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.
Our local paper, The Columbus Dispatch, has an article this morning on the split occurring in the Lutheran Church as more conservative congregations break off from the ELCA to form a new denomination. Such a story is hardly surprising. We Presbyterians have our own, similar movements. But just once when I read about such things, I would like to hear someone say, "We disagree over the meaning of Scripture, and so it seems best to stop fighting over that and form separate groups." But instead the quotes normally read like the one in today's article. Explaining that the split was over bigger issues that gay/lesbian ordination, a spokesperson for the new NALC said, "Also at play is a misunderstanding of what authority - Scripture or 'the mood of the times' - should guide the church."
In today's reading from Acts, we are in the middle of the account explaining how Peter comes to understand that distinctions of clean and unclean do not matter for those following Christ. While many current Christians are unaware of it, welcoming Gentiles into what was a Jewish faith community caused serious divisions in the early Christian movement. Jewish Christians continued to follow Torah, and saw no reason for Gentile converts to do otherwise. Those who would become part of the Jesus movement would need to become Jews, with males being circumcised, women undergoing a ritual cleansing, and both observing the dietary laws.
But the Apostle Paul saw things differently. He championed the view that emerges in the Acts story about Cornelius. Those Gentiles who accepted Jesus' gospel were to be baptized and welcomed into the faith as Gentiles. The old distinctions were gone. Problem was, the Jewish Christians claimed to have Scripture (which at that time meant what we call the Old Testament) on their side. The division in the early Church was severe, and many believe that Jewish Christians orchestrated the arrest and eventual execution of Paul. And I have little doubt that these Jewish Christians were certain that they were following the authority of Scripture, unlike this crazy Paul who was coming up with all these wild innovations that threatened their deeply held faith. In other words, they followed the plain truth of Scripture while Paul perverted it.
Interestingly, similar arguments were used 150 years ago in defense of slavery. Many theologians and church people, both north and south, were convinced that slavery was sanctioned and supported by the Bible. Thomas Cobb, one of the founders of the University of Georgia Law School wrote in large letters on his home when SC seceded from the Union, "Resistance To Abolition Is Obedience to God."
In the novel Nellie Norton: or, Southern Slavery and the Bible, (written by a Protestant clergyman and published in 1864) the title character is a young, naive New England girl who believes slavery to be a cruel abomination. But on a visit to Savannah with her mother, through encounters with slaves and discussions with Southerners, she comes to realize how wrong she has been. After all, as the pro-slavery people she meet point out, "The Bible is a pro-slavery Bible and God is a pro-slavery God." Also, "The North must give up the Bible and religion or adopt our views of slavery."
And there it is, the same tired argument. Those who disagree with me have thrown out the Bible. To borrow from the Lutheran bishop quoted in my local paper, they have traded the authority of Scripture for the "mood of the times."
Sometimes I think it no small miracle that the Christian faith survives and thrives. How many times have people of deep faith been found to be standing squarely in opposition to God? And apparently they have had good company all the way back to the very first generation of Jesus followers.
Sometimes I wonder if we haven't gotten this Bible thing completely wrong. Rather than trying the follow the Bible, maybe we would be better served if we simply tried to catch a glimpse of the God hinted at by all the various stories, rules, songs, and accounts. Maybe we would be much better off if we quit trying to find support for our views, and simply tried to get to know Jesus a little better. Maybe if we spent more of our time trying to know Jesus more deeply, trying to draw nearer to him, we'd all be a lot less sure that we know exactly what he'd say about every hot button issue of the day.
By nature I tend to be something of a control freak. This is often a real liability as a pastor, stifling the efforts of other leaders in the church. And it also poses a deeper, spiritual problem. It gets in the way of true faith. Faith is about trusting something outside myself, trusting God. By definition that means giving up control. Richard Rohr's daily meditations this week focus on the theme of paradox, and today's piece spoke to this problem of giving up control.
So when we speak of paradox, I’m trying to open up that space where you can “fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31), because YOU are not in control. That is always the space of powerlessness, vulnerability, and letting go. Faith happens in that wonderful place, and hardly ever when we have all the power and can hold no paradoxes. Thus you see why faith will invariably be a minority and suspect position. (Click here to read the entire meditation.)
