Theology and Other Humor

I know lots of people, including many pastors, who openly disdain theology.  I had seminary classmates who made no secret of how much they disliked it and how they took theology classes only because they were  required.  And I frequently hear people say that we need to quit worrying so much about theology and just "do what Jesus says" or "what the Bible says."

Yet I have rarely met anyone who is the least bit religious who does not have a theology.  They may not call it that, but they have clear ideas on what God is like and what it means to relate in some way to God.  And these theologies are often as varied as the varied individuals who have them.

When I hear some of these theologies, I often chuckle and wonder where in the world they came from.  But the Church has its own odd theologies and deeply held beliefs that, upon close examination, don't seem to have much biblical basis.  But often these are so treasured that no one chuckles at the absurdities.

This is perhaps nowhere more evident than with Christian ideas about death and resurrection.  Death has become a gateway to heaven, and so it is common to hear people speak of a departed loved one being "in a better place."  The Apostle Paul clearly has a different theology.  As he tells the Corinthian Christians, "The last enemy to be destroyed is death."  For Paul, resurrection didn't take you to heaven.  Resurrection was a future even that would happen when Jesus returned.  Only then would the dead be raised.  Jesus was the "first fruits" of this future resurrection.  He has been raised, and we will be, someday.

Now perhaps Paul got his theology wrong.  But just suggesting that will upset those whose theology requires the Bible to be literally true.  I sometimes suspect that God must get a lot of laughs (and more than a few tears) from all our theologies.

Don't get me wrong.  I love the study of theology, and since it is virtually impossible not to have one, it makes sense to work hard to get ours as well ordered as we can.  But as I grow older I am increasingly convinced that a fair amount of uncertainty and openness is a good thing.  I am totally convinced of God's love evidenced in Jesus and of God's desire to redeem creation, to bring about something better. But I'm increasingly unwilling to draw theological lines in the sand, especially when I suspect that some of those line are a source of either great amusement (or great sorrow) for God.

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Unfinished Business

I'm now in Falls Church, VA, but with the church office closed for Easter Monday, I'll actually begin work tomorrow.  Most adults know about beginning a new job, about the process of learning the ropes and figuring out what the work really entails.  This process now begins for me, but there is another piece to figuring out my work.  And this involves knowing what the overall work of the Church is.  What is it we are called to do as Christians?

Today's gospel is Mark's Easter morning account.  Mark's version has provoked much debate over the years.  Most Bibles note that the best manuscripts of the gospel end at 16:8.  Then follow shorter and longer endings which seem to have been affixed later.  There is little debate regarding these additions.  The questions are about the original ending.

From a grammatical standpoint, the Greek text of 16:8 ends very awkwardly, leading many to insist that the original ending has been lost.  Others insist Mark does this intentionally to leave the gospel with an unfinished feel that calls the reader forward to continue the command first given to the women.  There is no way to totally resolve this debate, but regardless, we are left with this strange conclusion to Easter, where three witnesses to the empty tomb say nothing because they are afraid.

Very few of us don't have some experience in this area.  We have heard all sorts of commands from Jesus, commands to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek, to love God over wealth, but we don't do as we are told.  Like the women on that Easter morning, we aren't convinced it is in our best interest to act as we've been commanded.  And so we don't.

Of course we know that the women did not remain silent.  The command to tell must have overwhelmed their fear eventually.  But we present day Christians have had nearly 2000 years to develop a long list of excuses for not doing as Jesus says.  At times we've perverted Jesus' call to follow him into a trite formula where believing a few things is all that matters.

And so the Church needs to remember what Jesus said to us, hear him call us once more and then overcome the fears that keep us from following.  And I think the Spirit is spurring the Church to do just that.  As anxious as it makes many of us, some of the change and the turmoil in the Church of late is calling us back to our work, to our unfinished business of showing the world God's new day, the Kingdom Jesus insists has drawn near.

And so as I begin learning the ropes of a new job, I pray that I never lose sight of my true job: helping the people of this congregation hear what Jesus is calling us to do.

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Mine

Technically, this is my last day as pastor of Boulevard Presbyterian.  I've not been working there for a couple of weeks, but with vacation and such, I'm still on the payroll through today.  This afternoon, I will load up the items from my office and pack them in a U-haul trailer.  And then I will depart my old church one last time as I head out for my new church.

My church.  It's a phrase most of us connected to church have used.  Pastors speak of their church and members do, too.  Often it is simply a way of identifying the particular congregation where we work or worship, but it can mean more.  The grammatical possessive often becomes literal.  The church is mine and it should conform to me, cater to me, provide for me, etc.  In ways subtle, and not so subtle, most of us at times claim some ownership of our churches.

