The Other & Where Are We Going?

"Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." These words from Deuteronomy are often referred to as the "Shema"from the Hebrew for "Hear."  (This is the only Old Testament verse I can actually recite from memory in Hebrew.) This command forms a centerpiece of Judaism, and many Jews affix them to their doorways, as Deuteronomy tells them to do.

Jesus reaches for this command when he is asked for the greatest commandment, linking it with another Old Testament command to love neighbor as self.  Linked together, these two speak of life animated by the Divine Other and by the human other. Quite a contrast to life organized around my wants and needs. But how on earth to move from the self-centered life to the other-centered life?

Today's meditation by Richard Rohr includes this. "The mystics’ overwhelming experience is this full-body blow of the Divine loving them, God radically accepting them. And they spend the rest of their life trying to verbalize that experience, and invariably finding ways to give that love back through forms of service, compassion and non-stop worship. But none of this is to earn God’s love; it’s always and only to return God’s love. Love is repaid by love alone."

The full-body blow of Divine love; now that's a phrase. And it speaks of an experience not easily transmitted by the methods of "Christian Education" I encountered growing up in the church. That is not to dismiss those as meaningless, but for all the information they imparted, they were modeled on the schoolhouse. And they did not speak the language of relationship or love.

This strikes me as the big challenge facing the church and congregations.  How do we provide the necessary information about God that is needed to distinguish those experiences that are of God from those that are not? And how do we help people be open to the experience of God that gives real meaning to their information about God? And while traditions like my own Presbyterian Church have historically done a very good job on the informational side, we seem to struggle on both counts now. We struggle with "Christian Education" even as we make sporadic attempts to do "Spiritual Formation."

To be sure, I have no magic solutions to offer. We seem to be in a time when the old is breaking down, but the new that will replace it is as yet very unclear. It is an exciting time with much experimentation going on. And it is a frightening time of dislocation where many hunker down with what they already know. But both the experimentation and the hunkering down can be, and often are, very self serving, without the Other-centered focused called for by Deuteronomy and Jesus.

Perhaps a good lenten discipline for many congregations would be to spend time reflecting on our focus. What is it that gives us meaning and purpose as a congregation? What is the "North star" that guides all that we do, and is it about the Other. This moves us into the language of "call." Call is always about an other, and it always draws us away from ourselves toward something else. But that makes call inherently frightening. Many people correctly intuit that a call in one direction by necessity eliminates a number of other directions, and many of us are loathe to narrow our options.

Speaking of focus, I feel very much that I am wandering around in this post, with no clear idea where I am headed. In that sense, these words mirror some of my worries for the church. Can we encounter the love of The Other and hear the call of that Other that pulls us away from ourselves and sets us out on the path we are meant for? Can our congregations hear a call that guides us clearly so that we began to realize where we are going, and also where we are not?

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Sermon audio: Listen to Him!

Sermon and worship audios on FCPC website.

Sermon video: Listen to Him!

More sermons available on YouTube.

Sermon: Listen to Him!

Luke 9:28-43a
Listen to Him!

James Sledge                     Transfiguration of the Lord         February 17, 2013

Some of you may be familiar with French writer and philosopher Albert Camus.  Perhaps you read The Stranger in a high school or college literature.  Camus was an agnostic and a pacifist, but after witnessing Nazi atrocities, he became part of the French Underground during World War II.  Though agnostic, he was asked once after the war to speak to a group of Christians.  Speaking out of the horrors of the war and the Holocaust he said this.

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear; and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could arise in the heart of the simplest man.  That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.  The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally…  Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured.  But we can reduce the number of tortured children.  And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us?…

It may be, I am well aware, that Christianity will answer negatively.  Oh, not by your mouths, I am convinced.  But it may be, and this is even more probable, that Christianity will insist on maintaining a compromise or else on giving its condemnations the obscure form of the encyclical.  Possibly it will lose all the virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago.  In that case Christians will live and Christianity will die.[1]

I’m reading this from the book, Christian Doctrine, in a chapter entitled “Are You a Christian?  The Doctrine of Sanctification.”  Shirley Guthrie, the Presbyterian theologian who wrote this book, says that Camus, an unbeliever, challenges Christians to take seriously our own doctrine of sanctification.  Sanctification is about how we, who have been embraced, forgiven, and claimed by God as children, begin to live as such children, letting the Holy Spirit work within us to transform us so that we act more and more like true children of God.

