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.
In today's gospel, Jesus speaks to the storm, and it obeys him. A raging storm becomes absolute calm. I know that as a preacher, I usually don't like it when such passages show up for Sunday. What do you say about Jesus doing a miracle such as this. About the only question that immediately comes to mind is, "Did this actually happen or not?"
Arguments about the Bible often follow the same sort of pattern. "Do you believe what it says is really true?" But I have started to think that the real significance of this story, and others like it, is less about what did or didn't happen and much more about what it means to depict Jesus as one whose voice can command creation.
I can decide to believe that Jesus did this miracle and that not necessarily make much difference in how I live or how I understand the nature of God, and so on. But when I start to explore the implications of this story... Only God can speak and creation respond. The real issue here is "Who is Jesus?" And if Jesus is indeed, Emmanuel, God with us, all sorts of other issues immediately arise.
For starters, if God can be fully present in a human being, then I immediately have to reconsider some popular notions about fleshy, physical existence being an inferior sort of existence. And if Jesus is truly God with us, then it seems that my understanding of who God is and what it means to be human are to be found here. It's not unusual to hear people speak of a meek and mild, loving Jesus while at the very same time picturing a demanding, harsh, God who has no trouble shipping off millions of people to eternal damnation. But if this Jesus who has compassion on the people because they are like sheep without a shepherd, who welcomes sinners and outcast, and who prays that his executioners be forgiven; if this Jesus is indeed God, then how can God be out to get so many people?
Just who is this Jesus? And do your answers actually fit with your basic notions of God, Christianity, and living the Christian life?
I'm not sure why, but I've been thinking a lot lately about the traditional, conventional faith claims of the Church. Of perhaps I've been thinking about the stereotypes of those faith claims. I'm not really sure. Regardless, today's verses from Matthew prompted more thinking of this sort.
A centurion walks up to Jesus and asks him to cure a paralyzed servant. Presumably this centurion is Roman, not Jewish. He likely offers sacrifices at temples to various Roman gods. I can't know for sure because Jesus doesn't ask him for his religious credentials. He just says, "Sure, I'll heal him." Only after that do we see the faith of the centurion who is happy with a long distance healing. No need for any Ernest Angley dramatics.
Then Jesus speaks of people from all over entering the kingdom while "heirs" get left out. Heirs here seems to mean the Jews, and their presumptions about being God's people. But many modern Christians could think they have supplanted the Jews and so could fill that role today.
It seems to me that just about the only time Jesus gets mad at anyone and speaks of them being left out, he is talking to folks who presume they are already in. Jesus never seems to speak as some Christians do, warning outsiders that they had better sign up, better plug into the formula, or they're in trouble.
I think my pondering, in the end, goes to the nature of God. A great deal of Christian thought seems to picture a God who is bound by some sort of formula, who has to punish somebody. Thank goodness Jesus jumps in and takes the bullet. But if Jesus is the fullest revelation of God, it's hard for me to picture a God with the sword drawn or the gun cocked.
When I was in seminary, I loved studying theology and always thought it odd that some of my classmates disliked it.One of the favorite images I picked up in seminary is that of theology or church tradition as spectacles, lenses through which we read and understand God’s revelation to us in Jesus and in Scripture.We never hear Jesus speak or read a passage of Scripture without some sort of interpretive lenses, without some sort of glasses on.
However, when we get accustomed to glasses or contacts, we can forget we have them on.We don’t think of what we see as being changed or corrected before we see it.We simply see what we see.A similar sort of thing happens with the lenses of theology and tradition.We don’t realize that we see what we see filtered and refracted by our lenses.
I saw this some years ago during an officer training class that I was leading.People elected as elders or deacons are required to receive training in our Reformed theology because as part of their ordination, they promise to be guided by that theology, to use those lenses, to help them understand what it means to be a faithful church.And as the class was discussing our theology, one of those officers-to-be said, “Why can’t we just be Christians?Why can’t we just all read our Bible and do what we find there?”
