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've long been struck by a line from today's gospel. As Jesus draws near to Jerusalem a rich man approaches him. (The "rich young ruler" does not exist in the Bible. He is a conflation of the accounts from Matthew, Mark, and Luke.) He addresses Jesus with great respect, calling him "Good Teacher." But Jesus responds to this address with, "Why do you call me good? Noone is good but God alone."
I've never quite known what to do with this line. If read literally, Jesus would seem here to deny all sorts of deeply held Christian beliefs. He must not be God in the flesh, and he must not be one person of the Trinity if he cannot be called "good" in the same way God can.
This might be a good place to reiterate that these "hiccups" are not pronouncements or well thought out biblical exegesis. They are a part of my personal reflections, prayers, and meditations, and as such they are not meant to withstand great theological scrutiny. Still, as a ponder this line, I find myself wondering about the nature of Jesus' incarnation, about what it means to be Son of God and yet reject the label good.
I'm sure there are many reasons why Jesus might say what he does, but I find myself wondering about what it means for Jesus to fully embrace our humanity. I grew up thinking of God in Western terms of static perfection, with humans, by contrast, neither static or perfect. We are forever changing. We may be getting better or getting worse but we cannot simply stay the same. But if Jesus is fully human, and considering that he rejects the label good, does that mean that Jesus is something quite different from that static perfection that defined divinity for me?
On the one hand such thoughts might seem to diminish Jesus in some way. But from another point of view they might enhance a view of human capacity to bear in itself the divine. I have heard from my earliest Sunday School days that humans were created in God's image. I won't get into the possible meanings of this "image," but both this image and the presence of God in Jesus speaks to the possibility of a humanity not quite so other and separate from God. It raises the possibility of human life that truly reflects the image of God.
As a pastor I do my fair share of weddings. Sometimes, when I am talking with a couple about the upcoming service, we go into the sanctuary and discuss wedding traditions. I occasionally point out that many of these traditions are rooted in rather archaic understandings of men and women. For example, in many weddings, the service pauses on the sanctuary floor, at the steps to the chancel area, where a father brings a women and gives her to her future husband, before the couple moves up the steps for the actual marrying. This tradition harks back to women as chattel, property that could be owned by a man. The pause at the chancel steps was to complete the property transfer.
Certainly most of us don't view a wedding this way, but clearly the notion of women as property persisted for much of the history of the Church. And that only underscores the radical nature of Jesus' words on marriage and divorce in today's reading from Mark. While this passage has often been used simply to condemn those who divorce, this misses the stunning way Jesus speaks about women.
"Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her
husband and marries another, she commits adultery." It is easy to miss the radical nature of Jesus' words if you don't regard women as commodities, but in ancient times, adultery was largely a property crime. It robs a man of his property. In the Old Testament law, a man cannot commit adultery against his wife. The only person who is wronged by adultery is a husband or father. But Jesus speaks of a man committing adultery against his wife.
Here and in many other places, Jesus refuses to see women as less than fully human. In Luke 10:38-42 Jesus praises Mary for taking the "male" pose of a disciple. And his famous commandment against looking at a woman with lust says that women are not to be viewed as objects to be acquired, a lesson we have still not fully learned.
It seems that for Jesus, nothing about a person can keep him from seeing her full humanity. People that others disparagingly label "them" are not so to Jesus. And so he shocks the religious folk by hanging out with outcasts, lepers, prostitutes, Gentiles, tax collectors and sinners.
I think most of us still struggle to see things as Jesus sees. Most all of us use labels for other groups that diminish their humanity, that allow us to hate or dismiss or discriminate against them. Maybe that is why Jesus insists that we love our enemy. He wants us to remember that he sees every single person in the world as fully human, as deserving of God's grace as the next person, as someone he deeply loves.
It is very easy to take pot shots at "organized religion" (although in my experience a great deal of it is terribly disorganized). And while many of these pot shots are well deserved, I think they often miss the point. Some critics seem to think the problem is religion itself, but the problem is more fundamental.
