Spiritual Hiccups - The Social Contract

When we train church officers here so they can take communion to our members who are unable to attend worship, I almost always tell a story I heard many years ago.  A pastor and church elder had taken the Lord's Supper to an elderly woman who had been very active in her congregation for years but whose failing health now prevented her. As the pastor repeated the words of institution (found in today's epistle reading) and handed her the bread, she closed her eyes and began to describe people sitting in the sanctuary.  "I see Mabel sitting in the choir loft, and I see..." 

Even though this was "private communion," the woman correctly sensed that it was a communal event and not a private devotional experience.  As she took communion, she saw the body of Christ.  That is, she saw the gathered individuals who made up her congregation, the living body of Christ of which she was a part.

I have often heard people understand the Apostle Paul's words, "For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves," as referring to the presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper itself.  And while my tradition does speak of a genuine, spiritual presence in the meal, the body Paul speaks of is not the bread.  He is addressing divisions in the Corinthian congregation, and he sees those particularly present in the way they hold the Lord's Supper, with those who arrive early not waiting for those who cannot, for those with plenty not sharing with those who have little.  And just a bit later in his letter, Paul makes explicit his understanding of the congregation as the body, insisting that each of them is an integral and essential part of that body.

We Americans have long had a strong individualistic streak in us, but for much of our history this was tempered by a strong sense of community, by the notion of a "social contract" of which all were a part.  But this social contract seems to have faded in recent decades, and our the dark side of our individualism has run rampant.  The causes of this are likely many, but I have to think that the privatization of faith has played a role. 

The standard practice for serving the Lord's Supper in the congregations where I grew up was to pass plates of bread and trays of cups down the pews in a manner similar to passing offering plates.  Theologically speaking, we could speak of a communal act of members serving one another.  In practice, however, it became a very private event.  When I first became a pastor, I watched this with some care, and I noticed that people generally served themselves.  They took the plate or tray from the person next to them, took bread or cup for themselves, and then handed to the next person.  And rarely did anyone look at anyone else.

At that church, I tried to institute a practice of each person speaking to the person they handed the plate saying, "The bread of life," or the tray saying, "The cup of salvation."  But I found that people were very resistant.  They did not want to look at or speak to one another.  Sometimes I could not even get the church elders, the ones who took the plates and trays from the table to the pews, to start things off with "The bread of life."  Even though I had talked about it with them in meetings; even though they were given written instructions explaining the process, many would not speak when they started the plate down a pew.

The notion that faith can be mostly about personal belief and piety is a strange one.  Jesus was clear that the core of being God's people was an absolute love of God paired with love of neighbor.  The two are inseparable.  Yet in modern Christian practice, we have often separated them.

This surely has had a negative impact on our society at large, this loss of faith as a force that binds us together and encourages us to sacrifice for the good of the other.  When religious people lament faith's diminishing role in our culture, they usually talk about prayer in school and so forth.  But I see those as minor issues compared to a loss that was not imposed on the Church from the outside.  No one told us we had to turn faith into a private affair.  We did that on our own. 

Fortunately there are signs that a shift is underway.  More and more of us are recognizing that faith cannot be practiced in private.  It must be lived out in communities of practice that help form us into the body of Christ we are called to be.  And just as we cannot celebrate the Lord's Supper without discerning the body - the larger faith community - neither can we fully experience salvation in private.  The healing, wholeness, and newness that Jesus means by salvation always involves the other.  And I can't help but think that if those in the Church truly experienced this salvation, it would have profound impacts on recovering a renewed sense of a social contract in our nation as a whole.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Longing

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
   so my soul longs for you, O God.    
My soul thirsts for God,
   for the living God. 

I'm reading an interesting book called The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality.  The author speaks of all people having a spirituality, though he does not mean what some people mean by that term.  He says our spirituality is what we do with and how we channel the fire inside us.  All of us are driven by some sort of passion, desire, restlessness or fire.  Our spirituality is how we understand, channel, tap into, squelch, or navigate this energy.

Fire and energy were not much a part of my early faith experience.  "Decently and in order" is a favorite Presbyterian axiom, and the church I knew growing up was big on order, logic, and rationality, with little evidence of passion or fire.  And I suspect that this sort of experience has something to do with the many folk who profess to be "spiritual but not religious."  They presume (incorrectly, I believe) that religion is stifling to the passion they associate spirituality.

