Spiritual Hiccups - Life for All

"Therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all."  

Paul is referring to the first human (adam is a Hebrew word for a "man" or "human" and not a name), and then to the man Jesus.  He says that if the first human's actions caused problems, Jesus' actions have set things right.  And it is striking how universal Paul's words are.  All humanity is caught in the problem of sin, but now Jesus' actions bring "life for all."  

Now I would not want to say that Paul's entire theology is expressed in this one statement.  In other places he does speak of the new life we experience "in Christ," of being joined to Christ in our baptisms.  But here, and in other places, Paul does seem to speak of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as having fundamentally altered the relationship of God with humanity.  It is also worth noting that those places where Paul speaks of "faith in Jesus" might just as easily be translated "the faithfulness of Jesus."  

Regardless, Paul does call all who will listen to faith.  He says that by faith we experience the gift, the grace of God.  But I don't hear Paul encouraging us to do what Christians often do: writing off those who don't have faith, or who don't have the right faith.

Some years ago, I and other neighborhood pastors were meeting to plan a community Easter sunrise service.  A Baptist colleague arrived from a funeral, and he shared how he struggled when he had to do funeral for someone he knew was not saved and was not going to heaven.  I was a bit taken aback by his comments and mumbled something about how I didn't worry too much about that.  I simply proclaimed the good news of Jesus and left the sorting out of saved or not saved to God.


I wonder why we sometimes feel the need to declare "those folks" to be lost or condemned.  Again, I'm not necessarily arguing for universalism, but I do wonder if Christians wouldn't be a whole lot better off if we quite worrying about where the in-or-out boundaries were, and focused more on living faithfully in ways that demonstrating the new quality of life Paul says we have when we are "in Christ."  


If Jesus' life, death, and resurrection do indeed lead to "life for all;" if Jesus does say from the cross, "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing," then shouldn't the Church avoid trying to figure out who gets left out of "all," who doesn't get forgiven, and simply live out the sort of love and forgiveness that Jesus showed.  


Sometimes I think that all the energy expended worrying about who's in or out is mostly about assuring ourselves that we're in.  We're trying to validate the hope that we've checked off the right boxes and signed on the correct dotted line.  And this seems to me more about our anxieties than about a desire to help those we deem to be on the outside.  But as for our anxieties, Paul says elsewhere, "If God is for us, who is against us?"  


If I am sure of nothing else, because of Jesus I know that God is for us.  And what could be more wonderful than that?


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Spiritual Hiccups - God's Broken Heart

For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,
     I mourn, 
  and dismay has taken hold of me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
     Is there no physician there? 
Why then has the health of my poor people
     not been restored? 
O that my head were a spring of water,
     and my eyes a fountain of tears,
  so that I might weep day and night
     for the slain of my poor people! 
O that I had in the desert
     a traveler’s lodging place,
  that I might leave my people
     and go away from them! 
For they are all adulterers,
     a band of traitors. 

I've always thought these some of the more pathos filled lines in the Old Testament, if not the Bible.  And while there are Christians who seem to think God a severe judge who punishes without compunction, even relishes punishing, the God described here is a God whose love for humanity is costly.  God's own interior life is in turmoil because of God's commitment to humanity.

The idea that it costs God to be for us runs counter to classic Western notions of divinity.  By definition, the Divine is static perfection, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  But the God of the Hebrew Scriptures does not fit neatly into such an understanding.  And neither does God's suffering on the cross in Jesus. 

Many of us have had the experience of growing up, maturing, and recognizing the pain we caused our parents when we were younger.  But for most of us, the trauma we caused our parents did not irreparably damage our relationship with them.  The same is often true in other loving relationships.  Most relationships contain hurts and pains inflicted on the other.  Most relationships carry with them scars and regrets.  But where love prevails, those relationships can grow stronger.

