Spiritual Hiccups - Fully Alive

When I read and savor Scripture, not planning to write a sermon or teach a class, I frequently find myself drawn to something that I had not noticed before.  That happened today with the reading from Matthew.  A rich young man asks Jesus, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?”  I already knew how Jesus would answer, but for some reason it had never occurred to me how this answer seems at odds with some basic Christian assumptions.  "If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”Nothing about believing in Jesus.  Nothing about faith.  Simply, "keep the commandments." 

Of course the story doesn't end there.  The young man says that he has kept the commandments, and considering that Jesus doesn't dispute this, I'm inclined to take it as a statement of fact.  (It is worth noting that keeping the commandments doesn't necessarily mean never making a mistake or slipping up.  It means being committed to keeping them, confessing when you fail, and continually striving to follow them.  It's likely this understanding that allows the Apostle Paul to say of himself, "as to the law, blameless.")

And so it seems this young man has kept the commandments Jesus says will let him "enter into life," but for some reason he feels this is insufficient.  "What do I still lack?"  Despite his initial question being about eternal life, he is unsatisfied with being told he is doing what is required.  For some reason, he feels there must be something more.

"If you wish to be perfect..."  I'm not sure the translators do us any favors with the word perfect.  The word conjures up notions of impossible flawlessness, complete purity without defect.  We all know that "No one is perfect."  But the Greek word translated perfect has to do with attaining an end or purpose.  The word could be translated complete, whole, or even mature.  In essence, Jesus seems to being saying to this fellow, "If you truly wish to be fully human, to become what you were created to be, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

A lot of us who are religious strike me as being a bit like this young man.  We meet our religious obligations and presume we are included on the heavenly guest list.  But quite often, we get the feeling that we are missing something.  We are not quite complete, fulfilled, and whole.  We are looking for something more, but like this rich young man, we struggle to trust that Jesus knows the way.  We simply cannot imagine that loving our enemy, losing our lives for the sake of the kingdom, or giving up very much of what we have will make us fully alive.  Our culture has done too good a job of teaching us that to be complete and fully alive, we need more, lots more.

Our world is full of spiritually hungry people who realize they are missing something.  But conditioned by our consumerist culture, they presume this longing they feel can only be satisfied with something more.  Thus they imagine religion to be just another consumer item.  And all too often, we in the Church present faith to them as such. 

On the week of Thanksgiving, when many of us will revel in an unbelievable abundance of food, then head for the malls in a consumerist frenzy, it is perhaps a counter-cultural act of faith to contemplate what we need to give up in order to be whole and complete.  Lord, what do I still lack?

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Sermon video - Vision Problems

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Spiritual Hiccups - Anxious and Busy

For God alone my soul waits in silence;
     from God comes my salvation.
God alone is my rock and my salvation,
     my fortress; I shall never be shaken.

For better or worse, pastors in Protestant Churches are often viewed as the CEO of the congregation.  People look to the pastor for direction and leadership.  And while pastors do have a critical leadership role to play, the CEO model sometimes builds congregations too much in the pastor's image and undermines the notion that Christ alone is Head of the Church.

Pastors seeing themselves as corporate CEOs can also be a great anxiety producer.  If the congregation rises or falls on my skills as a CEO, then it all depends on me.  I had better do the right things, say the right things, give the correct instructions, run the institution efficiently and effectively, organize the structures for optimum performance, and so on, or things could go badly.  And I suspect that this sort of thinking is one of the reasons that pastors report significantly higher levels of stress in their work than they did a generation ago.

One of the things I have learned as a pastor is that stress and anxiety make me a much worse leader.  When I am anxious, I tend to be more reactive.  Under the right (wrong?) conditions, anxiety can morph into upset and even anger.  Anxiety also leads to a kind of frantic busyness.  There is never enough time to get it all done; never enough hours in the day.  A common lament among pastors is how this busyness squeezes out time for prayer, time for quietness and silence, time for stillness and Sabbath. 

Congregations sometimes encourage pastoral busyness.  I recently heard a story about a church member who came to see the pastor during the week and was told that the pastor was in time of prayer not to be disturbed unless it was a dire emergency.  The member insisted on seeing the pastor, and informed him that he should pray on his own time.