Certainly there are many examples of faith communities that do seem stifling to passion and fire.  Yet when I think of the many people who have died for the faith over the centuries, surely they were animated by remarkable passion that enabled such sacrifice. 

I wonder sometimes about the passions and fires that animate our society these days.  They are many and varied.  People have all sorts of causes and passions: the environment, ending poverty, stopping abortion, political ideologies, personal pleasure, making money, looking out for number one, patriotic fervor, and so on.  And I suspect that some of the partisan division in our day comes from the deficient spiritualities channeling such passions. Sometimes these passions sweep us up and lead us to foolish excesses that damage community and ignore civility.  But many of us have gone the other way and buried our passions so deep inside ourselves that we are more prone to depression than excess.  And we contribute to our society's dysfunction by our numbness, by defecting in place.

We Mainline Christians, who have sometimes shunted fire and passion aside in our religious communities, would do well to acknowledge our need for passion and longing, to recognize that any true Christian spirituality has to do with the powerful, dangerous, yet life giving power of the Holy Spirit.  We cannot simply do things decently and in order.  We must also be on fire for God.  We must thirst for the living God.

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Sermon video - Invited into Blessedness

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Spiritual Hiccups - Who Am I, and Why Am I Here?

I have a lot of thoughts bouncing around in my head this morning, and when that happens, I always wonder if God is connected to any of them.  An elder in my church, in the context of a discussion on declining church attendance, wondered if congregations weren't asking the wrong question.  Rather than, "Why aren't people coming here on Sunday?" perhaps we should ask, "Why would anyone want to be a Christian these days?"

At the same time, I heard someone from another church complaining that the reason for decline in our Presbyterian denomination is that we have no real message, that we are afraid to call our members to the hard work of discipleship.

I wonder if there isn't a common thread to the comments from these two folks.  Do we Christians have a distinct enough identity that it has any real meaning in our world?  And if we don't have an identity, can we have a message?

In today's epistle, Paul writes to the church in Corinth, "'All things are lawful,' but not all things are beneficial. 'All things are lawful,' but not all things build up. Do not seek your own advantage, but that of the other."  The Corinthian congregation was apparently one with great energy but also great excesses, and some of them embraced their freedom in Christ to the extreme.  The particular issue here is eating meat sacrificed to idols.  (Much meat sold in Paul's day had been.)  Some Corinthians argued that since there was only one true God, what difference did it make where the meat came from.  Paul would grant them the logic of their argument, but he was more concerned about how these actions might impact others.  If their freedom had a negative impact on other believers or on the image of the community of faith, one should not exercise that freedom, says Paul.

Our culture is enamored with freedom and "my rights."  And even though the public is disgusted with the partisan gridlock in Washington, we keep it going by electing those we think will "protect my interests."  We rarely follow Paul's advice to seek the advantage of the other over our own.  Our individualism has grown so dominant, that we seemingly cannot.

Christianity in America has very often adopted the same individualistic mindset and in the process become a primarily private thing.  And the more private it becomes, the less possibility is has to give us a distinct identity.  We look no different from the world around us, and so our lives bear no witness to the possibility of a new life in Christ.

The Church did not set out to lose its identity.  But over the centuries, thinking of American as a "Christian nation" led to thinking that being a good citizen was perfectly compatible with faith and, further, that living as a good citizen in America would shape a person as a Christian.  All the Church need do was have worship and fill in a few of the finer doctrinal points.  Of course the problem with such a setup is that it depends on the culture keeping up its side of the bargain.  But our culture decided decades ago that it was just fine without us.  It stopped doing things to prop up the Church, and in the old, mainline denominations (those most tied to the culture), the decline has been steady ever since.

To be sure, the culture has lost out as well.  Faith once served as a restraint on the worst tendencies of individualism, tempering it with a commitment to community, to the neighbor.  Most certainly the decline of faith communities has contributed to a weakening of the social bonds that had helped balance my freedoms with the other's needs and well being.

But there is no going back to the 1950s, however appealing that might be to some.  Rather, people of faith must do the work of defining who we are in this time and place.  We have actually been given huge opportunity to consider afresh what it means to be a follower of Jesus, to think about what it means to be faithful in this age.  And then we will need to be able to transmit this identity to others.

I am more and more convinced that this will have two parts. The first is a deepening spirituality taught and practiced in our congregations.  We need to learn or relearn how to draw close to God, to listen for the Spirit, and discover our true humanity made in God's image.  And this will necessarily be paired with becoming communities of love who work for the good of the other.  People will not simply go to this church on Sunday.  Instead they will be the body of Christ together.