One of the real problems I have with faith as believing the right things, even with "accepting Jesus as personal Lord and Savior," is that such formulaic notions of faith often leave little room for the dynamic, pathos filled, scarred, surprising, grace-filled life of a relationship rooted in God's unwavering love for us.  We break God's heart, and we bring God great joy.  We recoil at the hurts we have inflicted, and we experience the love of God that is never beyond reconciliation.  Such dynamics can never be fully expressed in formula or doctrine.  They can never be completely prescribed in rules and law.  They can only be lived into.

The hunger for spirituality in our day, coupled with a corresponding distaste for the institutional church, may well speak to a desire for less formula and more relationship.  As such, this may be providential call to the Church to remember the relational, pathos-filled, overflowing-with-grace nature of our life with God.

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Spiritual Hiccups - I'm Thirsty! Now What Would Help?

Imagine for a moment, if you can, that you are terribly parched and thirsty, but for some reason you don't know exactly what that means.  You know something is wrong.  You know your body is craving something, but you simply don't know what it is.  I'm not sure how this situation could actually happen.  Perhaps someone with dementia might forget that drinking fluids cured this craving.  Perhaps someone with some sort of amnesia or who has suffered a stroke might experience a terrifying need that they did not know how to meet. 

"Let anyone who is thirsty come to me," Jesus says, and he speaks of "living water," which in Jesus' days literally meant fresh, running water, as from a stream.  But the narrator of John's gospel goes on to say that Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit.

It is not unusual for people to speak of "spiritual dryness."  But even those who have such a vocabulary often seem to struggle finding what they need to take away their thirst.  And I suspect that even more people know there is something wrong, but have no idea how to fix it.  And so they experiment and try all sorts of options.  Some options are better than others, even if they don't fully quench the thirst.  Other options can be terribly destructive.  Alcohol and drug dependence, abusive relationships, pursuing money and power at all costs; all these strike me as attempts to fill a need that, in the end, only make matters worse.

When I feel something is missing in my life, I often have inclinations about what would help.  In retrospect, a lot of these inclinations turn out to be less than helpful.  What I've heard, learned, picked up from the culture, and so on, doesn't always end up being the best guide.  And if the Pharisees in today's gospel reading are any guide, religious experts and leaders are not always good guides either.  

I hear a lot of people who say they are "spiritual but not religious."  Technically speaking I'm not sure this is truly possible, but I think I understand what they mean.  They somehow figured out that the craving they feel is a spiritual one, but when they've tried church, it didn't seem to help.  And perhaps this is because we churchy types sometimes get so preoccupied with doing church that we forget where our living water comes from, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me!

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Spiritual Hiccups - Prophetic Restlessness

There seems to be a restlessness, a stirring in the Church these days.  This restlessness does not come via official channels or from those charged with revitalizing denominations.  Rather this restlessness comes from people frustrated and disenchanted with the Church.  And I am inclined to view this as a prophetic voice to the Church.

The issue of integrity is a large part of this restlessness.  Many are frustrated with a Church that expends a great deal of energy trying to get its theology just right, but doesn't seem to be very good at equipping people in the pews to live new and transformed lives, lives that model God's reign, the kingdom that draws near in Jesus.  You can see this frustration both in the growth of the emergent church movement, and in the decline affecting many mainline congregations.  People are seeking something more than what seems to them religious veneer.

The problem of religious veneer, of civil religion, is nothing new.  Jeremiah rails against it in today's Old Testament reading.  The prophet condemns those who neglect widows and orphans and aliens, who pervert justice, and place their ultimate trust in things other than God, all while carefully maintaining their religious/worship rituals.   Through the prophet, God wonders how on earth Israel can act as they do, "and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, 'We are safe!' -- only to go on doing all these abominations?"

Now I certainly don't mean to say that the Presbyterian Church or any congregation has failed to be God's people in the same manner as those addressed by Jeremiah.  Still, the prophetic restlessness stirring the Church seems to call us (much as Jeremiah once did) to remember what it means to be the Church.  It invites us to examine ourselves, considering how well our church activities serve Jesus and the kingdom he proclaims, and where they may have devolved into something that has the look and feel of religious veneer.


