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.
If you've been following the daily readings, you've heard Job complaining about how he has suffered unjustly, demanding a response from God. You've heard Job's friends insist that Job must have done something to deserve all his misfortune, and he should repent of his misdeeds. Now finally, God has answered Job, though to my mind, the answer is not terribly satisfactory.
As today's reading begins, God has already pummeled Job with a barrage of questions. "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without wisdom?.. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" And it has gone on like this for two chapters when we get to today's reading. But God does not say that Job's friends were correct. In fact, God will condemn them and their advice shortly.
In short, God's answer to Job, even if it is a flight of fancy three chapters long, amounts to, "I am God, and you're not."
I wonder if most faith crises don't struggle right here. In the face of so much suffering in the world, of so much that surely is at odds with any hoped for Kingdom of God, can we trust that God is indeed God, much less that God is good? When we judge God's apparent willingness to tolerate evil and suffering, can we be satisfied with, "I am God and you're not," as Job was?
In the end, Job's acceptance rests on the fact that God does indeed show Godself. I think I could use a little of that about now.
In case you’ve missed it when I’ve said so before, I think the Pharisees get something of a bum rap.The Pharisees were a reform movement in Judaism, a group that worried about a faith too focused on rituals, festivals, and Temple sacrifices.They had read those verses by the prophet Amos where God says, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”And so the Pharisees were serious about doing more than professing their faith.They tried to walk the walk.And they encouraged other Jews to do the same.And their movement was a rather successful one.They were the forerunners of modern, rabbinical Judaism.
Of course when you start to focus on how people live it gets fairly easy to tell those who are serious about faith from those who aren’t.And the tax collectors and sinners we just heard about in our gospel reading certainly belong to the latter group.These tax collectors had nothing in common with our IRS or local tax office.They were Jews who secured, often bought, their position from the Romans.It was essentially a license to steal, and corruption was an integral part of the system.These tax collectors had a set amount to collect for the Romans, and everything they collected above that was theirs.And they could used Roman soldiers to bully and strong-arm folks.They were hated and regarded as traitors because they worked for a foreign power and grew wealthy by cheating their fellow Jews.
Similarly, the sinners in our gospel reading are not those who have had some small lapse and needed forgiveness.These were clearly distinguishable folks who did not keep the moral law or follow the purity rules.They lived outside the faith community, either by choice or because they engaged in unsavory occupations.To eat with these folks was to become unclean and impure yourself.Their status as sinners is not questioned, not even by Jesus.
And so the issue is not whether the Pharisees have judged these tax collectors and sinners too harshly.The issue is why Jesus feels so at home with them.To explain, Jesus tells a parable.Which of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”
Jesus begins his parable with this question, but it isn’t really a question.He presumes that every one of the scribes and Pharisees listening to him is nodding in agreement.“Oh yes, of course we would drop everything, leave the ninety-nine, and run look for the one lost sheep.”
But I don’t know if I would.It doesn’t seem to me a cost effective way to run a business.That one sheep is a paltry one percent of the sheep farmer’s total investment.It seems difficult to justify jeopardizing ninety-nine percent for the sake of one.Better to safeguard the ninety-nine percent, forget the one, and take the tax write off.
But I suppose shepherds in Jesus’ day viewed it differently.Their small flocks became like extensions of their family.They knew each sheep individually, and they couldn’t leave the one out there alone.
The Pharisees seemed to get Jesus’ parable with no problem, but it isn’t quite the same no-brainer for me.So what would be a no-brainer?What would make me immediately nod my head yes, would justify dropping everything?
I know one thing that it isn’t, not for me or apparently for many others.It isn’t the loss of scores of mainline church members.Mainline, Protestant congregations have lost millions of members since 1960.Some of those have joined non-denominational mega-churches, but most have simply left active church life.Presbyterians alone have lost around 2 million members.We’re about half the size we were 50 years ago.We’re not talking about any one percent here.Surely this would cause us to take notice, to drop everything.But in fact we have mostly shrugged.We wonder where they all went, but we’ve pretty much kept doing exactly what we’ve always done.We’d love it if they all came back, but…
What sort of thing would cause you to drop everything you were doing?What would cause you to set aside everything else and focus all your energy on that problem?How about if you heard that someone you love dearly had just had a terrible accident and was on the way to the hospital?I know that would do it for me.If I learned right this moment that one of my daughters was in an ambulance headed to the hospital, I would not be staying with you for the rest of this worship service.And if I found out she was going to be okay, I would be calling everyone to tell them the good news, to share my joy.
