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.
The God I came to know growing up was constructed from two primary sources. There was Jesus, although he always seemed to me distinct from God in some way. And then there was a very Western, philosophical, conceptual notion of divinity. It was taught the Bible in church and probably knew it better than many people do today. But somehow God always seemed more idea, more concept than some One. And in my admittedly hazy recollection of worship as a child, the typical sermon was a reflection on some Pauline letter, a philosophical, theological treatise with an illustration or two.
I learned many Old Testament stories growing up, but for some reasons the God the Hebrews knew didn't impact my picture of God very much. The Hebrews had a complicated relationship with a complicated God. And I sometimes wonder if Christians' tendency to avoid the Old Testament is because we prefer to avoid these complications.
Israel understood that they had been "chosen" by God, but also that they have a covenant relationship with God that was contingent on their keeping their covenant obligations. But they also spoke of a God who commitment to Israel caused God all sorts of trouble. At times God seems to vacillate between punishing Israel for her covenant failures and continuing to be faithful to Israel despite her unfaithfulness. God can come across as a spouse in a bad marriage who can't decide whether to get a divorce or reconcile.
A small glimpse of this complicated relationship is in one of today's psalms.
You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle.
Are they not in your record?
Then my enemies will retreat in the day when I call.
This I know, that God is for me.
To say that God is moved by Israel's sufferings is remarkable when you think about it. God's emotional life is somehow invested in Israel, whose tears are collected and tossings are remembered. This is no conceptual divinity. This is a God who has for some reason chosen to have the divine life complicated by these human creatures, creatures who often turn out to make terrible covenant partners.
Some Christians consider these Hebrew images of God as primitive and not binding on them. The problem with such a view is that Jesus is the example par excellence of God's complicated life. God's commitment to Israel, and to humanity in general, draws God directly into the complexities and dysfunctions of human life. In Jesus, basic Western concepts of God-as-perfection are violated. God suffers. God dies.
When I think about it, my image of my parents as a small child had some similarities with my picture of God. It was a flat, uncomplicated picture. Parents were undisputed rulers of their small universe. There was nothing complicated about them. Of course such views gave way to more mature notions of parents as complicated individuals whose commitment to their children complicated their lives in countless ways.
Perhaps Israel's messy, complicated picture of God is not the primitive one, but the more mature view.
I've been blogging my thoughts and musings on the Daily Lectionary texts for some time now, and it has become an integral part of my day. Often it is a rewarding process for me as I struggle with the Scripture's claim on my life. But when I am looking at the various readings for a particular day, I often find myself saying "Nope, not that one." Sometimes a text is too complicated to handle in a few paragraphs, but sometimes it says something I just don't won't to address or that I simply don't like.
Today's reading from Joel speaks of God paying back Tyre and Sidon and Philistia because they have hurt Judah. Many passages in the Bible speak of God punishing, of God judging, and some of these passages present a picture of God that sounds almost petulant.
I think that most of us want a nice, clear, coherent picture of God, so most of us selectively read the Bible, finding those texts that fit the picture we have settled on. And considering the high levels of biblical illiteracy among Christians, many people's picture of God is cobbled together from a tiny number of texts and from popular notions of what God or Jesus is like.
Earlier this week I heard Walter Brueggemann speak of how rabbis treat the Hebrew Scriptures as something "thick, layered, and conflicted." Such a notion necessarily means that Scripture doesn't always have a clear, obvious meaning, that its meaning emerges as one wrestles with the layers and conflicts within it.
It strikes me that many of us try to project a picture of ourselves that is clear and coherent is the same way we do with God. We like to keep hidden certain facets of our selves. Most of us have a fair amount of messiness sloshing around inside of us. But we often admit it to no one, sometimes not even ourselves. Of course others sometimes know a person who is quite different from the image we have of ourselves.
I'm not saying that God necessarily has the same sort of internal messiness that we do, but I wonder if our aversion to such things doesn't make it difficult for us to wrestle with the messy picture of God that the Bible presents. Conversely, how much richer might our faith become if we would actually wrestle with the thick, layered, conflicted picture that the Bible gives us, and see what blessings might emerge.
I was the oldest of four children. We came in pairs. My brother and I were a year apart, and then after a several year gap, came another brother and sister, also a year apart. From my perspective as the oldest, I was absolutely convinced that those younger than me got off easy. To my mind this imbalance also grew worse as you moved down the line.
