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.
Today's reading from Matthew is "The Judgment of the Nations" (or Gentiles, depending on how you translate). I've never been clear on whether to read this like a parable or as a prediction of things to come, but one point seems clear, God's judgment ends up surprising a lot of folks.
Jesus was speaking to Jews when he said this, and they likely heard it differently than you or I. To Jews, "the nations" (or Gentiles) referred to those other folks, the non-Jews, the people not a part of our faith. Perhaps that means that as Christians we should read this as "The Judgment of the non-Christians" or of "the Pagans."
Regardless, this judgment raises questions about what matters most to God, getting our belief structure ironed out just so, or aligning our lives with God's priorities. These Gentiles are judged as righteous when they unwittingly care for "the least of these."
If this judgment is about those folks, the people who aren't members of our churches, what are we in congregations to take away from this? A very tentative thought I have relates to the occasional Christian obsession with formulas. Believe in Jesus and get saved. But Jesus' words on the judgment of the pagans makes me wonder if we in the Church don't sometimes miss the point. Granted, it requires believing Jesus' word is authoritative to even have this discussion, but does the Church exist primarily to convince folks of the formula or to demonstrate and teach the way of life Jesus modeled?
John Calvin, the Reformation leader who began the tradition that birthed Presbyterians, often accused the Roman Catholics of lapsing into superstition, believing that certain rites magically guaranteed your standing before God. I wonder if the modern day Protestant Church hasn't sometimes lapsed into a new form of superstition, where a few correctly worded phrases magically guarantee our standing before God (even if we don't actually do very much Jesus told us to do).
And pagans who never had a clue scratch their heads and enter into the Kingdom.
I've written before about experiencing God's absence, seeking God's presence but not finding it. Such times can be very frustrating for those who desire God in their lives. At times such unfulfilled longing can seem like torment.
However, such longing may be God's way of inviting us into a deeper relationship. This longing may be a gift of the Spirit that beckons us. Psalm 42 seems to come out of a time of both longing and despair, a time when the psalmist's soul is cast down and enemies taunt him saying, "Where is your God?" Yet out of this dark night of the soul comes a deep awareness of the psalmist's intense need for God. "As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God."
It is easy to fall into a cursory relationship with God, a business-like, contractual relationship where we believe and do certain things in hope of some payout. But God knows we need something more. We were created out of God's love for love - love shared with God and with others. And sometimes the experience of unfulfilled longing may be just what we need to draw us out of our comfort zones into pure love.
We Americans are a very individualistic sort. Our individualism has generally served us well, although it has its dark side. But however favorably you may view this individualism, one thing is certain. The people who wrote the Bible did not live in an individualistic world. They tended to focus more on the group than on the individual.
You can see this in today's section of Paul's letter to the Roman Christians. Paul is wrestling with the fact that so many of his fellow Jews have rejected Jesus as Messiah. We Americans tend to view this along the lines of individual choice and individual consequences, but Paul seems to view it otherwise.
Paul speaks of their hearts being hardened by God, an event that opens salvation to non-Jews. But Paul also speaks of a still to come "full inclusion" of the Jews. I don't know that Paul is speaking of individuals. More likely he means Jews as a people, but clearly his frame of reference is God's plan to bring all peoples into a redeemed and renewed creation. This is not a contest with winners and losers, not a competition where some make it and some don't. It is simply God's love at work.
In our own families, at least in healthy ones, parents see their children as individuals, but their status as family members, as those who receive care and love, is never about their individual accomplishments. So why is it that so many Christians view the God most often called "Father" more like the coach of an elite team who easily cuts those who don't act just as they should?
On more than one occasion I have heard people insist that had they been alive in Jesus' day, they would not have joined the crowd in yelling, "Crucify him." They're sure they would have recognized and followed Jesus. I'd like to think the same about myself, but I'm not all that certain.
I thought of this when I read today's verses from Matthew. Jesus speaks of the Pharisees honoring the graves of the prophets and quotes them as saying, "If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets."