That’s legitimate and important question.And I suspect that similar questions lay behind the distaste some of my seminary classmates had for theology.Trouble is, the question itself is wearing glasses.The notion that individual Christians should read the Bible for themselves and act on what they find there is in fact a theological position, a set of lenses that some Christians, but not all, wear as they seek to follow Jesus.
As laudable as it is to desire some pristine Christianity not complicated by layers of theology, that’s pretty much impossible.We all carry around with us lenses that have been shaped by our culture, by our experiences in the church, by our place in history, and so on.But these lenses are so much a part of us, they are often more like lens implants than glasses.They are always there, we can’t take them out, and they have simply become a part of us.But what if they are distorting rather than focusing our vision?What if what we think we see is not what is really there at all?
I recently been reading a wonderful new book by Brian McLaren entitled A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that Are Transforming the Faith.The first of those questions is, “What is the overarching story line of the Bible?”And McLaren’s answer suggests that we have seen this story through bad lenses.We not only look back at Jesus, and the Old Testament story from which he emerges, through the accumulated theologies of our church, Calvin, Luther, Aquinus, Augustine, and even the Apostle Paul, but, as part of Western culture, we also see Jesus and his Jewish story through the lens of Greek philosophy, most of us without ever realizing it.
Now I have a feeling very few of you are interested in hearing about Neo-Platonism or its tension with Aristotle, so I won’t go into that.(I’ll be happy to discuss it with you later if you’re one of the few who are interested.)Suffice to say that this Greco-Roman notion of perfection as static, disembodied and spiritual, compared to the messy, decaying, infinitely inferior physical experience of bodies, trees and, such, has profoundly impacted how we see and understand Jesus, humanity, and the kingdom Jesus says he is bringing.
In the worst distortions, our Greek, philosophical lenses produce a Christianity with little use for bodies, for creation, for procreation, or any of the messiness of life.Such Christians are stuck here on earth until they are freed by death for that more genuine, better life that is not physical.And even in its more nuanced forms, this distortion often perceives a God who can scarcely put up with the world and its human inhabitants.God simply can’t abide how bad things are down here, and sooner or later cannot avoid wiping the whole mess out.But if you play your cards right and believe the right things, God will rescue you from this sordid existence into something better.Too bad about all those other folks.
McLaren argues that such pictures of Christianity and God can be found in the Bible only if you view it through bad lenses, and I’m inclined to agree with him.And these bad lenses are often used to view the Jesus found our gospel for today.There is Jesus, praying for his followers, and also for all who will believe through them. There is Jesus praying for the Church, for us, asking that we may all be one, that he may be in us and us in God, a mystical community bound together by God’s love.But then there’s that bad old world that doesn’t know God, doesn’t recognize Jesus.Too bad about all those folks.
In John, “the world” isn’t really a place.It’s a term he uses to speak of all that stands in opposition to God’s work in Jesus.It’s a slippery term with no simple, one-to-one correspondence.It’s not the culture, or the government, or the pagans, or the Jews.But the oppressive forces of the Roman Empire are certainly part of the world.As are religious institutions so bent on self preservation that they see Jesus as a threat are.And by the way, modern day churches sometimes fall into that group.
Those who are part of this world don’t “know” Jesus; that is they don’t recognize God present in him and so they don’t know God.But Jesus says those who have heard his voice, have recognized it and followed him, do know.And Jesus prays for those folks, which presumably includes us.Jesus prays that we will be part of that mystical communion he enjoys with the Father.“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us… I in them and you in me…”
How wonderful that Jesus wants to dwell in us, to give us the sort of intimacy with the Father that he enjoys.How comforting to know that this is the very last thing he does prior to his arrest and the cross.He holds us in the embrace of his prayer, of his longing for us.Too bad about all those other folks.
Except that Jesus comes precisely because God loves all those other folks.For God so loved the world…In other words, God so loved all those folks who don’t recognize Jesus, whether the oppressive forces of empire or the well intended but misguided, self serving operators of religious institutions.Those other folks are the very reason for Jesus.
So why does Jesus cradle us in his heartfelt prayer?To strengthen and encourage us so that we might show the world, might show those folks, how much God loves them.
