Spiritual Hiccups - And Also Many Animals

Sometimes when I am reading the Daily Lectionary texts, a line will jump out at me.  There is not always any rhyme or reason to this.  Many of the psalms appear over and over in the daily readings, and I have read them repeatedly.  But then one day a verse grabs me that had not before.  Today I was reading Psalm 36.  Near the middle, as it is speaking of God's faithfulness, righteousness, and judgments, suddenly this line jarred me.  "You save humans and animals alike, O LORD."

Not only am I not sure why this line touched me today, but neither am I sure what the line is doing in this psalm.  It doesn't seem much connected to the other things said there.  There is nothing else about animals in the psalm.  Did the psalmist simply need something to pair with humans to make the poetry come out right?

I don't know, but this is not the only place in Scripture where animals make, to my ear, an odd entrance.  My favorite is the ending of the book of Jonah.  Jonah is angry at God for sparing the city of Nineveh after the people repented in response to Jonah's prophecy.  In the very last sentence of the book, God says to Jonah, "And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?"

And also many animals?  That's what God pulls out for the grand finale of the closing argument?  That's supposed to make Jonah more sympathetic when he was upset that God hadn't slaughtered men, women, and children?

Sometimes people of faith can act as though everything in creation except us is an unimportant afterthought.  Despite Scripture verses  saying that all creation awaits redemption (see Romans 8:18-25), Christians often speak as if salvation were simply about our souls being whisked off to be with God while creation itself gets "left behind."  But Jesus says not even a sparrow's demise escapes God's notice.  And the psalmist insists that God "saves humans and animals alike."

It makes me wonder if we can truly be people of faith without considering ourselves a part of and intimately intertwined with all creation. 

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Spiritual Hiccups - Conflict in the Congregation

In the book of Acts, Luke presents a picture of the early Church that at times is remarkable, idealized, and almost utopian, but at other times that Church must deal with problems and conflicts that fly in the face of that idealized picture.  And so at one moment we hear that all believers shared all their belongings and property to help those in need, but then we hear about some believers who lied in order to hide some of their assets.  And despite the report that "there was not a needy person among them," today's reading tells us that Hellenist believers complained about Hebrew believers neglecting their widows, widows being some of the most vulnerable people in that society.

I've long suspected that Luke is doing two things by giving us these varying portraits of that first Christian community.  On the one hand he insists that a Spirit filled community can indeed live in ways that vividly present God's coming reign to the world, in ways that are remarkable and quite different from the ways of the world.  But Luke also knows that the faith community is not immune to the brokenness of the world.  The ways of the world will creep into the community and so the Church must be innovative and creative in maintaining the peace, unity, and purity we are called to in Christ.

Little is known about the conflict in today's reading.  Perhaps the "Hebrews" are Aramaic speaking locals while the "Hellenists" are Greek speaking Jews not originally from Palestine.  But whoever these groups are, they are different enough that these differences have become a source of division.  One can feel superior or inferior.  One can be "better" Jews than the other.  (Recall that all these first Christians still think of themselves as Jews.)  One can practice the faith "better" than the other.

Whatever the particulars, an Us-Them problem undermines the unity of the Church.  And so seven Spirit filled men, apparently Hellenists based on their Greek sounding names, are commissioned to special service so that divisions will not threaten the Church.  (We Presbyterians draw our ordained office of Deacon from this story.)

The book of Acts will go on to wrestle with an even bigger Us-Them problem, that of Jews and Gentiles.  That division has longed ceased to be much of an issue for the Church, but there is no shortage of issues and labels with which to divide ourselves.  Many churches in America are still racially segregated.  There are scores of denominations.  Some congregations are working class and others filled with professional sorts.  And even within congregations divisions arise over worship and music styles, political issues, the types of ministries the congregation should support, and so on.

In having to deal with conflict and division, it seems we are not so different from those first Christians in Acts.  But in terms of how we deal with conflict, too often we look less like them.  Too often, a real desire for unity and the leading of the Spirit seem absent.  Much like the partisan politics of our day, we want our side to win.  We want unity achieved by getting others to conform to our way.