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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

In today's gospel story of the Samaritan woman at the well, the issue of in-or-out boundaries is hard to miss.  The woman is a Samaritan, an ethnic group generally despised by Jews.  Adding to this problem Jews thought Samaritans' religious views "heretical".  And if that weren't enough, she is, of course, a woman.  Rabbis didn't teach women, only men.  In fact, women weren't considered quite fully human.

Both the woman and Jesus' disciples find it surprising that Jesus speaks with her.  And yet Jesus makes more theological progress with this female outsider than he did with the Pharisee Nicodemus.  She seems to "get it" in a way that rarely happens in John's gospel.

Despite the fact that Jesus was an expert boundary ignorer and crosser, we Christians are rather good at constructing boundaries.  In a world filled with us and them distinctions, we often use our religious beliefs to create more.  We create us and them boundaries between Christians and non-Christians.  And we create us and them boundaries within the faith, using our doctrines and practices to label and divide.

Now I'm not sure this problem can be solved by constructing a generic faith.  It is increasingly popular to say, "I don't worry about doctrines and denominational dictates.  I just try to follow Jesus."  But of course the moment people try to follow Jesus, they must make decisions about what that looks like, what things are required and what are optional, what the core practices are, etc.  And presto, you now have a particular way of being Christian that is different from someone else's way, which can potentially provide the material for yet another boundary.

I actually think we should celebrate our particular ways of being Christian (even as we look critically at those ways so that we insure we are actually following Jesus).  But we should not understand our particularities as dividing lines.  Perhaps an analogy can be drawn with regards to race and ethnicity.  The way to solve racial problems is probably not to obliterate all racial distinctions.  (The nation of Brazil once had an official policy that encouraged dark skinned citizen to become lighter.  Followed to its natural conclusion, racial problem would become a thing of the past when everyone merged into a single skin tone.)  I certainly hope we don't ever reach a point where all people and food and music are of one sort, where we solve the "problem" of diversity by trying to eliminate it.

The problem is not our differences, even our differences of faith and doctrine.  The problem is we judge our group or tradition to be superior, dividing the world up into us and them, in and out.  And then we can say lovely things such as "We don't want people like them joining our church, or moving into our neighborhood, or..."

I find especially appealing the notion that in Christ we become one regardless of whether we are male or female, Jew or Greek, black or white, etc.  It isn't that those distinctions no longer exist.  It is that they are all included together in God's love.  We are all held in God's embrace, and God longs to join us together into something new and wonderful.  Of course it is natural for people to be afraid of those who are different, not like us.  But then again, as it says in 1 John, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear."

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Spiritual Hiccups - Lusty Stallions???

When I read today's verses from Jeremiah, I came across a line that I had not noticed before.  Speaking to the wayward people of Jerusalem the prophet condemns how Israel turned from God despite the abundance given them.  "They were well-fed lusty stallions, each neighing for his neighbor's wife."  Ole Jeremiah doesn't mince words does he?

Well-fed lusty stallions; that is quite the image.  The abundance received from God has not left Israel grateful and beholding to God, but lusting for more.  That's something we know about in our society.  How is it that people who are quite wealthy, folks such as Martha Stewart or Bernie Madoff, still break the law, hurt others, and risk imprisonment so as to get more?  Why do people with a nice home and cars spend themselves into crushing debt in order to have a bigger and fancier home and finer cars?

I feel a bit lusty myself from time to time.  Not for my neighbor's wife, but I walk into a store and see a TV with a bigger screen than the one I have, and I want it.  I see a snazzier smart phone or a new iPad, and I want one.

For reasons that I've always struggled to understand, many religious people tend to be overly fixated on lust of the sexual sort.  But of course Jeremiah is speaking of Israel's unfaithfulness with God, not talking about  sexual deviance.  And the fact that Jesus speaks so often about our relationship to money, possessions, and wealth, and hardly at all about sex, seems to confirm where our real lust problems are.