And so I can commiserate with the elder brother in Jesus' parable. He had worked hard all those years, always being "the good son." But now his spoiled, rotten, no-good brother had returned home after becoming destitute, and Dad rolled out the red carpet.
Often when people hear the "Parable of the Prodigal Son," they focus on the love of the Father who welcomes home this undeserving son who has realized the error of his ways. But I find myself drawn to the very poignant end of the parable. It concludes without resolution, the elder son standing outside the celebration as his father pleads with him. Did the elder acquiesce and go in? Did he storm off? Jesus doesn't say.
I grew up in a nice middle class home where I really never wanted for much. I may have thought I had to do more work around the house than some friends (and some younger siblings), but my life was pretty good. I played sports, had a horse, was taught to water ski by my father, fished in a local pond, took my turn hand-cranking the ice cream churn on birthdays, and so on. Still, it seemed to me that my younger siblings had it better and got off lighter. I worked harder and got less for my efforts. It wasn't fair.
"That's not fair," is a favorite lament of little children, which almost always arises from feeling they've been shortchanged in some way. We humans seem acutely sensitive to others getting more or getting the same with less effort. And I wonder if this doesn't grow out of a view of the world and life that is profoundly different from God's. We operate out of the view that there isn't enough to go around. And if that is true, then we need to be careful about getting our share.
But if that view is entirely false, if God is a God of abundance, then such worries are foolish, like toddlers squabbling over who has the bigger piece of cake when both have been told they can have seconds, and even thirds.
I grew up with a very static picture of God. By static I mean things such as unchanging, immutable, immovable, and so on. And while there is some warrant for this picture in the Bible, it comes mostly from Western, philosophical notions of God as the embodiment of perfection. And perfection, by its very nature, cannot change. To change, to become different, would be a move away from perfection.
Interestingly, the ancient Hebrews did not view God this way at all. In the Hebrew Bible, God is incredibly dynamic, even emotional. God gets angry, God is pleased, God makes plans, God changes plans, God brings punishment, and God relents from punishing. In some places God is even said to "repent" of plans to punish.
In today's reading from Joel, the prophet calls the people to change their ways, to come before God with weeping and mourning and fasting. "Who knows whether (God) will not turn and relent?"
In the gospel reading, Jesus tells his parable of the lost sheep in response to questions about his hanging out with sinners, ending with this. "Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance." Perhaps it is not obvious, but if God experiences joy, then it seems that God can become happier than God was, which presumably means God can become unhappy. And all of this describes a dynamic rather than static God, a God whose relationship with creation and humanity costs God something, cost God what scholar Walter Brueggeman calls "a disturbed interior life."
I wonder if this isn't a much more helpful way to speak of the cross. Rather than some sort of sacrifice that God had to offer in order to placate Godself (When I say it that way I like the idea even less.), the cross is the embodiment of God disturbed interior life, the tremendous cost God endures in extending grace to us.
When we think of "costly grace" rather than "cheap grace," we are usually talking about our accepting God's favor without it requiring anything of us in return, without it changing us. But it seems that grace costs God quite a bit as well.
Letting go of a static picture of God challenges my Western notions of God as the very embodiment of the concept of perfection. But not only does a dynamic God appear to be a lot more biblical, the hope of a relationship with a dynamic God seems a lot more plausible.
When we hear about Jesus calling his first disciples, we are told, "Immediately they left their nets and followed him... Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him." And in today's gospel, Jesus turns to the crowds and says, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." Then after a couple of illustrations about calculating the cost of something before undertaking it he adds, "So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."
Following Jesus means letting go of other things. It means turning loose of what had been the best hope for security, for protection, for belonging. In the hyperbolic style of Middle Eastern speech, Jesus' instruction to "hate" actually mean to "love less." Still, there is a shift of loyalty, which requires old loyalties to recede.
I was at my local presbytery's "Church Professionals' Retreat" for the last couple of days. It featured Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann talking about how renewal comes out of loss, but how it requires grieving and lamentation for God's new possibility to become visible.
I wonder if Jesus isn't speaking in a similar way here. He is not saying that families and possessions are inherently bad things. But just as a successful marriage requires "hating" (in the sense of loving less) parents and siblings and shifting one's primary love to a spouse, the new life that comes from Jesus requires a similar shift.