Despite its reports of an idealized Church that seems an impossible dream to many of us, the book of Acts does not shy from speaking of the conflicts and divisions that arise in every human community.  But it does insist that these conflicts need not tear us apart, and they do not require winners and losers.  However they do require allowing the creative wind of the Spirit to blow through our communities and show us new and better ways.

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Spiritual Hiccups - One of Those Days

Psalm 123:3  
Have mercy upon us, O LORD, 
    have mercy upon us, 
for we have had more than enough 
    of contempt.

Ever have one of those days when it seems that what you do makes no difference, that it simply doesn't matter?  I imagine that all of us have them occasionally.  I certainly do.  Such feelings are not always "reasonable."  They can arise on days when nothing terrible has happened.  Maybe it's some cumulative impact, or maybe I just got up on the wrong side of the bed. 

Regardless, there are times when it is easy to resonate with the words of today's psalm.  While I'm not feeling like the object of anyone's contempt, it's just one of those days.  And it would sure be nice if God showed up in some significant way.

God often does.  Some of my most vivid spiritual experiences have emerged on the heels of some of my lowest moments.  Sometimes I wonder if it takes such moments, times when I feel vulnerable, for God to get through to me.  When things are going well I am whirring along, often too busy for God.  Sometimes it seems to require "one of those days," even a succession of them, to peel back the insulation of busyness, activity, and "competence" that shields me from God.

It can happen in other relationships as well.  People can get caught up in their routines, going through the motions of life while failing to nurture the relationships that really matter.  Sometimes it takes something to jar us out of such routines, to strip away the insulation that keeps us from actually being there with and for the other.

It's one of those days, God, and I've had enough of it.  Have mercy on me.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Primitive Faith

Today's reading from 1 Samuel relates the misfortunes that befall  Philistines who have captured the Ark of the Covenant in battle.  Each town where the ark takes up residence is soon struck with plagues of tumors and such.  It's the kind of thing that has little contact to the version of Christian faith I've lived around all my life, although it might be right at home in an Indiana Jones movie.

This is most surely a primitive religious story featuring a religious artifact with strange and dangerous powers, an artifact with the power both to curse and to bless.  But I am way too sophisticated for such a primitive religion or the primitive god it implies.  I have no use for a god who is dangerous or unpredictable.  My god must be reasonable, rational, and benign.  I want a god who will improve the quality of my life but make few demands on me in the process.

I am quite certain that some biblical notions of God are very much colored by the violent, tribal, holy-war world view of the ancient Near East.  It is to be expected that they saw God in ways colored by ways of life they took for granted.  But does that make my "sophisticated, enlightened" view of God any more accurate than theirs.  Indeed, sometimes my sophisticated, enlightened view of God envisions a god who is all but superfluous to everyday life in the 21st century.  My god is often relegated to spiritual pick-me-up duties, along with the occasional get-me-out-of-a-jam request. 

Sometimes I wonder if a "primitive" view of God might not have something to recommend over my own.

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Sunday Sermon video - Trinity and Creation: Unflattening God

 

Sermons on YouTube have better video quality.

Sunday Sermon audio - Trinity and Creation: Unflattening God

Sunday Sermon text - Trinity and Creation: Unflattening God

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; (Matthew 28:16-20)

Trinity and Creation: Unflattening God

James Sledge                                            June 19, 2011, Trinity Sunday

On Trinity Sunday I’m reminded of something my favorite Theology professor, Doug Ottati said a number of times.  “Functionally, most of us are Unitarians.”  He wasn’t talking about what we “believe,” but how we actually conceive of God.  We may sing “God in three persons, blessed Trinity,” we tend to reduce God to one of those persons.

Since it’s a trinity, there are at least three possibilities.  Some folks become Unitarians of the Spirit.  Quakers tend in this direction.  For such folks, God is conceived as Spirit. 

Others go with a Unitarianism of the Son.  For them, God is Jesus.  Their prayers are addressed to Jesus, and his name is invoked repeatedly in these prayers.

But among Presbyterians, and probably most mainline Protestants, the hands-down favorite is Unitarianism of the Father.  God is Father.  Some pray to “ Father God.”  It isn’t that Jesus or the Spirit are discounted.  They are important, but they are junior partners.  The Father is God and, Jesus and the Spirit are derivative in some way. 