The Pharisees were the uber-religious of their day. They were unimpressed by the ritual and pomp of priestly, Temple Judaism, and insisted that being God's people meant taking the commandments seriously and living lives of deep faith and conviction. They were religious reformers, and you could draw some real parallels between their attempts to reform Judaism and the early Protestants' desire to reform Roman Catholic Christianity.
Yet Jesus insists that their certainty about not joining their ancestors in killing the prophets is a hollow boast, which makes me wonder about our own religious certainties.
What was it about dedicated, often sincere, serious people of faith that put them at odds with Jesus? Why is it that Jesus' opponents were mostly religious authorities? What is it about religious life that seems to have the capacity to obscure rather than reveal God's presence? Jesus says over and over that the tax collectors and prostitutes enter into the Kingdom ahead of the religious folks.
One of the problems with all religious institutions is the tendency to substitute beliefs, practices, and doctrines for God. It is all too easy for our ultimate loyalty to be given to how we do things, how we like things, a particular conception of God, or simply to our particular congregation. But anytime we give ultimate loyalty to something other than God, that something becomes our idol. And when we worship an idol, even it if it is the best of congregations, we may see anyone who threatens our idol as evil, even Jesus.
To live lives of faith that matter, we have to make decisions about what we should and shouldn't do, about what God wants and doesn't want. We must discern what God calls us to do and precede to do just that. But we also must always remember that our decisions and our discernments are not God. And we must always be open for God to break through our certainties and show us something new and wonderful.
In today's Psalm it says, " 'Because the poor are despoiled, because the needy groan, I will now rise up,' says the LORD." And the Apostle Paul, in his letter to the congregation in Rome says that despite suffering and hardship, "No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us." Both Paul and the psalmist look at situations that seem desperate and say, "We see God at work, and we know that God's will finally wins out.
But while the Bible speaks of the certainty that God will set all things right, that God will indeed redeem and restore creation, many Christians seem to thing that the world is hanging by a thread and if we aren't careful, evil will triumph. A great number of Christians seem to think evil is much more powerful than it actually is. It makes me wonder if they know the line from Martin Luther's "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" which says, "The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him; his rage we can endure, for lo! his doom is sure, one little word shall fell him."
And the cross itself speaks of the impotence of evil in the face of God's love. If the cross is the greatest attempt to thwart God that evil could muster, and the cross is somehow the instrument of our reconciliation with God, then evil's worst deed only furthers God's plans. It would seem that evil has no chance against God.
I talk to a lot of church folks who seem very worried about the future. They worry that the church's best days are in the past, and they are afraid for the church they love. The Church certainly faces plenty of challenges in a culture that is rapidly changing. But I wonder if these challenges don't push us to reexamine the source of our hope. Is our hope in the religious structures and institutions that we have constructed? Or is our hope in the promises of God who brings light out of darkness and life out of death?
What is it that motivates our lives of faith? It seems to me that Christians who trust that God owns the future, and that God will indeed redeem all creation, discover a hope that allows them to embody and enact that coming Kingdom, a hope that can only be known through faith.
I’ve always loved July 4th. As a kid we would go to the lake for the day, swimming and water skiing, and then taking a 30 minute boat ride to watch a big fireworks display. When I got older, I remember going to uptown Charlotte for the big fireworks show they shot off one of the tall buildings and coordinated with one of the local radio stations so you could watch and listen to a sound track.
The grand finale was always the 1812 Overture. But no Forth of July medley would have been complete without Kate Smith singing “God Bless America.” Smith introduced the song just prior to World War II, and it quickly became a patriotic favorite, so much so that some lobbied for it to replace the Star Spangled Banner as our national anthem.
Kate Smith has been dead for decades, but many people still associate her with the song. The song itself enjoyed a resurgence of sorts after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Members of the US Senate sang it from the steps of the capital after the attack. It even replaced “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh inning stretch at some baseball parks.
