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 reading from Acts, Peter and John encounter a lame man who asks them for alms. Peter explains that they have no money, but he will give them what he has. And he promptly heals the man "in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth."
Throughout the gospels, the power of God in Jesus allows him to heal people. And following Jesus' resurrection, the disciples receive the Holy Spirit, and they too can heal in the same way Jesus did. God is present in them in much the same way God was present in Jesus, which is why Paul can speak of the Church as the body of Christ.
So where is that power today?
Some Christian groups explain that there was a time when the Spirit was active as we see it in Acts, but that period ended in biblical times. That makes for a convenient explanation, but I'm not sure what basis this explanation has. The Bible speaks of all the faithful having the Spirit, and Paul says the Spirit allots spiritual gifts to all. Paul isn't talking about our natural talents either. These are gifts that the Spirit imparts so that we can be the body of Christ, so that God is present in us.
But modern Christianity, especially Western Christianity, has wedded the faith to our rationalist, Enlightenment views. For many of us, Christianity is more akin to a philosophy. It is a set of beliefs we agree to, and any power connected to those beliefs is deferred until some future date, usually when we die.
But the Church cannot be what we are supposed to be if we are simply a belief structure or philosophy or moral/ethical system. If God is not present in us, if the power of the Spirit is not evident in us, we are not the Church.
When you attend worship, or when you read your Bible, what expectations do you bring to that activity? Do you expect to encounter God's powerful, holy presence there? Do you expect to be transformed and equipped to be the part of the body of Christ the Spirit has a designated you to be? And if most of us don't expect such things to happen, should we still claim to be the Church?
Today's reading in Acts describes the beginnings of the Church. "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people."
I'm struck by these descriptions and how different they sound from most Christian congregations I've seen. First, there is a serious, intense commitment, not the casual Christianity so often seen today. Second, there is a sense of power in this Church. There are "wonders and signs" done by the apostles, not to mention all the members having received the Holy Spirit. And this has evoked a general sense of awe among the entire population. All this has turned the Church into such a distinctive and different sort of community that it produces "the goodwill of all the people." Sometimes the mission work of the modern Church impresses those outside the Church, but too often the Church is viewed with contempt and disgust by outsiders because of our petty squabbles, the way we often mirror the worst of our society, and our general failure to be the community of love we are called to be.
Strangely enough, I think a great deal of this harks back to the way we have come to read the Bible. When we read the Bible primarily as a collection of information, it often becomes the source of division and contention. How we access this information and how we interpret it become the dividing lines between denominations and theological traditions. What we believe after reading the Bible compared to what they believe form boundaries that separate us and them. And naturally those who don't believe the Bible in the first place are completely on the outside.
In the end, being a Christian often becomes mostly a matter of what one believes. Certainly what one believes is important. Those first Christians clearly believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead. But I would argue that what made the Church in Acts so different was not so much what they believed but the power of God that they experienced in their midst. And now we've come back around to a blog from few days earlier where I mention this quote. "People come to us looking for and experience of God and we give them information about God."
I'm not sure if our informational reading of the Bible is symptom or cause. But I'm not sure it really matters when it comes to fixing the problem. When we begin to read the Bible more spiritually, seeking to meet God there rather than learn certain facts, that cannot help but change our notions of what it means to be Christian.
My father was a fairly strict disciplinarian, and I have tended to follow him in that regard. I think it is important for children to learn discipline, to hear the word “No” from time to time, to discover that there are consequences for bad choices. But while I think discipline important, some of my biggest regrets as a father grow out of it.
The problem is not discipline itself. My regrets come from those times when I allowed discipline to turn into a power struggle, a test of wills. Too often , I allowed these to become battles that I was going to win no matter the cost. But such victories rarely tasted very good.
Many years ago, I read a book by J. B. Phillips entitled Your God Is Too Small. The book talked about how our images of God often get in the way of truly experiencing or knowing God. The first half of the book contains thirteen unreal or too-small images of God. The first is God as resident policeman, followed by God as parental hangover. And I suppose that many of us occasionally think of God like a policeman looking to catch us doing something wrong, or like a father who is going to straighten us out whatever it may take.