Though not a Christian, Camus is knowledgeable enough about the faith to expect this of the church, and he is upset when he does not see it.  He is frustrated by our failure to live out our faith claims. Interestingly, Jesus seems to share some of Camus’ frustrations in our gospel today, saying to his followers, “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?”

Perhaps more than any other gospel, Luke seems to have the Church in view as it talks about Jesus.  By the time Luke is written, hopes for Jesus’ immediate return have begun to wane, and the Church has to focus more on what it meant to be faithful in an indeterminate, perhaps long lasting, meantime.  And in this story of Jesus’ glory and identity being revealed to the Church – here represented by three of his closest followers – Luke speaks both of how the Church is to live in the world, and of frustrations over our failure to do so, frustrations not unlike those Camus shares.

It Is Necessary

On the heels of Peter's profession of Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus "began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering..." I'm not certain this translation picks up the full force of the line. A different translation might say that Jesus "began to teach them. 'It is necessary for the Son of Man to experience great suffering...' "

It is necessary. Jesus is not simply predicting what will happen but is stating what must happen, what is required to happen. There is some compulsion that drives Jesus toward Jerusalem and the cross.

It is conventional to speak of this in terms of a formula. Jesus must die in order to pay a price that would otherwise have to be paid by us. (Given how frequently this formula is cited, it seems rather odd that the Jews could be "blamed" for Jesus' death. After all, it was necessary.) But often this formula sounds terribly mechanical, and it seems to imply that God is somehow as trapped by this formula as we are.

I find it much more helpful to speak of this in terms of what is necessary to restore any broken relationship. Generally this requires reaching across the divide of  hurt and pain to attempt a reconciliation. The deeper and more profound the break in a relationship, the more difficult this becomes.  At some point, it may become so difficult, so costly, that no one can bear such cost, and there is no healing to be had.

"It is necessary" feels to me like a statement of the costs involved if there is to be healing. The divine human relationship might seem to be beyond repair, but God is willing to do what it takes, to bear the cost required. It is no simple formula, but it is still necessary, a necessity God willingly chooses to bear.

In a Bible study earlier today, we were discussing the Noah's ark stories. We noted that the reasons given for God wanting to destroy all those on the earth (see Genesis 6:5) are virtually the same reasons given for why God will "never again destroy." (see 8:21) God's relationship with us human creatures seems to precipitate an internal crisis within God, one resolved in both the Noah story and with Jesus in favor of restoration, redemption, and hope rather than judgment and wrath. (See Hosea 11:1-9 for a poetic depiction of this.) But this is costly for God.

It is necessary, and God seems determined to do whatever is necessary to woo us back. And when you think of what colossal screw-ups we so often are, including how badly we screw up the church, that is truly good news.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Arguing with Jesus

The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, asking him for a sign from heaven, to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.” And he left them, and getting into the boat again, he went across to the other side.                          Mark 8:11-13

A lot of people seem not to realize this, but the Pharisees were not nasty bad guys plotting evil deeds while twirling their mustaches à la Snidely Whiplash. (For post-Baby Boomers, that refers to a 1960s Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon character.) The Pharisees were an educated and dedicated reform movement in Judaism, the forerunners of what became rabbinical, synagogue Judaism. They struggled against what they thought a corrupt Jerusalem Temple complex run by the priests, a struggle with some real parallels to the Protestant Reformation.

The Pharisees are not always portrayed negatively in the gospels, and they would seem to have had some natural affinities with what Jesus was saying and doing, yet they mostly end up in conflict with him.

Today's verses, and especially Jesus' reaction, might seem to indicate that arguing with the Pharisees was a common occurrence, one that had begun to wear on Jesus.  Not that arguing implies fighting. It was common for rabbis to engage in long discussion and debates. Indeed a great deal of Jewish writings catalog such discussions in a kind of doctrinal discussion project. But for some reason, this does not go well with Jesus as one of the discussion partners.

I wonder if this might be because Jesus won't play by the normal rules. He refuses to be just one more rabbi adding a bit to the discussion stew. He insists he knows and has authority that the other rabbis don't. If so, no wonder these discussions ended badly, with the other rabbis demanding a sign, proof that Jesus had such authority.

I don't say any of this as a knock on those rabbis,  nor on Judaism past or present. In fact, I find this to be a very active pattern in many churches today. Jesus not being physically present, it is carried on via more indirect methods. We engage in arguments with Scripture, with doctrine, with tradition.  Much of this discussion is a good thing, helping us be in conversation with something living and dynamic, helping us hone our faith and understanding.  But sometimes this discussion ends poorly, like Jesus' with the Pharisees. 