This Unitarian tendency is understandable.  The Trinity is profoundly unpictureable.  But I think this is the Trinity’s true genius. 

It insists on a God beyond our ability to fully picture or understand, a God who will not easily be manipulated or managed for our own purposes.

One of the fundamental problems with religion is that it wants to manage God and God’s blessings.  Religion tells you what you need to do or believe in order to get on God’s good side, to be saved, to get rich, to go to heaven, and so on.  But this attempt to manage God requires flattening God into something manageable.  It requires reducing God to something more like us, who conforms to our ideas and ways of seeing the world.

This flattening, managing tendency impacts how people handle passages such as the Creation account we heard this morning.   Some hear straightforward history and science.  Others hear a mythic description of the grand ordering of the cosmos.  But in both cases, the story is often slotted into preconceived notions about God and flattened so that it fits whatever religious management strategies we prefer.  Rarely is the story allowed to do its deep, theological work of opening us to a God who is, finally, beyond our conception.

The opening of Genesis is epic poetry, liturgy and praise, having more in common with the Psalms than with history, science, myth or philosophy.  And contrary to religious management tendencies that imagine it written for our use, it is addressed to Hebrew exiles in Babylon, at a moment of extreme crisis.  The promises of Yahweh their God seem to have failed.  The Babylonian gods have proved mightier.  Jerusalem and God’s Temple lay in ruins; God’s chosen people are captives.  Their very survival as a people is threatened, and their understandings of their God and their relationship to that God have been shattered.

In the midst of this crisis, the Israelites care nothing of how long it took for the world to be created, how old it is, or how it is ordered or structured.  What they need is a new and expanded understanding of God, of God’s relationship to Creation and to them. 

The poem seeks to provide that.  And while it shares elements common to the creation myths of Babylon and other Near Eastern peoples, those elements are dramatically recast to give a remarkable, new picture of God.  This God looks vastly different from typical, Near Eastern gods resembling human rulers and potentates.  This God does not need Creation or feed on its produce.  This God is no local deity, but a God who speaks into being the vast cosmos that is the object of God’s care and delight.  Over and over the poem repeats the refrain, And God saw that it was good.  The “good” here is not a utilitarian good.  This is an aesthetic good.  God saw that it was grand, glorious, wonderful, beautiful.  This wonderful creation abounds with the blessing and fertility God speaks as creation joyfully responds to its Creator. 

Finally God creates humans.  They are spoken into existence just like the rest of creation, but there is something different here.  Humanity bears the image of God.  The language is odd, and it gets mangled in translation.  Humanity is spoken of in the singular.  So God created the human in his image.  In the image of God he created him (her, it).  But then the poem shifts to the plural.  Male and female God created them.  Whatever this image of God is about it isn’t about maleness or femaleness.  God’s image applies to the human creature.  But sexual diversity exists within the creatures. 

Over the centuries there has been much debate about where in humanity the image of God resides; reason, language, and self-awareness are all suggested.  But the poem speaks of none of these, only of dominion over the earth, authority over all God has spoken into being.

And here those religious management tendencies kick in.  People imagine creation as ours to do with what we will, to bend to our will, to exploit, little more than a resource at our disposal.  But this requires flattening God back into a human looking ruler who exercises dominion and authority as we humans do.  But the God pictured in the poem does not coerce or exploit.  This God only speaks, calls, and blesses.

And on this Trinity Sunday, we also hear Jesus, God the Son, say, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”  But consider the way Jesus exercises authority; a gentle grace that beckons the hungry and thirsty to come to him; a patient grace that invites us to discover our true humanity in the ways he lives and teaches.  Here truly is the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. 

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.  Here is the Old Testament image for God and for Israel’s kings.  God’s exercises dominion and authority as a caring shepherd.