For some people, the leaving home that comes with marriage and adulthood provokes a profound sense of loss. But if a marriage is to thrive, somehow goodbyes must be said, old ways must be abandoned. There is loss that must be experienced in order to move to something new.
If someone "hates" (loves less) spouse rather than mother or father, the marriage is on shaky ground. So, says Jesus, trusting money or possessions to provide us security, happiness, fulfillment, or meaning makes it nearly impossible to discover our true humanity, our true selves in life as Jesus' family, as God's children.
Our culture works very hard to sell us the lie that we can have it all, and that chasing after it all is what we should do. But Jesus insists that abundant life, true humanity, salvation, is about letting go of some things so that our lives can move toward their truest destiny.
When I around 13, my brother came home with the comedy album, “George Carlin: Class Clown.” This album contained the famous routine, “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” and so we had to be a bit careful about letting our parents overhear it. But it also had a number of routines focusing on Carlin’s upbringing as an Irish Catholic.
Like many rebellious youth, Carlin had found the absurdities of religion, well, absurd, and he and his friends probably made life miserable for the nuns and priests who ran their parochial school. On the album he describes how they would try to trip up the priests by asking questions such as, “If God is all powerful can God make a rock so big God can’t pick it up?’
Or they would take a simple, straightforward rule, and then surround it with fantastic circumstances to confuse things. As an example Carlin explains that Catholics were required to receive communion at least once between Ash Wednesday and Pentecost. Not doing your “Easter duty” was a mortal sin. And so the question for the priest goes, “Father, suppose that you didn’t make your Easter duty, and it’s Pentecost Sunday, the last day. And you’re on a ship at sea, and the chaplain goes into a coma. But you wanted to receive. And then it’s Monday, too late. But then you cross the International Date Line.”
I thought of Carlin when I read the trick question that the Sadducees pose to Jesus. Just like Carlin, they take a simple, straightforward requirement of the law, and then place it into a set of bizarre circumstances. The law in question is something called levirate marriage. This law required the brother of a man who died without heirs to take his widow as a wife. The purpose of this law was primarily to give that dead brother offspring so that his line would continue on. But it also meant that these widows, who were extremely vulnerable in ancient times, would not simply be left to fend for themselves.
Now admittedly, levirate marriage is an odd concept to us, and so this whole discussion can be a bit hard for us to follow. But just as people in that day had different understandings of marriage, of men and women, they also had different understandings of resurrection.
Luke points out that the Sadducees say there is no resurrection, but neither they nor Jesus understood resurrection to be about going to heaven when you die. The Sadducees were what you might call fundamentalist traditionalists. They said that if you couldn’t find it in the Law, in the five books of Moses, it just wasn’t so. They tried to maintain beliefs that were the norm in Judaism back in King David’s time, one of those being that the only way you lived on after death was by having progeny, offspring who carried on your line.
But later Judaism drew on the prophets to envision a day when God did something wonderful and new, when a new age dawned. When this new day came, when God created a new heaven and a new earth, there would no longer be the sound of weeping or the cry of distress. And along with this hope grew a parallel hope that when God’s new day came, there would be a resurrection of the dead, and all the righteous dead would participate in the wonder of God’s new kingdom. The Sadducees rejected these later “innovations,” but the rest of Judaism had embraced this idea of resurrection, this idea of resurrection as an event in history. And this is what’s being discussed when the Sadducees try to trick Jesus. On that day, when all the dead are raised, “whose wife will the woman be?”
But Jesus rejects their question outright. All the layers of circumstance, the seven different husbands, don’t matter because resurrection is not at all what they imagine. On that day, says Jesus, old categories won’t matter because nothing will be the same. In that age they shall be “like angels,” which really tells us next to nothing. Most of our images of angels are not found in the Bible. And so we are left with Jesus saying that in the age to come, those who are raised will be nothing like they are now, but not really telling us exactly what that means.
Now since Sadducees don’t expect a resurrection to begin with, they presumably borrow a picture of resurrection from popular notions of that day, popular notions that Jesus dismisses out of hand. And that makes me wonder. Are our notions of resurrection and the age to come drawn from the good news Jesus proclaims, or are they popular notions that Jesus would dismiss?