Of course such pastoral busyness cuts us off from God and makes leadership more about us and less about Jesus.  If prayer is not part of a pastor's work, how on earth will that work be attuned to Christ's call?  And how will our leadership call others to a deeper, fuller relationship with Jesus?  How will congregations be places people come to learn a deep faith and spirituality, if the pastors are too busy to wait silently for God?

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Sermon audio - Vision Problems

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Sermon text - Vision Problems

Matthew 25:31-46

Vision Problems

James Sledge                             November 20, 2011 – Christ the King

There are a number of fairy tales and fables where a king, a wizard, or someone of great wealth travels about incognito in order to mingle among the common people.  In many of these the clothing of a beggar is the disguise of choice.  So dressed, the king asks some subject, “Could you spare a morsel of food for a poor beggar?” 

The hero of such fables is invariably a good and kind-hearted peasant who has almost nothing, but who willingly shares what little he has with this person he thinks to be a destitute beggar.  Only later does the peasant discover the truth when he is richly rewarded for his kindness.

Such tales sometimes include another person who treats the supposed beggar badly.  When the beggar’s true identity is later revealed, it is too late.  Any kindness now shown is clearly motivated by the possibility of reward.

There is an old Jewish folk tale where a young rabbi wanted more than anything else to meet Elijah the prophet.  (Elijah, unlike other people in the Old Testament, had not died but had been taken up to heaven in a whirlwind.)  The father of this young rabbi told him that if he diligently studied the Torah with his whole heart, he would indeed meet Elijah.

The young rabbi studied diligently for a month, but did not meet Elijah.  He complained to his father, but the father only scolded his impatience and told him to keep studying.  One evening as the rabbi was hard at his studies, a tramp came to his door. 

The fellow was disgusting to look at; the young rabbi had never seen an uglier man in all his life.  Annoyed at having been interrupted by such an unsavory character, the rabbi shooed the man away and returned to his studying.

The next day his father came and asked if he had seem Elijah yet.  “No,” replied the son. 

“Did no one come here last night,” asked  the father. 

“Yes,” replied the rabbi.  “An old tramp.” 

“Did you wish him ‘shalom aleikhem’?” asked the father, referring to the traditional greeting meaning “Peace be upon you.”

“No,” said the rabbi.

“You fool,” cried his father.  “Didn’t you know that that was Elijah the Prophet? But now it’s too late.”  The tale goes on to say that for the rest of his life, the rabbi always greeted strangers with “Shalom aleikhem,” and treated them with great kindness.[1]

The parable of final judgment that Jesus tells us this morning is a bit like such folk tales, and like such tales, Jesus’ parable has long been used to encourage people to act with kindness and charity to those in need, to “the least of these.”  Used this way, the parable is a powerful reminder of how we should live and act, a reminder of Jesus’ call to love our neighbor as ourselves.

But I wonder if there is not more than moral encouragement here, more than a Christian ethic.  For starters, those judged in the parable are “the nations,” the ethnos in Greek.  Most other places in Matthew’s gospel this word refers to Gentiles, and at the very end of Matthew, Jesus will command his disciples and the Church to make disciples of all these nations or Gentiles.  And so one way to read this parable is that it speaks of the judgment of outsiders, non-believers who unwittingly minister to Jesus.  If this is so, then it makes sense that these Gentiles would be surprised to be counted among those who inherit the kingdom. 

But we Christians should not be caught off guard by this.  After all, Jesus lets us in on the secret right here.  And indeed as followers of Jesus we are privy to much information that outsiders may not know.  After all, we are joined to Christ.  We have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit.  We have been transformed so that we can see things from a different point of view, a spiritual point of view.  When the Spirit dwells in us we become something new.  We are made new in Christ as we experience the incarnation within us, as we live in and through Christ.

Last week we kicked off our annual food and toy drive as part of the Deacons’ Community Christmas Packages that will deliver food and gift certificates and presents for children’s to hundreds of needy families in our area.  This effort will be supported by many who are not part of this congregation, who see a need and want to help.  Perhaps some of them are among those Jesus will say to, “I was hungry, and you gave me food.”