But if God’s understanding of authority is surprising, perhaps the most striking and radical element of the Creation poem is Sabbath.  Sabbath evolved into a day of worship and a rule to follow, but here Sabbath is simply about rest.  God rests – not because God is tired or worn out, but because things are complete.  This God who rules by gracious invitation exhibits no anxieties that creation will spiral out of control.  Which would seem to say to us made in God’s image that the world will not come apart if we do not exert maximum effort 24/7.  Creation is safely in God’s hands and we are free truly to rest.[1]

Sabbath is a radical idea in our anxious world where endless striving is the preferred way.  Sabbath blurs the distinctions between rich and poor, powerful and powerless.  In the true rest of Sabbath, no one lords over another; no one competes with another; no one seeks advantage over another.  All are at peace because all are at rest.

“Not possible,” we say.  And we flatten God back into a manageable deity who fits into our image of how the world should work, a god who plays by the world’s rules, a god who blesses our plans and schemes rather than inviting the world into the wonderful, new possibilities of God’s dominion and authority. 

Trinity.  God is Spirit.  God is Son.  God is Father.  God is all of these which means that God cannot be reduced to any of these, nor flattened into a generic go we carry around in our pockets to use as we see fit.  God is too big, too beyond our grasp, too wonderful; too grand, beautiful, and glorious for us to do anything other than stand in awe, to lose ourselves in worship and praise.  And finally, to give thanks that Jesus invites us, and the Spirit fits us, to enter into this unpictureable relationship that is the Trinity.

Thanks be to the Triune God!

---

[1] See Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982) pp. 35-36.

Spiritual Hiccups - Beware of... Pastors?

I follow someone on Twitter who tweets under the name nojunkjustjesus.  This person doesn't seem to have much use for traditional church congregations and denominations.  The tone is a little shrill and over the top.  There is also a lot of over-generalizing about the Church.  But I keep following this person because there is a grain of truth in the tirades against people like me and the denominations and congregations we serve. 

In today's gospel reading, Jesus warns his followers, "Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets."  In Jesus' day, "scribes" were teachers and experts in the Law.  They were esteemed religious and community leaders.  And in that sense, they occupied a role not so different from  the traditional one many pastors have filled in their communities. 


Things are rapidly changing in our culture, but many congregations still expect their pastor to have connections to the Chamber of Commerce, participate in one of the local service clubs, and give invocations at civic events.  Given this civic standing of pastors, they were often expected to drive a certain sort of car and to dress in the same attire as other important local business folks.  

Change a few words in the above quote from Jesus, and he might be heard talking about pastors.  That's a bit unnerving, for a pastor.  "Beware of the pastors, who like to walk around in long robes and love to be greeted with respect..."


I suspect that most pastors enter their vocation out of a true sense of calling, seeking to live out their faith.  But the call to follow Jesus and work for the kingdom he proclaims is often in tension with other calls, calls to make a living, to provide for a family, to support a congregation and denomination the pastor loves, and so on.  Add to these a little natural human ambition and ego, and it can be very difficult to separate God's call from other motives. 


Jesus said, "Beware of..."  I wonder what he warn us about if he walked our streets today.


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Spiritual Hiccups - Risky Faith

I've been pondering a sermon for June 26, one based primarily on the Genesis story of God "testing" Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his only son Isaac.  It is a story rich with possibilities, but to be honest, it is a frightening story as well.   Does God really test in such a manner?  Would God ask such a thing?

It seems to me that many Americans, both those in the Church and those who are "spiritual but not religious," envision a God who is extremely safe.  God is sweet and kindly, a source of warmth, blessing and contentment.  No wonder so many of us recoil at the line in Psalm 147 a notion found repeatedly in the Bible, "The LORD takes pleasure in those who fear him."

When the disciples receive the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, this wonderful gift emboldens them, grants them amazing powers, and compels them to proclaim the message of Jesus.  But the Spirit was not the nice gift of a doting grandfather.  This gift would turn their lives upside down and would place them in dire situations where they would have to decide between fulfilling their call or saving their lives.