As I think about my own difficulty giving up control, I wonder about Rohr's comment on faith always being "a minority and suspect position." Indeed our culture mitigates powerfully against faith as an absolute trust in God. Many speak of America as a Christian nation, but we trust our security not to the LORD who "builds up Jerusalem" (see today's Psalm) but to a massive military complex. In faith the psalmist can sing, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea." (Psalm 46) Yet fear drives much of American life. We fear terrorists, those who are different from us, those who disagree with us, etc.
If letting go and discovering faith is indeed a minority position, then perhaps the most faithful thing those who would embrace faith can do is to make a powerful minority witness. I say I am, or at least strive to be, a person of faith. And so I will strive to be a person who is not afraid, who discovers joy in turning over my fears to God, and who learns to live without needing to control.
I while back I wrote for several days running about Scripture engaging us in holy conversation rather than being a set of absolute rules and edicts. Today's reading from Job draws me back to these thoughts.
One of the problems with treating the Bible as some sort of divine reference set is that it requires very selective reading of the Bible to maintain such a view. There are many devout Christians who, when they undergo great pain and suffering, wonder what they have done to deserve it. They presume that their struggles are related to being out of favor with God. Such a notion will find plenty of support in the Bible. The book of Deuteronomy is littered with the phrase "so that it may go well with you," this going well always a byproduct of keeping God's commandments. But to Deuteronomy's theological certainty that God's blessing and curse springs directly from how one keeps the Law, Job raises its voice to say, "Now wait just a minute!"
Job is good and righteous. Even God says so. Yet Job is visited with all sorts of horrible pain and suffering. And contrary to quaint sayings about the patience of Job, the Job found in the book bearing his name rues the day he was born, shakes his fist at God and demands an explanation for how it is he can suffer so despite being a righteous man.
The book of Job stands as a kind of protest, a minority report if you will, over and against the more accepted theology behind Deuteronomy. And unless we are willing to say that one book is right and the other wrong, then it seems to me that we should say that Scripture itself is engaged in a conversation about the nature and shape of faithful life, a conversation in which we are called to become partners.
I receive a daily meditation via email from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who founded something called "The Center for Action and Contemplation" in Albuquerque, NM. (If you are interested you can sign up to receive these emails by clicking here.) In last Friday's meditation, he used some very provocative language, drawing on St. Bernard of Clairvaux's commentary of Song of Songs.
He said that we are the mutual food of one another, just as lovers are. Jesus gives us himself as food in the Eucharist, and the willing soul offers itself for God to “eat” in return: “if I eat and am not eaten, it will seem that God is in me, but I am not yet in God” (Commentary 71:5). I must both eat God and be eaten by God, Bernard says. Now this is the language of mystical theology, and is upsetting to the merely rational mind, but utterly delightful and consoling to anyone who knows the experience.
This is strange language to my ear, but not really any stranger than the language Jesus uses in today's verses from John. "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them."
Neither "eating" nor "abiding" are the sort of thing I learned growing up in the church. Of course I heard both words used in terms of the Lord's Supper and in terms of God present to us by faith, but this never had the visceral sort of feel I get from hearing Jesus or Bernard.
Modern Christians in the West have often made faith a mostly head thing. This is even more true of Presbyterians. So where do we encounter God on a more visceral, incarnational level? For us "from-the-neck-up" Presbyterians, how do we worship in a way that helps people meet a God who doesn't remain a disembodied concept, but who, in Jesus, gets involved in the mundane, profane, messiness of human existence?
We Presbyterians, like other Protestants, are products of a 500 year old reform movement that said individual Christians should read the Bible for themselves, that God is available to each of us directly through Scripture. But we live in a day when many Protestants rarely read their Bibles, and so polls show that most of us cannot name the 10 Commandments. Still, I imagine that this one will sound familiar to many of you. Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.
Sabbath is a pretty big deal in the Bible. It’s there at the very start. In the first creation account, God makes everything in six days and rests on the seventh. But apparently, Sabbath keeping didn’t become a really big deal for the Hebrews until they were carried off into exile in Babylon around 600 BC. In a foreign land, the Temple and Jerusalem destroyed, Sabbath keeping became the primary way Jews maintained a distinct identity. In Babylon, synagogue and Sabbath became the way that Israel preserved their faith and stayed close to God.
By Jesus’ time, there was a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. People could go there for religious festivals and to make offerings. But synagogue and Sabbath remained important. Especially for those Jews who thought Temple worship sometimes focused too much on ritual and not enough on living as God intended, Sabbath keeping, along with the commandments in general, was emphasized.