After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the phrase “God bless America” began showing up on yard signs, often written in red, white, and blue, or displayed on a background of the US flag. Variations on this theme also showed up such as “God bless our Troops.”
If you know the lyrics to “God Bless America,” you know it is a simple prayer. It isn’t militaristic. It doesn’t call down God’s ire on any others. It simply asks for God’s guidance and blessing. But in those yard signs, and perhaps even in the military-style, march music of the song, it is easy to move beyond a simple request for blessing to a call for God to bless us and curse our enemies. Now surely God is on the side of good and against evil, but does that means God is our God and not theirs? Are we always in the right? Does God wear red, white, and blue?
Does God belong to one nation and not another? People of the ancient world thought so. Indeed the world in which Israel lived thought of gods as local divinities. Every group had its own god and all wars were holy wars because they were contests between the adherents of different gods. And whoever won the battle or war must have had the mightier god.
Israel comes to know the God they call Yahweh in this setting. And at first they think of Yahweh just like other folks think about their tribal gods. God is for Israel and against their enemies. There are plenty of stories in the Bible where God is described just so. But as Israel comes to know this Yahweh better, images of a tribal god begin to break down. Yahweh isn’t just their god, but is God of all creation. And Yahweh doesn’t care just about Israel. Indeed, God’s special relationship with Israel is for the sake of those others. When Abraham first meets God, Yahweh says, “I will bless you and make your name great… And in you all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”
The prophet Isaiah describes Israel as God’s servant, words the New Testament writers later apply to Jesus. “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant… I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” And Jesus himself embodies this, sending his followers to carry the good news to “all nations.”
Yet despite all this, images of a tribal God persist. Many Americans have a great deal of difficulty separating “God and country,” assuming that the two simply go together. America is a great and wonderful country. And some of our most appealing attributes are drawn from Christianity. But if loving God and loving country are two sides of the same coin, does that mean the God of the Bible, the God seen most fully in Jesus, is our tribal god?
So perhaps providence has placed today’s Old Testament reading in the lectionary. Every three years it shows up near July 4th, this year on the day itself. And what a curious little story it is. In the midst of many stories about the prophet Elisha, we meet a fellow called Naaman, a general in the armies of Aram. He is a powerful and important man, but he has some sort of skin disease which will not go away. But after we’ve been introduced to this Naaman, nothing else in the story happens quite the way you might expect.
The story plays havoc with expectations about how God works and where real power lies. A captured Israelite slave points Naaman toward possible healing. Naaman assumes that such power must go through channels, and any prophet able to heal must be in service to the king. And so he goes to Israel’s king with a great deal of wealth to buy a healing. But the king of Israel presumes it is a ruse meant to manufacture an insult that will justify an attack. The Israelite king doesn’t think to summon Elisha. Perhaps he is so focused on issues of us versus them that it never occurs to him that God might want to heal Naaman.
Nonetheless Elisha summons Naaman, who then takes offense when proper pomp, pageantry, and ritual aren’t followed. And for a second time, it takes unnamed servants to point the powerful Naaman toward God’s healing.
And so finally God does heal this foreigner, and an enemy at that. No doubt there were those in Israel who had prayed that God would strike down the Arameans, including their commander Naaman. But instead, God heals Naaman.
In much the same way, people of Jesus’ day expected God to send a Messiah who would strike down the Romans and the commanders of their armies. But instead Jesus heals a Roman centurion’s slave and praises the centurion’s faith. He tells a parable featuring a hated Samaritan as the hero, and tells his followers to proclaim forgiveness to all nations.
But despite the witness of Elisha, despite the God we meet in Jesus, we are still drawn to the image of a tribal God. Not that we all belong to the same tribe. Some want a red, white, blue God. Some fashion a Republican or a Democratic God. Some picture Jesus with blue eyes and blond hair, a member of their white tribe. Some people hate gays and so their god does, too. Some people hate liberals or conservatives, and so their gods do, too. But whatever tribal god we embrace, such a god seems far different from the God we say we have seen in Jesus who is, according to the Bible, the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.
