Sermons and thoughts on faith on Scripture from my time at Old Presbyterian Meeting House and Falls Church Presbyterian Church, plus sermons and postings from "Pastor James," my blog while pastor at Boulevard Presbyterian in Columbus, OH.
It is not at all unusual to hear laments from once large, influential congregations about how things have changed. "Remember when we had 65 youth in the confirmation class? Remember when you had to come early or you'd have trouble finding a seat? Remember when we had eight women's 'circles' that were brimming over with women of all ages?"
In America, we tend to judge things based on size and growth. Bigger is better. More is better. Grow or die. In my profession, "successful" pastors are almost always "called" to bigger churches, but we are less "marketable" if our current church is not growing, or worse, is shrinking.
Now it is certainly true that congregations sometimes fail to grow because they are not welcoming and hospitable, because they do not understand that they are called to connect with and share God's love with others. Sometimes congregations shrink because they stop following Jesus and turn inward.
But sometimes congregations worry too much about numbers and success as it is measured by our culture. And sometimes we forget that we are called to be faithful, to follow Jesus, and that numbers and our culture's notion of success are not always good measure of our faithfulness.
"For you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the LORD set his heart on you and chose you -- for you were the fewest of all peoples." These words are spoken to the people of Israel as they prepare to move from their time in the wilderness into the land of Promise. And God tells them that they are not "set apart" (the meaning of holy) because of their successes or growth. They are set apart because God loves them.
As Christians, we say that God has claimed us in the same way. God loves us and sets us apart not because of our successes or growth, but because God so loves the world. We a holy people because God's love has set us apart for bold lives of faith that show God's love to the world. This is where our faith begins. This is where our Christian witness begins. Our successes are not our witness. Our witness is simply to share the good news of God's love in Jesus through our words and deeds.
Sometimes, amidst the anxieties that can emerge from a lack of growth or "success," we need to be reminded of how God loves us and calls us. Some congregations' "successes" of the past had less to do with faithfulness and more to do with a culture that virtually required church participation. But in a time when the culture not longer sends us members, we can rejoice that God's love for us was never rooted in our membership rolls. God has loved us, and God loves us still. And God's love frees us from fears and anxieties - as well as from being captive to the good old days - and calls us to be a holy people, a special people, a people marked and set apart to share God's embrace with all.
So it's Ash Wednesday. I was well into my 30s before I attended my first Ash Wednesday service, but they have become very meaningful to me. Yet, I still find something a bit humorous about hearing Jesus tell us to practice our piety in private followed by scores of worshipers going out in public with a mark on their foreheads advertising their Christianity for all to see. (Some churches do encourage their members to wash off the cross before going out in public.)
Despite this, I like the way Ash Wednesday and Lent call us to take stock, to examine ourselves and see whether our lives are properly aligned and oriented with regards to what is truly important. For those who call themselves "Christian," who claim an identity in some way rooted in the person of Jesus, this self examination asks if our priorities look like his.
Jesus' critique of public piety and his call to store up treasure in heaven rather than here on earth calls us to examine our core motivations. Are we motivated primarily by what's in it for us, or are we motivated primarily by the ways of the Kingdom, of God's will over my wants?
It is possible to hear Jesus' words as nothing more than a longer range version of "what's in it for us?" Don't seek short term gains on earth, but go for the long term rewards of eternal life. But I don't think that is what Jesus means at all. Jesus is the embodiment of what he teaches, and Jesus seems totally unmotivated by the hope of some reward. Rather he is motivated by the ways of heaven, which, according to his model prayer, is where God's will is done. Living a life motivated by the ways of heaven means working for the world to become a place where God's will is done as well.
"Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." These words remind us that all our schemes and plans are transitory, but Jesus has invited to become a part of something new and permanent, that coming day where God's will is done here on earth as it is in heaven. Ash Wednesday asks us if we have ordered our lives around the self serving patterns of this world, patterns that are passing away, or if we have ordered our lives around what really matters.
I once knew a man who insisted that he and his wife never fought and that they never had. I didn't know him well enough to judge the truth of his claim, but my doubt must have been apparent, because he reiterated his assertion in several forms, as though he felt the need to convince me.
I didn't try to argue with him, but I do have trouble believing that in a healthy relationship fights are non-existent. If you are really engaged in a relationship and have any significant expectations of the other person, surely there will be times when some level of conflict will emerge. The only way I can imagine a marriage or other serious relationship without conflict would be if neither party really cared. And I have seen marriages like this, relationships so dead that the couple is able to coexist peacefully.
Relationship with God is certainly different from a marriage. Unlike marriage it is not a relationship of equals. Still, I have trouble envisioning a relationship with serious God which has no conflict. And given how enigmatic God can be and how many things there are about God that I simply cannot understand, it seems inevitable that God will disappoint me, that I will occasionally feel let down by God, and even that I will become angry with God.