But we need not wait until then to see Jesus face to face, to minister to Jesus and be ministered to by Jesus.  That face that you see at the apartment door when you deliver one of the Deacons’ baskets is the face of Jesus.  For that matter, the face next to you right now is the face of Jesus, as is the person next to you at work or at school, the person you see on the street or meet at the store.

“Whoa,” someone is no doubt thinking.  “Jesus is telling a parable.  It’s a metaphor, for goodness sake.”  But I don’t think so.  At the very core of our faith is God in the flesh.  We know God most fully as a human being, as a person who ate and drank and slept and sweated and burped and had body odor.  And when we say that we can’t possibly meet God in a single mom on food stamps, it seems to me we have the exact same vision problem that many religious folks in Jesus’ day had.  They couldn’t see God in Jesus because of who he was and how he acted.  He came from that God forsaken town of Nazareth, for heaven’s sake.  He went to parties and drank with riff raff and sinners.  No way he was the face of God.

I’m not sure we can actually see God’s face in unless the Holy Spirit gives us eyes that can see such things.  And I don’t think we can really see Jesus in the face of others unless the Spirit heals our vision problems. 

I suspect that most of us have known someone whose spiritual vision is better than ours.  We tend to think that such folk are just kinder than us, more sensitive and caring than us, and I guess there is some truth to that.  But I’m pretty sure that the folks like this that I know see better than I do.  They see someone hurting or in need, and they really see Jesus.  And in the strange ways of God, those people can actually meet Jesus in them.

In just a few minutes, we will ordain and install ruling elders and deacons to help guide us in living as the body of Christ.  The nominating committee, in identifying these people, carefully considered the gifts and abilities that  God would surely give to those called to such ministry.  As these elders and deacons answer Christ’s call today, I hope you will join me in holding them in prayer, asking the Spirit to equip and strengthen them for that calling.  But I think that most of all, my prayer will be that the Spirit gives them the eyes they need to see Jesus.

---

[1] From “The Tramp” in Ellen Frankel, The Classic Tales: 4000 Years of Jewish Lore (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. 1993) pp. 604-605.

Spiritual Hiccups - O Lord, It's Hard To Be Humble

"Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven."

Over the years, there have been countless suggestions concerning what it means to "become like children," as Jesus says we must do.  The innocence of children is sometimes suggested, although anyone who has ever raised a child might say that the illusion of such innocence is hard to maintain past infancy.  It seems likely that childhood in Jesus' day was understood far differently than in ours, and this likely makes for additional difficulty in understanding what Jesus asks of us.

Jesus does offer us a clue when he adds, "humble like this child."  But of course humility is not much admired in our world, in children or adults.  We learn at an early age that we must draw attention to ourselves if we're going to get ahead.  There are books and seminars that tell you how to make your résumé stand out or how to make sure your college application gets noticed amidst all the others.

But Jesus seems to think that children are humble, and I suspect they were much more so in that day.  Children in First Century Palestine had no power.  They were totally dependent on parents.  They had no disposable income.  Very often their worth was understood more in terms of potential than intrinsic. Such a status might make me humble, too.

The English word "humble" comes from the same Latin root as humus, referring to earth or soil.  I suppose this has connotations of lowliness, but it also speaks of the earthiness that is part of our created nature.  We don't need the Bible to tell us that we are dust and we shall return to dust.  But for the gift of life, we are simply organic material, humus.

But God has made us but a little lower than angels, says Psalm 8.  God has given us amazing gifts and abilities, and those who realize how dependent they are on God for these understand something about humility.  And they tend to deflect attention from self and toward God.  Who we are "in Christ" becomes more important than who we are on our own, and our lives point beyond ourselves to Jesus.

This requires a fundamental shift for many of us.  We are so used to saying, "Look at me; look at me!"  It is so difficult to speak as John the Baptist does of Jesus when he says, "He must increase, but I must decrease."

Humility is not about being a doormat for others.  Jesus speaks of himself as humble, and his power and authority are obvious, even to his opponents.  But in his ministry, Jesus always points people beyond himself to the Father.  The earthly, human Jesus is totally focused on God's will rather than his own.