Think about popular understandings of resurrection, about life after death and heaven. Think about your own. There are many possibilities. There’s the ever popular getting your wings at the pearly gates and becoming an angel image. There are various images of heavenly, pastoral bliss. There is the gazing down on loved ones below image. There are images of a vague spiritual well-being or bliss. You perhaps have others. Interestingly, none of these are in the Bible. When the Bible speaks of resurrection or of the age to come, it resorts to simile and metaphor, to the wolf living with the lamb, to swords beaten into plowshares, to something so new and so wonderful that it cannot be accurately described.
I’m not trying to shatter any dreams here. Rather, I’m wondering if we haven’t sold resurrection woefully short. I’m wondering if Jesus’ vision of a new day, of God’s kingdom, of the age to come, boggles our minds so that we settle for something we have an easier time processing, things pretty much as they are now, but simply relocated to a better locale, to the nicer neighborhood of heaven.
I recently had a conversation with someone of deep faith, discussing how we seem to have replaced Jesus’ good news of the Kingdom with good news of going to heaven. This person acknowledged my point, but went on to say that he did not see how even God could straighten out this world. Yes, he said, the Bible does speak of a new heaven and new earth, of a New Jerusalem here on earth, of a redeemed creation. But just look at the world. It’s as messed up now as in Jesus’ day. So perhaps heaven is the best we can hope for.
Perhaps it is, that is unless we can see something that lets us hope for more. And that is precisely what the prophets and Jesus do. They see something other people cannot. It’s in our reading from Haggai this morning. Haggai says, “Look at the ruins of Jerusalem. Aren’t they a dump? But take courage for I see God at work!”
You know, prophets are really strange dudes. I know lots of people think that what makes a prophet a prophet is telling the future, but biblical prophets aren’t really about predicting the future. Rather they glimpse a reality that other people aren’t able to see.
When you think about it, Jesus is a pretty strange fellow, too. And he sees things other people don’t, which is perhaps why Luke’s gospel calls him a prophet. Jesus keeps saying, “Look, the kingdom of God has come near.” And when they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, his followers see it, too. And they form a strange new community, the likes of which the world had never seen. And Jesus invites us to join them, to see as they see.
Lord, send your Spirit. Let us see what we’re missing.
I've got the television on as I type, watching a college football game. College rules don't allow the same sort of end zone celebrations seen in the NFL, but the players still strike poses, flex their muscles, and pat themselves on the chest. Some of it is genuine celebration, but mostly it's a "grown up" version of "Look at me, look at me!"
Our culture is filled with variations of this. People who quietly do their jobs without getting much notice rarely advance to the top of their company. You have to call attention to yourself. In my denomination, when pastors are looking for a new position, it works much like a secular job search. We have to sell ourselves, trumpeting our strengths and minimizing our weaknesses so that a search committee will "Look at me!"
It's behavior that comes naturally to many, very similar to behavior in other animals. Just watch a nature program that shows males posing and strutting as they seek to attract a mate.
So what do we do with Jesus' words in today's gospel? "For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."
Our culture doesn't value humility, probably because our culture is all about striving to make it, to get ahead. At its very core, it is a culture of anxiety. In our anxiety, we are perpetually worried about whether or not we've been noticed, about whether or not we're getting the credit we deserve.
Wouldn't it be nice to live life without worrying, without anxiety? Wouldn't it me nice if we could simply focus on doing what God calls us to do, trusting that what we need would come to us? That is, after all, what Jesus tells us when he says in another place in Luke, "Instead, strive for (God's) kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well."
We believe in Jesus, and we want to follow him. But we sure have a hard time trusting him, don't we.
I have long thought that Jesus' lament over the city of David is one of the more poignant utterances in the Bible. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" The sadness that I hear in Jesus' voice is all the more striking given his description of "the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!" Despite the city's long history of spurning God, Jesus wants only to drawn them to himself.
God's desire for us and our resistance... Surely this is one of the great mysteries of our existence. Oh, I know that there are theological formulations that can account for all these behaviors, but from a personal, experiential level, how is it that humanity, that I, can be so unyielding in the face of God's desire?
For my own part, there are many times when I would appreciate God being a bit more obvious about longing to draw me in. Frequently God seems far too subtle for me, and I feel that I must struggle to sense God's desire.
