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.
Most Christians are likely familiar with Jesus saying, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you." Most of us are also familiar with how difficult this can be (along with how easy it is to chastise others for their failure to do so). But for some reason, a different part of today's gospel reading caught my attention. "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them."
Why is it that we love others? Why is it that we love anything? It certainly makes sense that we would love those who love us. In fact, this is probably how we learn to love. Children learn to love because they are loved by parents and family. And we learn to love in the way Jesus speaks because we are loved this way. As it says in 1 John 4:19, "We love because he first loved us."
Very often, loving our enemies is seen as one of those idealistic, impractical, even impossible demands of faith. But what if we viewed it more like the process of a child learning to love? A child who never learns to love is maladjusted and faces real difficulties in developing adult relationships. Might the inability to love those who do not love us work in similar fashion? Might it be a kind of maladjustment that severely hampers us in being the fully human creatures God desires us to be?
One popular understanding of Christianity says that believing in Jesus is the critical thing. Other stuff, such as loving you enemy, is in the extra credit category, a good thing, but not essential. Yet Jesus certainly doesn't talk this way. He commissions his followers to make disciples of all nations by "teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you." And if Jesus is what it means to be fully human, then perhaps his telling us to love our enemies is like a parent telling a two year old to share a toy with a sibling. He is trying to teach us what is absolutely necessary if we are to live with others as we are meant to live.
Most of us are probably more familiar with the Beatitudes from Matthew's Sermon on the Mount than we are with the Sermon on the Plain in Luke. The blessings are so similar that both seem to be rooted in the same teaching of Jesus. But Luke's account contains something not found in Matthew, a corresponding list of woes, and so we see both sides, the blessed and the cursed.
The final woe or curse hits me a little hard. "Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets." Different things motivate different people, but one of the things I crave is the approval of others. Nothing strokes my ego like a "Good sermon," or receiving a number of positive comments on a blog post. So should I be glad when no one says anything, and should I worry when I receive a few extra pats on the back?
If you read through the list of woes, you'll probably find one or two that gore your favorites, but what does this mean? If would be fairly simple to get people to speak badly of me. I could preach sermons that condemned my congregation for its failures. But would that mean God was happy with me, that I was blessed.
At the risk of spiritualizing Jesus' words, I wonder if both the Sermon on the Plain and the Sermon on the Mount aren't about aligning ourselves with the Kingdom, with the new order of things that will exist when God's will is done on earth as well as in heaven. In our world, being rich generally requires others to be poor. And having people speak well of me often requires me to assure people that the way we live and the things we chase after are perfectly compatible with God's coming reign.
It seems to me that one of the most difficult things about following Jesus is genuinely receiving God's love while at the same time hearing God's call to become something we are not. How do we live in ways that reflect God's Beloved Community while being honest about the ways in which we fall horribly short? It is easy to live at either pole. It is easy to be a community of affirmation where God blesses every conventional aspect of every member's life. And it is easy (if less popular) to be a "prophetic" community that calls down God's wrath on every conventional aspect of society. More difficult, it seems to me, is genuinely to embody God's love while also embodying a call to repent, to turn and become more and more like Christ, agents of God's dream for Creation.
Today's gospel reading is an easy text with which to attack biblical literalism. Jesus' disciples harvest grain (albeit a tiny amount), and then they do a quick threshing operation to separate wheat from chaff. Both actions appear to be violations of working on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees call them on it. Jesus' primary defense is not all that compelling. "Don't you remember that David broke the rules, too?" Clearly this business of following biblical rules is complicated, and requires interpretation.
But as easy as it is to dismiss biblical literalism, we mainline Christians often fall into a kind of relativism that reduces the faith to something along the lines of "Believe in God and be nice." Nothing terribly wrong with either of these, but neither is there anything terribly significant. It's a little hard to imagine the risen Jesus commissioning his followers, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations by teaching them to be nice."
The problem with biblical literalism is that it tends to substitute a text, or some portion of a text ,for the living, dynamic God. And it presumes that a relationship with this God can somehow be reduced to a one-size-fits-all set of instructions.
But if relationship with God is too complicated for an easy, neat, fit-every-situation set of instructions, that does not reduce the remaining choices to "Be nice." Consider the task of living in relationship with a spouse. There might not be an absolute set of rules that fit every situation, but long term, committed relationships require agreed upon standards of behavior if the relationship is to survive.
I come out of a stream of the Christian faith that has not tended toward literalism, and I personally find it overly simplistic, intellectually dishonest, and ultimately deadening to mature faith. But literalism is not the threat to my stream of Christianity. Thinking that following Jesus involves little more than believing a few things and "being nice" is.