That is often very difficult for me, just as it is difficult for me to trust Jesus when he says, "Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life more my sake will find it."  Can that really be true?  Can losing my life in Christ truly heal me and make me whole?  Jesus, give me the confidence and faith to know it is so, and live in ways that reveal you to the world.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Getting It Right

This Sunday in worship, we will celebrate Christ the King, and we will also ordain and install elders and deacons to lead the ministry, mission, and spiritual life of our congregation.  As we do so, they will respond to a number of "constitutional questions," including one that asks, "Do you promise to further the peace, unity, and purity of the church?"

Over the years I have had prospective elders or deacons express concern about some of the other questions they will answer.  But I've never heard anyone express any reservations about this question.  Who wouldn't want the church to be more peaceful, unified, and pure?  Who wouldn't want a congregation to look less like the broken world we live in and more like the community God calls us to be?

But in practice, this question may be the most difficult one to live into.  This difficulty arises because seeking peace often sacrifices purity, seeking purity often throws out unity, and so on.

In today's reading from Ezra, the focus is very much on purity.  Ezra has condemned Israel for marrying foreign wives, for incurring guilt before God by marrying those whose religious practices are "abominations" and so polluting the purity of the faith.  Ezra has the commandments on his side as he chastises the people, leading them to "send away all these wives and their children."  In a day when women were totally dependent on men for protection and provision, this may well have been a death sentence to many of these mothers and children.  But in the name of purity...

Interestingly, the Old Testament contains another book where one of these foreign wives is lifted up as a paragon of virtue and faith.  Ruth, who like Ezra has a short biblical book named for her, is a foreign wife who is celebrated and who is great-grandmother to King David.  Even more interesting, some scholars think the book of Ruth was written in the same period when Ezra was encouraging the sending away of such women.

We people of faith often worry a great deal about getting the rules correct.  My own denomination's decades long wrangling over whether or not to ordain gays and lesbians is a good case in point.  For people on both sides, this issue became the purity line in the sand, a line of such importance that it justified sacrificing peace and unity.

I sometimes wonder about my denomination's (and my own) desire to read Scripture carefully in order to construct a clear theology that covers all the bases.  Don't get me wrong, I do think that deducing some sort of theology is necessary and even unavoidable.  All people have some sort of theology, some notion of what God is like and what difference that makes for their lives.  But it seems to me that any biblical theology has to leave room for a fair amount of ambiguity and tension.  "Getting it right" cannot become the god we serve.  Even Jesus, speaking in today's gospel reading, tells Peter that he does not owe the temple tax, that he is free of its requirement.  Yet he also tells Peter to procure the coin for the tax and pay it, "so that we do not give offense to them."

It very often seems to me that the Presbyterian passion for theology tends to squeeze out the Spirit. We prefer clear conclusions and guidelines, well crafted order, over the wind of the Spirit "that blows where it chooses."

And so I really like that ordination question which insists that getting it right means furthering "the peace, unity, and purity of the church."  Not one of them, but all of them.  Seems that getting it right often means balancing somewhat contradictory calls and living faithfully within that tension and ambiguity. 

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Spiritual Hiccups - Save Us!

It has been interesting - sometimes even comical - watching the ever changing polls on the Republican presidential front runner.  Romney, to many the presumed, eventual winner, tends to stay near the top, but others take their turn surging to favorite status and then falling into disfavor.  Newt Gingrich is now on his second ride toward the top, having previously crashed, burned, and been given up for dead by many.

I suppose that much of this is simply the normal political process.  A fresh face catches people's attention and generates excitement, but then the person's flaws and liabilities become more evident, and he or she falls from grace.  But I also think something else is at work.  We want someone to save us.  We want someone to fix things and make them right.  We're looking for a savior, but of course no one can live up to such expectations.

Whether the savior we embrace promises to take back America or restore hope, whether they are Republican, Democratic, or Libertarian, they end up disappointing us to some degree.  President Obama's campaign has already acknowledged that they do not expect to energize students they way they did in 2008.  Too many have become disenchanted with their savior.

