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 in Acts, the Church is shown adding new believers right and left despite a general fear of persecution. Today we find ourselves in a very different situation. The Church is losing members right and left. This seems to be the case by most any measure, whether it be the membership statistics of denominations, worship attendance figures from congregations, or polling statistics that show fewer and fewer Americans participating in the life of any congregation.
Interestingly, I occasionally hear people blame this decline on our culture's hostility to the Church, citing things such as "removing prayer from schools." But even the most vocal advocates for America as a full-fledged, Christian nation would never argue that US Christians face the sort of hostility reported in the book of Acts. No one gets arrested for saying, "Jesus is Lord." In fact, state legislatures routinely invite local pastors to offer prayers, and pastors and Bibles are regular attendees at presidential inaugurations. So why is it that the Church in Acts is growing while so many American congregations are declining?
I think a clue may be found in the language used by many Christians to describe the situation. A great deal of angry words from Christians lament our loss of prominence and power in the society. Such language seems to think of power as something that can be bestowed or removed by the culture. But the power the Church displays in Acts is present despite all attempts of cultural authorities to stamp it out. Where is that sort of power in our churches today?
It is an interesting contrast. The Church of the First Century had no official powers, no legitimizing endorsements from the culture, but it was alive with divine power. The Church of our day is accustomed to walking the halls of cultural power, to being propped up and supported by the culture, but often we seem dead when it comes to spiritual power. And I'm pretty sure that no official, cultural, or societal power will be able to resuscitate us.
I recently ordered a book by a Presbyterian pastor about helping people encounter the Holy in worship. The opening chapter began with this little anecdote.
One Sunday morning, a mother went upstairs to her son’s room to wake him for church. Slowly opening the door, as it softly squealed in protest, she said, “Dear, it’s time to get up. It’s time to go to church.” The son grumbled and rolled over. Ten minutes later his mother again went up, opened the door, and said, “Dear, get up. It’s time to go to church.” He moaned and curled up tighter under the blankets, warding off the morning chill. Five minutes later she yelled, “Son! Get up!” His voice muffled by the blankets, he yelled back, “I don’t want to go to church!” “You have to go to church!” she replied. “Why? Why do I have to go to church?” he protested.
The mother stepped back, paused, and said, “Three reasons. First, it’s Sunday morning, and on Sunday mornings we go to church. Second, you’re forty years old, and you’re too old be having this conversation with your mother. Third, you’re the pastor of the church.”[1]
The book’s author tells this story to highlight the ambivalence many pastors feel about worship. A lot of pastors enjoy preaching and enjoy teaching but find worship unsatisfying. When I did my seminary internship, the pastor of that church was getting fairly close to retirement. And he told me one day that when he retired he would likely not attend worship anywhere for a year or so.
I was too surprised by this admission to ask him to explain exactly what he meant. I presume that he still planned to pray, to read the Bible, to serve God in some way. But for some reason he wasn’t going to attend any worship services.
What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices, says Yahweh… Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile… I cannot endure your solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. Seems God can be more than a little ambivalent about worship, too.
Now granted our worship is quite different from that of the ancient Hebrews. No animals are slaughtered; we pay little attention to the cycles of the moon; nothing is burned. Yet I think fundamentally, our worship has much in common with those Israelites. For many of us, worship is something that we do to help maintain our standing with a distant, far-off God, a God who is not much involved in our daily lives.
I know that’s not true for everyone. Some of you experience God as very active and present in your life. But on the whole, I’m not sure Presbyterians act like this is so, and the Church’s worship has not acted like it either.
Perhaps I can clarify by asking a few questions. Who is Jesus? What was his message? Why did he travel about the Judean countryside healing, teaching, and gathering followers?
Very often, people answer such questions in terms of Jesus as Savior, the one whose death somehow rescued us. And more often than not, this rescue is understood in terms of going to heaven. In other words, a far-off God in a far-off heaven rescues us from this messed up earth and our limited bodily existence for something better, somewhere else.
Yet Jesus speaks of God’s kingdom not as something far-off, but present. Both Jesus and Isaiah speak of God as extremely concerned about the earthly plight of human beings, and Jesus speaks of a kingdom that has already begun to emerge in his ministry, and which we are called to be a part of now.
Unfortunately, the Church has too often lost sight of this, has thought in terms of a far-off God and so has confused the Kingdom of God with heaven. When that happens, religious focus becomes other-worldly and more about beliefs and status than about God’s dream for a new earth. It is about whether we believe the right things about this far-off God so we can get into that far-off heaven.
But over and over Jesus tells us to get ready for the coming kingdom here and now. Jesus begins his ministry by calling people to repent, to turn around and change direction because the kingdom of God has come near. Jesus does not come to rescue us from earth but to proclaim the good news that God will not abandon creation. God wants to restore and redeem creation, and Jesus calls us to begin living in new ways, ways that conform to that new day. And so when Jesus speaks of selling possessions to help others and having treasure in heaven, he’s not talking about reserving spots in a far-off heaven. He’s talking about investing ourselves now in God’s dream for the world.
When God is in some far-off heaven and Jesus comes to take us there, his parable about alert slaves ready for the master’s return is usually understood to speak of death. You never know when you might die, so you’d better have things in order. But Jesus is talking about the Kingdom, God’s new day.