Over the years I had a few encounters with parents who cared for a special needs child. In a couple of instances the disabilities of the child were profound, and it required tremendous amounts of time and energy from the parents. Sometimes the sibling of this special needs child felt a bit left out. I can only imagine what this must be like, with so much of their parents' attention focused on a brother or sister. It would be easy to be resentful, but those I've met have generally not seemed so. The sometimes lament their situation and are frustrated by it, but they recognize their parents are doing what they must do, what love requires.
I thought about this when I read Jesus' words in today's gospel. The religious folks are offended - as religious folks tend to be - that Jesus is hanging out with sinners. But Jesus insists that they need him more, saying, "I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance."
Many Christians like to think of God in parental terms, and some are insistent about referring to God exclusively as Father. (That this is a problem for a Trinitarian view of God is a topic for another day.) And yet some of these same Christians seem to conceive of God in the most un-parent like way, lavishing love and blessings on those who are "right" while preparing the most dastardly punishments for those who are not.
If God is in some way a loving Father, then is stands to reason that God might be a bit like the parent of a special needs child, lavishing special love and care on those who need it more. It isn't a matter of God loving the "good children" any less. It's a matter of some children needing more from God if they are to live full lives.
We Presbyterians don't have confessionals, and it is rare that someone comes to me to confess anything. But we do have confession as an integral part of our worship services. Each week, in some form or fashion, thousands of Presbyterian congregations (and other denominations) pray a prayer of confession together, have a time for silent personal confession, hear a prayer of confession offered on their behalf, or some combination thereof. And then, we're forgiven. "Believe the good news! In Jesus Christ you are forgiven," or something similar is said, and then we move on in the service.
I occurs to me that I've never discussed with very many people how they experience that moment. I have heard complaints over the years that prayers of confession are "downers" accompanied by a request to drop them. I've had people tell me they didn't think the prayer in the bulletin applied to them. But I've never heard much about what it means or how it feels to be forgiven.
Jesus finds himself in hot water over his "Your sins are forgiven you," in our gospel reading today. We toss around forgiveness as freely and easily as a "Hi, how are you," on Sunday morning. But to some of the religious folks in the synagogue with Jesus, his offer of forgiveness was a huge deal, something they couldn't believe he had the authority to do.
And so Jesus heals a paralyzed man as proof of his authority. Makes me glad no one ever challenges my authority to forgive. Faith healings have never been my forte. Not much likelihood of me causing a stir in the sanctuary one Sunday morning with people in awe, glorifying God, and saying, "We have seen strange things today."
I wonder what things they thought were the strangest. Healing a paralyzed man is no small feat, but the original issue is the authority to forgive. And for that matter, did Jesus think this paralyzed man needed forgiveness more than he needed healing? Strange things indeed.
I think one of my own troubles with this passage is a tendency to think of God's forgiveness in terms of a category, something I have or don't. This is often linked to notions of salvation, and so forgiveness becomes about categories of in and out. But I'm gradually coming to see forgiveness as a wellness issue, as something that addresses addresses what ails us both individually and corporately.
When I look at my own life and the relationships I have; when I look at our society and the current state of partisan rancor, it seems that I and many others carry around with us lots of hurts and wounds, lots of grudges and enmity, and significant difficulty trusting others. We need to protect ourselves against the other. Sometimes this other is our enemy or opponent, and sometimes this other is someone we love. And all these relationship problems get carried over into our relationship with God. When we are angry at God, we often won't admit it. We feel the need to hide parts of ourselves from God for self protection.
And so all of us desperately need forgiveness. Not the "You're forgiven and now on God's good side" sort of forgiveness, but the restored relationship with God and others sort of forgiveness. We all desperately need this sort of healing forgiveness that frees us to be more fully alive, that frees us to discover deep joy in loving God, self, and others.
Jesus said to those questioning his authority to forgive, "Which is easier, to say, 'Your sins are forgiven you,' or to say, 'Stand up and walk'?" Strange things indeed.
How does God feel about the state of human affairs? What does God think about a world that is filled with war, where some are fabulously wealthy while others starve, where even in a rich country such as America, thousands of children live in poverty and receive a substandard education that will leave them trapped in poverty? How does God feel about a world that sees less and less need for God, that "believes" in God without that impacting people's behavior one whit?
One might expect God to be angry. Indeed many religious traditions speak of an angry God who stands ready to punish, who doesn't blink an eye over sending people into eternal torment.
Certainly God is angry in today's Old Testament reading from Hosea. It is the anger of a lover who has been betrayed. God is the faithful husband who has lavished gifts on a beloved, yet that beloved has sought other lovers. In pain and anguish, God threatens to lash out at this unfaithful spouse.