Jesus' parable today seems to address just this.  The tenants of the vineyard decide that it is theirs, and they insist on keeping it for themselves, even if they must resort to extreme measures.

As we move deeper into Holy Week, it may be worth contemplating what the actual owner of the Church expects of us, the tenants.  Where have we substituted our desires for the commands of Jesus?  Jesus says that we are to lose ourselves for the sake of the gospel, but when it comes to our churches, we seem to focus much of our energies on preserving. 

The owner expects the tenants to produce good fruit from the vineyard, a vineyard that does not belong to us.  Something to think about as I head out to my new church.

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Caught Up in the Mundane

I've been off the grid lately in this time between leaving one congregation and starting at another.  My life has been preoccupied with getting ready to move from Columbus to Falls Church, VA, and I have discovered that the normal rhythms of my life have been thrown out of kilter.  Those rhythms revolved around my identity as pastor.  But for these last couple of weeks, I've not been one.

Without my old pastor rhythms, my life has begun to revolve around rhythms of home and car repair, planning and packing for a move, doing taxes, and tying up loose ends.  In a sense, my life feels like it has become captive to the mundane.

I don't mean to disparage the mundane.  The fact of God's Incarnation in Christ, that Jesus experiences hunger, hallows the mundane.  God is at work and is encountered within the mundane.  The spiritual is not outside the mundane.  But that does not mean the the mundane is inherently spiritual.  A discerning eye and awareness are required to encounter God in the mundane.

Though God is in the mundane, the mundane makes a very poor god.  And when the mundane totally dictates the patterns and rhythms of life, life gets out of kilter.

Monday's gospel reading is one of those places in Mark where one story exists within another, and the two need to talk with one another to understand fully what the author is trying to say.  Jesus cursing a fig tree (an odd event considering that "it was not the season for figs") and its withering bracket the cleansing of the Temple.  Mark seems to say that the Temple is not bearing the fruit is should, and, given the events of the cleansing, it might be correct to say that the Temple apparatus had gotten caught up in the mundane of religious enterprise. 

Church work and religion offer their own form of the mundane, rhythms and activities that can come to dominate the life of those who are a part of them.  And while God indeed inhabits and is at work in the the details of church administration, planning worship services, and setting budgets, those things make very poor gods.

A deep spiritual question that many ask is "Where is God in my life?"  In a sense, this asks where God is within the mundane.  The Church has often assumed that the mundane rhythms of its life were of God, but many no longer share such assumptions.  And so the burning spiritual question for both the individual and the Church becomes, where is God at work in the rhythms of my life?

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Sermon video - Beyond the Now

A bit late, but here is the video of my final sermon at Boulevard Presbyterian on March 18, 2012.

Videos also available on YouTube.

Gifted Congregations

I mentioned in my previous blog how congregations often have an inflated sense of the pastor's importance (as do pastors themselves).  This situation is very much on my mind as I conclude my time at one congregation and transition to another.  In this congregation I have ego driven worries about "what they'll do without me," and I imagine that some members have similar worries. 

Looking forward to a new congregation, I have worries about whether I have all the gifts needed for that particular place and community.  And no doubt there are worries about, or at least expectations about, what I will do to lead that congregation when I arrive. 

There is a reason people refer to the first year or so in a congregation as a "honeymoon period."  It takes a while for people to observe your flaws and less desirable traits, things that didn't get noticed during a whirlwind courtship.  And these "disappointments" are often the discovery that the pastor is not perfectly gifted to make the congregation great and wonderful.

When it comes to gifts and talents, you don't need to look very hard to realize that we value some gifts over others.  Look at the relative salaries of CEOs compared to workers at most any company.  For that matter, look at the salaries of senior pastors compared to other staff in most congregations.  But in his letter to the Corinthian Christians, the Apostle Paul works very hard to challenge such notions.  The Corinthians seem to have valued certain spiritual gifts over others, to the point of denigrating certain members.  They saw gifts as a way of rating and valuing (or devaluing) fellow believers, but Paul insists that these gifts are not a matter of better and worse.  They are the work of the Spirit for the good of the whole. 

This in no way denigrates the position of the pastor or minimizes her importance to a congregation, but it does undermine the hierarchies of gifts that too often exist in churches, not to mention society.  As Paul makes so clear in other parts of his letter, all the people and all their gifts are essential, and without all of them, the body is broken. 