This work will be harder for older, established congregations than it might be for those less bound to old patterns forged during our old alliance with the culture.  But easy or hard, this is the work that is before us.  And in Christ, we are more than capable of the task.

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Sermon audio - Invited into Blessedness

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Sermon text - Invited into Blessedness

Exodus 20:1-20

Invited into Blessedness

James Sledge                          World Communion-October 2, 2011

Even in a world where less and less people attend church or participate in any sort of religious community, most people know about the 10 Commandments.  They may not be able to name them, but they’ve heard about them, seen pictures of tablets with Roman numerals on them, perhaps with Moses holding them.  And they've likely heard of the court cases over whether or not the commandments can be displayed on public buildings. 

Now I have no interest in talking about the proper boundaries between church and state, but I do think that dragging the 10 Commandments into our culture wars both trivializes and misunderstands them.  I hear people say that placing the 10 Commandments on a courthouse wall is appropriate because they’re the basis for our civil law, but that only makes me wonder if they’ve have actually read them.  Only three of the ten correspond to laws that we enforce.  And our culture is grounded on violating some of them.

24/7 is a big catchphrase in our society.  Factories run 24/7 because it’s inefficient to shut down.  Some stores and restaurants stay open 24/7, and those that do generally advertise that fact proudly.  And even those who do attempt to keep Sabbath still expect stores, movies, gas stations, and places to eat to stay open for them.  We can’t even imagine a society where everyone stopped and rested for a full 24 hours.

And if we have subverted Sabbath with our 24/7 culture, we have actually made coveting a cornerstone of our economy. 

Every day we are bombarded with advertising, much of it designed to make us covet.  Our economy depends on convincing enough of us that we need more and more, that if our neighbor has newer and better stuff, we should want it.  And we should be willing to go into debt, worry constantly about money, work more hours, and become stressed out so that we can have it.

The fact is that the 10 Commandments are not primarily a set of rules for a well run society.  That societies need laws against stealing and murder, and to insure that justice is based on the truth is so obvious that all sorts of folks have figured this out.  Cultures that never heard of the 10 Commandments had rules against murder, theft, and false witness.

No, what is distinct about the 10 Commandments is not a few commonsense laws.  It is the different sort of society envisioned in those other commandments.  Like the Kingdom Jesus proclaims, the 10 Commandments describe an alternative community very different from the world that we live in.

This radically alternative community is perhaps best seen in those opening commands about other gods, idols, and misusing God’s name.  These commands do not form the basis for any civil law.  Rather, they stand as an alternative to the distorted cultures and societies that we humans construct.

“God bless America.”  The phrase is spoken regularly by politicians left and right.  It was a hugely popular song during World War II and still is today.  On the face of it, asking God’s blessings on our nation seems perfectly appropriate.  But while I do hope God blesses America, I’m sure that in our asking, we frequently transgress some of those opening commandments, perhaps all of them.

If that startles you, I’m not surprised.  Many of us assume that the first few commandments are not that hard to keep.  After all, we don’t live in a world where there are that many god choices.  No temple to Baal or Zeus or Artemis down the street, and the only idols many of us have seen are in museums.  And while language has gotten a lot coarser in recent years, many of us try not to take God’s name in vain.

But in fact, these opening commandments are about where our ultimate trust and loyalties lie, and who we think is really in charge.  In the world where the 10 Commandments are given, “other gods” were about hedging your bets, insurance.  Many Israelites thought they could worship Yahweh, and still offer a little something to the local fertility god just to be on the safe side, to insure that the grain would produce.  We don't put much stock in fertility gods, but we know all about hedging bets and insurance.

For ancient Israel, idols were often a part of this insurance, but the prohibition against idols isn’t just about other gods.  It prohibits images of any kind, including ones of Yahweh.  Yahweh is not like other gods.  Yahweh will not be managed or used.  Yahweh will not be packaged and brought out when needed.  Yahweh remains mysterious, unpictureable, undomesticated, wild and free.  Israel can only conform to Yahweh, not the other way round. 

