Freedom

Americans love freedom, even worship it.  We celebrate free speech, our right to bear arms, our freedom to worship as we see fit, our freedom to go where we want and become what we want.  We can get upset if we think someone is trying to restrict our freedom or our choice.  We know our rights and freedoms and we exercise them.

"'All things are lawful for me,' but not all things are beneficial. 'All things are lawful for me,' but I will not be dominated by anything."  So writes Paul to the church at Corinth.  Paul has been freed from the law in Christ, he insists.  But Paul will not exercise that freedom if it does not aid the spread of the gospel.  He will never use his freedom if it might harm himself or anyone else.

For Paul, freedom is never about "I can do whatever I want."  Instead he has been freed for a new life pleases God and aids others.  In this new freedom, Paul can face suffering joyfully if it helps others know Jesus.

Paul views freedom very differently than many of us because Paul understands life and the world very differently than many of us.  Paul is not the center of the universe.  He does not view all events and happenings with regard to how they impact him.  Jesus is the center of Paul's world.  And "in Christ," he views everything anew.  As he says in another letter to the Corinthians, "From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view." 

Paul is radically free, but his freedom is not about him.  He feels no need to exercise his rights or insist on his own way.  Made a new creation in Christ, he has been freed from such petty notions of freedom.

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Us and Them

For some strange reason, despite most voters saying their big issue is the economy, the Republican presidential campaign has been spending a lot of time on social issues such as abortion and who should pay for birth control.  And sometimes the conversation takes on an all too familiar tone of faithful us versus godless them.  This reached a something of a beyond the pale apex when Rush Limbaugh called a woman who disagreed with him a prostitute and a slut, and suggested she should post sex videos online in return for getting free birth control.

Even most Republicans thought this went way too far (thought strangely, none of the presidential candidates), and Mr. Limbaugh gave an apology of sorts.  I don't feel any need to comment on Limbaugh's remarks in particular, but I think they fit within a pattern often seen among religious folks. We often presume that we occupy a religious high ground from which we may disparage the morality of others.

Conservative Christians tend to do this on issues of sex, abortion, and a few other law and order type items.  But we more "progressive" Christians can get just as holier-than-thou over social justice issues that are near and dear to us.

And so I was struck by Paul's words on sexual and other forms of immorality in today's reading from 1 Corinthians.  The Corinthians have obviously misunderstood something Paul has said to them earlier about shunning immoral persons, and Paul wants to clear things up.  The faithful are not to judge those outside the church on their immorality.  And his earlier command not to associate with immoral people does not apply to outsiders, but only to immoral church members.

Now it is difficult to make an easy application of Paul's words in our day.  The Christians at Corinth were outside the mainstream of society, and Paul was not so concerned with politics and such as he presumed that Jesus' return was imminent.  Still, it seems to me that we in the church are often prone to do exactly the opposite of what Paul recommends.  We are loathe to say anything about the morality of those in our group, be they members or our church or our political party.  But we are quick to pass judgment on those outside our faith, our church, or our political group.

Seems to me that Jesus warned us about wanting to remove the speck in our neighbor's eye while ignoring the log in our own.  And our reputation (sometimes deserved) as hypocrites arises largely from our ignoring Paul and Jesus on this.

There's a chapter in Donald Miller's book Blue Like Jazz (now a motion picture - hope Miller appreciates the plug) where he and a few other students at liberal and godless Reed College decided to set up a confession booth at an annual festival.  Given the Hedonistic nature of the festival and the rarity of openly Christian students on campus, this seemed an odd idea.  But this confession booth took Paul and Jesus' words to heart.  It wasn't for the godless, liberal students of Reed to admit the errors of their ways.  Rather it was for Miller and his companions to confess the Church's sins to the world, to the other students at Reed.

It was a huge success as a steady stream of people came to hear their confessions.  And afterwards, the students at Reed were a lot more interested in hearing about Jesus and helping with mission projects.  Who'd have thought that the best way to reach out to the "godless" is for the "godly" to say they're sorry.

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The End of Plans

When politicians come to the end of their term in office, it is common to hear that they are concerned with their "legacy."  What mark have they made that history will remember.  Sometimes the public can detect a real shift in the manner of a president or governor when their focus turns from getting elected to how they will be remembered.

Pastors are not politicians, but that doesn't mean there isn't a political aspect to being a pastor.  Most pastors want to be liked by their congregations, which is not so different from a politician wanting your vote.  And most pastors want to make their mark in some way.

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 Yahweh their God         Psalm 146:3-5

I'm a "lame duck" pastor.  I'll be leaving this congregation in a few weeks.  I hope my legacy is mostly good.  I hope that whatever mark I've made has been helpful for this congregation and for its future.  But I have no doubt that some of things I started or that I wanted to start - my plans - were more about me than about God.  They were my plans and they will perish with my departure.