In human relationships, it is not uncommon to hear one person speak of being upset, even angry, because a partner seems distant or absent. Sometimes anger and conflict grow out of a deep longing for a partner who will not or cannot share themselves in a meaningful way. And of the frustrations I experience in my relationship with God, this is my biggest. Sometimes God seems so distant and unavailable that it grieves me. Sometimes this grief can lead to a standoff with God, an arrangement not unlike a dead marriage where the couple manages to coexist while barely acknowledging each other's presence. But sometimes my longing turns to frustration and even anger.
I don't know if the writer of Psalm 42 is angry, but I do sense the mixed emotions of a relationship that isn't quite right. There is a longing for God, but also a sense of being abandoned. There are memories of better times, and a restless and troubled soul that wonders if that can ever be recovered.
Now I don't mean to encourage anger and conflict in relationship with God or humans. But at the very least anger does mean there is some engagement in the relationship. And if we never get upset or angry with God, is our faith a relationship, or is it just a belief in a concept?
When I am having a really bad day and nothing seems to be going right, it is remarkable how easy it is to slip into a "Woe is me" mindset. All the world seems aligned against me. Life's unfairness was never more clearly on display. And considering my vocation as a pastor, God has clearly forgotten about me.
When I gain a little perspective from such moments, I can see unflattering parallels with Jonah, who complained bitterly to God about the death of a vine that had shaded him from the sun. When God asked, "Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?" Job answered, "Yes, angry enough to die." And if you're familiar with Jonah's story, you know that his self-absorbed petulance was all the more remarkable considering that the issue at hand was the fate of the great city, Nineveh, with over 100,000 residents, as well a "many animals."
In a Jonah like mindset, encountering the Shema in today's Old Testament reading is a bit jarring. (Shema is a transliteration of the Hebrew word that opens Deuteronomy 6:4, "Hear, O Israel..." and has become the name of this core of Jewish teaching that the faithful are to recite twice daily, affix to their doorposts, etc.) "Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone. You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." In a "Woe is me" moment, it is disorienting to be reminded, "It's not all about you; it's all about God."
You needn't be religious to think that our culture has become much more self-centered, much more narcissistic. As a culture, we find it harder and harder to view something as good unless it is immediately good for me. And these narcissistic tendencies are as apparent in religious life as they are in the culture at large. I hear from many pastors that the most common complaint that they hear regarding worship is, "It's not feeding me." Even worship, it seems, can be measured primarily by how it does or doesn't "meet my needs."
But Jesus calls us to discover a wonderful freedom from this tyranny of self. His good news promises release from the anxieties and fears that so often drive us, a freedom that comes from giving ourselves over to loving God and loving others.
Very often, faith is understood to mean believing the right things. But I think true faith is about embracing this good news. True faith is something even the most devout among us struggle with because one of the most difficult things is turning our lives completely over to God. It is so hard for us to trust that giving ourselves to God without reservation and truly loving others will work out well for us. We just can't quite trust God more than we trust ourselves.
I'm not sure anyone ever fullys get there, but most of us know people who are better at it than we are. And most of us who are serious about faith have occasionally tasted this release from fear and anxiety Jesus' good news promises. And so, even on a "Woe is me" day, there is hope, even certainty that God's grace is drawing us toward life as we are meant to live it. The Spirit is working in us to help us become the "children of God" we are called to be.
When I was in seminary, I got to go on a three week long trip to the Middle East. From students who had been in previous years, I knew that one highlight would be an early morning ascent up Mt. Sinai where we would watch the sunrise. Our group assembled in the darkness around 4:00 a.m. Guides looked us over and decided if we were the right size for their camel. We then road the camels for about 45 minutes to a large flat area not too far from the summit and then hiked the rest of the way to the top. There, along with fifty or so other tourists and pilgrims, we waited as the pink glow of sunrise gradually gave way to a fiery, orange-red sun slowly emerging from behind the mountains of the Sinai peninsula.
I had seen pictures of this event in a seminary chapel service. I had heard a classmate speak of what a moving, “mountain-top” experience it was. I was all ready for my own experience, my own epiphany. But nothing happened.
Don’t get me wrong. It was a stunning view. I have some incredible pictures, and I cherish the memories. But God did not seem to be especially there. I did not encounter God’s presence in any profound way. I was hoping for a spiritual high, and all I got was a Kodak moment.
It seems to me that worship often suffers a similar fate. On some level, worship is supposed to be an encounter with God’s majesty, a brush with God’s holiness that inspires awe, praise, and commitment. But often, too often I fear, it is a collection of words and music, some of it perhaps beautiful, maybe even inspiring, but not because of God. Too often, many of us seem unaware of God even being here.