Protestant reformers such as John Calvin shared a lot in common with these folks. They thought that much of medieval Catholicism had become too focused on ritual and not enough on living as followers of Jesus. And so Protestants tended to forego much of the ritual of Roman Catholic worship. They also emphasized Sabbath keeping, now relocated from Saturday to Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection.
I grew up in a thoroughly Protestant South where Catholics were something of a rarity. And our world shut down on Sunday. I almost never heard the sound of a lawn mower on a Sunday afternoon. And I still find it difficult to crank up my lawn mower on a Sunday.
The Sabbath keeping I knew as a child has largely faded from the American landscape, but it is enjoying a resurgence as a personal spiritual practice. Many who are seeking to grow deeper spiritually, including some who are neither Jewish nor Christian, have discovered observing a regular day where the work and busyness of our world is set aside, where the focus is on God, on worship, on meditation and reflection, is a powerfully renewing, enlightening, and energizing thing to do.
Jesus himself observed the Sabbath. He could regularly be found at the synagogue on the Sabbath, teaching as a traveling rabbi. But Jesus also regularly found himself embroiled in conflict on the Sabbath, just as he does in our reading today when he heals a crippled woman.
Jesus ran afoul of the Sabbath rules, guidelines that had been formulated to help people properly keep Sabbath. We sometimes misunderstand these rules, seeing them as petty legalism that valued rules over all else, but that really wasn’t the case. These rules had all sorts of exceptions. You could do work on the Sabbath to rescue a person or animal in danger. But if the situation was something that could wait until sundown when the Sabbath ended, you were supposed to wait, the intent being to help people keep their focus on God.
But as well intended as the Sabbath rules were, they shared a problem inherent in just about every form of religious practice. Practices originally designed to draw people close to God almost inevitably become the focus of the religion. Even if they no longer serve their original purpose, people will persist in these practices, insisting that they are essential to the faith. And that’s as true for us as it was for the leader of the synagogue who confronts Jesus.
That synagogue leader saw Jesus violating rules that had served the faith well, that were time honored methods for helping people keep God at the center of their lives. And so he could not see God at work right before his eyes. The very thing he trusted to keep him focused on God had, in fact, hidden God from him.
It can happen just as easily to us. If you grew up in the church, you grew up with some sort of worship style. You heard certain sorts of hymns and prayers. Whatever sorts they were, they were originally meant to draw you into God’s presence. And they have done and continue to do just that for many people. But a style from a certain time can become a barrier to folks from another time unfamiliar with that style. It can actually obscure God for them. And when we decide that a particular worship style, a particular sort of music, a particular way of praying is the right way, we have begun the process of enshrining our way as an idol, forgetting that worship is about drawing near to God, encountering God, not about our tastes. And this is not a matter of old versus new. New styles of worship are as prone to this as old.
I think that a great deal of younger generations’ current apathy about the Church is because they see much about us that looks like that synagogue leader’s insistence on a time honored form or Sabbath keeping. We seem more focused on what we’ve always done than on God. Often, that is a valid criticism of we churchy types.
Those who have had it with churchy types whom they see as more concerned with going to church than being the church, will sometimes throw Jesus’ Sabbath fights back in our faces, telling us that we’ve perverted Church. They say, “You should call off your worship services and go out and help the poor and needy.” Perhaps they’re right. Jesus does say that those who help the poor and needy, who visit the sick and the prisoner, who welcome the stranger, have done the same to him.
But in truth, Jesus never makes either/or distinctions between worship and serving others. For Jesus, all of life is about drawing near to God. Jesus regular spends time in worship and prayer, and it is his intimacy with God that impels him to demonstrate God’s love by curing the sick and embracing the sinner and the outcast.
When Jesus responds to the synagogue leader who protests a Sabbath healing he says, “You hypocrites!” Our word hypocrite comes to us directly from the Greek word in our gospel, hupokritai. But the original meaning of this word is an “actor,” someone who plays a role. And whenever our practices and traditions let us be religious without actually opening us to God and what God is up to, that’s what we are doing. We’re playing Christians.
When you come to worship here, or any other church, do you encounter God? Do you touch and feel the transforming, mysterious presence of the holy? When you come to the Lord’s table, does God’s grace fill you and nourish you so that you long to share God’s love with others? And if your answer is “No,” why do you think that is?