And Jesus says God feels that way about all those who are lost, about the tax collectors and sinners of that day, about the drug dealers and gang members of our day.Jesus hangs out with such folks and God is ready to rejoice and throw a party when they repent.
So where do we fit into all this?How do we become a part of this thing that God is so passionate about?How do we become a part of something that God wants to celebrate?I think that we often have difficulties with this because we misunderstand what Jesus is talking about in today’s parables.We misunderstand what it means to be lost, to be found, to repent.
You can see this when people talk about evangelism.Anytime I’ve been part of such a discussion, invariably someone says, “I don’t know enough to share my faith with someone.”In this view of things, evangelism is about transmitting enough convincing information that someone decides to believe in Jesus.Lost equals not believing in Jesus, found is what happens when that changes, and repenting is the move from lost to found.Trouble is, the Jesus we meet in Luke’s gospel doesn’t talk this way.
Jesus spends most of his time teaching about God’s kingdom, God’s new community, something Jesus insists has come near.It is a new day that will lift up the poor and oppressed, that will bring justice to those who have been mistreated.When Jesus sends out his followers he tells them to proclaim this kingdom and to cure the sick.In the beginning, being a part of the Jesus movement was less about believing the right things and more about living in ways that conformed to the kingdom, that cared for neighbor even when it was costly, that reached out to those others found unclean and undesirable.And I suspect that those tax collectors and sinners came to listen to Jesus because it sounded like they were welcome there, that God wanted them to be part of that new day every bit as much as the go-to-church-every-Sunday folks.
And that means that getting involved in what God is passionate about, getting involved in what makes God want to celebrate, doesn’t require an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible or a seminary understanding of Christian doctrine.It merely requires a willingness to welcome and love people wherever you find them, just like God does.It merely requires sharing the amazing love Jesus give us with others.
On most days, every single one of us encounters someone who is hurting, who is suffering, who has been made to feel inferior, who has been told she isn’t wanted or needed, who is lonely, who is frightened, who feels there is something wrong with him that makes him unacceptable, who has been shunned by others.Almost every single day, we meet people who need us to drop what we’re doing and move toward them, to reach out to them, to help them, to let them know that they are not alone and not outside God’s embrace.
And so, almost every single day, in ways large and small, each one of us has an opportunity to become a part of what God is passionate about, to become a part of what God is excited about and wants to celebrate.Every day, we all have the chance to be the living body of Christ to others.We don’t need to know more.We just need to do it.
Very often when I lead a funeral service, I begin with these words. "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die." These words are from the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and a portion of that story is today's gospel reading. They are a staple at funerals, but I wonder if they should be.
Jesus says these words in response to Martha, Lazarus' sister, who has just said that she knows Lazarus will be raised "in the resurrection on the last day." Martha already believes in the resurrection. And is doesn't seem to be some sort of faulty view of resurrection. It is pretty much the same thing the Apostle Paul says many times. On the last day, when the trumpet sounds, the dead will be raised.
So Jesus is apparently not correcting her view of resurrection. Rather he seems to be correcting her view of the time. If Jesus is the resurrection, then the last days have broken into the present.
But we Christians have had 2000 years to lose the urgency Jesus' words require. We've lost a sense of the new age dawning, and have perverted resurrection to mean "going to heaven when we die." For that matter, I'm not so sure I want this age to end and the new age to arrive. I've got this age pretty well figured out, and I happen to be reasonably secure and comfortable. Let's leave resurrection and the age to come to some future date. That way I don't have to change the ways I live. I just have to believe the right stuff.
I once had a Jewish friend ask me an old question. "If Jesus is the Messiah, where is the Messianic age?" Too bad we Christians have gotten so disconnected from our Jewish roots that we've forgotten the two go together.
I'm not sure there is much need for me to jump into the fray over a the planned Qur'an burning by a few lunatics who call themselves Christians. They have been repudiated by religious leaders of every stripe, and even by General Petraeus. And while they have their supporters, the vast majority of Americans find these folks foolish, if not offensive.
However, I wonder if such folks are not engaged in a lunatic fringe version of behavior we all practice. We all seem to need enemies, and the more frightened we are the greater this need. Having an enemy is a great builder of unity and common purpose. Many remember the unity America briefly experienced following the 9-11 attacks. We were all one because we all had a common enemy.