I don’t know about you, but I have realized over the years that I have a great deal of difficulty being in close relationship with people who have very different views and values than I do. Similar behavior likely accounts for why most people marry people who are a lot like them, why social groups are often made up of similar folks, and why churches can often be categorized as liberal or conservative, black or white, high society or working class. Such congregations seem to refute the Bible’s insistence that we are all one in Christ, but they fit well with my own tendency to think of God as a bigger and better version of me, sharing my difficulty being in relationship and loving people who are different from me. I know better logically and theologically, but still I presume that if God really loves me, then surely God must hate the folks I hate. Presto, my own tribal God.
We live in one of the greatest countries the world has every known. I pray that God will bless and guide us, and I have no doubt that God loves us. But the moment we decide that this means God loves others less, or worse, that God hates others, we’ve created a tribal God, an idol. But in Jesus we meet a very different God. And this Jesus calls me and you to proclaim God’s love to all the world, to bear witness to and demonstrate the coming dominion of God, that promised day when people from east and west, north and south, from every part of God’s creation shall join together in the great feast of the kingdom, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, American nor Irish, Jordanian nor Chinese, Iraqi nor Russian, Ethiopian nor Thai, where all are one, where all are welcome, and all are called children of God.
I stretch out my hands to you; my soul thirsts for you like a parched land. Answer me quickly, O LORD;my spirit fails. Do not hide your face from me, or I shall be like those who go down to the Pit. Ps. 143:6-7
I think it well worth remembering that the single largest category of psalms are the so-called psalms of lament. The Psalms regularly cry out to God, complain about God's absence, beseech God to deal faithfully with them. Such Psalms speak of a faith that can wrestle with real doubt. Strange then that I know so many Christians who view doubt as the deadly enemy of faith.
Out of chaos often comes the greatest creativity. We now know this is the very nature of the universe. And the only thing that can endure deep doubt or anxiety is deep faith. You will not allow yourselves to enter into complexity, ambiguity, mystery, or the partial darkness that everything is, without a very strong faith. You will close down.
I have found that those who can tolerate ambiguity and hold darkness are those who rise to great faith. Faith gets purified every time you go through the cycle of doubt and failure. (from Fr. Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations)
I also once heard a quote from author and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner that said, "Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith." I tend to think that true faith cannot exist without frequent encounters with doubt. The people I have met who insist they never doubt strike me as being a bit like little children who clap their hands repeatedly on their ears while making noise so as not to hear anything they don't like. Such faith has great difficulty engaging others or being shared with others, because it can brook no questions and cannot be examined.
Maybe I feel this way simply because I am one who is prone to doubt. But I seem to have a fair amount of company in the Bible and among other great figures of the faith. So I think I will count my doubts a blessing.
One of the things I loathe is admitting to my own weakness. I want to project strength and competence, and I admire such traits in others. On this count I'm hardly unique. Americans in general seem to admire strength and detest weakness. We worship great athletes who will their way to championships. We mythologize the self-made man or woman, the people who seem to control their own destiny.
By contrast, many of us hate to be perceived as needy. Indeed the word needy is often used as a derogatory term to describe a dysfunctional dependency on others. And yet I am a pastor in a faith that speaks of Jesus as Savior. Presumably that mean we are in trouble and need to be saved, healed, or changed in some way. We aren't strong enough to fix things ourselves. In other words we are weak and needy.
I was reading today's verses from Paul where he speaks of wanting to do what is right but being unable to do so. (And who among us hasn't decided to do something we knew was in our own best interest, but been unable to follow through.) And I was reminded of a David Brooks column that ran just yesterday in the NYTimes. He was talking about Bill Wilson, the founder of AA and wrote this. "In a culture that generally celebrates empowerment and self-esteem, A.A. begins with disempowerment. The goal is to get people to gain control over their lives, but it all begins with an act of surrender and an admission of weakness. "
I've found myself wondering lately if one of the reasons I sometimes find it difficult to sense God's presence is because I won't let myself be weak enough to need God. Might a little disempowerment, a little weakness be just what the doctor ordered?