Early this year, we began the Appreciative Inquiry process here at Boulevard, which gave birth to our Dream Team which is now giving birth to the groups and activities described in the Dream Team material in your bulletin. When the Dream Team first began to talk with members and to listen for how our strengths helped us hear where God is calling us, I was intrigued by what emerged. There was interest in more small groups and more community involvement, but in concert with these was a desire to grow spiritually and to do mission.
Now spirituality and mission can be pretty vague terms and can mean lots of things to lots of different people. But to my mind, spirituality is all about drawing closer to God. Spirituality presumes that God is not far-off in some distant heaven, but that God is present to us, available to us. And the Dream Team seems to have tapped into a hunger we have to connect better with God, with Jesus. And this cannot help but connect us with what God wants and what God is doing. Deep spirituality gives us eyes to see God’s coming new day.
And when we see it, we long for it, for things to be set right. To use the biblical term, we hunger and thirst for righteousness. And so we begin to work for things to be set right. We begin to invest in God’s future, to give our money and time and energy to mission that reveals that coming new day to others. Yes, poverty, hunger, violence, hatred, and oppression can seem intractable problems, and it is easy to become frustrated, to trade God’s new day for belief in a far-off God who rescues us for some far-off heaven. But when we drawn near to the Master, as we experience his transforming love in our lives, we know he is at work here. We know he is bringing that new day, that the Kingdom will break through when we least expect it.
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Jesus is calling us to find our places in that Kingdom, to invest ourselves now in God’s dream for a new day. Where is God calling you to be a part of it?
[1] N. Graham Standish, In God’s Presence: Encountering, Experiencing, and Embracing the Holy in Worship (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2010), 9.
Many of us are familiar with the phrase "from the wrong side of the tracks." In the South where I grew up, you could see this quite literally in some small towns. A train track often bisected the town, and it was pretty obvious that there was a more desirable side and a side that was less so. Jesus was from that side.
In today's gospel reading, Jesus is gathering followers. He calls Philip who in turn recruits Nathanael. When he tells Nathanael that they have found the promised Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael replies, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Fortunately Nathanael went with Philip to see for himself.
It is nearly impossible to go through life without developing ideas about how things are. Such notions are necessary for organizing our lives, but they are also problematic at times. These notions let us make quick judgments and respond quickly. They allow us to look at an array of choices and quickly refine the list down to manageable size. But as necessary as they are, they often mislead us, and when the become fixed and rigid, they form prejudices of all shapes and sizes.
Our notions of how things are lead to expectations. When someone says she's a lawyer, people already have a set of expectations about what kind of person this is. When I tell someone I'm a pastor, I can often see the wheels his head turning and those expectations registering. Often I engage in a preemptive strike of sorts, quickly clarifying that I may not be the sort of pastor they expect. And I when people find out I drive a motorcycle, some of them have great difficulty reconciling that with their expectations.
Most of us have expectations of lawyers or pastors that aren't really accurate for large numbers of either group. And I suspect that most of us have notions and expectations about Jesus that aren't terribly accurate either. Jesus is an extremely well known figure in our society, but people seem to know a lot of different Jesuses. There is meek and mild Jesus, Jewish rabbi Jesus, kindly healing Jesus, sword wielding warrior Jesus, and more. Often these different Jesuses have little in common with any pictures of Jesus we find in the Bible. They are more the result of what different people are hoping for. Very often Jesus becomes the embodiment of our expectations about God. Jesus becomes the embodiment of our religious hopes, dreams, fears, and frustrations.
But if the Bible is clear about anything, it is clear that God is not like us, that God acts in ways that are not our ways. And so it would seem impossible that God would not regularly defy our expectations, act contrary to those expectations, and seek to transform those expectations so that we become more like God.
Many people are familiar with gospel accounts of Jesus calling fishermen on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Andrew, Simon Peter, James, and John are among those called from their former life as fishermen to "fish for people." But John's gospel tells a completely different story. Andrew is a disciple of John the Baptist who hears the Baptist say Jesus is Lamb of God. Andrew then follows Jesus, and he goes and brings his brother Simon to join them.
There is no reconciling these very different accounts if we read the Bible as history, as a reference work filled with accurate (from a modern, western point of view) information. We are left with deciding that one of the accounts in accurate and the other wrong. But that poses insurmountable problems for most Christians, and so some resort to elaborate notions of some pristine biblical text that has been lost, while the Bible we now have has been corrupted in some way in its transmission down through the centuries.
To my mind, a much more fruitful line of thought is to realize that the biblical writers weren't trying to pass down history. The New Testament was written for communities of Christians, not to convert non-Christians. The writers weren't trying to tell people the story of Jesus, but to help them better understand its significance.
In the case of John's gospel, his story of Andrew and Simon Peter becoming disciples is his way of explaining how John the Baptist fits into Jesus' story. John the Baptist was very well known and still had his own disciples long after his death. All four gospels understand John's work to in some way prepare the way for Jesus, but each of them explains this is somewhat different ways, with the fourth gospel being strikingly different.
Most all Christian I know want to be spiritual people. We know that faith and communion with God are not things to be acquired by normal, worldly means. So why do we insist on treating the Bible as though is were a worldly book rather than a spiritual one? The truth of the Bible is not ahistorical. It is rooted in real, historical events. But receiving its truth is not a matter of having all the right information. It is a matter of letting the Bible open us to God.
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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.