But then comes a most surprising turn. Out of God's woundedness comes an improbable therefore. "Therefore, I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. From there I will give her her vineyards, and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she shall respond as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt." Though God is the injured party, though God is the one who has been wronged, God woos Israel. God seeks to fan the flames of love and restore the passion that has been lost.
This is what God does in Jesus. God's anger, God's upset at human folly and waywardness, at our continual chasing after things more alluring than God, issues forth in the surprising "therefore" of the cross. It is heard in Jesus' longing as he weeps over Jerusalem.
God as wounded lover is an image that needs to be claimed especially by the Church. For it is in the Church that God is most especially wounded. Those who have never known any sort of relationship with God cannot wound God in quite the same manner we can. For we are those who profess our love, but then sneak off to cavort with other lovers. Yet even for us, God says, "I will allure you. I will speak tenderly to you, so that we may once again know that love where each of us had eyes only for the other."
On those Sundays when I am not preaching and hear rather than speak a sermon, I often find myself wondering what I would have done with the same scripture verses. One hazard of being a pastor is the difficulty of listening to another's sermon without critiquing. But besides that, I often make judgments about the scripture itself. Sometimes it is, "Boy, I wish those verses had showed up when I was preaching." Other times it is, "I'm glad someone else had to wrestle with that."
Today is somewhere in between. On the one had, Luke 16's parable of the rich man and Lazarus 16 is rich with sermon possibilities. But on the other hand, the text speaks a message that may not be all that palatable. And so this is also a text that often gets domesticated.
Like Mary's Magnificat earlier in Luke's gospel, this parable speaks of a radical reversal, of the poor lifted up and the rich pulled down. Such language is unpopular. We prefer that all be lifted up, but Luke says in several places that good news for the poor is coupled with bad news for the rich. Because of our discomfort, sermons on this text often turn the parable into a lesson on helping the poor. We take a little food to homeless shelter and feel good about ourselves even though we remain heavily invested in a world where our suburban lives are sustained by migrant workers, children in third world factories, and our nation consuming unfathomable and unsustainable quantities of the world's resources.
How do you preach from a text where good news for some means bad news for others, and you're among the others? How are the rich and comfortable to find some good word in Jesus' Kingdom parable of reversal? To be honest, I am not entirely sure. But I suspect that good news for us starts when, like members of AA, we admit who we are, when we admit that our things and our personal comforts often blind us to those who are first in the Kingdom of God. I'm not sure we can hear much good news in these verses until we take that step.
What must it have been like to encounter the earthly Jesus, to meet him as he went about his ministry? When the gospels attempt to share something of this with us, they are no doubt hindered by the impossibility of rendering such an experience in words. But a common refrain in the gospels describes Jesus as "speaking with authority." This is in our gospel for today along with another common refrain, demons recognizing Jesus.
I think that both of these refrains are attempts to describe Jesus' spiritual presence. Jesus taught just as many other rabbis did. He read from the same scriptures and his teachings sometimes had much in common with others. But even when he said the very same thing as others it sounded different, and people could sense it. "They were astounded at his teaching, because he spoke with authority."
In the same way, demons recognizing Jesus speaks of this same spiritual presence. We don't live in the world of the gospel writers, a world that was filled with demons that caused all sorts of things we would attribute to other causes. But the fear expressed by these semi-divine agents of the First Century speaks to an incredible spiritual presence in Jesus, a vivid sense of God at work that could bend events toward God's will.
I think the Church would do well to focus more on this issue of presence. We need to realize that authority is less about facts and ideas well marshaled, presented, and argued, and more about God's presence. The hunger for spirituality in our day is in many ways a hunger for just such an authority.
The presence and authority that Jesus manifested was all out of proportion to the number of followers he had, the financial resources at his disposal, or his connections to people in power. It was the power of spiritual presence, of God actively at work in him. And as the body of Christ, the Church also must seek this sort of power and authority, one derived from God's presence palpably moving in our midst. Even in a day when congregations face shrinking numbers and financial resources, when we draw nearer to God, when we become more open to the Spirit, our authority grows, and we become truer to our call of being Christ to the world.
Jesus' visit to his hometown of Nazareth is narrated somewhat differently in the different gospels. And for my money, Luke's account is the most striking. Not only does Jesus explicitly identify himself with prophecies of a new age, of good news for the poor, captive, oppressed, and the coming of God's Jubilee, but he seems to go out of his way to upset and alienate the hometown folks.
In other gospel accounts, the good people of Nazareth are at first impressed but then remember that Jesus comes from no special background and has exhibited no remarkable qualities to date, and so they "took offense." But in Luke, while everyone is speaking well of him, Jesus gives offense. He starts talking about prophets not being accepted in their hometowns and then reminds everyone of times when God's saving power was offered to Gentiles and not to those in Israel. If Jesus wanted to be run out of town, he could not have done any better.