Do not put your trust in princes,
     in mortals, in whom there is no help.
When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
     on that very day their plans perish.
Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
     whose hope is in the LORD their God. 

We live in difficult times, and we want someone to save us.   Very often it seems we want someone to save us from ourselves.  We want someone who promises to fix things without it costing us anything, goring our ox, or requiring hard work and sacrifice from us.  Others need to provide that.

Sometimes I think that we put our trust in candidates because putting our trust in God means following Jesus.  It means becoming different from what we are now, being transformed so that we look and act more and more like Jesus.  That looks too much like work.  Surely there is another solution.  Surely there is an ideology that will solve everything.  Surely enough money and things will make life good.  Surely making sure all of my needs are met will make me feel complete.  Surely there is some answer that doesn't ask me to change.

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, who have discovered new life by letting go of the old life and becoming new beings in Christ.


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Sermon video - Hearts on Fire

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Spiritual Hiccups - Mountaintop Experience

If you're the religious or spiritual sort, you likely cherish mountaintop experiences.  I know I do.  Those moments when God's presence is vivid and God's will for me clear are touchstones in my faith walk.  Recalling them sometimes can keep me going in those all too frequent times when God's presence is less vivid and God's will less clear.  And sometimes I would like to reconnect to such moments, especially if I'm in something of a spiritual dry spell.

Such a desire is natural, but it can have its pitfalls.  It can long for religious/spiritual experience for the sake of that experience.  I take it that Peter's desire to memorialize the mountaintop experience reported in today's gospel is something along those lines, plans for a physical connection to that moment that would allow him to reconnect with the unbelievable vision he has just seen.  But his plans are interrupted by the divine voice which commands Peter (and us?), "Listen to him!" that is to Jesus.

And so I find myself reflecting on the place of religious experience this morning.  I cannot imagine a faith of much consequence without some such experience.  But I also have met a few people who seem to be addicted to such experiences, who spend much of their time cultivating them.  (Some of the more negative stereotypes about "spirituality" are related to such folks.

In his devotion for today, Father Richard Rohr says this.  "When you see people going to church and becoming smaller instead of larger, you have every reason to question whether the practices, sermons, sacraments, or liturgies are opening them to an authentic God experience."  I suspect the same can be said of attempts to cultivate religious experience simply for its own sake.  Such experience is meant to enlarge us so that we go deeper into relationship with God as well as with those around us.

Sometimes I just want my "God fix."  Thankfully, Jesus usually finds a way to draw me out of such self centered spirituality.  Jesus, help me listen for your voice, calling me to my vocation in the valley.

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Sermon audio - Hearts on Fire

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Sermon text - Hearts on Fire

Matthew 25:14-30

Hearts on Fire

James Sledge                                     November 13, 2011

For most of my life I have thought of banks as some of the more conservative institutions around.  By conservative I don’t mean politically conservative.  Rather I’m using a more basic definition of preserving and conserving what exists.  This sort of conservatism makes changes only after very careful consideration.  The default decision is the tried and true, what has worked well in the past.  This sort of conservatism has little use for the novel, and it does not take unnecessary risk.

To me, banks and bankers epitomized this sort of thinking.  At least they did until the financial collapse of 2008.  When the financial markets tumbled a few years ago, we discovered that those staid bankers had abandoned their traditional conservatism.  Far from fearing the novel, they had embraced all sorts of creative and innovative investment vehicles.  There seemed to be no worries that some of the more exotic, mortgage-based investments could fail.  People acted as though big profits were simply guaranteed.  But then it all came tumbling down.

But if the image of bankers as cautious, prudent, careful, and risk-averse folks disappeared in that 2008 economic collapse, another group still has its cautious, conservative, careful image fully intact; the typical Mainline church congregation. 

We don’t reject all innovation and novelty.  We have a somewhat contemporary worship service here, after all.  But of course traditional Presbyterian congregations generally didn’t adopt such services until they had been a huge success for many years in other, non-traditional congregations.