But that common enemy has proved illusive and hard to define. So we find substitutes and stand-ins. Saddam Hussein worked nicely for a while. "Islamic Fascism" has a nice ring to it, even if no one knows exactly what that means. If we can't agree on an external enemy, internal ones will do. The bitterness of current partisan politics is a prime example of this.
Because enemies are so helpful in building unity, people who are seen as "different" make great enemies. If they don't fit into a particular vision of unity and oneness, then perhaps they are in league with the enemy. Many Americans, who wouldn't think of burning a Qur'an, are nonetheless deeply suspicious of Muslims. Their otherness makes them, if not an actual enemy, a group that bears watching. But this is only a slightly subtler version of Terry Jones and his Burn a Qur'an day.
The need for enemies seems to be a part of our human nature, and so labeling Muslims the enemy is hardly surprising. But, as many have pointed out, it is behavior that seems terribly at odds with the teachings of Jesus. He says we are to love our enemies and pray for them. Paul writes that if our enemy is hungry, we are to feed them. In other words, even if someone really is an enemy, the Christian response is to love them, to treat them as one of us and not as enemies. And if this is how we are to treat genuine enemies, such as Osama bin Laden, how can declaring any group our enemy justify anything other than our love?
The Apostle Paul writes, "Do not be conformed to the world..." But the fact is we want to believe in Jesus while still living by the ways of the world. We want to call him Lord, Lord, without actually doing as he says. We want to react to our fears even though "perfect love casts out fear."
And so Terry Jones, the Florida pastor so much in the news of late, is a window into a darkness that lives in all of us. And as such, he is a reminder of what a radically different way of living Jesus modeled and calls us to follow.
To my mind, one of the real problems of Christianity is the tendency of its adherents to see the world in terms of us and them. There are those who believe in Jesus, who have affirmed him with the correct formula, and then there is everyone else. This strikes me as not so very different from some Pharisees and other Jewish leaders who insisted on people vigorously keeping the Law. This included the purity codes that made it impossible for Jews to share a meal with non-Jews, and it also included concerns about not using God's name in incorrect ways or ways that dishonored it. This concern gets Jesus in trouble in today's reading from the Gospel of John.
When Jesus answers the charges of blasphemy leveled against him, his primary defense is rooted in the works that he does. Even if you don't believe in me, Jesus asks, can't you see the works of God being done by me?
Over the centuries, it seems to me that the Church has gotten less concerned with the works of God, and more focused on believing the right things about Jesus. Evangelism is generally considered convincing people to believe those right things about Jesus. And not believing the right things about Jesus puts you in the "them" camp, period. It matters not one whit whether such folks are doing the works of the Father.
I wonder what would happen if we understood Christianity to be primarily about helping people to live in ways that revealed God's hopes and dreams for humanity and creation. What if we worried less about whether or not people espoused the right creeds, and worried more about loving God and neighbor. After all, Jesus, in Matthew 25:31-46, speaks of Gentiles, of others, of them being welcomed into the Kingdom because the lived Kingdom shaped lives, even though they didn't realize they were serving Jesus in the process.
Is your faith mostly about what you believe, or how you live?
Not being from Ohio, I sometimes find the obsession with all things Buckeye a bit much. And so I don’t usually mention OSU in sermons. But I think that the experience of having a favorite sports team may be of some help in understanding what Jesus says to us today.
When we have a favorite team, say the Buckeyes, we feel affection and loyalty for that team. Perhaps it’s because we grew up in a family that always supported that team. Maybe we went to school there. Maybe we just liked the colors of their uniforms. But whatever lies behind our affection and loyalty, we support and pull for our team. We cheer when they are winning and we suffer when they lose, which accounts for why winning teams tend to have more fans that losing ones. Who wants to suffer all the time?
But there is a counterpart to the affection, love, and zeal we feel for our team. There is a corresponding lack of affection and love for their opponents. A few Buckeye fans take this to ridiculous and sometimes unhealthy levels, but even the most modest, polite fan knows that pulling for your own team means pulling against the other. You don’t actually have to hate the other team, but you certainly have to like them less than you do your own.
Jesus says something similar when he talks about what it takes to follow him. When we decide that we want to be his disciples, that we will give our loyalty to him, Jesus insists that it has an impact on all our other loyalties.