If you pick just the right Bible verses, you can construct just about any God you prefer, but on the whole, I think the prevailing image of God that emerges from the Bible is not God as cosmic cop or an overly strict father, not a God who wants to catch or punish anyone.
Look at the picture of God in today’s reading from the prophet Hosea. The situation is one that seems custom made to provoke an angry-father sort of response. Israel has done everything possible to anger God. Despite all the blessings they had received, they ignore God’s law, they worship idols, they won’t listen to the prophets, and they mistreat the poor. What is left for God to do but come down on them and come down hard? Indeed as Hosea speaks for God that seems to be the inevitable outcome. But then we hear God say, “How can I give you up Ephraim? …My heart recoils within me; my compassion grow warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger… for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.”
I will not come in wrath. Yes, there is a need for discipline. Yes, there are consequences for bad choices, but in the end, God does not come in wrath. And nothing embodies that more than Jesus. In Jesus, God responds to human waywardness, human refusal to align our lives with God, our brokenness and sin, with love and mercy beyond imagination.
Still, there are some Christians and some forms of Christianity that take Jesus and plug him into a formula that is still filled with wrath. In this formula an angry God looking to dole out some serious punishment shows up, but if you believe in Jesus you get a pass. You get “saved” from God’s wrath and get to go to heaven.
I’m not quite sure where this comes from. After all, if Jesus is our best glimpse of God, then his love and compassion and willingness to give himself for others must be part of God’s nature. Surely Jesus isn’t one face of a split personality God. So surely being saved isn’t about saving us from a wrathful God.
The Bible says that you and I were created in God’s image, a God the Bible says is love. So wouldn’t it make sense to think Jesus saving us is about healing, about restoring that image of God in us so that God’s kingdom might be seen in us and among us? And while save and heal may sound like very different things to us, the Bible often uses the same word to speak of both.
So if saving us is about healing and restoring us, how does that happen and what does it look like? It happens when Christ dwells in us, when the Spirit fills us. And when that happens it is visible in our lives, visible clearly in our relationship to money and possessions. Jesus says so quite plainly. In fact Jesus talks about possessions and money more than any other topic. And it’s right there in today’s reading. “Be on guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
Whoa! Hold on! Our culture and economy would beg to differ. Our whole world is built upon convincing people that even though the car they have is fine, they need a new one, even though their closet is full of perfectly good shoes and clothes, they need more. Our consumer driven culture and the advertising industry attached to it preaches non-stop that our happiness depends on having more. And we’re hooked. We’re addicts who have to have more and more. Of course we never quite get enough. No matter how much we get, we need more.
Now I don’t think Jesus expects that none of us should have anything. He obviously owned clothes himself. His band of followers clearly had money to buy food and such. Peter owned a home where Jesus sometimes stayed. Jesus actually seems to have been a pretty fun guy. He obviously drank because he’s accused of being drunkard. And he attended dinner parties in folk’s homes, enjoying the comforts of those homes and the food and drink his hosts served. But still he talks repeatedly about this problem of money and possessions, this addiction that our culture pushes on us so incessantly. So what are we to do?
I wonder if the analogy of an addiction might not help us here. For example, lots of people drink alcohol without it interfering in their lives. But there is a point where the need for alcohol becomes a problem, where it drives a person’s life in ways that are destructive to just about every facet of life from relationships to employment to health and so on. Very often people whose lives are being controlled by this addiction cannot see it. Their longing for alcohol is so consuming, such a burning desire, nothing else seems as good, as wonderful.
Maybe we should think of Jesus as someone doing an intervention for the possession addicted asking, “Don’t you want to be freed from anxiety over never quite having enough? Don’t you want to be freed to truly love others and give yourself fully to others? Don’t you want to discover a sense of self worth and well being that isn’t threatened by every advertisement for some cool new thing you don’t have? Then I’ll help you reorient your life so it’s rich toward God.”
So how do you know if Jesus is speaking to you this way? It’s actually pretty easy. You look at your checkbook and credit card statements. You look around your house, in your closet and garage. You check your calendar. You look around and see where God fits in all this. Is God a priority when it comes to how you spend your money? Or does God get a little something if there’s anything left after you feed your addiction? And when you do give something to God, is it a joyful experience like giving a special present to someone you love, or is it done begrudgingly? When you look at yourself this way, what do you see?