While I love my work most of the time, and while I consider it a great privilege to be paid to wrestle with Scripture, seeking to hear God speak, I wonder sometimes about the role of educated, professional pastor.  I wonder if we don't sometimes end up acting a lot like those princes in the psalm.  And in the process we may very well draw people away from leaning on God, on placing their hope and trust in Yahweh.

The Apostle Paul already sees this problem developing back in his day with the congregation in Corinth.  Some like Apollos, some prefer Paul, some follow Peter.  It infuriates Paul that this focus on Christ's workers is deflecting the Corinthians from being one in Christ.

And so as I prepare to leave one congregation for another, I'm trying not to think much about legacy.  But I am trying to think a lot about how I might serve a new congregation in a manner that points away from me and toward Jesus.  After all, I assume that he has plans for his Church.

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Sermon video - Bringing Up the Rear

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Cutting God to Pieces

Sometimes the process of working up a sermon can be frustrating.  (To a much lesser degree, writing these little reflections can be so as well.)  By that I mean that some passages of Scripture do not seem to inspire.  I look over them and find them pedestrian or, worse, threatening.  As one who usually preaches from the lectionary (a set of readings for each Sunday), my nightmare is when all 4 selections leave me cold. 

When you think about it, this process of chopping up the Bible into tiny little snippets is quite odd.  No one would read a novel the way we often approach the Bible, taking in a few paragraphs or perhaps a page or two at a time.  But if I ask a Bible study group to read the entire Gospel of Mark before next week's class, you would think I had just asked them to read War and Peace.  (For the record, Mark is 21 pages long in a large print Bible I pulled off my shelf.)

Perhaps you've heard some version of an old Indian parable about the blind men and the elephant.  It exists in many different versions, but all involve blind men who attempt to discover what an elephant looks like by touch.  One feels a tusk, another a leg, another the tail, and so on.  And they separately conclude that an elephant is like a pipe, a pillar, a rope, and so on. 

These blind men surely could have moved around a bit and expanded on their encounter beyond one particular part of the elephant, but in the parable they do not.  And sometimes I wonder if we don't handle the Bible in similar fashion.  We seize upon a passage or two, then proclaim, "The Bible says so!"

Reading the Bible a page at a time doesn't necessarily cause this.  Presumably we can eventually combine all those little snippets into a whole of some sort, like blind men or women who eventually made their way all around the elephant.  But in my experience, this rarely happens.  Many of us spend so little time with the Bible that a bigger picture never emerges.  And so when we do encounter Scripture, our impressions may be as unhelpful as those of a blind man who thinks the elephant is only the tail.  And I suspect that almost all of us have a picture of God that suffers from this deficiency. 

Back in the 1950s, J.B. Phillips wrote a book entitled, Your God Is Too Small.  I read it many years ago when I first became serious about faith.  Recalling it, I think the small gods he describes are products of this piecemeal and/or selective reading of Scripture.  We end up with petty, trivial, tribal gods that look more like what we want in a god than Jesus or the God of the Bible.

Where do you get your picture, your image of God?  Is it big enough?

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Sermon audio - Bringing Up the Rear

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Sermon - Bringing Up the Rear

Mark 8:31-38

Bringing Up the Rear

James Sledge                                                                     Lent 2  - March 4, 2012

Satan shows up in our gospel reading this morning.  And Satan has been in the news of late thanks to the Republican presidential campaign, specifically a speech given by Rick Santorum.  I’m not entirely sure how the speech became an issue.  It was given by Santorum back in 2008 at Ave Maria University, a conservative Catholic college, but once it started getting airplay on the internet, it was all over the news.

In it, Santorum pushes the rather odd notion that the United States has been about the only thing Satan worried about or attacked for the last 200 years or so.  And apparently the most fertile territory Satan has found for his work has been college campuses and the Mainline Protestant Church.  (Santorum isn’t really being anti-Protestant here.  He simply said that America was founded as a mostly Protestant country and so that’s what Satan went after.)

Now to my mind, if you want to argue for a personal “Father of lies” who is out creating horror and mischief in the world, things like the Holocaust, apartheid in South Africa, genocide in Rwanda, or the shelling of civilians in Syria should surely make any short list well ahead of OSU or Ohio Wesleyan.  So I imagine that my and Rick Santorum’s understanding of Satan are a bit different.

The Bible may not be all that much help clearing up these differences.  Satan appears in a number of different guises in the Bible.  In some of them he isn’t a bad guy at all but a kind of prosecuting attorney for God.  Sometimes he’s credited with things that don’t seem to be his fault. 