Taking Yahweh’s name in vain emphasizes this.  Our translation gets much closer to what the Hebrew actually says.  “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of Yahweh your God.”  This issue here isn’t foul language.  It is seeking to enlist God in our causes.  But this God will not be enlisted.  Yahweh will not bless Israel or curse her enemies to suit Israel’s plans, nor will Yahweh bless America or curse our enemies to suit our plans.  Yahweh is not on call.  Rather Yahweh calls Israel to find new life according to God’s plans.

In the same way, Jesus does not follow along with us, promising to bless us or make things go well for us because we believe in him.  Rather, Jesus invites us to follow him along a way that the world thinks foolish, a way of self-giving that loves the neighbor, even when that neighbor is our enemy.  He invites us to join him in the way of the cross. 

I think I’ve shared with you before something my wife has posted on our refrigerator door.  It’s a quote the singer Bono used at a Washington, DC prayer breakfast some years ago.  "Stop asking God to bless what you are doing.  Get involved in what God is doing because it is already blessed.”

In the 10 Commandments, in the call of Jesus, we are invited into the blessedness that God is already doing.  It is not a blessedness that easily conforms to our plans or desires.  It is a blessedness experienced in Sabbath, in the realization that the world is safely in God’s hands and will not spin out of control if we stop and truly rest, if we disconnect, if we become quiet and still.  It is a blessedness that comes in aligning our lives with God's promised new day, with the hope of a new, restored world, a world we enact at the table. 

At the Lord’s table, all are invited: the well, the sick, the poor, the stranger, the American, the foreigner, every race, family, and tribe.  At the table, all are one; all are guests; all are welcome.  At the table, Jesus is our host, and he does not honor the divisions of the broken world that we construct.  At the table, all boundaries between us and them disappear. 

This table is the promise that God will not leave the world to our foolishness nor be drawn into our petty schemes.  Instead God graciously invites us into something wonderfully new, a transformed world governed by love, a world where the Holy Spirit reshapes us so that we become like Christ.  Come to the table; come from east and west, north and south, from every land, race, and culture.  Come to the feast.  Come and be made one in Christ.

Spiritual Hiccups - Choosing and Unchoosing

I vaguely remember a children's song based on today's gospel reading.  It had a line that repeated several times.  "The wise man built his house upon the rock..."  And there was a corresponding line that went, "The foolish man built his house upon the sand..."  I can remember the catchy tune, but I'm pretty sure the lesson of the song was lost on me.  Oh I heard that you should build your house on rock and not sand, but I'm not sure I made any real connection to faith.  Object lessons and metaphors are generally lost on concrete-thinking children.  Of course I'm not sure all that many adults have bought into Jesus' message.  We may sing of Christ as our solid rock, but we are sometimes quite good at ignoring what he says is a solid foundation, to hear his words and act on them.

It isn't that we don't want help from Jesus finding something solid and dependable in life.  Many of us crave a sense of stability and certainty.  We live in a world where many of the things we've counted on seem unsure.  Everything is changing, and not always for the better. 

Jesus certainly offers us plenty of specifics.  Today's reading is the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, and in it Jesus has clearly laid out how we are to live, teaching on everything from personal piety to money to forgiveness to the law to judging others to putting God first in our lives.  He says that actually doing his teachings will anchor our lives firmly, but in our day, it is easy for Jesus' teachings to get lost in a dizzying array of other voices and choices.

Americans have long been big on individualism and have valued making our own choices.  Nonetheless, the number of choices now facing us are mind boggling compared to 50 years ago.  There used to be an old joke about getting phone from the phone company (the only place you could get one way back when).  It went, "You can have any color phone you want as long as it's black."  I didn't have any choice about going to church as a child, or as a teenager for that matter.  And the culture I grew up in worked pretty hard to limit the other available choices on a Sunday morning.  The stores weren't open, the movies weren't showing, no sports were played, and you would get dirty looks from your neighbor if you cut your grass.

I have not desire to go back to those "good old days,"  but we do face a difficulty that some previous generations did not.  To choose Jesus we have to unchoose some other things, many other things actually.  And we live in a culture that constantly tells us we can have more and more, that we should have more and more.  Our TVs get hundreds of channels.  We flip around with our remotes trying to watch multiple shows at one time.  And the TV manufacturers are trying to help us, bringing out new models that show two, three, four programs at once.

Even when we want to follow Jesus, so many other things beckon us.  I'll take home a book I know I should read but then I don't want to miss that TV show, and I need to get to bed and rest but Colbert is on.  And I need to spend more time in prayer but another email just came in on the smartphone, and I need to check in on Twitter and Facebook or I might miss something. 