Many of us think of Jesus as cancelling out all those Old Testament images of a God who tests Abraham by asking him to kill his own son.  But Jesus demands that those who follow him give up their own lives.  Paul insists that to be in Christ is for the old self to die.  And in The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaks against the "cheap grace" of a sweet, benign God.  Grace is costly, he insists.  Its cost is seen in the cross demanded of Jesus.  And its cost is seen in Christ's call.  "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

None of this is to deny or diminish God's grace and providential care.  But the biblical God is not to be taken lightly.  God's love calls us into a relationship of risky trusting.  Our testing may be nothing like Abraham's, but we are tested every day as we must decide whether to follow the path of faithful, trusting discipleship that takes up the cross, or whether we will trust in the safe God of our own devising.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Reversal

In today's Old Testament reading, Hannah takes her young son, Samuel, to leave him with Eli to be raised in God's service.  The formerly barren Hannah had promised to dedicate her son as a Nazirite if the LORD would grant her prayer for a child.

After she presents Samuel to the priest, she offers a prayer or song, one that seems to be a model for Mary's song/prayer known to many as the Magnificat.  The same themes of reversal that Mary sings are found here.  The power of the mighty is broken while the feeble are strengthened.  Those who were full now struggle to find food while the hungry grow fat. 

Jesus also speaks of reversal in his ministry, of the first being last, of sinners and prostitutes going into the kingdom ahead of the devout. 

Oddly, despite the Bible regularly trumpeting this theme of reversal, religion seems most often to be focused on the status quo.  In virtually every culture history has known, religion ends up a partner in maintaining the status quo.  Despite the Bible's words on bringing down the powerful and lifting up the poor and oppressed, religion, including the Christian Church, very often becomes an ally with the rich and powerful, as well as an enemy of the poor and oppressed.  Christian theologians once provided religious defenses of slavery.  One esteemed theologian from my own Presbyterian seminary was still arguing that the Bible supported slavery years after the Civil War.  More recently, the South African practice of apartheid was formally sanctioned by church theology.

It seems that there is a strong conserving tendency in the human creature's innate religiosity.  But God's reign does not arrive via conserving, but via radical change, by everything being made new.

Just about every Sunday I pray, "Thy kingdom come..."  But often it seems there is an unspoken caveat.  "Just keep things pretty much as they are." 

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Sunday Sermon video - Body Parts

Spiritual Hiccups - Passing Down the Faith

A verse in Psalm 145 says to God, "One generation shall laud your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts."  The psalmist seems to assume that those who have experienced God's grace and favor, who praise and worship God, will not be able to help sharing their enthusiasm for God with the next generation.  The psalmist clearly never met the modern, American Christian.

Anyone who has paid close attention to life in the Church has likely noticed large numbers of parents who are active in Church but whose children are absent.  I have heard some of these parents say that they think faith is a personal choice and they don't want to force it on their children.  And so I know of many children still in elementary school who decide for themselves whether or not to "go to church."

Now if this is starting to sound like the self-serving whining of a pastor who wants more children involved in church programing, that's not where I'm going with this.  I'm more interested in what this situation says about the faith of their parents.  Many of these same parents require their children to participate in sports and other "enrichment" activities.  They certainly require their children to attend school.  This would seem to suggest that these parents view education and enrichment activities as essential components to leading a productive, fulfilling life.  But Christian faith seems not to be so essential.

In her book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church, Kenda Dean notes that the vague, banal notions of Christianity uncovered in the "National Study of Youth and Religion" - something the study labeled "moralistic, therapeutic, deism" - were not invented by these young people.  They learned to be "almost Christian" in the Church.  They got their vague notions of faith from a Church that had watered down the faith over the years to the point that many parents understand it to be less important than youth soccer or piano lessons.

And I must confess that I both grew up in and - even as a pastor - too often still proclaim the message of this vague faith that has little to do with actual life, that matters less to real life than music lessons or Little League.  I have to admit that I've been quite comfortable with a faith that is not incarnated into daily living, that is no more than a set of beliefs and notions.  I have my own tendency to be "almost Christian," to believe but still be indistinguishable from the culture, with no discernible faith practices that embody the way of living Jesus taught.

A lot of Mainline Protestant congregations worry a lot about Christian Eduction programs for children.  We are forever trying out new curriculum and models for the Sunday School hour, as though 45 minutes a week on 2 or 3 Sundays a month for 9 months of the year is going to shape and form people into something other than almost Christians.  If anything, it seems that we adults are the ones who need to relearn what it means to be Christian.  Maybe then we would be able to sing with the psalmist about one generation lauding God's works to another.

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