I'm no expert on this, but lust, of all sorts, seems to bespeak something missing in a person's life.  There is a real or imagined hole that the a person is desperate to fill.  Unfortunately our lusts often lead us to fill the emptiness in our lives with that which does not satisfy.  And we quickly need another fix.

The only way out of the need for such fixes is something that does satisfy deeply.  And Jesus says that the answer is loving God with all our being and loving our neighbor as ourselves.  Lusts aren't about relationships.  They are about things or people we've objectified into things.  But love is something else altogether. 

Too often, Christian faith is understood to be about believing the correct things.  But Jesus says it is about relationship.  Jesus says it is about love.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Giving God a Bad Name

For much of modern Christianity, there has been a tendency to view the world along us-them lines.  We are Christians; they are heathen pagans.  We are right; they are wrong.  We are in; they are out.  We get it; they don't.  You get my drift.  And their only hope is to become like us.

For much of the modern Christian era, it was also difficult to separate Christianity from Western civilization.  Many of the assumptions about the West were shared with the Church (though to be honest, I'm not always sure who was sharing with whom).  Thus the colonial expansion of the West coincided with the missionary movement.  Just as many assumed an eventual Western dominance and hegemony over the entire world, so the Church also assumed the same for the faith.  And missionaries often engaged in a great deal of westernizing to go along with Christianizing.  One oft noted example was the requirement for African churches to adopt Western music and musical instruments. Pastors also needed to wear Western styled robes.  Somehow anything from their culture was problematic.

But while few people any longer hold onto dreams of Western world dominance (if anything we're worried it could go the other way), the old us-them lines of the missionary days often persist.  In matters of faith, we still tend to think of right and wrong, in and out, us and them.  And they need to become like us.

That makes Paul's words to the Roman congregation of interest to me.  Paul speaks of those Gentiles who instinctively abide by the law as being "a law unto themselves."  He speaks of the law being "written on their hearts," and Paul is not talking about Gentile Christians, but simply Gentiles.  Conversely, Paul warns his Jewish brothers and sisters about counting on their relationship with God to shield them when they live contrary to God's ways.  And he paraphrases the prophets saying, "The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you."

It seems to me that the us-them of Christian-heathen has essentially supplanted the old, biblical us-them of Jew-Gentile.  We're the special ones with the relationship with God.  And if you become one of us, you can be special, too.  Yet while happily claiming our special relationship with God via Jesus, we continue to create and support a society that is at odds with Jesus' teachings about peace, non-violence, wealth, sacrifice, loving our enemies, and so on.  And when we claim relationship with God through Jesus but don't live as Jesus taught us, don't we find ourselves under those harsh words of Paul?  "The name of God is blasphemed among the (non-Christians)/Gentiles because of you."

Fortunately, I see signs everywhere that this is changing.  While the good news Jesus calls us to share is still very often blemished by arrogant, us-them attitudes, increasingly a new breed of Christian is emerging. These folks are more interested in being faithful to Jesus' teachings than in labels and doctrines.  There is nothing wrong with doctrines per se, but they exist to help us in following Jesus.  They were never intended to be possessions that let us feel special or superior to "them." 

When we find ourselves falling into an us-them sort of thinking, it is helpful to recall that the people Jesus upset were not the pagans, heathens, or "them," but religious purists and leaders of the religious institution.  And then we should ask ourselves, do our actions in the name of Jesus cause non-Christians to curse God and Church, or to give thanks and praise?

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Spiritual Hiccups - Do You Want It?

I've always thought Jesus' first words to the ill man in today's gospel a bit odd.  We are told that the man has been ill for decades, and also that Jesus knew the man had been lying near a pool thought to have healing powers for a very long time.  And yet Jesus asks him, "Do you want to be made well?"

I've long wondered why Jesus would ask such a question.  A man sick for 38 years who has come to a place of healing; surely it's obvious.  Besides, why does Jesus need to know if he wants to be healed?  Why not just say, "I know you have been sick and hoping to be healed for a long time.  Stand up, take your mat, and walk?"