I think that all people are "religious" in some sense. By this I mean that even those outside of recognized religious groups are looking for things that give life meaning and purpose. This applies not only of the "spiritual but not religious" crowd, but also to those who attach themselves to causes, ideologies, and even some activities and hobbies. Most of us look for meaning in things bigger than ourselves, and yet our searches have a way of becoming self serving and egocentric. We often measure faith, our work for a cause, or our time given to a charity by the benefits we receive from it. I can't count the number of times I've heard people comment on what a downer it is to provide food for a needy family and the people not be appreciative. They're anticipating a benefit, a warm feeling when the see a needy person's smile, but when that doesn't happen, they feel cheated.
To varying degrees, all struggle with such egocentric tendencies, and so it should be no surprise that this impacts all faith traditions. The central message and call of any faith can easily be bent away from its original trajectory and founding precepts. A focus on the faith's "benefits" can skew things so that most of the faith's activities become about securing those benefits. You sometimes see this in Christianity when the focus becomes almost solely about believe the right things so that you are "saved." And in the process all the things Jesus said his followers must do get forgotten.
You can also see this at work in today's reading from Isaiah. The prophet speaks to a people who seek God, who engage in spiritual practices and disciplines designed to draw them close to God. But this activity is self centered, and so the prophet calls them to a new spiritual practice. "Is not this the fast that I choose:to loose the bonds of injustice,to undo the thongs of the yoke,to let the oppressed go free,and to break every yoke?Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house?" The prophet draws the people away from seeking faith benefits and calls them to embrace the purposes of God
True religion always draws us away from self. This is why Jesus says that those who try to save their own lives will lose them while those who lose their lives for the gospel's sake find them. Any religion, any spiritual quest, any search for meaning that cannot let go of the self will end up being skewed and distorted toward that which seems to pay dividends. And at that point, the main good served is my good, and the only god served is the god of my feelings, my wants, my and desires.
In today's reading from Mark, Jesus explains to his disciples that he will be betrayed, executed, and then rise again. "But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid toask him." Especially in Mark's gospel, the disciples can come off as incredibly obtuse. What's so hard to understand? But in truth, most of us struggle to makes sense of suffering. We avoid it at all costs so why would the Messiah embrace it?
Over the centuries the Church has come up with a number of formulas and doctrines to neatly explain Jesus' suffering and death. Some of us have become so used to these that we don't even notice how problematic it is to speak of a God who "needs" someone to suffer and die for our sin. But I wonder if our doctrines of atonement don't also make Jesus' suffering such a special case that it has no connection to the suffering that is part of our lives.
Numerous times Jesus calls his followers to emulate him, to "take up the cross." He speaks of finding one's life in the act of losing it. And the Apostle Paul speaks of our need to be crucified with Christ, to die to the old self and become new. Jesus and Paul both seem to think that suffering plays a key role in us becoming who we are called to be.
Now I want to be careful not to make light of another person's suffering by saying, "It's good for you." I don't presume to know when suffering is or isn't good or redemptive. But I do wonder if suffering of some sort isn't required to move us from where are to where God wants us to be.
Not many of us would claim to be perfect as we are. Most of us are acutely aware not only of certain faults but also of a darkness inside that we do our best to keep hidden from others. But at the same time, most of us are averse to change. The devil we know is better than the unknown, and real change is a step into the unknown.
Paul said that becoming a new creation in Christ requires the death of the old self. But what could be more frightening than to lose your self? I am happy for faith to improve my life, make me happier, or make me feel more fulfilled. But when you start to talk about radically changing who I am, I can quickly become as obtuse as those disciples trying to figure out what Jesus was talking about when he described his own suffering and death.
Those of you who know me well know that I love technology. And I probably spend too much time on the computer and on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. But as big a waste of time as this can be, I do run across a lot of different perspectives, especially on Twitter. I follow people on Twitter I’ve met at conferences, and through them I’ve found other people to follow. A lot of these are younger pastors and people connected with the Emerging Church movement. And it is very interesting to observe some of their conversations threads.
One thing that I noticed early on, these younger pastors come from a very different religious landscape than the one in which I grew up. In high school, virtually all of my classmates were Christians and church members. But these pastors have lots of friends and conversation partners who are of different faiths, who are agnostic, who are atheists, who have a very jaundiced opinion of the Church, who do not view the Church as a force for good in the world, but rather as a problem.
