Holding onto Paradox and Contradiction

I read Richard Rohr's daily meditation, and then I read the daily lectionary passages. Some days these compliment one another perfectly. Rohr was talking about how dilemmas, conflicts, paradoxes, and contradictions are a necessary part of scripture, and how we gain true wisdom only when we wrestle with such paradox and contradiction. Noting the "fragmented" nature of scripture he quotes Wendall Berry who says, "the mind that is not baffled is not employed."

Then came the morning psalm. "O LORD, who may abide in your tent?  Who may dwell on your holy hill? Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right."Such lines are not uncommon in the Bible. Only the pure and the righteous shall dwell with God.

Such talk is hardly restricted to the Old Testament.  Today's reading from Ephesians is also about purity. "Be sure of this, that no fornicator or impure person, or one who is greedy (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God."

 So God wants nothing to do with you unless you are pure and righteous. Only problem is Jesus says things like this to the good religious folks who worked very hard at purity.  "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you."

Have you ever noticed that Christians of both liberal and conservative stripes often feel a need to get rid of such biblical contradictions by emphasizing some and ignoring others? Some people's God is mostly concerned with purity and righteousness while other people speak of a God who seems not to care about such things at all, only wanting to embrace them and say, "There, there."

Strange that we expect humans to be complex and full of self contradictions, but we expect God to be a flat, two dimensional, cartoon character.  We think God should be easier to comprehend than our friend, partner, or neighbor.  What would Wendall Berry say about that?

I wonder what our faith might look like if we were more willing to hold onto the self-contradictions of scripture. (And perhaps even of God?)  If we took seriously God righteousness and holiness and mercy and forgiveness, how might that show in our lives?

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Sermon audio: Sign of Abundance

Preached by Diane Walton Hendricks on January 20.


Additional audios of sermons and worship can be found on church website.

Must Be Crazy

Jesus' family tried to stop him, to drag him back home because folks were saying, "He has gone out of his mind."  So it says in today's gospel. Jesus was acting strangely enough that people thought him possessed, and his family seemed to agree.  They thought it best to go get him and talk some sense into him. Fortunately this is no longer a problem. We in the church are free to domesticate Jesus as we see fit, to make him into a champion of middle class values and attitudes, perfectly at home with the status quo. 

This notion of domesticating former revolutionaries struck me yesterday as I watched the President's inauguration on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.  Amidst the frequent references to Dr. King, I was struck how he has become a sanitized revolutionary, remembered for platitudes easily embraced by most all decent folks nowadays.  There was little to see of the Dr. King who spoke out against the Vietnam War, who questioned American capitalism, and who blasted white, middle-class Christianity.

While in a Birmingham jail, King wrote an open letter to fellow clergy, especially to white pastors in more liberal churches whom King had supposed would be natural allies, but who instead told King to slow down, to stop acting so impatient (so crazy?)  Here's a piece of that letter.

So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent -- and often even vocal -- sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

I was especially struck by that last line of the paragraph about young people's disappointment.  Judging by the number of young adults who want little to do with church in our time (now at a third and rising for those under 30), King could just as easily be speaking of the twenty first century.

It is strange the way the church so often becomes defender of the status quo. After all, our founder was persecuted and killed by the status quo.  But for some reason we imagine our status quo to be sufficiently "Christian." And those who do claim the culture has fallen away so far as to earn God's ire measure this in trivial things such as "prayer in school" or with regards to the right stance or hot-button social issues.  Nearly impossible to see in any of this is a Jesus who was at home with prostitutes and other ne'er-do-wells but who frightened to death many of the good, church-folk of his day.

I have yet to meet anyone who would seriously claim that the world has been transformed into anything resembling the vision Jesus proclaimed of a Kingdom of God, a new realm where earth looked like heaven, all things done just as God would have them. And yet the church, as Dr. King unhappily discovered, is often the biggest defender of the status quo has. This is so commonplace that there is an old joke about the 7 last words of a dying church being, "We've never done it that way before."

I wonder what would happen if the church became a little less beholding to the status quo or to "how we've always done it, and a little more shaped by the pattern of Jesus and how he lived. Actually, I think we know and that is what keeps so frightened of change.  We're afraid people would say, "Those folks must be crazy!"

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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

Water into wine.  Even people who've never been to a church have probably heard about Jesus turning water into wine. It's a pretty whiz bang sort of  miracle, but I'm not sure its significance is much appreciated.  Often the story gets drawn into discussions about religion and alcohol, or about whether or not to believe in miracles.