For example, lots of people talk about Satan tempting Adam and Eve in the Garden, but look up the story and you’ll find no mention of Satan at all.

By Jesus’ day, most Jews had come to see Satan as a bad guy, an opponent of God in some way.  And so it was common to speak of Satan as the cause of illness or misery.  But an actual being named Satan shows up rarely in the gospels.  In Mark’s gospel it happens just twice.  Satan’s first appearance is at Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, and it is quite brief. (Jesus) was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.  That’s it.  Our reading today contains the only words in Mark that Jesus actually speaks to Satan, and of course these words are directed at Peter.

I think Jesus’ words to Peter may be much more helpful to us than fanciful ideas about Satan invading college campuses.  According the Jesus, the Satan problem is much more personal and immediate. 

Who Speaks for God?

God makes the news on a fairly regular basis.  Well not so much God as God's surrogates, people who say they speak for God or who push agendas that they claim God wants.  More often than not these surrogates are connected to some religious group and the agendas that they say God wants are often connected to the teachings of their religious group.

Now it is very difficult to be serious about following God or Jesus without ending up in a religious group of some sort.  Whether you're focused on feeding the poor, racial reconciliation, or ending abortion, you are likely to link up with others who think about God in similar fashion to you.  We are social animals and we need the support of groups.  Religion often gets a well-deserved, bad reputation, but it's nearly impossible to practice any form of serious faith or spirituality without some sort of group or practices or methods.  And as soon as you do that, presto, it's a religion.

But having said that, it certainly seems that a lot of God's surrogates are obnoxious and shrill.  They sometimes seem more angry than loving, more arrogant than humble, more "it's my way or the highway" than "love your enemies."  If those claiming to be God's surrogates are supposed to represent God, to share some attributes with God, well no wonder some people get a bad impression of God, not to mention religion.

God doesn't seem to be real big on showing up in person that often, and so as someone who believes in God, I think it's a good thing that God at least put in a lengthy appearance in the person of Jesus.  For me, Jesus is the surrogate's surrogate, the one who fully embodies the character and disposition of God.  And Jesus rarely has the shrill, angry, arrogant, "my way or the highway" attitude of some who claim to represent him and God.

When Jesus does get all worked up, it's almost always at shrill, arrogant, holier-than-thou religious types.  It's not that Jesus is anti-religious.  In fact, he's a very religious person.  But he seems constantly to have troubles with his religious brethren, and he ends up spending a lot of time with folks the religious surrogates wag their fingers at.

My own denomination (Presbyterian Church, USA), like most denominations, has a mixed history as God's surrogate.  We've had our better moments, and we've had our colossal failures.  But as religious participation has waned in America, we, like many other denominations, have gotten worried about survival.  We talk a lot about evangelism and worry about how to attract new people to our congregations.  To the degree that all this helps us become a little more outwardly focused, a little more concerned about people outside the church, I'm all for it.

But I sometimes wonder if we wouldn't be better served simply to focus on being more accurate surrogates.  If we spent our time getting to know God better, and then modeling God in our lives - living in ways that look more like Jesus - then I suspect lots of folks might rethink some of their distaste for religion.  They might even be interested in following Jesus themselves.

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Hunting Down Jesus

Today's gospel reading tells of Jesus getting up very early in the morning and going out to a deserted place to pray.  He must have slipped off before his disciples got up (there are only 4 at this point) because we next read, "And Simon and his companions hunted for him."

That sounds harmless enough, but I fear the Bible translators have let the disciples off easy here.  It sounds as though the disciples are simply looking for Jesus, but the Greek word Mark uses usually presumes hostile intent on the the part of those doing the looking.  This is a word used to speak of "pursuing" an enemy.  But why would these 4 disciples be chasing Jesus in such a manner?

I suspect that, like most of us, these guys have expectations of Jesus.  They've seen his charisma, seen his healing power, and they know they have winner on their hands.  But Jesus has up and disappeared on them.  They need to find him and bring him back.  Perhaps they can even set up a little center at Simon's house.  Jesus has already packed them in.  This has all the makings of a huge religious enterprise.

But Jesus is not going to cooperate.  Even when they find Jesus, he refuses to be captured.  The disciples plead, "Come on back, Jesus.  Everyone is searching for you."  But Jesus replies, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do."  Jesus has work, a mission, and it doesn't fit with his followers' religious ambitions.

An inherent problem with all religious endeavor is the desire to get God in a box so the divine becomes manageable.  We want God to assist us in our plans and schemes.  All too often, we want to capture Jesus and tell him, "Come with us."  But only a Jesus we imagine actually does.  God's Living Word will not follow us.  Instead he says, "Deny yourself, let go of your agenda, stop trying to drag me where you want to go, and take up the cross and follow me."