Parents over-schedule their children in sports and enrichment activities because they are afraid that those children might miss out on something valuable, on something they could need.  But Jesus talks about narrow gates and hard roads, about living in a particular way, which of course means not living in some other ways.

I sometimes wonder if a problem people have with Christianity is less that they don't want to choose Jesus, and more the realization that they don't want to unchoose all those other things.  Yet every choice requires unchoosing other options.  To choose one person as a spouse effectively eliminates millions of other possible choices.  Choosing to have children means to unchoose some other possibilities.  (Though we all know people who attempt to ignore these realities, who keep dating after they marry or take infant children with them to bars, fancy restaurants, and sporting events.)

I wonder if some of us aren't so frazzled all the time because we know well how to choose, but we've become very unpracticed at unchoosing.  No wonder our lives sometimes feel like they're falling down around us.  I wonder what things I need to unchoose in order to get my life on solid ground, on a firm foundation.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Walking the Walk

There is a quote from comedian Stephen Colbert making the rounds on Facebook today.  If you don't know Colbert, his Colbert Report features him of the host of a half hour comedy/"news" show where Colbert parodies conservative talk show hosts.  But while he feigns being an avowed, right-wing reactionary, in reality he is much more moderate.  And he is also a devout Catholic not afraid to let his faith make an appearance on the show (though often found in the opposite of the ridiculous things his character says). 

The line on Facebook was from a show a while back, and it says, "If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it."

Perhaps quite appropriately, today's gospel reading features Jesus saying, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”  It seems that "believing" in Jesus, if it does not lead to a changed way of living, does not count for much in the new day Jesus says he will bring.  At least according to these words, we can believe as hard as we want, but if we don't do God's will along with it, Jesus will say to us, "I never knew you; go away from me, you evil doers."

We Protestants have championed grace and faith over works to the degree that we sometimes act like what we do doesn't matter at all.  Jesus clearly thinks otherwise.  God's grace does claim us no matter what we have done, does invite us into restored relationship through no merit of our own.  But God's love and grace are given to us to draw us into a loving relationship with God where we will quite naturally show our love and gratitude in return.  If we truly love God we will want to please God, and will make efforts to do so.  But if we are simply "believing in Jesus" because we think it will get us something, we've missed the point entirely.

I suspect that some of the malaise and decline of traditional churches comes in part because there has not been enough evidence of new life, of walking the walk, for people to see much point in church.  I know a lot of long time church members who ring their hands a great deal over the declining number of people in the pews.  And being paid by people in pews, I confess to a certain amount of anxiety about this as well.  But if our congregations are not walking the walk, not doing God's will in the world, I don't know why God would not just leave us do our little thing, and pour out the Holy Spirit on those congregations and gatherings that are actually helping people find new, restored, Spirit-filled life as the living body of Christ in the world. 

God is working God's purposes out, but God does not need my denomination or yours to do so.  The body of Christ will still thrive, but it will be found wherever the faithful answer Christ's call, are equipped by the Spirit, and seek to do God's will in the world.  And the hope of God's coming Kingdom will continue to shine in the darkness.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Can God Rise Up?

“Because the poor are despoiled, 
   because the needy groan,
     I will now rise up,” says the LORD."

 Can my God "rise up?"  Can yours?  Or is my God simply a concept, a hope, a distant giver of blessing and perhaps life after death, but not a God who can rise up and defend the poor or correct wrongs?  Given some of the things sometimes attributed to God, such as Pat Robertson saying God sent an earthquake to Haiti as punishment for a deal with the devil, many Christians are understandably reluctant to see God actively at work in the world.  But what, then, can our God do?

If many modern Christians have little sense that God could or would act on the world stage, I'm not certain if that is the fault of the Church or of God.  Certainly the Church has contributed mightily to notions of a God interested in little more than our status when we die.  Certainly the Church has neglected Jesus' teachings on the Kingdom and our call to form people to show that Kingdom to the world.  But God can be awfully hard to spot at work in the world.  It is not surprising that very few people, even avowed Christians, are expecting God to act on behalf of the poor and needy and punish those who have neglected them.  I'm pretty sure the poor and needy would come in for a lot better treatment if people really thought God was paying attention on that count.