I heard a very good sermon on this passage today from Diane Walton Hendricks, the pastor for spiritual growth here at Falls Church Presbyterian. She pointed out that this story is about God's abundance, about how God steps in when it seems there isn't enough, enough resources, enough money, enough political will,  enough hope, enough time, etc. (I will post the sermon on this blog later in the week.)

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has written on "the liturgy of abundance, the myth of scarcity." He points out that consumerism is all about scrambling to acquire things of which there aren't enough to go around. But the biblical narrative is one of enough for all, enough to go around. And in his first "sign," Jesus demonstrates this promise of enough, or God's abundance.

Much of public discourse and politics these days is about scarcity and about how to deal with it.  Who will get left out?  What essential services must be cut? In a nation of incredible wealth, our lives are often shaped more by the myth of scarcity than by any promise or liturgy of abundance.  Seems to me that one of the most important things a follower of Jesus can do is to expose and counteract that myth by proclaiming and living in ways that bear witness to the hope and promise of God's abundance.

The Faith of Others

I've always been both enticed and bothered by today's gospel reading, the story of a paralyzed man who is lowered through to roof to get around huge crowds. It's one of those favorite Bible story episodes I remember from my childhood. But as an adult I was troubled by the notion that Jesus only heals the man to prove to the scribes that he has the authority to forgive sin.  Does that mean if no scribes had been there, Jesus wouldn't have healed the man?

But something different struck me on reading the story again today.  It was the initial motivation for Jesus to act.  "When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, 'Son, your sins are forgiven.' ” Not the paralytic's faith but "their faith."

A well known phrase in the gospels is Jesus saying "Your faith has saved you," or "Your faith has made you well." (These are just different translations of the same Greek.)  But in today's reading it seems Jesus should say, "Their faith has saved you/made you well." 

American Christianity tends to be highly individualistic, but in this gospel a person is both forgiven and healed because of others' faith.  That reminds me of another biblical phrase that can be translated more than one way. A lot of Protestants are familiar with passages such as Galatians 2:16 which says, "A person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ." But the Greek of this sentence can just as easily be translated, "...through the faith of Jesus." So are we saved, justified, healed by our faith, or by his?

Part of Paul's insistence in such passages is that our new and restored relationship with God is not something we accomplish.  Rather it is a gift.  But very often we Protestants simply turn faith into a different sort of work or accomplishment.  We decide to believe certain things and so God must reward us.  But what if it's more like the story of the paralytic in today's gospel?  When Jesus saw "their faith," he forgave the man.  When God saw Jesus' faith, he forgave us?

If this is in fact the case, then what does it means to live a life of faith?

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Egos and Community

When you've worked hard and done a good job, it's quite natural to have some pride in your accomplishment.  It also makes good sense to appreciate and thank those who have worked hard and done a good job. Never to hear a "Well done" makes such effort feel pointless, and even the Bible gives us that phrase, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

But then there is this line from today's epistle reading. "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works, so that no one may boast."  So that no one may boast... I take it that boasting marks some sort of line where recognizing hard work makes an unfortunate transition into egoism.

The warning in today's epistle is far from the only one in Scripture.  It seems that ego can be a real problem for people of faith.  This problem is the central one behind another epistle, First Corinthians. The Corinthian congregation was very animated and motivated by their faith.  The people diligently tried to hone and improve their spiritual gifts, but they also thought some gifts superior to others. They looked down on those who didn't have them and felt puffed up if they did have them.

The gifts of God became things that divided and destroyed community rather than building it up, which is why Paul tells them that the greatest gift is love. Paul's words about love being patient and kind and bearing all things are heard primarily at weddings these days.  Egos can cause problems in marriages, so that is not inappropriate, but Paul isn't speaking about romantic love. He is reminding the Corinthians that the greatest gifts do not puff up one's ego, they diminish it as the good of the other becomes more important than self.

This problem with ego continues to bedevil people of faith. Those who diligently strive to work out their theology in great detail so that it will guide them in faithful living look down on those whose theology is different. Those who have expended great energy and effort to worship God with the very best music and liturgy they can muster, look down their noses at others who are "less sophisticated" and do "bad worship."

You can probably come up with countless other examples where our egos lead us into ways more apt to produce division than unity, that create categories of "us" and "them." We Presbyterian clergy have any number of these. We like to point out our "educated clergy" who are required to take Hebrew and Greek, often with an implied slight to those uneducated clergy of some denominations and churches. And we don't always leave the slight implied.

I do think we should try to encourage hard work, and we should acknowledge the efforts of those who work hard. But when such encouraging or acknowledging moves into egoism and begins to create "us" and "them," when it fails to build community but instead creates division, something has gone amiss. And the cure, if Scripture is to be believed, requires gratitude, and it requires love. That's the Jesus kind of love.