Now admittedly Jesus’ words about hating father and mother come across a little like the most rabid sort of Buckeye speaking about Michigan. But that is mostly because something gets lost in rendering those words in English. The word in Luke’s gospel can mean “hate,” but in the hyperbole filled style of Middle Eastern speech, this is actually an emphatic way of saying to love the other less. Jesus does not say that we need to feel genuine hate for our families or our own lives. Rather he says that following him requires all those other things to take a back seat to loving Jesus. If there is any sort of conflict, any need to choose between the two, we have to pull for Jesus ahead of all others.
There may be a way to speak of this that doesn’t sound quite so negative. When a person grows up, falls in love, and gets married, that demands some adjustments in relationships that may have previously been the center of someone’s life. This usually happens so naturally that we scarcely take notice of it. But leaving home and marrying means a certain severing of ties and loyalties to one’s parents. For many of us this didn’t involve any conflict or anything resembling hate, but nonetheless, our primary loyalty shifted to our spouse.
And if you never thought about how absolutely necessary this shift is for a marriage to work, simply recall that marriage most all of us have seen where this shift didn’t happen. Such marriages sometimes produce letters to Dear Abby complaining about how his or her relationship with Momma is still number one. When a person can never say “No” to a parent for the sake of a spouse, that marriage is destined for serious trouble.
As I said, most of us know this almost instinctively. Only the most callous, maladjusted sort would get married and insist on still dating old girlfriends. When you get married, when you fall in love, they are new ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends. The new relationship demands the giving up of some things if it is to work.
And speaking of giving up some things, there’s no avoiding the topic of money. Money is often cited as the number one factor in failed marriages. Sometimes this is simply a matter of money trouble causing so much stress that the strain damaged the marriage. But more often the issue is how money is spent. Sometimes a spouse is unwilling to give up, or at least cut back on, an expensive hobby or expensive tastes for the sake of the marriage. When spouses are unable to put the needs of the relationship or partner ahead of their own, that makes a long marriage very unlikely.
Jesus speaks in much the same way. Money and things are a huge barrier to walking with him. No doubt many of you have heard that Jesus speaks more on the problem of money and possessions than he does any other topic. But we Christians have had a very long time to massage Jesus’ words, to domesticate them and cage them in a religion that often seems to be more about morality and right beliefs than it is about what Jesus actually said.
But the Bible tells us that before Jesus’ followers were ever called Christians, they were known as people of The Way. In other words, their identity was shaped more by the manner in which they lived than by the set of beliefs they proclaimed.
Many of us in the Church desperately need to rediscover this. We need to return to the roots of the faith, to reengage in The Way Jesus shows us, a life shaped and ordered by loving God and loving neighbor, a life than is drawn deeper and deeper into the life of God, a life that transforms all our other relationships and loyalties.
I was in my mid-thirties when I had the first stirrings of what might be termed a mature faith. And only in the last few years have I begun to discover a deepening relationship with God that can, for brief moments, dwell in the embrace of divine love. And all along the way, the need for my love of Jesus, my love of God to supersede other loves has been a challenge. When I went to seminary at age 35, I had a career. Shawn and I had a house payment and two little girls. Questions about ultimate loyalties, about loving Jesus more and loving others less were not abstract theological questions.
As with all relationships, I still have to work at this. Sometimes when I am wrestling with what God is calling me to do, I realize that my pleas to God for guidance, for direction, contain an unspoken “as long as it doesn’t cost me anything, as it includes a good salary and a nice location.” Sometimes my own comfortable, familiar life and routines make it difficult to risk falling too in love with Jesus.
What about your walk with Jesus, your life in God? Where does it fit in the various loves and loyalties of your life? Does it look anything like what Jesus asks? The love and loyalty Jesus demands is no petty jealousy. It is nothing less than the desire that each of us discover the joy of the deepest, most wonderful love we have ever known. Jesus is speaking the language of a lover, and so our own experiences of love may help us here.
When you give of your time doing what you think Jesus wants you to do, when you put your money in the offering plate, what lies behind that? Are these obligations like community service hours now required by most high schools? Are they your share of making sure we keep the lights turned on and salaries paid here at the church? Or are they the joyful experience of one lover giving something precious to the other?
If you’ve ever fallen deeply and passionately in love, you already have a pretty good sense of what Jesus is talking about when he speaks of loving everything else less. But if you’ve never experienced falling in love with Jesus, I don’t know that someone can preach you into that, anymore than they could preach you into falling in love with anyone. It will help if you spend time each day reading and reflecting on Scripture. It will help if you spend time in places where Jesus can be found, among the needy, the sick, those needing comfort, acceptance, hope, or a kind word. It will help if you begin to shape your life to be more like his. But in the end, it will only happen when you open yourself, risk yourself, to the passionate love Jesus already has for you.