We live in a time in which the church many of us grew up with is passing away.No matter how much we may long for it, no matter how meaningful it was for us, it is slipping into the mists of the past.That’s actually nothing unusual, and not all that troubling.Various forms of church have appeared and disappeared since the faith was born.Even in our own little denomination, the church of my youth bore little resemblance to the Presbyterian Church of a hundred years previous.
But for some reason, maybe because of today’s rapid pace of change or an increasingly secular culture, or maybe because of the move from a modern to a post modern world, many church people seem to be looking backward more than forward.We huddle in our little enclaves, wondering where all the people went.In a lot of congregations there is a terrible fear of decline, and even of death.And even in congregations like this one, many long for the old days of overflow crowds and monster confirmation classes.And when I talk to them, some seem sure that the best days are back there.But we’ll hang on.We’ll keep doing what we do.Too bad about all those other folks.
Except those are the ones God loves.And Jesus holds us in his prayers; Jesus promises to dwell in us so that those other folks will see God at work in us, so that they will see God’s love take on flesh.Jesus says that he will be in us so that our love and unity will show God in Christ to all those other folks.And if Jesus is truly in us, is there any doubt that we can do whatever Jesus calls us to do?
As I was reading today's verses from Hebrews, I found myself wondering about what it means to be human. This question has provided fertile ground for philosophers, theologians, and thinkers of all sorts for eons. "I think, therefore I am," said Descartes. The following was scribbled on the bathroom wall of my college dorm. "Todoistobe - Socrates, To be is to do - Kant, Do be do be do - Sinatra"
Sometimes we ask a child, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" And sometimes we ask, "What do you want to be when you grow up? Perhaps these are simply different ways of asking the same thing. But perhaps not.
I've always been somewhat surprised at how seldom I hear Christians make reference to Jesus when answering the question of what it means to be human. Despite the popularity of WWJD bracelets and wristbands, despite the Apostle Paul speaking of Jesus as the "new Adam," that is the new model for humanity, I don't hear many Christians going to Jesus as the perfect, embodied answer to, "What does it mean to be human?"
In the gospel of John, Jesus speaks of coming that we might "have life, and have it abundantly." I can't help but think that this abundant life Jesus offers is about being human in the fullest sense of term. And given the shape of Jesus' life, I have to think that he defines abundant life a bit differently that many of us tend to do.
I've been reading Brian McLaren's new book, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith. McLaren may be one of the best spokespersons for "Emergent Christianity," and I find the book both refreshing and thought provoking. McLaren's first question is about the overarching message of the Bible. I won't try to paraphrase him, but his answer speaks of God's love that seeks to "liberate and reconcile."
Thinking about a God who "so loves the world," who still cares for Adam and Eve even after they have disobeyed, has always given me pause when considering issues of "salvation." Where is the tender love of God in statements such as, "If you don't accept Jesus as your savior, you're going to hell."
Such questions come to mind for me when I read today's verses from Ephesians. As Paul greets the Christians at Ephesus, he speaks of God's love that "...chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved." Chose and destined are the sort of words that give way to arguments about predestination and such. But I'm less interested in those questions and more focused on what it means to speak of God's love.
Those chosen at Ephesus were Gentiles, a group that many of the first Christians presumed were outside the bounds of God's love. But God's embrace in Jesus turned out to be much bigger than Jesus' own followers could imagine. In fact, it took quite a while before the Church came to accept these Gentile converts fully. That's ancient history, but I can't help wondering about how common, how human it is to set limits on the reach of God's grace. We want to draw boundaries. These boundaries always include us and exclude those that are different in us. How different you must be to get excluded varies, but the desire for boundaries is nearly universal.
I wonder what God thinks of our boundaries. I wonder if they make Jesus laugh, or cry.
If you love me…That’s pretty provocative phrase, sometimes even a manipulative one.Jesus has said just that to his followers on his last night with them.In our reading he broadens the circle saying, “If anyone loves me…” although our translation hides the “If anyone....“
If we weren’t in a worship service right now, and you heard someone say, “If you love me…” how would you expect that sentence to end?What comes after “If you love me?”