If you go with Paul on this, there is no such thing as congregation that isn't sufficiently gifted, and if some seem that way, it is only because they resist the work of the Spirit in their midst.

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No Longer Your Pastor

The title of this post is not quite true.  I am in the office today, will conduct a funeral tomorrow, and do some visits on Wednesday.  But then I will no longer be pastor at Boulevard Presbyterian Church.  Yesterday was my final Sunday, and the congregation held a fabulous goodbye dinner following worship.  And so for most of this church's members, I finished yesterday.

It is strange to think about such things as I read Paul's letter to the church at Corinth.  Paul was in Corinth for a time, but of course he is elsewhere when he writes.  But he still acts like their pastor.  He still gives them advice, still tells them what they should do.  My denomination expressly forbids me from doing the same because when I leave, I am no longer their pastor, and they need to let go of me and get ready for someone new.

Not that I want to be like Paul, writing letters and offering advice and criticism.  My position as pastor here is not much like Paul's apostleship, where he helped begin the Corinthian congregation and, in a day before seminaries and paid church pastors, continued to pastor and encourage them from afar.  Paul's letter try to keep the congregation focused on Jesus, on the new life they are called to in Christ.  Interestingly, my not writing letters and giving advice serves much the same purpose.

One of the hazards of professional pastors is that congregations often become extensions of their pastor's personalities.  Pastors can become the center of things, sometimes to such a degree that even Jesus can get pushed aside.  (I'm familiar with a church in Columbus where the name of the pastor was painted on the side of their bus in considerably larger letters than the name of the church.)  And even when pastors work hard to avoid such issues, the pastor's prominence in weekly worship, at governing board meetings, and so on, makes it easy for people to think of this as James' church rather than Christ's.

Whether intentional or otherwise, there exists an inflated sense of the pastor's importance in many congregations, and I think this demands we stopping playing the role when we retire or move on to another congregation.  It is a good thing for congregations to discover that they are the body of Christ regardless of who is in the pulpit.  It is good to separate their sense of call and mission in the community from the individual who served as their pastor.

I love the congregation I am leaving, and so I want things to go well for it.  I will keep them in my prayers.  I want to encourage the people here and, if I hear of some problem, my instinct will be to "help."  But helping might well hurt the process of the congregation discovering who it is "in Christ" and without me.  There could well be a moment when I may need to bite my own tongue when someone asks my thoughts. If so, please understand that is because I care deeply for Boulevard that I may have to say,  "I'm sorry, but I'm no longer your pastor."

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Sermon audio - Beyond the Now

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Beyond the Now - My final sermon at Boulevard Presbyterian

John 3:14-21

Beyond the Now

James Sledge                                                                           Lent 4 – March 18, 2012

The words Jesus speaks to us this morning actually begin as a conversation.  Nicodemus, a Pharisee and leader in his religious community comes to see Jesus, at night.  He was quite sure that Jesus could not do the things he was doing apart from God, but he came to Jesus in the dark.  In John’s gospel, darkness is not a good thing.

Nick remains “in the dark.”  As he speaks with Jesus he grows more and more confused, and by the time we get to the part of the conversation we heard this morning, befuddled Nick seems to have disappeared from the scene.  Jesus talks past Nicodemus as though he were no longer there.  He even shifts from saying “you,” singular, to saying “y’all,” plural.

To be honest, I was not all that happy that this Scripture readings showed up on my last Sunday here, but none of the readings really excited me.  So I settled on the John verses.  At least they did talk of God so loving the world, of eternal life.  But of course then they go on to say how many are condemned already and that people are evil, preferring darkness to light.  A lot to unpack in a “goodbye” sermon.  I was tempted simply to ignore all that about judgment and condemnation, but that would be ignoring a lot that Jesus said.  So here goes.

When I was young and single, I found it difficult to tell a young woman that I was attracted to her.  For me there was nothing quite so terrifying as putting myself and my feelings out there where I might get shot down.  I assume that many of you have at some point in your life wanted to tell another person that you were interested in them, that you wanted to go out with them.  But once you blurt out, “Would you go out with me?” or, when in a relationship, “I love you,” you have precipitated a crisis moment.  There is no going back.  Things might go well or they might not, but things will not be the same.

If you’ve ever been shot down when you asked someone out, or if you’ve ever loved someone who would not or could not return that love, you may have some small sense of what Jesus is talking about when he speaks of judgment and of people being condemned already. 