Perhaps I'm making a big deal out of nothing, but for some reason this man's desire for healing seems to matter.  Does that mean that God doesn't give us what we need, what God wants to give us, until we want it.  Is this like AA, where you have to want to get sober before you can get with the program?

There are certainly biblical examples to the contrary (take the Apostle Paul), but it does seem that in general, God's approach is gentle and quiet, not overwhelming.  God seems to want us to desire the healing and wholeness that God is literally dying to offer us.

A lot of popular images of God don't seem to fit well with a God who won't barge in without an invitation.  But this gospel paints a remarkably gentle and patient picture of God.  "Do you want to be made well and whole?  Do you want to become the person you are meant to be?  Do you want to discover life of a quality you could never achieve on your own?" 

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Spiritual Hiccups - Never Content

We humans seem to have a contentment problem.  No matter what we have, no matter what we achieve, it is not quite enough.  As with some other human traits, this difficulty finding contentment is part blessing and part curse.  It can drive people to better themselves, to cure illnesses, or fight hunger and poverty.  But it also can drive people to cut corners in order to make a bit more profit, to accumulate more and more possessions, to cast off a spouse for someone "better."

In today's reading from Jeremiah, God is portrayed as perplexed at such behavior on the part of Israel. "What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?..  I brought you into a plentiful land to eat its fruits and its good things.  But when you entered you defiled my land,and made my heritage an abomination... for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water."

I find that I engage in this sort of foolishness all too often.  Despite those times when my relationship with God has filled me to overflowing, leading me at various stages of my life to become more involved in my congregation, to serve in mission projects, and to uproot my family and go to seminary, it is still easy to become disenchanted with God, to go after other sources of fulfillment and meaning.  

I follow a Twitter account that goes by the name "Unvirtuous Abbey" and posts silly prayers.  I remember one from last Fall when the news came out that NBA star Tony Parker had cheated on his wife, Desperate Housewives actress Eva Longoria.  It read, "Lord, you who cured the blind, we pray for anyone who would cheat on Eva Longoria. Amen."  I chuckled, but Tony Parker's problem has nothing to do with his eyesight.  

But despite our foolishness, God is faithful.  Our inability to be content has its consequences, but one of them is not God abandoning us.  In fact, God's response to our foolishness is Jesus, what the Apostle Paul calls God's foolishness for us.  And I think that a big part of growing in faith, of a deepening spirituality, is allowing God's foolishness to transform ours.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Success and Faithfulness

Our culture greatly values success and results.  In most any category - business, education, sports - we admire those who have worked hard and made something of themselves.  The desire to succeed can be a powerful force for good.  It motivates people to work hard, to become better at what they do.  It can encourage innovation, new and better ways of doing things.

But using success as a measure has its downside as well.  For starters, some things are hard to measure, and so we can be tempted to measure what is easy to gauge.  Some education reforms seem to require so much testing (an easy form of measuring) that teachers complain they have no time to teach anything other than test taking skills. 

From a spiritual standpoint, the focus on success sometimes forgets that faithfulness does not always lead to what the culture calls success.  By our culture's standards, Jesus' life is not a success.  He causes a stir, attracts a handful of followers who abandon him when things get tough.  And then he is executed.  Jesus' faithfulness to his call does not produce easily measurable evidence of success.

Congregations, pastors, and church members can easily gauge themselves "failures" based on not living up to some measure of success.  And indeed there are plenty of times when congregational decline is the result of failing to follow God's call.  But it is also possible to be faithful and that not lead to more people and increased pledges. 

Today's reading from Psalm 119 begins, "Your hands have made and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn your commandments."  We are God's; we belong to God.  In this lies our intrinsic worth, and we honor this when we become what God has made and fashioned us to do and be.  Such faithfulness may or may not produce signs our culture deems success.  Neither Jeremiah nor Paul - who provide our Old Testament and Epistle reading for today - would have measured up according to many popular gauges of success.  Yet God judges them good and faithful servants because they have faithfully carried out their calls.

O God, you have made and fashioned me.  Help me to understand my call.  Show me the work you have given me to do, that I may be your faithful servant.

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