vocally defend their right to a parking place. Where members from one political party demonize members from another political party. Where people judge and distrust each other. Where people do things for others because of a reward or expectation of return benefit.

But Ruth establishes a different relationship. She starts a community built on transcending personal interest. By devoting herself to Naomi’s welfare, Ruth starts a community that promotes the same mutual benefit. Not the individual benefit of two individuals but the mutual benefit of two people who depend on each other and support one another.

And there’s one significant thing further. Ruth accepts Naomi’s God, our God, as her God. She not only transcends her own interests for Naomi’s sake but transcends her own beliefs. She puts her faith in something beyond herself. She puts her life on the altar to be prayed over to Naomi’s God not knowing what will happen. This new community that she builds with Naomi dances around a central understanding that these women are part of something bigger than themselves. That mutuality, that community of common faith is beautiful.

Conclusion: What’s the Point?

So what’s the point? Why is it so important for us to take heed of Ruth’s story?

For one thing, we should pay attention to Ruth’s transcendent act of devotion, her beautiful act of faith because we need beauty in our lives. We need something to counter the base impulses of society. We need something to counter violence and pain and grief and the mundane toil of the day that can suck us in and steal the joyous essence of life itself.

And we need something to remind us of the true nature of the triune God- creator, redeemer, sustainer. In theology, there is a description of the holy trinity as an ideal community. Three equal members in one single godhead. No part of the trinity acts alone, no part has existence outside the others. This description is called perichoresis which comes from the Greek image of people dancing in a circle: creator, redeemer, sustainer joined in sacred dance.

This is a beautiful image that we can look to and model in our lives. It’s an image of what God wants for our lives. What God wants for our communities:

Worshipful communities whose members reveal God to each other in selfless acts of beautiful faith.

A beautiful faith that embraces a holy relationship through which we might live fully, joyfully, and with hope.

AMEN.

Statement of Faith

2007-05-27T14:39:00.000-04:00

I believe in God the creator who, through sovereign power, calls human beings to participate in the formation and reformation of creation, of culture, and of life itself. God’s relationship with humanity is grounded in certain unique truths, which are:

=That we are all equally created out of God’s love and in that shared created-ness, we have equal standing before God and one another. No created being or institution possesses ultimate or transcendent, spiritual or moral authority or wisdom or power;

=That we are charged, as agents of God’s will, to engage each other in ways that acknowledge the equality of our origin in God’s love and to engage creation as stewards of that love;

=That we are blessed with God’s eternal faithfulness, constantly expressed in the new things God does in our lives and in creation and that causes us to challenge fundamental assumptions generated by our individual and collective desires.

I believe in God the Christ who, through redeeming grace imparted in his death on the cross, calls human beings to participate in the revelation of God’s love. Jesus’ relationship with humanity is grounded in certain unique realities, which are:

=That we are called to a mission of reconciliation and care for the human family, to relieve burdens of suffering, of poverty, of sickness, of strife, and of powerlessness in Jesus’ name;

=That we are called to costly Christian discipleship by proclaiming God’s justice for all, and by requiring accountability and confessional honesty in our own lives and in the lives of others even when our words are unpopular;

=That we are called to accept Jesus’ claim upon our lives, marked in baptism, and to make that claim the essential context for our words, thoughts, deeds, and worship.

I believe in God the Holy Spirit who, through sustaining fellowship, calls human beings to participate in communities that express and live their faith in God. This faith reflects unique norms and values, which are:

=That freedom is God’s merciful gift of liberation from the dominating tyranny of self-centeredness, pride, and self-preservation and enables us to serve God and each other before serving ourselves;

=That the Christian church is the Body of Christ, led by Christ- a fellowship of worshipping people in which forgiveness is practiced, in which burdens are borne mutually, and through which the community and the world are engaged with hospitality;

=That holy scripture is the essential witness and testimony of God’s servant peoples in history that we interpret in order to understand God’s love, God’s will, God’s justice, and God’s transcendent sovereignty over all created things;

=That prayer is essential and holy communication in which we praise, confess, give thanks, seek and find God’s presence in our lives;

=That holy sacraments are ritual, corporate engagement with the triune God that bind us together as the Body of Christ and that rededicate our lives to divine service through the Body of Christ.

What'll It Be: Twinkies or Carrots?

2007-05-25T17:39:00.000-04:00

Acts 5:12-32

We live in an era when the word of God has circumnavigated the globe.

What began as a branch from the root of Jesse and was preached to the Jerusalem masses under the Portico of Solomon on the east side of the Temple, came to be spread throughout the world on the wings of European empires and American foreign mission boards. And now, now as the world grows ever smaller and ever flatter, Christianity is finding its own way back to the west.

The word of God has always been on the move.

Now it finds us here in North America in the beginning of the 21st century - even right here in our Presbyterian pews where we thought we had already heard the word of God and where we thought Jesus was already among us. Right here amid the familiar and the reliable and the comfortable.

But this returning word of God stirs us out of those comfort zones with an Asian hallelujah or hymns with Caribbean or African rhythms. This rebounding word of God makes us anxious and confused because it isn’t our European tradition. We feel like the first apostles alone in a sea of competing theologies and spiritualities.

More than anything, we feel as though we’re being left behind but we can’t quite understand why. Why?

We’re educated. We’re faithful. We’re giving and we’re loving. But the culture that embraces the multitude of spiritual voices, the culture in which our footsteps fall every single day, doesn’t care. No it doesn’t. What our culture wants is only a simplistic maxim to live by. Something easy to digest, easy to remember, not too taxing for the brain or the soul. Too often, what we offer is the full 14 volumes of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics.