My Presbyterian denomination, along with many others, expects the Lord's Prayer to be part of just about any worship service. I have some questions about the wisdom of this, but regardless, it means that most who have any church experience know that the prayer asks for God's will to be done. More specifically, the prayer asks that the world conform to how things already are in heaven. In the Bible, heaven is where God lives, so to speak, and not where folks go when they die. In heaven, all is as it should be with God's will always done. And the transformation of the world into the Kingdom of God is about God's will being done here as well.
Given this, you'd think that we Christians would expend more energy than we sometimes do in seeking to conform the world, or at the least our own lives, to God's will. According to Jesus, God's will is about good news for the poor, release to captives, welcome to the outsider, healing and embrace for the sick and the untouchable, denying self for the sake of others, taking up a cross, and so on. And in a pointed parable told to the religious purists of his day, Jesus slams those who get their doctrines straight, who say and believe all the right things, but don't change their lives to conform to God's coming Kingdom, the new day Jesus says that he brings.
Too often my prayer goes, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is heaven. Just don't ask me to change or bear any real cost for this happening." Obviously Jesus' own prayers were a bit different, seeing how they led him to a cross.
I like to think of myself as a pretty good exegete (a fancy word for someone trained to take apart and understand a passage of Scripture) and a fair preacher, but I'm a real neophyte when it comes to Christian spirituality. I love the fact that my Presbyterian/Reformed Tradition values the intellect and insists that it be heavily engaged in the faith, but this sometimes leads to an overemphasis on head knowledge and an underemphasis on what some call heart knowledge.
I realize that all sorts of things pass themselves off as spirituality these days, some of them things incompatible with Christian faith; some of them incompatible even with good mental health. But the fact of some problematic spiritualities floating around does not change the fact that spirituality - or mysticism as it used to be called - has a long and cherished place in Christian faith. And so a think it a wonderful thing that there has been a resurgence in spirituality in many Presbyterian churches.
All of this gives a little background to my own reaction to some of today's lectionary verses. In Psalm 145 I read, "The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth." And then in Matthew Jesus says, "Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive." Now as one who more often than I care to admit feels that God is distant, and who is not overflowing with confidence that I will receive whenever I pray, such verses unsettle me just a bit.
Perhaps that makes it providential that I also read an interesting piece on faith in a daily meditation I receive via email. Father Richard Rohr clearly is more experienced in things spiritual than I am, and he had some interesting thoughts on faith. "The opposite of faith is not intellectual doubt, because faith is not localized primarily in the mind. The opposite of faith, according to a number of Jesus’ statements is anxiety. If you are fear-based and “worried about many things,” as he says in Luke 10:41, you don’t have faith in a Biblical sense. Faith is to be able to trust that God is good, involved, and on your side. So you see why it takes some years of inner experience to have faith. It is not just that somewhat easy intellectual assent to doctrines or an agreement with a moral position. This has passed as the counterfeit of faith for far too long."
What does faith mean to you, and how do you grow in faith? Or to follow Fr. Rohr's thinking, how do you become less anxious? We seem to be living in anxious times, times which are perhaps corrosive to faith. For some reasons this reminds me of a cartoon I once saw in which an overly animated flight instructor is screaming at a struggling student pilot, "Relax, dammit!!"
Oh, for a bit more of the knowledge that doesn't live between the ears. Oh, for a little more heart knowledge.
Today's reading from Matthew is "The Judgment of the Nations" (or Gentiles, depending on how you translate). I've never been clear on whether to read this like a parable or as a prediction of things to come, but one point seems clear, God's judgment ends up surprising a lot of folks.