I don't know for certain why Luke chooses to tell this story so differently, but I suspect that his understanding of Jesus fulfilling Isaiah's prophecy, bringing good news to the poor and release to the captives, carries with it an inherently offensive message for many. This is perhaps even more so for "religious folks."
Religious people often anticipate and expect some sort of blessing from God for their religiousness. But the Kingdom that Jesus proclaims often seems to offer blessings to those outside the mainstream. Isaiah's prophecy speaks of the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed, and (in the Jubilee year) all those in debt and who have lost the family land over the years. According to Luke and Jesus, God's new day is about blessings showered on those in need, whom the world has not blessed, and this carries with it an inevitable offense to those who assumed they'd figured out the formula for God's blessing. And Jesus doesn't wait for the Jerusalem congregation to figure this out on their own. He goes ahead and smacks them over the head with it. (Jesus would have made a terrible pastor.)
Years ago, my wife wrote something she heard Bono (of U2 fame) say at a Washington, DC prayer breakfast. Bono quoted someone, but I don't know who. All it says on my refrigerator is, "Don't ask God to bless what you are doing. Get involved in what God is doing. It is already blessed."
Sometimes I think that many church folks, much like the good people of Nazareth, presume that we, as well as what we are doing, are somehow already blessed by God. Maybe that's why Jesus launches a preemptive strike that day in Nazareth. And I wonder what he would say if he stopped by one of our congregations and read a little Isaiah to us one Sunday.
I've always found today's reading in Acts somewhat curious. Paul comes across some fellows who are called simply "disciples" and "believers." There is no disciples of whom or believers in what, just disciples and believers. So these fellows must in some way be attempting to follow Jesus. But then we discover that these fellows didn't receive the Holy Spirit at their baptisms. In fact, their baptism apparently wasn't Christian but one connected with John the Baptist. (This doesn't necessarily mean that they had gone to be baptized by John in the wilderness. John's disciples were still active long after his death.)
So it would seem that these folks received a baptism of repentance from a disciple of John, and they also had heard and embraced the gospel of Jesus. But because they have not received the Holy Spirit, the story in Acts views them as not yet full Christians. They are almost Christian, but without the Holy Spirit, without being gifted by the Spirit in ways that would help build up the Church, they don't quite meet the minimum standards.
I once preached a sermon from this story that got one member terribly upset. She insisted that as long as she had faith she was "saved" (her word), and that was that. Everything else was icing on the cake. But these verses in Acts seem to disagree. They insist that if the Spirit is not present and at work in someone's life, they are not quite Christians, almost Christians. (I'm not talking here about the status of such folks when they die. I'm talking about whether or not they are part of the Jesus movement the Acts story calls "the Way.")
We Presbyterians have tended to be suspicious of things too associated with the Holy Spirit. We like things "decently and in order," and the Spirit is too unpredictable, too messy. Does that mean that we are almost Christians?
Today's reading from Luke continues the story of John the Baptist's ministry. Yesterday we heard John call those who came to be baptized "a brood of vipers." He warned them that the ax was poised to chop down trees that don't bear good fruit, and he said that whoever had two coats must share with anyone who has none; the same with food.
Today John says he is not the Messiah, but the Messiah is coming who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. Also, "His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." And after all these uplifting words about vipers, axes, winnowing forks, and unquenchable fire comes this, "So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people."
This is good news? The Messiah is coming, and he's ready to separate wheat from chaff, to chop down every tree that doesn't bear good fruit. This is something to get excited about?
Now one possibility is that Jesus is not exactly who John expected. He was hoping Jesus would give everyone their due but Jesus did a lot more forgiving than John foresaw. That's possible. But I think the reason Luke calls John's message good news is because it is the language of the coming day of the Lord, of God's Kingdom arriving.
The good news here is that God is about to inaugurate the new age. God is beginning the process of setting creation right, of lifting up the poor and freeing the oppressed. God has begun the work of transforming creation into what it was meant to be. Mary has already told us in her Magnificat that this will involve a leveling, a lifting up of some and pulling down of others. And John now uses traditional prophetic language to say this moment has arrived.
But still, I wonder how many of us with a lot more than two coats find this good news. When the inequalities of this world are in our favor, does a leveling sound like good news? I don't know about you, but I would prefer that people get lifted up to where I am rather than my being pulled down.
I wonder if welcoming the Kingdom doesn't require a radical sort of trust, trust that the things we count on for security are illusions, trust that letting go of what we have opens us to life that cannot be found in clinging to it, trust that I do not need to rise above others but need to move toward them. None of this is prosperity gospel type good news. But it seems to be good news in the eyes of God.