If the father of a teenaged girl hears her boyfriend say, “If you love me…” look out!A little more responsible use of the phrase might come from a wife whose marriage is in trouble.A woman who still loved her husband while he had become more and more distant, she might quite accurately say, “If you love me you will come to the marriage counselor with me.”It seems quite reasonable for her to expect that if he loves her, he will be willing to take certain steps, to do certain things.
Back to the more manipulative side, I suspect most of us have heard a child riding in a shopping cart screaming to her mother, “If you love me you, you’ll get me that Hannah Montana DVD.”
Whether this phrase is used responsibly or manipulatively, that use is rooted in the expectation that love has tangible consequences.If we love someone, we will act is certain ways.We will treat them well, do things for them, and so on.A child realizes this on some level when she screams and pleads for a toy in the store.But her mother has a more grown up, mature understanding of love.And so she doesn’t give her child everything she wants, but she does care and provide for that child.
If you’re anything like me, you have a few regrets related to the childish, immature version of “If you love me…”Many of us can look back on our earlier years and wonder how on earth our parents did keep on loving us.I know a few people who never seemed to outgrow the childish notion of thinking their parents’ job is to provide whenever they ask. But most of us, eventually realize that our parents’ love requires a response from us, and we began to develop a more mature, adult relationship with them.
Young children, and a few adults, don’t understand that love is about relationship, and relationships always involve a back and forth, give and take where each person does things for the other out of love.Women sometimes seems to get this better than men.We males are sometimes stuck in a more childish, “what’s in it for me” view of love and relationships.Perhaps that’s why women and mothers are more associated with loving and caring.Perhaps that’s why Mother’s Day calls for gifts of flowers while Father’s Day rates a tie.
In John’s gospel, God’s love is all about the back and forth of relationship.Because God so loves the world, Jesus comes to us.God’s love takes tangible, concrete form in Jesus.Jesus gathers followers around him and, not unlike a mother, he cares for them, protects them, teaches them, and demonstrates full and abundant life for to them.He loves them in the most profound way possible, and as he prepares to give his life for them, he promises that even his death will not leave them alone.The Holy Spirit will continue to make him present to them, teaching, guiding, and strengthening them.
But then comes the flip side, the response side, the “If you love me” side.“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” Jesus says to his disciples on his last night with them.And in our reading he also speaks past them to us.“If anyone loves me…”“If anyone loves me he will keep my word.”If anyone loves me she will do all the things I have commanded you.If anyone loves me he will bear much fruit.If anyone loves me she will continue the works I have been doing.
Speaking of works, we Protestants have some issues with how works fit into our faith.Going back to Martin Luther, we have said that our standing before God is not a matter of works but of faith.We don’t earn our way to salvation but receive it as a gift.The theological term is “justification by grace through faith.”
But this focus on God’s grace and on faith sometimes leads to misunderstandings.In one such misunderstanding, we replace keeping the commandments and doing good works with faith.Faith, in essence, becomes the thing we do to get God to love us, which of course only makes it a different sort of work.In a related misunderstanding, we narrowly define faith as believing so that faith comes to mean accepting the correct facts and formulas.Faith becomes almost totally a head thing, not a doing thing.
I saw this in action a few years ago when we tried to get a handle on our membership rolls here at Boulevard.Like many Presbyterian congregations, we have quite a few people on our rolls that we’ve not seen in a while.And so we sent out some very pastoral letters letting folks know that we missed them and hoped we could help them reconnect and find a way to be active here again.But if they had moved away or if they just weren’t comfortable here any longer, perhaps we could assist them in finding a place that better fit their new circumstances.
We apparently succeeded in giving the letters a pastoral tone because no one seemed to get offended by them.But a number of people responded that although they had no plans to become active and we would not be seeing them around the church or its ministries, they would still like to remain on the rolls.I’m not sure, but I think they felt that as long as they “believed,” that meant they were faithful and so could expect to remain members.