I want to ask you to do something today when we take up the offering. I know that for a lot of people this is one of the most mundane, even profane things we do during the worship service. Thank goodness there’s usually music to distract us. But today I want this time to be a time of spiritual reflection. Regardless of whether you put anything in the plate when it comes by you, regardless of whether or not you are a member of this congregation, I want you to look at that plate and think about what it says about your relationship with God, about how your life is or isn’t rich toward God.
And if it turns out that that you’re addicted, that you’ve relegated God off to some tiny corner of your life, don’t worry. God does not come in wrath. God loves you, and Jesus comes to save you.
I once heard someone from the Alban Institute say that one of the problems mainline congregations have is, "People come to us looking for an experience of God, and we give them information about God." On a day when the reading from Acts is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, I wonder if the way we approach the Bible doesn't sometimes contribute to this problem.
When our primary concerns revolve around what the Bible says, whether it is historically true and so on, we are focusing on what information is contained in the Bible. The problem with this is it seems to reduce the faith to knowing the right information. But as the reading from Acts shows, even disciples who were taught personally by Jesus, who witnessed his ministry first hand and experienced his resurrection, were not able to be the Church until the Spirit lived in them. The Apostle Paul spoke of something similar, of being in Christ and so something completely new.
How might we approach the Bible so that it could be an encounter with God rather than information about God? Approaching Scripture as a conversation partner rather than a reference source may be a good start. But we need to go further and realize that Scripture can speak to us beyond the words on the page, to expect that Scripture has more than information to impart.
Interest in "spirituality" has grown tremendously in recent years. I believe that, in part, this arises out of the failure of informational approaches to the Bible. Practices such as lectio divina, divine or spiritual reading, provide means of encountering the text rather than asking what information is there. Scripture becomes a conversation or prayer partner in which God is experienced, in which new insights and guidance are found quite apart from what a casual reader of the text might see. This is a rather different kind of knowing from the typical, Western, rational sort of knowing. (A web search on dectio divina will provide you with numerous articles on it and suggestions for how to practice it.)
I could read every book ever written about a historical figure, be it George Washington, Alexander the Great, Amelia Earhart, or Jesus, but I will never actually know any of these people on the basis of this information. Knowing about someone and knowing someone are very different things. And I believe the Bible, set free from being a reference or history book, has the power to help us know God.
In his fascinating book, A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren says that Christians of all stripes tend to use the Bible as a legal constitution. Considering that we Americans are the product of a constitutional system of government and law, this is hardly surprising. And so we use the Bible like a legal reference tool, searching for sections that pertain to the subject at hand. Worse, we often use it as a reference, searching for those sections that support what we already believe, have planned, etc. And so at various times and places, the Bible is pro-slavery and anti-slavery; it's for women as pastors and against it, and so on.
But was the Bible ever intended as such a document. In the previous two days, I've mentioned historical contradictions in the Bible, and one of the variant story's of Judas' demise is a reading for today. And today's Old Testament reading features the judge, Deborah. She's leading the people of God and giving orders to the military commander, despite the fact that other biblical passages would seem to frown on such a role.
An obvious problem with the Bible as constitution is the fact that such documents were unknown to the biblical writers. They had laws, of course, but not foundational documents that undergirded those laws. Their foundations lived in narratives, in stories. Stories and myths were their primary vehicles for talking about who they were and who God was. (I use the word myth not in the popular sense of untruth, but in the classic sense of stories that explain the beginnings of creation, peoples, etc.) Because such stories were used to explain and define, historical accuracy was never their primary purpose. And so you can find - especially in the Old Testament - stories that contradict one another lying side by side. For example, read the stories connected to Noah. If you pay attention you will notice differing accounts that report contradictory numbers of animals on the ark. There are also two Creation stories with differing orders of creation
Stories, by nature, make poor legal reference material. We understand this when Jesus tells us a parable, but for some reason we expect the Bible as a whole to abide by our modern notions of truth and accuracy. But if we can set those aside for a moment, how might we come to the Bible in a more productive manner? Perhaps the notion of Holy Conversations may be of some help here.