Of course this isn't simply a modern issue.  Perhaps we do find it easier to see God absent because we can understand the science behind earthquakes or hurricanes, but the fact is that people in biblical times were not so different from us in thinking God had taken a vacation.  The Old Testament is full of accounts where the rich and powerful lived with no worries about God stepping in and stopping their exploitation of the poor.  Sure, some of the prophets warned them that God's patience was running out, but no one had seen God do anything to back up such warnings in a long time. 

To be honest, I don't know why God acts - or more often doesn't act - in the manner often seen in the Bible and in our day.  If I were God, things would be different, but obviously I'm not.  And surely God knows what God is doing.

So what does faith look like in times when we have trouble seeing God at work in the world?  Is it simply a personal, interior thing?  I know folks who assume so.  Is it simply a matter or getting my beliefs in order so that I'm "saved," meaning that my name is on the heavenly guest list?  I know quite a few folks who think so.  Or is faith the assurance that God will act in God's time, and so living in expectation of that time?  As Jesus when he promises that God will grant justice to those who cry out, "And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"

Do we believe that God can rise up, that God can stir Godself and correct and restore a broken world?  And if we do not, what exactly do we believe in?

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Spiritual Hiccups - Worry, Anxiety, and Priorities

We live in anxious times.  People are worried about the economy.  They are worried about terrorism.  They are worried about partisan gridlock focused always on the next election and rarely on doing what is good for the country.  And I have observed something over the years.  We are rarely at our best when we are worried and anxious.  We become reactive and lose some of our capacity for thoughtful decision making.

One of the interesting places this can be seen is in small, dying church congregations.  The closer a congregation gets to death, the higher the anxiety tends to be.  And while this worry may provide an incentive to do something, observation and research have shown that the closer a congregation draws to death (similar things can be said of many other institutions), the more difficult it becomes for it to do the things that might help it revive.  When a congregation gets anxious and worried about survival, its actions tend to exacerbate rather than cure its crisis.

Jesus seems to think that worry comes from a lack of faith.  It is the product of chasing after things that cannot really give meaning and life, or it is an inability to trust that God will provide.  Our culture has worked very hard for decades to create the first kind of anxiety.  Much of the advertising aimed at Americans is designed to create anxiety, an anxiety that will be alleviated if only we purchase this product or that.  But as soon as we buy into this, we're hooked.  There is always one more product, or a newer and better version of the one we just bought.  And of course our very economy itself is now dependent on this anxiety cycle.  It requires ever increasing levels of consumer spending to sustain itself.

I wonder what Jesus would say to us if he came today?  The people he spoke to, telling them not to worry about what they would eat or drink or wear, lived in a more subsistence economy, with most people more focused on daily bread than on building wealth or deciding between a 40 inch or a 52 inch flat screen TV.  And what does it mean for us when Jesus says, "But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well."?  Will we get our new TV if we focus more on God's work?  Or do we stop worrying about TVs altogether when we are focused on building the world God envisions?

I do enough worrying of my own that I have a hard time answering such questions.  So perhaps I should simplify things by instead asking what it would look like for me to strive for God's kingdom and righteousness, and letting the other stuff sort itself out. 

Think how freeing that might be, to find a driving purpose in life not set by advertisers and not designed to hook us into a never ending cycle of consumption.  Think how good it might be to measured on nothing more than our faithfulness to God's cause.  Think how freeing from stress it could become content with God' provision.  I wonder if I can do more than think about it.

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Sermon audio - Remember Who You Are

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Sermon text - Remember Who You Are

Philippians 2:1-13

Remember Who You Are

James Sledge                                       September 25, 2011

Mohandas Gandhi, the famous Indian leader who led a non-violent campaign against British colonial rule in his country, is often quoted.  I see his quotes pop up on Twitter and Facebook with some regularity.  “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”  “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”  And here is another, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” 

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

The quote from Paul and the one from Gandhi seem incompatible.  If Christians have the mind of Christ then how could we be so unlike Christ.  And yet there is a ring of truth to what Gandhi said.  Too often, we Christian do look very little like Jesus.  Too often no one would see us and think they had caught a glimpse of Jesus, even though that is precisely what it means to wear the name “Christian.”

When you meet people from another country or culture, especially when it is a place you have never been, you are likely to draw some conclusions about that country or culture based on the people you meet.  The same is true when we Americans travel abroad.  The way American tourists act in foreign countries gives the people there an impression of what America is like. 

