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.
I know that some people detest sports metaphors, but I grew up playing sports and am a big sports fan, so I can't help myself. One pattern I've noticed over the years is football teams that have struggled on offense promising to "open things up," to bring in a passing attack that will rack up the points, only to see things remain the same. Coaches who've promised to throw lots of passes revert to old habits of running the ball up the middle. On occasions I've even seen a new coach brought in to jazz up the offense only to end up looking much like his predecessor.
I don't know if coaches who say they're going to run a more wide open offense are just saying what they think fans want to hear, or if they seriously intend to throw the ball more but simply slip back into comfortable patterns. However, I do know how easy it is to be attracted to a new way of doing things but then fall back into old habits. And Christians sometimes look like football coaches who have seen a new and better way, but then act as they always have.
Jesus encounters such in our gospel reading. He is addressing people who are drawn to him, who I suppose could be said to "believe in him" when he says, "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I tell you?" To apply sports metaphors ad nauseum, "Why do you call me a coaching genius, and not do what I say?"
Human beings are creatures of habit. As a pastor I see this every Sunday when people come in and sit in exactly the same place they sat the week before, and the week before that. This is not all bad. It's nice not needing to decide where to sit every week. But we will persist in habits that are not helpful, even persist in habits that we say we want to break. We're also pretty good at insisting our existing habits are just fine, even that they are sanctioned by God. It wasn't so long ago that mainstream American Christianity proclaimed segregation God's will.
Old habits die hard, but the first step in killing off bad ones is to recognize them. Do our habits align with what Jesus told us? Do our habits fit with being a disciple of Jesus, or have we simply gotten so used to the way we live that we presume it must be fine with Jesus?
Love your neighbor, including the enemy. Help the poor. Offer kindness to the stranger and the alien. Care for the hungry. Those who try to save their lives will lose them while those who lose their lives find them. Do not return evil for evil. All these things and more are at the heart of Jesus' message, and yet many of us follow habits that don't always align very well with what Jesus says.
"Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I tell you? Do our habits help us do what Jesus tells us? Jesus says that developing habits that do builds our lives on a solid foundation that will stand the test of time.
How many of you believe in Jesus? I know that seems a rather odd thing to ask at Sunday worship, but play along with me. How many of you believe in Jesus? Raise your hands. Okay now, how many of you came to worship today because you were worried that you were about to stop believing in Jesus, that it had become so difficult that you might not be able to keep it up? Raise your hands again.
Seems that this is not a big issue for most of you. Not many are worried that your belief in Jesus is so fragile it could collapse at any moment. I realize that a show of hands might not be the best proof of this. Many might not want to admit such a thing publicly in the sanctuary. But still most of your are probably not struggling just to maintain belief in Jesus.
So let me try a different question. How many of you would say you have faith? Raise your hands. Still a lot of hands, but different looks on people’s faces. This question is a little different because people can mean a number of different things by faith. What does it mean to you? How do you define faith?
This is not the first time I’ve ever asked such questions. And in my experience some people think of faith as pretty much the same thing as belief, but others think of faith as more complicated, including belief but also things such as trust. But of course trust itself is a bit complicated. Some folks mean trusting that if you believe in Jesus you will get into heaven, and others mean trusting Jesus enough to actually do as he says.
But even though faith is complicated, I’m going to artificially simplify it for the moment. I’m going to divide faith into two camps. In Camp 1, faith is mostly about belief and things associated with belief, about believing in Jesus and any hoped for benefits from that. Its concerns tend to be about believing the right things. For those in this camp what is distinctive about their faith is the particular things that they believe.
The other camp is mostly about following Jesus and doing as he says. For this camp, faith is about trusting Jesus’ instructions enough to actually follow them. For those in this camp, what is distinctive about their faith focuses on the actions they take. Can they truly pray for and do good to their enemy? Will they let go of their own money and possessions and give to the poor? That sort of thing.