If I see the Bible, with its variety of stories, poems, hymns, laws, proverbs and so on, as a divinely inspired collection that grows out of various faithful people's encounter with God, perhaps I can enter into a conversation with these various folks from various times and places. (Brian McLaren suggests thinking of the Bible as a "community library," with many thoughts and views on faith, not all of them in lock step agreement with one another.)
Interestingly, John Calvin, the father of my own Reformed/Presbyterian Tradition, modeled what I'm talking about when he took up the issue of lending money at interest. We modern folks have forgotten that this was once a burning religious issue. Christians were barred from being bankers because of the biblical prohibitions on lending at interest up until Calvin's day (the 1500s). But when Calvin looked around the city of Geneva, where he served as both spiritual leader and city manager, he saw how fledgling small business enterprises needed capital to start small factories. But those pesky biblical prohibitions made it difficult to raise such capital. A constitutional reading of the Bible was of little help to Calvin. Finding verses that supported lending at interest was nearly impossible.
But Calvin didn't use such an approach. Rather, he engaged the Bible in a conversation. He tried to understand how those biblical prohibitions functioned within the story of Israel and then the Church. And in this conversation, he came to the conclusion that these prohibitions were not a matter of God being against lending or interest per se, they were protections for the vulnerable and poor. But Calvin wanted to use lending to fund business that would employ the poor and raise their status. And so he concluded that lending (with certain restraints to prevent hurting people) was in keeping with the original prohibitions. He readily admitted that the Bible did not permit lending money at interest, but he claimed that in allowing just that in Geneva, he was upholding the fundamental concerns of God for the week and oppressed, the poor and the widow.
When you read the Bible, what sort of book or resource is it for you? Do you see the larger narrative and library, the different parts in conversation with one another? Or do you read verses in isolation like a legal code? I have to admit that preaching can encourage the latter. Each week there is a short snippet of Scripture from which I am to draw biblical truth. I won't claim that it's making my preaching any better, but more and more I am seeing the entire Bible as a part of every sermon, with the verses for that Sunday raising their voice to speak within the great cloud of witnesses, each of whom have some insight to share with us.
Today's readings from Matthew and Acts give me another jumping off point for talking about Scripture as conversation. As Acts (written by the same person who pens Luke) opens, the disciples meet Jesus a number times over the 40 day period following Easter. This all happens in Jerusalem, where the disciples have been since Jesus' arrest and where Jesus orders them to stay until the receive the Holy Spirit. Today's Matthew reading tells of Jesus' death on the cross. In Matthew, this will be the last time any of the 12 disciples will see Jesus in Jerusalem. After his resurrection, Jesus appears to the women and has them direct the disciples to a mountain in Galilee where he appears to them.
There is simply no reconciling these different accounts if we are going to read the Bible as a history book. (Matthew and Acts also offer wildly different accounts of Judas' death. In Matthew a repentant Judas tries to return his betrayal payment and then hangs himself. In Acts the wicked Judas buys property with his ill-gotten gain and promptly "burst open in the middle and his bowels gushed out.) But if the Bible is not primarily a history book, what are we to do with it?
There are a number of options. Some people look at the obvious historical contradictions and conclude that the Bible is simply unreliable. And here is where literalists' insistence on the historical and scientific accuracy of Bible often undercuts sharing the faith. Insisting that two radically different versions of an event are both historically true makes the faith unintelligible to many people. And the mental calisthenics sometimes used to explain away historical contradictions only make the problem worse.
A far better option, to my mind, is to admit that the Bible is neither a history nor a science text. Today's accounts in Matthew and Acts are rooted in historical events well known to the first readers of both. The authors are not trying to tell those First Century readers what happened. Rather they are trying to explain the significance of Jesus' resurrection. Acts is tracing how the resurrection has launched a missionary movement centered in Jerusalem and spreading out to all the known world. Matthew has a more Jewish perspective, and he launches this movement from a mountain in Galilee, mirroring how Israel is constituted at another mountain in the Sinai wilderness. Both accounts offered rich possibilities for the first Christians to contemplate and understand what was taking place as a result of Jesus' resurrection. And they still offer fertile opportunities for Christians to enter into conversation around what it means for Jesus to be the new Law-giver on the mountain, and for the Church to be a mission oriented body empowered and pushed ever outward by the Holy Spirit.