In our staff meetings we have been wondering a lot lately about this problem of encountering God, perhaps better, of failing to encounter God. And it’s not just a worship problem. Many people want to draw closer to God. The spirituality section at Barnes and Noble bespeaks a population desperately longing for the holy, the divine. There is a deep human yearning to connect with God. So why does this search so often seem to go awry? There are surely many reasons, but I found myself thinking about two that may seem a bit contradictory: an awe problem and an intimacy problem.
Annie Dillard has famously commented on the awe problem, noting how we come to worship blissfully unaware of what we are doing, like early polar explorers who carried with them fine china and flatware but neglected to bring warm winter clothing. She writes, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does not one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”[1]
Dillard laments how casually we often come into worship, into God’s presence. We think nothing of sipping our coffee and checking our iPhones. We act pretty much as we do every other moment of every other day. We don’t really expect God to show up, at least not the God of the Bible who causes Peter, James, and John to fall on the ground trembling in fear.
Sometimes I think that worship fails to encounter God because it seeks a small, trivial god we can manage and control, a god we can carry around in our back pocket, a god whose only concern is whatever little existential crises we may be having that day. We’re not looking for a God who might rattle us to our core, turn our lives upside down, and call us to become something new and different and wonderful that gets the world ready for God’s new day.
But if part of our problem is that we’ve lost the capacity to be thunderstruck by God’s presence, equally problematic is that we have forgotten the language of intimacy with God. We know how to talk about God, perhaps even to send requests to God now and then, but many of us have become terribly deficient in communicating with God.
Last fall during the Sunday education hour, we had a class for worship leaders. One of those mornings we were talking about what made for a good public prayer, and several people pointed out a common problem in the prayers they heard in worship. Too often those prayers seemed aimed more at worshippers than they did at God. They used the language of explanation and description, talking more about God than with God. A lot of us pastors deserve to be skewered by this critique. We’re far too fond of using prayers to reinforce our sermons or demonstrate our verbal prowess.
But the prayer language Jesus taught us is intimate language. It addresses God not with formal titles but with a child’s familiar Abba, Daddy. And I think I hear God’s side of this in our reading today. We tend to translate the Bible in an overly formal manner. Abba, Daddy, becomes Father. And when we hear God speak on the mountaintop today, to my ear it comes across a bit too much like a royal decree rather than a Daddy’s joyful utterance, “This is my son, my beloved, my delight.”
Watch a mother or a father with an infant sometime, and listen to them “talk” with one another. There’s not a lot of information in such interactions. Such intimate language is often without grammar or even words. But no one would deny that they are communicating with one another. No one would deny that they are sharing powerful emotions, solidifying their bonds to one another, delighting in one another’s presence, influencing one another’s behavior, even if not a single intelligible word is spoken.
Lovers sometimes use similar “language,” a language that can sound like gibberish to one not caught up in the throes of love. And for centuries, this sort of talk was part of the language of Christian spirituality. But in our modern world, where language is used mostly to inform, explain, and influence, the Church has often forgotten how to join in the intimate “gibberish” of lovers, infants, and poets. And we have impoverished ourselves immensely.
Awe and intimacy might seem to be so far apart that they couldn’t possibly go together, but then you might say the same of Jesus being “fully human, fully divine.” And I am convinced that meaningful faith requires both awe and intimacy. We must encounter the awesome, even fearsome presence of a holy and other God that makes us dive for cover; otherwise we will imagine that God’s job is to serve us and meet our needs. And we must also encounter the grace of God that touches us and says, “Do not be afraid. I love you, and I long to show you life, true human-ness, in all its wonder.”
All praise and glory to the God of mountain peaks and oceans’ depths, who created far flung galaxies and the vastness of space, and who reaches out to touch us in the person of Jesus.
Thanks be to God!
[1] Annie Dillard, quoted in Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989) p. 83.
This week's obituary for Peter Gomes, professor, theologian, and minister at Harvard University, contained a quote from him that has been posted frequently on facebook and Twitter. And while I worry that the term "fundamentalism" can mean many things to many people, I think the quote worth repeating here. “Religious fundamentalism is dangerous because it cannot accept ambiguity and diversity and is therefore inherently intolerant... Such intolerance, in the name of virtue, is ruthless and uses political power to destroy what it cannot convert.” (from a 1992 op-ed piece by Gomes in The New York Times)
I think that one of the worst examples of faith, and therefore a terrible hindrance to sharing faith, is faith with no room for doubt or ambiguity. Sometimes this faith seems to be so tenuous that the slightest doubt would cause it to crumble, and so its defense is to become so rigid that all other formulations are simply wrong.