Jesus starts to insist that we must follow him and seek God's will more than our own and we get testy. We're happy to listen to Jesus and consider what he has to say, but we'll be the judge of whether it is of any great merit. We're not any more ready than those Pharisees to grant Jesus that sort of authority over our lives.

As one who places myself well to the left side of the faith spectrum, I have to admit that this particular "arguing with Jesus" problem is a favorite of us liberals. (Conservatives have their own ways of misconstruing Jesus, ways we liberals are quick to point out even as we ignore our own.) We liberals are happy to enter into conversation and discussion with Jesus - and most anyone else for that matter - but we struggle actually to accept Jesus as more than a wise conversation partner.

The are probably many reasons for this. But whether we think ourselves too smart and educated, see things in too nuanced a fashion, or simply recoil from anything that reminds us of "God said, I believe it, that settles it," we end up participating in that good ole bugaboo, idolatry.

Idolatry is simply about placing our trust in things other than God. And while the word "idol" may conjure up thoughts of molten images, the most successful idols are much harder to spot. Family and country make passable idols. Church can be an even better one. Reason and intellect will do fine, too, and these have the added advantage of appealing to people regardless of what they think of church.

Now I will admit to engaging in a bit of hyperbole and generalization to make my point, but I do think it a most interesting question to ask, "Who or what can exercise some degree of authority over you life?" To some degree, that is your god.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting blind obedience to any doctrine or any particular church stance. I think Jesus is more than happy to get in there and have a great discussion, even argument with us. I just hope those arguments don't end with Jesus shaking his head and  sighing deeply in his spirit.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Enough with the Worship

This morning I was reading from Paul's letter to the Galatians, and I was struck by this line.  "You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years."  Paul is chastising them for abandoning their new life in Christ and returning to something old. Perhaps this refers to Jewish festivals or perhaps pagan ones. Either way, we church folks have our special days, months, seasons, and years. (We're in "year C"by the way.)

I also came across this in today's meditation by Richard Rohr. "Most of us just keep worshiping Jesus and arguing over the right way to do it. The amazing thing is that Jesus never once says, 'Worship me!' whereas he frequently says, 'Follow me.'" And that reminded me of this passage from Amos. "I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies." That's God speaking by the way, who goes on to say, "Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

It must be one of those days when I can stop making connections, because I found myself thinking back to Paul's words to the Corinthian church from Sunday's sermon, famous words that said without love (that's Christ-like, self-giving love) all else we do is meaningless.  "Noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" is one of Paul's illustrations.

Yet despite all this, church in American remains focused heavily on worship. As a pastor, I can mess up a great many things, but if most people are happy with the worship, I will get by. There's a reason we get referred to as "preachers," and people joke about us working one day a week.

I don't have anything against worship, and indeed my tradition thinks it of vital importance. But when people of faith define that faith by private belief and attendance at worship, we have moved into the territory of the quotes above.  

When it comes to this, the now largely finished Christendom role that traditional, mainline churches once played is a huge albatross around our necks. In that former time, we imagined ourselves partners with the culture in a Christian enterprise. We could concern ourselves largely with worship in the mistaken notion that the culture itself was somehow forming people to live as disciples and providing them with opportunities to serve. Being a "good citizen" was very nearly equal to "discipleship."

While being a good member of one's community can indeed by a way of living out faith in Jesus, there is plenty Jesus calls us to that our communities often prefer that we wouldn't do. While this would seemingly be obvious to anyone who as actually read the gospels, the fact that some faithful church people endorsed racially based slavery as God-ordained, fought against civil rights, and think defending the right to bear arms is a Christian duty points to how easily the obvious gets overlooked.

Still, we in the dwindling mainline church keep focusing on worship, often to the point of everything else being tokens. We keep expecting that if we do good worship people will keep coming because that was what we did in Christendom. But if anyone asks us how to experience the Spirit's help and guidance or what it actually means to follow Jesus, we stammer, suggest they talk to someone else, or tell them about the new, informal worship service we are planning.  And then we wonder why things are going so poorly for our brand.

Since I'm making so many connections today, here's another one, from a piece by Jack Haberer of the Presbyterian Outlook which begins, "The bad news is that the older generations have wrecked the church. The good news is that newer generations are poised to resurrect it — that is, to support Jesus’ resurrection program." (If you're curious you can read the editorial here.) 