Again, this division is huge over-simplification. What one does is impacted greatly by what one believes. Still, I think there is merit to this division, and I think that many of us can identify more with one camp or the other. With that in mind, I want to look at the request the disciples make to Jesus about faith. When they cry out, “Increase our faith!” what exactly are they asking?
It’s a little hard to imagine that these disciples need help believing in Jesus. Some of the doubts that can arise with us were probably not problems for them. They had seen God’s power at work in him in the most dramatic ways imaginable. And so they probably don’t need much help believing the right things, but doing the right things is something else.
Jesus has just spoken to the disciples about their work shepherding the faithful, how they must not cause others to stumble and how they must correct sinful behavior but be ever ready to forgive. The disciples seem to be worried about their ability to do this, and they cry out to Jesus, “Increase our faith!”
Jesus’ response seems far from pastoral. “If you had even a hint of faith, you could do remarkable things. And even then, they should regard yourselves as ‘worthless slaves’.”
Some of you will remember that in my first couple of years we brought in an Alban Institute consultant named Al Bamsey to help us work through lingering problems associated with the traumatic departure of my predecessor. Al did a number of interviews with groups of members and staff and leaders. Out of this he wrote a report that included our recent history as well as some conclusions about where we were as a congregation. He also held a Saturday event to explain the report and to work on any issues that might keep us from moving forward.
Al was concerned that there might be some latent conflict that needed to be addressed. And so for a long time he queried the 75 or so of us gathered that day about those conflicts. This produced several flip-chart pages worth of comments, but Al got more and more frustrated as this went on because none of these comments described conflicts. Instead, they were programs or activities that people wanted to see. Al kept pleading, “These are wants. I’m interested in conflict.” But only more wants were forthcoming.
Finally, Al’s frustration reached the point where he lost all pastoral restraint, and he blurted out, “You bunch of babies! There are 75 of you here, and you could do every single item on this list if you just decided to do them.” Naturally, many people took offense, and he had pretty much lost control of the meeting. But that “You bunch of babies!” line was a memorable one, and I’ve heard it repeated in conversation many times over the years.
It strikes me that, from a pastoral standpoint, what Al Bamsey said had a similar feel to what Jesus said about worthless slaves. And on the surface, the content of what Al said may seem similar. The tasks before you seem daunting, but you could do them if you just try. But in actuality, what Al and Jesus say are not similar at all. Al Bamsey was talking about a long to-do list of programs and activities that people thought we should do, or ought to do, or that they wanted offered. Jesus is talking about something quite different, what he commands us to do.
Jesus employs the metaphor of a worthless slave, something that sounds terrible offensive and off-putting. But as I mulled over this metaphor, I began to see something liberating in it. A slave, especially a worthless slave, would not be asked to do too much. He would simply been given something simple to do, a task. Jesus seems to think he has done something similar with us. He has given us simple tasks. They sometimes require hard work, but we are more than capable of doing them.
However, we in the Church often make things complicated. We think we need the latest whiz-bang programs, innovative educational opportunities, and inspiring mission events. We need the latest and greatest thing that the church down the street has or that the big mega-church is doing if we are going to keep up.
But we don’t. We don’t need more and more. We simply need to listen and hear the work Jesus gives us. We need to set aside those things that come from our own egos or assumptions or expectations about what a church is supposed to be. We need to take a look at our lives, both here, at home, and at work, and ask ourselves, “How have we gotten ourselves overwhelmed and frazzled and burned out by chasing after things that do not truly matter?” We need to stop, to step back from our busyness, and listen for Jesus’ voice. Each of us needs to hear Jesus telling us what our work is, what our task is. Individually, and as a congregation, we need to separate religious busyness for the work Jesus gives us to do.
When we do that, the work may be hard, but it will not be overwhelming. It will not cause burnout, and our faith will be more than enough for the task. When we listen, Jesus speaks to us as he once did to those first disciples. “You already have faith aplenty. Just do as I have commanded you, and watch what happens.”
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.