I let The Presbyterian Hymnal plop open in my lap.  I flipped through a few pages, seeing more dates from the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s than from 1900s, the century in which that hymnal was published.  And the couple of hymns I saw from the 1900’s were set to hymn tunes from earlier centuries.  This is not necessarily a criticism or a complaint.  There were some wonderful hymns on those pages.  And our economy would probably be in much better shape right now if bankers had retained a bit more of this sort of conservatism seen reflected in our hymnal, the conserving of what exists, changing it only after careful consideration.

Issues of caution, prudence, careful and risk-averse investing are on display in our gospel reading this morning as well.  A master is about to leave for an extended time, and so he turns over his investments to several of his slaves.  Perhaps this spreading around of his portfolio was his idea of diversification. 

There is a tendency to flatten parables and miss their many facets, reducing them to fables with a simple message.  In the case of this parable, that often becomes, “Use your talents wisely.”  But such a “moral of the story” ignores much in the parable.  For example, the third slave is called “wicked and lazy” by his master, an assessment often accepted without question.  But that master does not refute the slave’s assessment that he is “a harsh man, reaping where (he) did not sow.”

Other, perhaps more illuminating facets of the parable relate to the wealth entrusted to each slave and the huge returns earned by the first two compared with the simple preserving of the principle by the third slave.  Here, the term talent sometimes gets in the way, as does our unfamiliarity with the financial options available in Jesus’s day.

For the first hearers of the parable, a talent was a large sum of money, and nothing more.  In fact it was equal to fifteen or twenty years wages for a laborer.  And those first hearers had never seen a local Savings and Loans or bank as we know them.  There were money changers where you could invest money, but there were no regulations or government guarantees.  The only really safe thing to do with money in those days was to hide it.

Perhaps it would help if we updated a few elements in the parable.  We could change it so that the CEO of a large investment firm has decided to take an extended vacation.  And so he summoned several of his money managers and told them to take care of his portfolio.  To one he gave 10 million dollars, to another he gave 5 million, and to a third, 1 million.  The first manager wheeled and dealed and made another 10 million.  The second did much the same, doubling his portion.  But the third manager didn’t have all that much to play with, and so he opted to put it into a very secure, interest-bearing money market account. 

Or look at it another way.  Think about what you would do if it was your money.  Would you have taken the more risky investments, or would you have played it safe?

This parable has so many facets, I’m not always sure where to focus my attention.  On the one hand, the freedom and abandon that allowed those first two slaves to make risky investments and double what was entrusted to them has a powerful attraction.  What was it that let them act as they did?

But the parable itself spends much of its time with the third slave, the one who did the prudent and cautious thing.  Since the parable focuses so much on him, I suppose I should at least wonder what it was about him that makes him the bad guy in the story, even though he did exactly what many prudent people of Jesus’ day likely would have done.

“Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your money in the ground.”

“So I was afraid.”  Seems to me that religion often has a great deal of fear in it.  “Do you want to burn in hell?”  Even the much friendlier, “Do you want to be saved?” carries with it implied fear.  What happens if you’re not?  And denominations’ and churches’ hard fought efforts and battles to get our theology just right seems to have more than a little fear involved.  What might happen if we got it wrong?

The Bible says that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” but in this parable the fear of the master is the downfall of this slave.  By contrast, his two fellow slaves seem to have no fear at all.  They took some pretty serious risks, acting as though they could not fail.

Where in your life have you thrown caution to the wind and acted as if risk did not matter?  Where have you broken free from caution and prudence and risked it all?  Perhaps you once fell in love, or are in love now, and you did things or are doing things that would have seemed crazy and foolish before.  Maybe some passion once caught you and swept you up, and you threw yourself into it in a way you cannot imagine doing now.  Or perhaps you’re caught up in just such a passion right now.

Is it possible to fall in love with God, to be swept off your feet by Jesus so that you act with wild abandon, dance like no one is watching, and look foolish to those who do not understand such passion?  Is it possible for the pull of Jesus to grab you and overpower you, draw you in so that you act in ways you never knew were possible?

Is that possible, Jesus?  We are here, Jesus.  We are waiting.  Will you come into our hearts and set them on fire?  We are here, Jesus.  We are waiting.  Come to us.