We resist.  We say, "No, Jesus, come with us.  We know the way."  But I'm not sure even we believe that.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Pelvic Issues and Immature Faith

Richard Rohr's meditation this morning opened with this observation.  "In recent elections one would have thought that homosexuality and abortion were the new litmus tests of Christianity."  I should add that Rohr is a Catholic priest who I presume does not like the idea of abortion.  But he also recognizes that focus on sexual purity and morality tends to distract us from the bulk of Jesus' teaching (Rohr says 95%).  Jesus is much less worried about personal purity and more concerned with "issues of pride, injustice, hypocrisy, blindness, and what I have often called 'The Three Ps' of power, prestige, and possessions,"  says Rohr.

I read today's lectionary texts after reading Rohr, and the absence of sexual morality or purity issues was striking.  I'm not suggesting that the Bible has no interest in such issues, but they are hardly primary, although  one might think they are after hearing political candidates talk about their faith-based stances.  But today's texts included more typical biblical concerns.  The psalm talked about the prisoner, the blind, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.  And Jesus proclaims nearness of God's kingdom, which is then demonstrated by calling some fisherman to follow him, teaching, and restoring a tormented soul to wholeness. 

If you dropped open your Bible anywhere in one of the gospels, there's a very good chance Jesus would be healing, or talking about how greed and money causes us huge problems, or telling us to love enemies, or reaching out to those that religious folks found repulsive.  So how is that Christianity often ends up looking so little like Jesus?  How is it that a casual observer of American culture could easily conclude that Christian faith is obsessed with what happens in people's bedrooms?

I'm not sure why this is, but people's religious views often seem to get stuck in a very childish state.  In many traditional churches, religious education is almost entirely for children, and it seems that our faith often does not advance much beyond those rudimentary Sunday School lessons.  Much of Jesus' teaching does not translate easily into a third grade Sunday School class, and so all too often, Jesus' message gets distorted into, "Be good little boys and girls." 

I can't seem to stop mentioning Rohr today, but he has an interesting observation about immature faith.  Speaking of the aforementioned focus on sexual purity he says that "early-stage religion has never gotten much beyond these 'pelvic' issues."  I kind of like that one.  And I think it is a helpful measuring stick as well.  If your faith spends a great deal of time on "pelvic issues," that's a pretty sure bet that it is ignoring the core of faith, that it is rarely following Jesus where he calls us to go.

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Sermon video - A Glimpse of God's Heart

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Spiritual Hiccups - I Don't Understand

It's curious how a line of Scripture will sometimes strike me.  I only got one verse into this morning's psalm before I found myself wondering what understanding had to do with learning God's commandments.  The line in question, from Psalm 119:73 reads, "give me understanding that I may learn your commandments."

Learning the commandments seems more a matter of memorization than understanding, but the psalm doesn't ask for a better memory.  It asks for understanding.

People often want faith to be a simple matter, and I regularly hear people say that things would be much better if we just did what it says in the Bible, if were returned to being a Christian nation, if we "got right with God."  It couldn't be more simple, at least not until you get into the details.  What's that saying about the devil being in the details?

I've always felt that if faith were a simple thing, if living as God's people were a simple thing, the Bible would be a pamphlet or brochure.  As it is, the Bible sitting on my desk is over 2000 pages long.  (The Catholic Bible is even lengthier than mine.)  But even when you consider only a brief section of Scripture, the simple versus complex and nuanced issue can arise.

There have been a number of court cases in recent years regarding public display of the 10 Commandments.  Those who support such displays argue that they are the basis for our civil laws and that we are a "Christian nation."  But such arguments quickly founder when we actually examine the commandments.  How does Sabbath keeping fit into a 24/7 culture, and what does idolatry have to do with civil law?  Wrongful use of God's name is particularly problematic, and perhaps that is why people often trivialize this one into a prohibition against swearing.  But if God is serious about us not invoking the Divine to further our own agendas, a lot of Christian political candidates are in deep trouble. 

Even the second half of the commandments, those that correspond more easily to civil law, can create problems.  The support of Newt Gingrich by some Christian Right pastors comes to mind here.  And the one about not coveting anything that belongs to your neighbor would seem to undermine a basic motivation for the American consumerist culture. 

But I don't mean to speak only against simplistic, conservative takes on faith.  In my experience, most all of us tend to think that the articles of faith we hold dear are simple.  Liberal, progressive, social justice Christians sometimes act as though there is nothing in the Bible but social justice.  The disturbing fact is that Christians of all stripes like to simplify what being faithful means so that it fits neatly within the issues that motivate us.

Life is complicated.  Relationships are complicated.  Anyone who tells you they have life and relationships all figured out is likely delusional.  Surely living in relationship with God is no different.  Understand?

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