Impressed by Compassion

When I read today's gospel account, I was unsure whether to focus on the miracle of feeding all those people with 5 loaves and two fish or on the fact that Jesus had compassion for the crowd in the first place.  After all, Jesus and his disciples had traveled to a deserted place for a little R and R, to get away from the crowds, a move prompted because "many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat."

The miracle itself is impressive enough, feeding 5000 men, presumably meaning that there were thousands more women and children.  But for those Christians who are thoroughly convinced that Jesus is divine, the miracle does not necessarily say much.  Of course God can whip up a meal for the crowds.  That's the kind of thing gods do.  But to me, the more illuminating piece of information is the way Jesus reacts after being thwarted in his attempt to escape the crowds.  "And he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things."

Pastors often borrow this sort of language, speaking of shepherding a church, with the congregation referred to as the flock.  But the analogy can break down pretty quickly, and not necessarily because the pastor isn't a miracle worker.

Pastors tend to invest a great deal of time and energy in their congregations, often for smaller salaries than might be available to them in other professions.  But we pastors usually expect something in return.  We expect those congregations to respond to our leadership in ways that reflect well on us.  They're supposed to embrace what we tell them and do great things so everyone will know that we are good and effective pastors.  And sometimes when "the flock" doesn't do as we hope or expect, we get frustrated. 

Sometimes when pastors get together, they end up complaining to each other about their congregations.  A lot of this is perfectly harmless, a way to let off steam.  But at times we start to sound more like a boss complaining about his sorry employees than a shepherd who has a deep compassion for her sheep.

Among the many and varied images of Jesus available to 21st Century Americans, there is one referred to as "Jesus CEO."  There are even business models that claim to draw their inspiration from the CEO practices that Jesus models.  But I have some difficulty imagining Jesus as a CEO, at least one in charge of anything like most modern corporations.  The Jesus we meet in today's gospel reading would never make it in such a position because he would be forever stopping what he was doing to care for someone. 

So Jesus fed thousands from one lunchbox.  Sure, that's a big deal, but gods are forever performing miracles.  But this Jesus is filled with tender compassion for the very folks who are frustrating his plans.  Now that's a strange sort of God.

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Faith, Love, and Restraint

A realize that the people on reality shows such as The Real Housewives of Orange County or Keeping Up With the Kardashians are hardly representative of most Americans.  Still, the success and attraction of such shows suggest that, for all their over-the-top excesses, they connect in some way to the American cultural ethos.  They may be gross exaggeration and even parody, but that only works by exaggerating or parodying existing patterns of American life.

The American dream is a dream of more.  For generations we have expected that our children would be better off than we are.  The first home we purchase is a "starter home" because we plan to have bigger and better ones as the years go by.  Such desires provide a great deal of motivation for hard work and innovation, but unchecked, they undergird a culture of excess.  They consume us, turning us into miniature versions of Orange County housewives or Kardashians, people who exist to consume.

The reason so many Americans have gotten themselves into trouble living beyond their means is that we are so convinced that we need more.  The idea that less could be good, that restraint is to be desired, is foreign to many of us.

Writing to the Corinthian Christians, Paul speaks about restraint born of love.  His concern is that these "enlightened" Corinthians addressed in his letter, having realized that there are no other gods and that meat sacrificed to those gods in not demonically tainted, are happily eating such meat, splurging in their new-found freedom.  But Paul is worried that neophyte Christians who are less "enlightened" may join in eating this meat and then be wracked with guilt to the point of damaging their faith.  Paul acknowledges the freedom to eat meat sacrificed to idols, but insists that if doing so could possibly harm another, he will gladly "never eat meat."  (It helps to realize that most meat in Corinthian butcher shops had come from some temple where it started out as a sacrifice.)

Paul understands his own freedom to be constrained by love.  Love is the greatest gift that that the Spirit gives.  It trumps all else, and so Paul cannot enjoy any excess that does not uplift the others of the community.  All those soaring lines about love being patient and kind, not insisting on its own way, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things - lines perhaps most familiar from weddings - are from Paul when he tells the Corinthians about the one excess they should pursue, love.

The only problem with what Paul says is that it doesn't quite compute without faith.  There is a logic to it, but it's a logic that breaks down if life isn't organized around something other than self.  For Christians, it is the spiritual presence of Jesus, the Spirit dwelling in us, that makes possible love as the highest goal and ideal.  To willingly do without for the sake of the neighbor begins to makes sense when faith draws us close to the truth Jesus proclaims.  "Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it."

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Sermon video - God's Daring Imagination

Sermons also available on YouTube.