Perhaps that's enough for one day, but I think I'll continue this thread tomorrow.
Christians seem to fight a lot over the Bible. "The Bible says this. The Bible says that," we insist, usually to others who don't see it the same way. What people fight over says something about what they think is important. So I suppose that all this fighting at least says we consider the Bible important, that we expect it to guide us in some way. A more cynical view might say that we simply view the Bible as a convenient trump card, and we want to find ways to use it to our advantage.
In our biblical fighting, there are many who see the Bible as literally true, and thus any verse must be taken at face value as God's direct word. The problems with this stance become obvious to anyone who reads the Bible with much care. The Bible doesn't always agree with itself.
I know that biblical literalists are trying to "protect" the sanctity of God's word by their stance, but I fear that they actually do more harm than good. I fear their stance makes Christianity seem foolish and absurd to those who didn't grow up within such a tradition. They see the insistence that all the various things in the Bible are literally true to mean that faith requires turning off one's brain.
Today's gospel is a good case in point. Many people, even outside the church, have heard that while Jesus was on the cross, he engaged in conversation with the two criminals next to him, and promised the repentant one they would be together in Paradise. Yet in Matthew's gospel, we hear that Jesus was mocked and derided by all manner of folks, and all we hear about the criminals next to him is this, "The bandits who were crucified with him also taunted him in the same way." That's it.
Then there's today's reading from Judges where God is angry because Israel breaks covenant, and lets them fall to their enemies, but then feels sorry for them when their enemies are bad to them. Are we really supposed to believe that God is so capricious, that God can't anticipate that Israel will suffer once they are defeated?
It seems to me that we need a better way of accessing the Bible than simply saying "I believe it," or "I don't." A number of people have suggested the idea of a conversation. And I like the idea of the Bible as an inspired conversation among people of faith about what it means to live as God's people. It helps me understand how the Bible can say in one place that Israel's men must "send away" their foreign wives and children (Ezra 9-10) and in another place lifts up a foreign wife as a paragon of faithfulness (Ruth).
What does it mean to you to say the Bible is true? More on this tomorrow.
Today's reading from Matthew shows Pilate giving in to the crowd and ordering Jesus' execution. This story has been misused over the years to support anti-Semitism, but of course those who supported Jesus and those who cried for his death, the disciples, and Jesus himself were all Jews. Matthew is a Jew who probably never envisioned a day when Christianity would be a religion distinct from Judaism.
Anti-Semitism aside, I am fascinated by this picture of people who are eagerly awaiting a Messiah yet demand the death of Jesus whose followers hail him as Messiah. No doubt Jesus' opponents operated from a variety of motives, but clearly many of them thought they were being faithful to God in opposing Jesus. He looked nothing like what they expected from God's Messiah. Jesus' own disciples struggled at times to reconcile him with their expectations. So why is it that so many missed God at work in Jesus?
For those who accept that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, we must wrestle with the obvious fact that Jesus defied the religious expectations of his day. None of the religious traditions in Judaism were looking for a Messiah quite like Jesus. Their expectations were drawn from Scripture in much the same way many current Christians' expectations about God and faith are drawn from Scripture. And still the majority rejected Jesus. I have to think this is more than a one time problem. A God whose thoughts are not our thoughts and ways are not our ways (see Isaiah 55:8-9) is bound to act in ways that startle and surprise us on a fairly regular basis. I certainly have my own expectations about God, and they usually cohere with my moderate/progressive sort of Christianity. Others have expectations that cohere with their conservative sort, and so on. And it can be very difficult to discern whether our expectations emerged from our religious experiences or if they simply conform to existing preferences we already had.
I don't believe it responsible simply to say that everyone's truth is true for them. God is God, and not whatever we wish God to be. Sometimes my expectations are simply wrong. Sometimes yours are. So from time to time, whatever our leanings, we need to step back and look afresh at God, and especially at Jesus. From time to time we need to drop all our assumptions about what faith means, what salvation means, what Church is, and so on, and try to get back to Jesus. When you peel off all the layers or interpretation and set aside the mosaic picture of Jesus we've constructed from selected gospel stories and popular imagination, there is much Jesus says and does that still startles and surprises, that still challenges and confounds. All of which draws us a little closer to the true, living God rather than the God of our expectations.