These young pastors defend the Church to their friends. They point out all the good things the Church does in the world, but they are also sympathetic to their friends’ view of the Church. After all, they can look around at our society and see far too much hate and divisiveness, too much anger and screaming, too much lying and spin, too much demonizing and attacking. They can also see far too little restraint and humility, far too little listening and considering the other’s view, far too little love. And quite often, they see the Church a willing participant in this, rather than embodying something better.
But while these young pastors can sometimes seem discouraged, most of them are working tirelessly to renew the Church, to help her become the agent of hope and love and God’s dream that Jesus calls us to be.
There was a time in my life when, although I knew the Church was supposed to care for people in need, I thought its primary job was to help people get their name in the correct column of God’s heavenly spreadsheet. We were to help people understand and believe the right things so that they were “saved” by faith, “saved” meaning getting your ticket punched for heaven.
Jesus does come to save, but when we define save simply to mean getting into heaven, we pervert the good news Jesus proclaims into something Brian McLaren calls “a gospel of evacuation.” This false gospel says that Jesus doesn’t give a whit about how things are here on earth, only about the status of our “souls.” But that’s not what Jesus says. Jesus proclaims the nearness of God’s kingdom, that day when God’s will is done on earth. And he calls those who will follow him, his disciples, the Church, to begin living now in ways that will help the world see this new day.
In Matthew’s gospel, the Sermon on the Mount contains the core of Jesus’ teachings on what it means to be his followers, his Church. These teachings include the Beatitudes which we heard last week, and they continue on through our readings today and for the next several weeks, encompassing all of chapters 5, 6, and 7. And if you sit down and read these teachings, you will discover that Jesus says very little about what we are to believe, but he says volumes about how we are to live and what we are to do.
The entire Sermon on the Mount is about the ethics of the Kingdom, about what it looks like to live as Kingdom people. And as Jesus makes clear in the verses we heard today, our living by these Kingdom ethics is supposed to provide a light to the world, a way that the world sees the wonderful things God is doing in Jesus.
Jesus is talking about our witness as his followers. But if you are anything like me, you may think that witness has to do with telling others about your faith. Or maybe that’s just me. Growing up in the South I regularly heard “witness” used to describe Southern Baptist styled evangelism where people were asked whether or not they were saved and, if not, then told what they had to do to get saved. But the witnessing Jesus talks about here has nothing to do with words. Our witness, our light shining in the world, is our good works.
We Presbyterians have often downplayed works, seeing them as a threat to the teaching of being saved by grace rather than works. But Jesus says as clearly as he can that being light for the world, being salt for the earth, is about us being a force for good in the world so that others see what we are doing and say, “Praise God!”
Many lifelong Presbyterians grew up hearing about faith and grace versus works. But I think much of this conflict between faith and works is a misunderstanding. True, God’s love for us is not the product of anything that we do. God doesn’t save us because of our works. God loves us and embraces us because that’s just how God is. But Jesus says that those who experience God’s love are called to show it to the world with our good works. God embraces us in Jesus so that we can share the hope of God’s new day with the world.
I think that’s why Jesus connects our being light and salt with the law and the prophets. Jesus doesn’t call off the law or prophets because these guide us in our witness. They describe the shape of God’s new day and help us to move beyond words and beliefs and religious rituals. As the prophet Isaiah says to us, Is not this the fast (the religious ritual) that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house?
When a mother who has been laid off receives food and Christmas presents for her children and says, “Praise God,” a tiny glimmer of light shines in a dark world. When someone who has been told he is worthless and disgusting comes into a church congregation and meets God’s love in people who welcome and embrace him, the light shines. When the poor and the oppressed know that the Church will be their advocate, will stand up to the powers-that-be on their behalf, the light shines and God is glorified. When someone steps into a local church congregation and finds a community that together is discovering a spirituality that leads to a life of serving others, the light shines and God is glorified.
A month and a half ago, we gathered here on a Saturday morning to assemble nearly 400 boxes with food and Christmas gifts for needy families. And one of the things that struck me that day was seeing more people I did not know than I did. More non-members than members assembled those boxes. And while some were members of other churches, many were not. They had simply been drawn to the light that they saw shining here.
A lot of people are worried these days about how traditional church congregations are doing. Our culture no longer tells people, “You’re supposed to go to church.” In fact, our society tempts people with all sorts of other attractive activities at the same time most churches hold worship. In response to this situation, denominations that have never thought a lot about evangelism suddenly find it a compelling topic. There are all sorts of programs that train members to share their faith, that guide churches in how to advertise and get their message out. And there is much to learn from such programs.