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Irresistible Presence

"And immediately they left their nets and followed him."  That's what happens when Jesus calls Simon and Andrew to follow him in today's gospel, an event pretty much repeated with James and John.  That's pretty amazing.  I'm not sure if I've ever said to a church session or committee, "Let's do this," and immediately they all said, "Sure, that's a great idea. Let's get started."  Of course I don't really expect that to happen. I may suffer from messianic delusions as much as the next pastor, but I know I'm not Jesus.

The disciples' immediate response is amazing not simply because it is so at odds with my experience.  In the Old Testament, God calls quite a few people, and besides Abram (later named Abraham), they all have some reason they shouldn't say, "Yes." They need coaxing and reassuring.  But not Simon, Andrew, James, and John.

Considering what fumbling and bumbling followers these four often are, I don't think Mark's gospel is pointing to them as paragons of faith. Rather it is saying something about the presence of Jesus that is nearly irresistible. For those who encounter him and hear his call, the truly amazing thing would be to say, "No."

Which is all well and good until I began thinking about my own encounters with Jesus and my response to his call. I have very little trouble saying "No" to Jesus.  So either my powers of resistance are remarkable, or perhaps I've not really encountered Jesus.

It's that old problem I talked about before, knowing about Jesus versus actually meeting him.  Knowing that Jesus said, "Love one another" or "Make disciples of all peoples" versus hearing him say that to me. 

There's a hymn in our Presbyterian Hymnal that I will confess to disliking greatly, not for its music but for its words. It begins,

We walk by faith and not by sight; No gracious words we hear
From Christ who spoke as none e'er spoke; But we believe him near.

In my understanding of this verse and those that follow, this hymn describes faith as believing what the Bible says is true. But the Bible speaks of the Spirit making Christ present to us. The Apostle Paul speaks of us being "in Christ" and made new by that experience.  And on occasion he claims to have a word "from the Lord." Is Paul an anomaly, or did we modern, rationalist Christians take experience out of the faith equation? It certainly makes things much more neat and orderly if everything Jesus said is way back in the past, and the Spirit doesn't issue any new commands in Jesus' name.

I'm not advocating turning our brains off. Charismatic types have done great damage to the church and the faith throughout history. But if it is true that we can no longer hear any gracious word from Christ who spoke such words long ago, well no wonder the Church sometimes seems to be half dead.

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Faith Patterns

The daily lectionary moves to a new gospel today, taking up the gospel of Mark. A lot happens in these opening 13 verses: and introduction, John the baptizer and his ministry, Jesus being baptized, and Jesus being tempted for 40 days in the wilderness. All that in 13 verses. Of course that means that we don't get a lot of detail about the events, and there's more about John than Jesus. But I wonder if Mark doesn't give us something of a basic pattern for the life of faith.

A call to repentance, a response, a clear identity and the gift of the Spirit, then a time of testing all come prior to Jesus beginning his ministry. Mark does not directly address the question of why Jesus would need "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin," but Jesus certainly does repent, at least in the sense of changing the direction of his life. Jesus has lived well into his adult life without attracting any attention at all, but that will change dramatically in short order.

A call to change or repent, a response to that call, a clear sense that this is central to who you are and is divinely inspired and supported, and a time of testing or temptation... I wonder if Mark doesn't  provide us with a kind of prototype for the Christian life.

There was a time when I would have argued against such an idea. I grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and we tended to leave dramatic faith experiences to Baptists and other more "born again" sorts. Being nurtured in the faith from birth, we not only had no actual memories of our baptisms, but we were often taught that our faith was more about accretion than transformation. If repentance was part of the pattern, the change in direction was so slight as to be almost imperceptible, perhaps prescribing an arc that could be seen following a long passage of time, but there were no dramatic turns for most of us.

I now reject such thinking.  While it may indeed be that we trust in Jesus from such an early age that we can't speak of a dramatic conversion experience, being called to the work of ministry is another matter.  And all Christians receive such calls. More precisely, all who would follow Jesus receive such calls. The term "Christian" does not always imply actually following Jesus.

Jesus presumably grew up with some sense that his identity was rooted in God. Surely there were inklings and moments in his life prior to  his baptism where he felt that he had special purpose. Still, his life seems to have followed a road little different from other people in his community for nearly 30 years.  Jesus may have always been Son of God, but his life did not prescribe any smooth, gentle arc. It featured a screeching turn as God's call became clear to him.