God is here! The Spirit is moving in this place. In Jesus, God seeks to connect with us, longs to connect with us. Jesus is here, calling us to become his living body in the world. The Spirit is here, helping us to hear Jesus’ call, and equipping us to do all that he asks.
Growing up in the Church, I heard today's reading from Acts many times. Philip is directed by God to the Wilderness road where he meets an Ethiopian eunuch who is reading Isaiah. Apparently this fellow is drawn to Judaism in some way as he has been to Jerusalem to worship. The Spirit directs Philip to talk with the eunuch and the result is another Christian convert, baptized on the spot in some water beside the road. Then Phillip, his work done, is magically whisked away.
As a child the images that caught my attention were Philip running beside the chariot, the exotic notion of an Ethiopian, and of course that moment when "the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away." As a young child, I don't think I had any idea what a eunuch was, or why that might matter.
Eunuchs were forbidden from entering the Temple. The Law of Moses clearly considered them unclean, right along with "those born or an illicit union." And so this fellow Philip meets - better, who Philip is introduced to by God - has a couple of strikes against him. He's a Gentile foreigner, and he's a eunuch. What is to prevent him from being baptized? Quite a lot actually.
It seems no coincidence that Isaiah is the prophet who envisions a new day when the foreigner and the eunuch will be welcomed, when the old religious barriers will be gone. And this story in Acts announces that this promised day has arrived. The Kingdom, God's Dream, the Beloved Community has broken into this world, and it is made visible in the life of the Church as those formerly excluded are now called brothers and sisters.
The image of Philip being snatched away by the Spirit of the Lord seemed wildly incredible to me as a child. But I have come to realize that even more wildly incredible is when the Spirit helps Christians to see every one they meet as brothers and sisters, those whom God loves and calls us to love in order for the Beloved Community to be seen by all.
Right now I'm following a discussion on Twitter about the future of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and a lot of the conversation is related to scarce resources. Strands in the conversation include how older pastors are being encouraged to retire later by the Board of Pensions, which of course makes it harder for new pastors to find positions. There is also a strand about how we keep funding church camps, often at the expense of New Church Developments (NCDs). Many younger pastors - quite rightly, I think - see NCDs as essential, but often people my age and older have great memories of their days at church camp, and so they vote to fund camps out of these nostalgic feelings.
When resources are scare, the question of how to allocate them is always difficult. Many congregation, many families, and many governments are struggling with what to cut and what to retain. All of which makes today's gospel reading of more than passing interest to me. It's one of the several accounts of Jesus feeding a huge crowd with just a few morsels of food. In today's account from John's gospel, Andrew responds to Jesus' question about how they would feed the crowd with, "There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?"
What are our meager resources in the face of such great needs?
There are two very different ways of understanding the stories of Jesus feeding the multitudes. One insists it is a full blown miracle. Jesus multiplies the few loaves and fish into an abundance. Another view sees the story as a miracle of sharing. Lots of folks in the crowd had food with them, but kept it hidden until Jesus began to share the boy's small offering. When everyone shared, there was more than enough.
I'm inclined to view the second understanding as a modern, rationalist view of the story. But I also think that the bigger issue is not which interpretation is correct, but whether we can act like either interpretation is true. Can we trust that we have enough between us to do everything Jesus is calling us to do? Or can we trust that Jesus will provide everything we need when we do what he calls us to do? Seems to me that how we act looks very much the same whichever understanding of the story we believe, as long as we act out of trust.
None of this answers the question of whether to give funding priority to NCDs over church camps. I think that is a question of call. Is Jesus calling the Presbyterian Church to maintain its camps, or to start new faith communities that help 21st Century people learn to be Jesus' disciples? (The way I frame this question betrays my answer.) But I am convinced that when we are doing what Jesus calls us to do, there will be enough, and then some.
I mentioned yesterday how the early Christians thought of themselves as Jewish. That means that the stoning of Stephen in yesterday's reading and the "severe persecution" against the church in today's verses are struggles of us versus us, not us versus them. Nearly 2000 years later, Christians are accustomed to thinking of Jews as them, but that simply was not the case for the first generation of Jesus' followers.