Now the fact is that our Presbyterian constitution has a long list of responsibilities and requirements for members.But apparently we’ve done a pretty poor job of helping folks understand this.Because we tend to think of faith as something that lives between our ears, our understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus is pretty minimal.
I wonder what would happen if when people joined the church we changed the questions a bit?Not that there’s anything wrong with the questions we ask now.One of them asks, “Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love?” And another says, “Will you be a faithful member of this congregation, share in its worship and ministry through your prayers and gifts, your study and service, and so fulfill your calling to be a disciple of Jesus Christ?”
Still, what if we simply borrowed some of Jesus’ words from John’s gospel?What if, speaking on behalf of Jesus, we said to every person joining the church, every member of a confirmation class, every parent bringing a child for baptism, “Do you love me?If you love me, you will keep my commandments.Do you love me?If you love me you will feed my sheep.Do you love me?If you love me, you will continue my ministry.”
God loves us so much that God comes in the person of Jesus saying, “Follow me and I will show you the way to full and abundant life.My way is not all that popular.It is not the way recommended by the culture, and many think it silly and foolish.But it is the way of true life, of eternal life.And I will come and dwell in you.The Spirit will strengthen you and guide you in this way.I will do all this and more because I love you.”
“And if you love me…”
All praise and glory to God, who love comes to us in Jesus, calling us to new life. Thanks be to God.
I was struck by the relationship between what Jesus says in today's Matthew passage and the reading from the law codes of Leviticus. Leviticus almost never appears on anyone's list of favorite books of the Bible, but today's reading contains that much quoted line, "you shall love your neighbor as yourself." It also commands that when fields are harvested, the edges of the fields are to be left alone. Neither is the grain that falls to the ground to be picked up. Neither shall grape vineyards be picked bare, and none of the grapes that fall from the vine may be harvested. These inefficient farming techniques are so that the poor and the alien may harvest some for themselves.
I'm not exactly sure how to update these commands for a non-agricultural economy such as ours, but I assume it would mean that some significant portion of either the product made or the income brought in would be channeled to the poor and the alien.
Jesus' words don't require any non-agricultural update, but that doesn't necessarily makes it any easier for me to embrace them. "You cannot serve God and wealth." I suppose it all hinges on what you mean by "serve," but Jesus clearly understood our relationship to money and wealth to pose one of the biggest problems for a relationship with God. A casual observer might miss this considering how preoccupied Christians can be with things such as family values, sex, and the like. But Jesus talks about the trouble caused by money more than any other issue.
We all need money to live, for basic security. But where does it start to become a problem? Where does my desire for things begin to deny the poor and the alien their share? Where does my desire for wealth start to focus my life on the accumulation of wealth rather than serving God? Sometimes I'd rather avoid such questions. But Jesus says I cannot if I want to follow him.
Even outside the Church, there is a great deal of interest these days in spirituality and in prayer. There are books galore on both topics. I have some of them, and many of them are quite good and helpful. I particularly like Richard Foster's book, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home and Thomas Keating's works on contemplative prayer.
But as helpful as these can be, I suspect we would all do well to occasionally go back to Jesus' instructions on prayer. Many of us know "The Lord's Prayer" as a part of a worship ritual. But we might do well to find it in the Bible and hear it teaching us on prayer. Matthew's version is today's gospel lection, and with it Jesus offers a bit of commentary on his own prayer. He focuses in on the line asking "forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors," adding this. "For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."
I know that sometimes my prayer life seems quite disconnected from my everyday life. Or worse, it is a laundry list of things I wish God would do for me. But Jesus' prayer instructions remind me that my own prayers ought to help shape me into the sort of person Jesus calls me to be. To that end, there's probably nothing better than praying the prayer Jesus taught as my own prayer, and not simply as an element of worship.
In today's gospel, Jesus speaks to the storm, and it obeys him. A raging storm becomes absolute calm. I know that as a preacher, I usually don't like it when such passages show up for Sunday. What do you say about Jesus doing a miracle such as this. About the only question that immediately comes to mind is, "Did this actually happen or not?"