I don't care for notions of a one-size-fits-all faith or for exact formulas that every person of faith must adhere to. But that does not mean there are no patterns that can be discerned, or that there are no normative sorts of experiences.  The Bible is full of "call" stories that vary greatly in their details. The call of Abram is quite different from the call of Moses or Jeremiah or the virgin Mary or the first disciples of Jesus or the Apostle Paul or of Jesus himself. But as different as they all are, the pattern outlined in today's gospel would seem to fit into each.

Have you experienced God's call in your life? If so, how has this pattern played out for you?

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Sermon audio: In Line with Us

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Sermon video: In Line with Us

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Sermon: In Line with Us

Luke 3:15-22

In Line with Us

James Sledge                             January 13, 2013  -  Baptism of the Lord

John the Baptist gets a curtain call today.  We just heard from him during Advent, as we do every year. In fact, John gets two Sundays during Advent. He’s there to help us get ready, to prepare for the coming of a Savior.  But now here he is again.  This time the focus is on his ministry of baptizing as we remember Jesus being baptized.

As a result, we don’t hear all of John’s message this time, don’t get called a brood of vipers, and don’t hear about the ax at the root of the trees, but we still get some sense of that. John says of Jesus, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”  I’ve always gotten the impression that John expected Jesus to kick butt and take names.

I wonder if John thought the world was beyond hope. Did he expect Jesus to show up, clean house, and start over with some righteous remnant?  Was Jesus going to institute a fiery version of the Noah’s ark story, wiping out all the bad with unquenchable fire?

John the Baptist was probably a pretty strange guy.  Prophet types often are.  But despite all his strangeness, I know a lot of people whose thinking is a good deal like John’s.  Sometimes mine is, too.

A lot of Christians proclaim a slightly modified version of John’s message.  “The world’s horrible, filled with all sort of terrors and cruelties and exploitation and needless suffering.”  John could point to Herod and Roman occupation and corruption in the Jerusalem Temple hierarchy and the way the poor always got the short end of things while the rich got richer.  Herod and the Romans are gone, but other than that we know all about the exploitive dictators and military occupations and corrupt religious institutions and the poor getting the short end of things while the rich do just fine. 

John expected Jesus to show up and fix things somehow, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. In the Christian variation on John’s message, fixing things is still not going to be pretty.  But now it comes mostly via evacuation.  Jesus comes with his winnowing fork and carries the wheat off to heaven. But the not so good and creation itself, well nothing but fire will fix that.

Liberals Christians sometimes burn less stuff, less folks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t adhere to the basic formula where the world is in some way hopeless and beyond redemption.

Something to Eat

Reading today's gospel made me think about how often feeding miracles shows up in the gospels. All four contain one, and Matthew and Mark have two.  Six miraculous feedings.  No missing that Jesus provides food for the hungry.

So many occurrences suggests this was a very well known story. No matter what sources a gospel writer had, there it was.  And Mark had two different accounts (apparently replicated in Matthew). Perhaps they were the same event via different sources, or perhaps they were stories of different feeding miracles.  Either way, Jesus feeding the crowds features very prominently in the story the early Church told.

Our course meals figure prominently in other ways. Huge portions of the synoptic gospels are devoted to Jesus' last meal with  his followers. A banquet was a well worn metaphor for the coming of God's reign. And the early Church came together around a meal.  (The typical dry cubes and thimbles of juice in the Lord's Supper I grew up with bore scant resemblance to such meals, much less to a banquet.)

Eating a meal with someone is a significant act. Most of us are pretty picky about who we invite over for dinner.  In our day of fast and easy food, we may not spend much time reflecting on the act of eating, but we still have favorite foods and restaurants. And while going to the movies is a safe first date, dining together at a nice establishment is a much more intimate event.

Church suffers a huge loss when the experience of worship is more like the movies or a concert than like joining others for dinner.  Not that movies or concerts cannot be deeply moving, but they lack the intimacy of a meal.  They lack the sense of receiving something one cannot live without, nourishment and companionship, community if you will.

I suspect one reason so many young people find traditional worship unappealing is that it feels more like going to something than it feels like receiving something you deeply need.  The pendulum swing in my tradition back toward more frequent celebration of the Lord's Supper perhaps senses this lack. But I am not sure that simply doing communion more often, especially in services with lots of people, changes things very much.

I once new a church member who I liked a great deal. When he would leave Sunday worship, he often commented on my sermons.  If he had really liked one he would make a point of saying, "I really enjoyed the lecture today." I never objected.  I knew he meant it in the kindest possible way, but it always unnerved me a bit.

Jesus taught, he told stories, he healed, and he fed people and ate with them, and the early Church and the gospel writers seem quite captivated by the food part.  Jesus offers food for those who are hungry, and he gives it to his followers to distribute and share.

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