I don't suppose battles of us versus us should be all that surprising. If you look at our current political situation, or at the state of the church, the worst fights are often internal ones. Republicans may want to view Democrats as them and Democrats do the same to Republicans, but of course we are all Americans, all the same us. And we Christians can be our own worst enemies. We demonize those who disagree with us in theology or practice. We try to turn them into a them, but the fact is we are all imperfect, flawed followers of Jesus, all the same us.
We humans seem to need enemies. We need an us that we can be against. But Jesus comes breaking down all those us-them barriers. He is scary to the authorities precisely because he upsets this status quo of us and them. Worse, he calls his followers to mimic him, to reach out to them, to love them. Jesus tells us to love our enemies. Surely this is the ultimate undoing of us versus them.
Given this, it seems unimaginable that the Church would engage in hate, that we would want to label this group or that group a them. But of course we do. Sometimes it seems that we are so busy being the Church or being Christians that we forget to be followers of Jesus. We forget that "God so loved the world," which seems to draw a pretty big circle labeled "us."
I'm back in the office after attending the wonderful "Church Unbound" conference in Montreat, NC. The very notion that the Church is bound in some way is an intriguing one. It says that we are chained, confined, or constricted in some way that keeps us from being the people God calls us to be. It says that we need to be set loose from something in order to answer our calling to be followers of Jesus.
Of course most of us are not all that keen on admitting that we are bound. Addicts resist admitting that their addiction controls them in some way. Micro managers often can't see the abilities of others because they can't let anyone else control anything. And all of us get stuck in ruts without realizing it.
The Church has these problems along with another. We often assume that the things we do are somehow divinely ordained. I've heard people say, "It isn't really worship without a pipe organ." Of course pipe organs didn't exist for much of Church history, and most American congregations didn't have such organs until the early 20th century.
We all have our own preferences when it comes to worship style, mission emphases, fellowship events, and so on. But what happens when our preferences get in the way of being the body of Christ? And if we confuse our preferences with "how it is supposed to be," what then?
In today's reading in Acts, Stephen's trial comes to an end, and he is stoned to death. In that trial he accuses his accusers. "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do." Stephen was a leader in the new movement that sprung up after Jesus' death and resurrection. This movement did not consider itself something separate from Judaism, but an integral part of it. But what they were doing looked and felt different and new. And this offended the religious sensibilities of some. This wasn't "how it was supposed to be." Therefore it was wrong and needed to be stopped before it caused too much trouble.
Any time we resist something new that the Spirit is doing, we are bound by our expectations of how things should be. Our "shoulds" become God, in a sense, become idols which bind us and keep us from following where Jesus calls. What is binding you?
In one of the Church Unbound sessions this morning, Brian McLaren quoted or, more likely, paraphrased William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury who died in 1944. "If our concept of God is flawed, the more we worship the worse off we are. We would be better off as atheists." Where do we get our concept of God, and how do we know if it is flawed? Most Protestants would say we check our Bibles, but I'm not so sure that's a simply task.
Today's readings may illustrate my point. In one we hear a portion of the Samson stories about a warrior strongman who doesn't look all that different from Hercules. In Acts we hear a recitation of the Exodus story, of Moses being prepared to help lead Israel from slavery. And then in John we see Jesus healing a royal official's son (from a distance) as a "sign." So we have a strongman who "judges" Israel, a story of rescue from slavery, and a healing. In the first, Samson doles out his share of death and destruction to Israel's enemies, presumably with God's blessings. Then we hear of how God works to rescue Israel from bondage under the royal power of Egypt. Finally we see Jesus who uses no weapons, but threatens the power of Rome by calling people to believe in him, to entrust themselves to a power other than the Emperor.
So the question arises, "Is God a god of violence who visits destruction on our enemies; is God a god who rescues the slave from the oppressor; or is God a god who heals and calls people to abandon traditional loyalties to nation or empire and become citizens of God's reign?"
I won't for a moment pretend that these are the only three choices for a concept of God. Nor will I suggest that all concepts of God are mutually exclusive. But some concepts are.
A different question may be a way of getting at your concept of God. "What is Christianity's primary message and purpose?" The way you answer this question says a lot about your concept of God. To look at one possible answer, if Christianity is supposed to provide a means of escape from this evil world and this messy, bodily existence, what does that say about God's relationship to God's creation? If God is intent on destroying sinners and the earth, what does that say about the nature of God?
What do you think is the Christian faith's primary message and purpose? Where did you learn that? Things to ponder...