Gandhi was not a Christian, but he lived in a country that had been ruled by Christians for hundreds of years.  What he saw clearly had not impressed him all that much.  But Gandhi had bothered to learn about Jesus from the Bible, and so he realized that he liked Jesus very much.  It was Jesus’ followers that bothered him.  It reminds me a bit of the funny but troubling movie and book by Dan Merchant, Lord, Save Us from Your Followers.

In his letter to the Philippian Christians, Paul is pretty clear what it looks like when we have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus.  We do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, we regard others as better than ourselves, we worry about other people’s needs more than we do our own.

I’m not sure we need Paul to tell us this.  If we know the story of Jesus at all, we know that he cared little for earthly possessions, that he spent much of his time caring for others, that he hung out with the bottom tier of society, that he warned over and over about the dangers of wealth, that he was non-violent and called his followers to love their enemies and “turn the other cheek,” that he gave himself for others even to the point of death on a cross, and he called his followers to embrace this self-sacrificial way of the cross.  We know all of this, so why don’t we look more like Jesus?

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

I suppose one possible reason that we’re not more like Jesus is that it seems to us an impossible task.  If Jesus was sinless and perfect, what chance do we have to be the same?  I don’t think Paul expects the Philippians or us to become sinless or perfect, yet it is clear he thinks we can become very much like Christ.  And this is not simply a matter of us trying harder.  Rather it is about the new life that comes to us in Christ.

When Paul urges the Philippians saying, “If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete,” he is insisting that encouragement in Christ, consolation from love, and a sharing in the Spirit are indeed available to us.  The word translated “if” in our reading is a Greek form implying that this is indeed true.  Some translators even prefer to render what Paul writes, “Since there is encouragement in Christ, consolation in love, sharing in the Spirit,” and so on.

And this isn’t the only interesting translation issue in our verses.  When Paul quotes an early Christian hymn about the nature of Christ who did not regard equality with God something to be exploited but instead emptied himself, he introduces it with that phrase, Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.  But this could just as well be translated, Let the same mind be in you that you have in Christ Jesus. 

Given the way Paul often speaks of how we become something new in Christ, I actually think this the more likely translation.  Paul is not urging the Philippians or us to try harder to be like Jesus.  Instead he is calling them and us to live out who we actually are.  The good news that Paul declared long ago to the Philippians is they have become new people in Jesus.  They have died to sin and be reborn to new life.  God is now at work in them, enabling them both to will and to do the things that honor God.  Paul is not simply giving a motivational pep talk.  Rather he is urging them, and us, to remember who we truly are.

I was at a pastor’s conference a few weeks ago, and in one of the presentations they played a clip from the Disney movie, The Lion King, my pick for the all-time best Disney animated film.  If you've never seen it, the story revolves around Simba, the cub of the lion king, Mufasa.  Simba is heir to the throne, but Mufasa's brother Scar, the villain in the story, hatches a plot where Mufasa is killed and Simba is convinced that he is to blame for his father’s death.  Racked with guilt, Simba runs away into self-imposed exile, leaving the pride to the evil rule of Scar. 

In the clip played at the conference, Simba’s old girlfriend comes to plead with him to return, to take his place as king and overthrow Scar before it is too late.  Simba resists, but with help from Rafiki, a mandrill who is a kind of priest, prophet, and wise sage, he has a vision of his father.  Voiced powerfully by James Earl Jones, Mufasa tells his son, "You have forgotten who you are, and so you have forgotten me... Remember who you are." 

Emboldened by the promise that his father Mufasa dwells inside him, Simba, no doubt with fear and trembling, returns to take his rightful place.  Remembering who he is and what that calls him to be and do, he restores the lion kingdom back to the peace and harmony it knew under Mufasa.

When I watched that movie clip, Mufasa’s words to his son grabbed me and would not let go.  "You have forgotten who you are, and so you have forgotten me.”  I could not shake the sense that this was spoken directly to me.  It was as if Jesus was speaking to me. “You have forgotten who you are, and so you have forgotten me.”  And if we have forgotten who we are in Christ, no wonder Gandhi says, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.”

Of course the good news is that correcting this situation is not about us mustering up tremendous courage or remarkable fortitude and commitment.  Correcting this situation is instead about remembering.  Remember that in your baptism you were joined to Christ and the Holy Spirit now dwells within you.  Remember that in Christ the power of sin over you has been broken, and you are able both to will and to do that which honors God and reveals Christ to the world.  Remember, God is at work in you.  Look inside yourself, and remember who you are!