So, in the face of this swirling ocean of voices we’ve found ourselves in a crisis of relevance as a people loyal to the one gospel yet surrounded by a society whose values are the reverse of gospel values.

A society which reveres competition over compassion.

A society which seeks revenge rather than justice.

A society which promotes individual empowerment over connectedness and fellowship.

A society which finds in its soul absolutely no need for forgiveness.

A society which, as the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, puts it: feels no need for “adoption into God’s initmate presence.”

The well known and admired Barbara Brown Taylor has chronicled that she entered ministry with a strong desire for in depth religious dialogue. But she notes that her first parish required more of her attention in the arena of sustaining the congregation than challenging her congregation. It had more to do with questions of functional immediacy than questions of eternal meaning.

Well, maybe that’s as it should be - to some degree. Maybe faith within the parish is all about strengthening and sustaining, nourishing and nurturing. After all, if you want to teach your congregation about the theological undergirding of belief you’ve got to do a good job of pastoral care first. You’ve got to deal with real life before you can deal with theological structure.

But as important as feeding and caring for the parish is, it’s not the totality of Christian discipleship. More than that, those basic life issues are fundamentally connected to that theological structure. If we’re not careful, the parish can become isolated and insulated. It can live for years there inside the Temple and never breathe the vibrant air of openness.

But God calls Peter and the Apostles, indeed God calls each of us in every pew, in every parish to take our faith outside the Temple and be with the crowds beneath the columns of the Portico. We ‘ve got to out into the public square.

My country cousins might have said: “You can’t stay in the kitchen. You’ve got to get out on the porch.” While I may be too much of a city slicker to make that sound authentic, the sentiment is entirely accurate.

Suffice it to say that Peter and his pals make good role models for us. They got out of the kitchen and went out on the porch and when people began to listen and believe, Peter and the others got arrested. That’s the cost of discipleship. But we’re told that the Holy Spirit was with them and they were freed from captivity and directed to go back to the public square and teach some more.

Again the Apostles were arrested and made to appear before the Sanhedrin, the council of Temple authorities, arbiters of religious custom, validators of socio-religious practice.

And the council chastised these Christ followers and said: “Look! We told you people not to teach and preach anymore to that clamoring crowd out there. You’re just stirring them up telling them all manner of things that contradict what we know is best for the Hebrew people. We make the rules here and you can’t upset the established order of our society by talking about that false prophet, that crucified phony.”

Peter could have said: “We’re sorry. Okay, you’re right. From now on we’ll just teach about the prophets of old. We’ll talk about the glory days of David and the importance of adhering to the accepted laws of religious authority. Oh yes, and we’ll give the people some simplistic maxims that are easy to follow.”

But Peter did not say that. He didn’t say that at all. The Holy Spirit had commanded the Apostles to teach something far more meaningful than conventional ritual that would appear holy but would in truth offer no real sustenance to humanity nor honor to God.

Peter wasn’t willing to go along with the pronouncements of these human authorities when the Creator wanted so much more for the world.

Peter understood that societies built on the policies of human authority always fall short of the Kingdom of God.

A report just this spring connected obesity among the poor to that disfunctional bastion of American policy- the Farm Bill. In its contemporary form this familiar lesigslation supports farmers by subsidizing certain cash crops. Some $25 billion worth of subsidy goes to three products: corn, soybeans, and wheat – the very commodities that yield the fats and carbohydrates essential to the commercial manufacture of processed foods like, well like Twinkies.

By contrast, the Farm Bill does extremely little to encourage the production of healthy, fresh produce such as carrots. Every processed food, every sports drink, every quick snack, every corn-syrup enriched food product on your grocer’s shelf is Federally subsidized so that the most filling yet fattening and artery choking foods bear an artificially low price while unsubsidized, healthy, fresh foods don’t.

If you want to get the most for your food dollar buy those Twinkies. They’ll fill you up and you’ll feel that pleasing rush of corn derived sugars and soy derived fats. If you want something life sustaining, well then, you’ve got to pay full price for the carrots.

Societies built on the policies of human authority always fall short of the Kingdom of God.

But we’ve got to remember that the word of God is always on the move. And we've got to get going or else get left behind. We’ve got to get ourselves out on the porch.

You see, we can’t retreat inside the insular sanctuary of the parish because the Holy Spirit commands us to live our faith among the crowd of the Portico in that a mixed up world where the economic values of agricultural subsidy dominate the moral values of public health.

We’ve got to get out on the porch and talk about it.

But then when we get out there, out in that broken and fearful world, what will we say? Whose voice will we use? Which set of values will we say is truth? What will you and I say to the world?

Will we subsidize processed truth rich in social carbohydrates and cultural sugars so that we won’t get chastised? Will we say that mercy is an un-necessary social ingredient in civilization as long as our group can be powerful? Will we say that God just wants us to fulfill our independent, individualistic, personal goals and ignore others living obese lives on a thin economic margin?

Or will we witness some truth that supercedes sanctified cultural folklore and the disfunctional accumulation of social norms? Let us be witnesses to Christological values and divine truth.

let us witness that the last shall be first.

Let us witness that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Let us witness that the peacemakers, yes the peacemakers, are the children of God.

Let us boldly claim that adoption into the intimate presence of God, the need for self-awareness and forgiveness of sin are critical ingredients for healthy human life and spiritual well being.

I’m asking you these things today just as I’m asking myself. I’m asking us both to make a choice that will define our relationship with the world, a choice that will define our relationship with creation itself.

Will we give the crowd some cheap liturgy of popular cultural values?

Or will we live costly yet truthful discipleship to the God of our ancestors. The one true God, who on an Easter morning long ago raised up Christ Jesus, the one true hope for all people?

Glory be to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

AMEN.