When you look at all the problems in the world, war, hunger, poverty, and more; when you observe the bigotry, partisanship, and hatred that seems so pervasive, a natural question to ask is, "How did things ever get this way?" I suppose that's the sort of question asked by Jesus' disciples when they met a blind man. "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
Knowing how things got the way they are can sometimes be very helpful in figuring out solutions. But often questions about cause are mostly about laying blame. Knowing whose sin resulted in someone's blindness does nothing to help the situation. Sometimes it may even have the opposite effect. If it is someone else's fault, it isn't my problem.
Why things are the way they are is an intriguing question that may be worth our time, but Jesus doesn't waste his time on it in our gospel reading. He dismisses his disciples' question by saying that the blind man is an opportunity for God's work to be revealed. I have my doubts that Jesus meant God caused this man's blindness just so Jesus could heal him. Rather I think that Jesus is so focused on the caring, loving, healing, transforming work of God that every such encounter is a moment of revelation, a moment when God's hopes and dreams for humanity can be demonstrated.
In the Western world, with our deep roots reaching back into Greek philosophy, we can sometimes become paralyzed by questions of why. We become so engaged in seeking to understand that we forget to act. I'm not trying to sound or be anti-intellectual. Faith seeks understanding, after all. But faith begins with a step, a movement along the path Jesus blazed.
Most of us aren't able to restore a blind person's sight, but most of us encounter situations every day that are at odds with God's hopes. We see people in need. We see people who are ostracized. We see people who are lonely. We see people who are hurting. The list goes on and on. And every one of those encounters is an opportunity for us to be agents of revelation, for us to demonstrate God's dreams for the world.
I've mentioned before that that those who use the phrase "the patience of Job" must never have read very far into the biblical book of Job. Job's patience quickly wears thin as he struggles to understand his suffering. His "friends" insist he must have done something to deserve his fate, but Job knows this is not true. And so in today's verses, he laments the fact that God pays attention to humans. He says life would be better if God would "look away from them, and desist, that they may enjoy, like laborers, their days."
What an interesting notion. Religious people are often trying to figure out how to get closer to God, how to improve the lines of communication, but Job wishes God would just go away and leave us alone. It seems to me that this is a popular option for many today. At least a lot of people seem content to live as though God had nothing to do with their lives. Not that many folks opt for outright atheism, but a lot are happy to assume that what Job wishes for is actually the case.
I won't claim to know why this is so. I don't think it's because the hand of God has weighed so heavily on them that, like Job, that wish it would go away. But I do wonder if the God they have met via some Christians and some congregations doesn't make a distant God seem preferable.
We church folks often look at our more secular neighbors and wonder, "What's wrong with them?" Sometimes I think we'd do better to ask, "What picture of God have we presented that makes them so determined to stay away?"
Why is it that so many "good, religious folks" who encountered Jesus dismissed him? How is it that people who were trying to be faithful to God, saw Jesus as a threat to that faith? These are hardly academic questions, and their answers say something about what might cause us to miss God at work in our midst.
How do we know when our religiosity (my spell check says that's a real word) draws us closer to God and when it actually pushes God away. If we assume that this simply can't happen, then I suspect we find ourselves in precisely the same place as those Pharisees, priests, and other religious leaders who found Jesus so problematic. Often we tend to minimize this problem by turning the Pharisees and priests into dastardly villains, people of such wickedness that they are nothing like us. But there is really nothing to support such a view beyond our desire for them to be nothing like us.
The fact is that many of Jesus' opponents objected to him not because they were terrible people, not because they set out to be enemies of God, but because Jesus acted so counter to their assumptions of what it meant to be good, religious folks. If we try to view Pharisees as the good, church-going, upstanding citizens of their day, who winced at the immoral behavior of those who never darkened the door of a synagogue, who thought their society would be a lot better off if people were more serious about keeping the commandments, who worried about a culture that was becoming less attuned to the faith because of the enticements of Greco-Roman hedonism, we may see that they are not so different from some of us. Which brings me back to the question of how such folks missed God at work in Jesus.
What are your religious assumptions about what it means to be Christian, about how we encounter God, about what God is up to in the world and how we connect to that? And if Jesus showed up, would he fit those assumptions? Would the Jesus who hung out with outcasts and riff-raff, who saved his harshest words for good religious folks, who never let a religious rule get in the way of helping someone, would he not offend good church folks like us?