But at the same time, I seem to have an uncanny ability to dismiss and "forget" those moments when God's presence has been more dramatic, when God's desire for me has been palpable. And when I try to remember and draw strength from those moments, too often they feel like someone else's memories, like stories of faith rather than my own experience of it.
What is it about this relationship dance with God that is so difficult for many of us? Perhaps that is why some of us are content with some sort of institutional religion. At least the rules are clear. At least we know just what to do and to expect. But a lot of people are saying this isn't enough. I think that the struggles of traditional churches in our time grow in part from this. People have a vague sense of the poignancy in Jesus' longing for us, and they want to feel it, to know it.
I saw Twitter conversation yesterday that started with someone's speaking of joining a monastery and gradually evolved into talking about how congregations could be urban monasteries. And if this means congregations as places where we all learn how to open ourselves to God's desire, where we learn the steps of the relationship dance with God, then that seems a pretty compelling image to me.
I just checked The Weather Channel homepage, and Tropical Storm Tomas is still headed for Haiti. I suppose this might not be earth shattering news, especially as Tomas is no longer a hurricane, except that there are still thousands and thousands of Haitians living in tent cities in the aftermath of last year's earthquake. And the winds and rain of Tomas come on the heels of a cholera outbreak in these tent cities.
It is easy to look at the situation in Haiti and fall into despair. After all the attention, the donations, and the telethon following the earthquake, the situation is still so dire. And of course Haiti is only one example.
Situations such as this make it easy to understand how the Church took only a few generations to move from talking about God's coming Kingdom to talking about heaven when you die. Jesus spoke over and over about the Kingdom, God's new day that had drawn near, that was at hand. He spoke of how it lifted up the poor and oppressed while pulling down the rich and powerful. But as the years went by, and as the Church was embraced by the Emperor Constantine, by the rich and the powerful, hope for the Kingdom turned into hope for a better life when one died.
We've been talking this way for so many centuries that it is a bit hard even to glimpse the Kingdom that Jesus says is all around us. In today's gospel, Jesus says that the Kingdom is like the tiniest seed or a bit of leaven, something scarcely visible that transforms its world.
As I look at our world, straining to see some signs of the Kingdom, I sometimes wonder why it seems so hard to spot it. Is God dallying in bringing the Kingdom? Or are we blind to the Kingdom and so failing to be the seed and yeast we are supposed to be? Or maybe I simply miss the seed and yeast because they are so small. A little help here, God?
I've probably written about this before so I apologize in advance if you've already heard this. One Sunday as I was preaching, I observed an usher speaking to someone in the narthex. (Glass windows in the back of the sanctuary give me a pretty good view.) I recognized the fellow talking to the usher, though I doubt the usher knew who he was. He stops by the church every now and then, looking for some food or a bus pass. From what I could tell, the usher was polite and kind to the man, but pretty quickly he escorted the fellow out of my field of vision, headed toward one of our main doors which are located on either side of the narthex.
I learned later that the usher had told the man to come back later. We were in the middle of worship and it was not the appropriate time. The congregation never was never aware of any of this. It happened, quite literally, behind their backs. But I imagine that many of them would have approved. We were in the middle of worship, and later would be a better time.
That's essentially the same argument offered by the synagogue leader in today's gospel. He doesn't object to Jesus healing the woman, but her condition was chronic and not life threatening. It could have waited. "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day."
At the heart of this conflict is how people of faith live appropriately before God. What sort of things should we do to honor and please God? What are the rules to live by if we want our ways to conform to God's ways? What sort of things take precedence over others?
The Bible frequently encourages worshiping God. It also speaks of refraining from work on the Sabbath. Jewish rules in Jesus' time allowed exceptions to the work prohibition if a life was in danger or if it was a real emergency, but this woman had suffered for 18 years. What would one more day hurt? But Jesus seems to think that helping someone in need is sufficient cause to make a Sabbath exception.
21st Century American Christians typically aren't all that big on Sabbath regulations, so the synagogue leader's actions look like arbitrary, religious legalism to us. But I suspect that nearly all of us who are serious about our faith have our share of arbitrary, religious notions about what is appropriate, how things should be done, etc. And I wonder how often I might find myself trying to prevent Jesus from offering someone healing and restoration, saying, "Come back later. Now is not the appropriate time."