In today's reading's Paul speaks of boasting of his weakness, and Jesus says, "For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?" Surely all human theologies and faith formulations fall far short of the glory of God. There is much we do not know or see clearly, as Paul himself says in his famous words about seeing "in a mirror dimly." Surely all of us have enough trouble with our own eyes to be cautious about correcting others' faulty vision.
As I read Jesus' words on judging, it seems to me that they forbid any absolute fundamentalism, any insistence that my understanding is exactly how things are, and no other formulation can be considered. And if that is true, then certainty is actually an enemy of faith. A little doubt, and the humility that goes with it, leads to a closer walk with Jesus.
I'm not sure why this has been on my mind so much of late, but I've been thinking a lot about adding and subtracting with regards to what makes for a good and full life. We live in a world that presumes addition lies at the heart of a better life. We need more; we need bigger; we need better. We need more money, more and better things, a bigger and better house. We also need more and better experiences. We want to travel to places we've never been before. After all, to be well rounded is to be acquainted with many things.
Now who would argue against reading more classic literature or having college students experience study abroad. And there are certainly times when more money comes in very handy. But the fact that more of certain things is often good does not necessarily justify the notion that more is better, that the good life is about having it all.
Our obsession with more underlies a lot of the anxiety in our world. It puts us in endless competition with other folks who also want more. We vie for attention, favors, influence, and prestige. People worry about whether or not they have "made it," by which they usually mean having acquired the requisite amount of things, status, position, etc. Our anxieties are sometimes aggravated by those who have added more than us and gotten ahead of us, just as they are sometimes soothed by comparing ourselves to those who have not been as good at addition as we have.
"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life... Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." In his teachings, Jesus acknowledges that we need certain things, but he also insists that true life comes, not from grasping for these things, but from letting go. Quite often, Jesus argues for subtraction over addition.
Recently someone pointed out to me that I and just about everyone that I have ever met has read more books than Jesus ever did, learned more than Jesus ever did, traveled to more places than Jesus ever did, enjoyed more entertainment and fine food than Jesus ever did, lived in luxury Jesus never dreamed of, and so on. By the math of our culture, our lives are infinitely superior to Jesus' life. And yet many of us label ourselves "Christian" and say that following Jesus is the way to true life.
I have heard it said, and believe it true, that you can tell more about a person by looking at her checkbook and credit card bills than you can from anything she tells you. That is because when you figure out where someone's money goes, you figure out where his passions lie.
I think it is common in our day for people to think of spirituality as an add-on, another consumer item acquired to enhance the quality of life. It means learning some techniques on meditation or prayer, and perhaps some sort of participation in a group or even in a religious organization. It is somewhat akin to an exercise program for the interior life. And unless one gets caught up in it, its financial implications are limited to the costs of the program. Like joining a gym or buying some running shoes, a spiritual program may require purchasing some books, attending a class, or going on a retreat.
But Jesus makes an explicit link between spirituality and finances, between one's heart and one's checkbook."For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Where your money goes, there goes your soul.
Given that we live in a consumer society, and that our religious culture has lived in a capitalist system for the entire life of America, it is hardly surprising that we tend to view faith and spirituality as one more thing to help life be good and full and complete. But true spirituality aims to draw us into the divine mystery and, in so doing, to help us discover who it is we are truly meant to me. This cannot happen by adding more or by acquiring something. It can only happen when our lives, both inwardly and outwardly, are reshaped so that they conform more to the character of the divine.
And when this happens, our passions begin to look more like God's passions. And the evidence will be found in checkbook registers and on MasterCard statements.
I have discovered over the years that one of the great spiritual difficulties for me is remembering. By that I mean that moments which were formative, that spurred me to make some change in my life or convinced me that God wanted me to take a particular path, become fuzzy, without the power they once had.
I presume such many others have had similar experiences. Remembering, at least meaningful remembering, can be a difficult thing. Over time, couples often forget the feelings they once had for each other. Current irritations are more vivid. Sometimes they drown out those old moments to the point that people doubt old feelings of love, dismissing them as youthful infatuations.
When relationships run out of steam, the present overwhelms the past. All relationships deal with this at times, and remembering is essential. Remembering old promises, remembering old commitments, remembering formative moments in the life of a relationship is necessary for it to grow and continue.
Today's reading from Deuteronomy realizes this need for remembering. Even the powerful experiences of God in the wilderness will lose potency in the face of the present if people do not work to remember. "But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children's children."
When I was growing up in the Church, I was taught some of the history of God's people. I was drawn into this remembering. But too often, it seemed an academic exercise. Faith was about knowing the material and agreeing with it. But faith is about relationship, right relationship with God. And relationship is not about knowing the correct facts and agreeing with certain doctrines. But it is about remembering.