But when our light shines, when our worship and spirituality connect to Jesus so that we hear and do the good works he calls us to do, people will notice the light. Many will be drawn to it, and God will be praised and glorified.
Today's gospel contains the famous line, "I believe; help my unbelief!" And I wonder if we wouldn't all do well to embrace the line as our own. Mark's gospel tells of a man bringing his son to the disciples for healing. The boy has was sounds like severe epilepsy, something attributed to possession in Jesus' day. When Jesus comes on the scene, the disciples have been unable to help, and Jesus' exasperation is evident for all to see. "You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?"
Surely Jesus must feel the same way about me and about the Church from time to time. Not that we don't work hard at this church thing, but I fear that many who come to us for help feel a lot like the father in today's gospel. We talk a good talk. We try hard, but where is the power of the risen Christ? Where is the evidence of the Spirit's gifts and power at work in us?
Over the years churches and denominations have created all sorts of structures and systems to help us do our job. Governing boards, mission agencies, seminaries, and so on have frequently contributed to the Church's ability to share the gospel in word and deed. But it is easy for churches and denomination to become nothing more than the sum total of our structures, systems, and members. And we can view as impossible anything that seems beyond the reach and power of these.
After the father in today's gospel sees the inability of Jesus' disciples, his plea to Jesus seem less than confident. "But if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us." Jesus answers, "If you are able! - All things can be done for the one who believes."
All things can be done. Really? Can we really accept such a possibility. I think that father shares our difficulty. He certainly wants it to be true. He hopes it is true. "I believe; help my unbelief!"
We believe, Jesus. We think our faith makes a difference. We feel the power of your presence. But we know well the limits of our abilities, and our congregations' abilities. Please, please, help our unbelief.
When I was in seminary, I had the opportunity to be part of a three-week-long trip to the Middle East and Greece. We started our journey in Damascus, Syria, and one of our early stops there was the huge Umayyad Mosque, which has a small shrine in it purported to contain the head of John the Baptist. The structure is completely open, with almost no furniture. The floor is covered with carpet and rugs, and you must take off your shoes to walk on it. And you had best watch your step because there are numerous birds nesting in the rafters, leaving their droppings here and there.
Ancient buildings don't have the hermetically sealed structure of ours. Birds come and go, making nests the way they do today underneath bridges. And according to the psalmist, this not only happened in the Jerusalem Temple, but it is as it should be. "Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O LORD of hosts."
It is curious the way that Christianity often thinks of God as only interested in the fate of human "souls" when the Bible so often speaks of God as not only delighted in Creation but concerned for it. Jesus says that not a sparrow falls without God knowing. Paul speaks of all Creation groaning as it awaits redemption, and today's reading from Isaiah has creation joining in worship. "The mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."
Perhaps this last is only hyperbolic, prophetic imagery, but perhaps not. I don't agree with those folks who claim that they can worship simply by communing with nature, but I do think they offer a needed corrective to Christian practice that has become detached from nature. It almost makes this Presbyterian want to figure out how to do a "blessing of the animals."
The first lines of today's psalm grabbed hold of me. I paused, and though I continued reading, I was still thinking about how Psalm 116 begins. I've read it many times before and not had it affect me this way. But today, for some reason, I immediately began to think about how rare it is to have someone who will simply listens, someone who isn't figuring out how to respond to you or straighten you out, someone who isn't wishing you would hurry up and finish so he can move on to more important things.
The image of God's ear inclined toward me, God patiently listening to me pour out my troubles and complaints, God treating me as though there was nothing more important at that moment, is a remarkable one. And it is an image reflected in the life of Jesus, who had time for children, who stopped for the poor, the sick, the despised, and the unclean, who ate with sinners and tax collectors.
No one could carefully examine our world and not surmise that things are not as they should be. War and violence are everywhere. Human capacity for cruelty to others and our ability to justify such cruelty is astounding. Surely God at some point will say, "Enough!" and be done with us. Indeed many Christian groups speak this way when the talk of a "rapture," people "left behind," and God destroying the earth. But the Bible does not speak this way. It speaks of God redeeming all Creation, a rather surprising move, or perhaps not for a God whose ear is inclined toward us.