I wonder if this realization by Haberer isn't critical to traditional churches.  We have to quit thinking of ourselves as wonderful, sacred bearers of God's timeless, heavenly truths, and admit that we need resurrecting. While there is plenty in our tradition that does have value and worth, that is a faithful expression of what it means to follow Jesus (By the way, some of these new generations of resurrection folks are much more keenly aware of our traditions' merits than we in them are.), there is much that is nothing but old, tired habit that we have made idols.  And increasingly, younger people who are looking for a living faith with a living God are rejecting our human-made idols that have proven as inert as the ones Old Testament prophets railed against.

There's an old adage about the church being a hospital for sinners rather than a club for saints. Even though I'm not sure we really believe that, perhaps we need to take it one step further and recognize that it is not only we individuals who need healing. The institutional church that we create could use some critical care.  Now where are those defibrillator paddles?

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Sermon video: The Greatest Gift

More videos available on YouTube.

Sermon: The Greatest Gift

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

The Greatest Gift

James Sledge                                                               February 3, 2013

I’m guessing that many of you have heard this passage from 1 Corinthians before.  Maybe my experience is skewed by being a pastor , but I’ve heard it a lot, mostly at weddings. I don’t keep good enough records to say this with any certainty, but I would be surprised if I haven’t used this passage in at least half the weddings I’ve done.  And in a number of weddings that didn’t use these words on love, the couple was making a conscious decision to do something different from what they’d seen at all their friends’ weddings.

Paul is not talking about marriage or romance, but his words can speak to the sort of love required to sustain a marriage.  But I doubt that many couples who choose this passage realize its real meaning, though that may be as much the church’s fault as anyone’s.

____________________________________________________________________________

If you were having some significant difficulties with someone who was very important to you, and this person wrote you a long, heartfelt letter trying to resolve the situation, what would you do?  That may seem a rather odd question.  Most of us would read the letter.  And it would have to be incredibly long not to do so at one sitting. Certainly we wouldn’t read it a few paragraphs per day, sometimes skipping around rather than going from beginning to end.

Yet this is precisely what we do with the letters in the Bible, which is why so many people have heard Paul speak on love without having the foggiest notion of why he felt the need to do so.  This lack of context leads to all sorts of interpretive mischief. Shortly before our passage, Paul writes this about the Lord’s Supper.  For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.  People routinely suggest that this is about mystical presence in the elements, but when you read what comes before and after, Paul makes quite clear the “body” he is talking about is the church, the community of faith.

So too, the words we heard this morning address concerns outside the reading itself.  Paul is concerned about divisions within the community of faith. In particular, he is worried about divisions that arise from some members thinking they are better than others, and in the Corinthian church, this seems to have happened around spiritual gifts.

I'll Never Forget You

Can a woman forget her nursing child,
     or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget,
     yet I will not forget you.

Isaiah 49:15

A recurring religious question is that of God's disposition toward humankind and the world. And at those moments when things seem to be unraveling, when all evidence points to a life or a world hurtling out of control toward destruction, it is easy to wonder how long God will tolerate such things.  Surely someday, God will have had enough.

Such a question is on Israel's mind as the prophet speaks.  Their experiences suggest that God has abandoned them.  Perhaps it is all their fault.  They abandoned God and so are only getting what they deserve. But still this is a terrible realization, and so Israel says, “The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.”  So it seems.

But through the prophet, God responds. "Can a mother forget her young child?" We would certainly hope not, and any who did would be considered a disgrace to mothering. But God insists that the divine loyalty toward Israel - and through them "all the families of the earth" - surpasses that of a mother toward her child.

Sometimes, amidst our trying to figure out all the particulars of the faith, or all the machinations of the church, we need to pause and  remember this.  "I will not forget you," says our God. "The most effusive love of the most caring mother pales by comparison to my love for you."

That is a promise worth remembering and revisiting on a regular basis.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Grumpy Pastor

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
     to raise up the tribes of Jacob
     and to restore the survivors of Israel;
 I will give you as a light to the nations,
      that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

 Isaiah 49:6

I'm feeling a bit grumpy about the church and my denomination today, and attending a presbytery meeting yesterday has little or nothing to do with it. (Presbyteries are regional, representative governing bodies and my denomination's districts or dioceses.)  It turned grumpy when I saw another Facebook post about the proposed changes to our medical benefits.  I won't bore you with details, but like everyone, our denomination is dealing with the spiraling cost of healthcare. And the group that oversees our medial plan is proposing big changes, changes that seem to hit small churches and young pastors with children the hardest.

Now I should add that there are many things in our health and pension plan that lean the other way. Pastors who make less money pay smaller deductibles and their churches pay less for the same coverage.  And pastors making salaries below a certain point get treated as though they make more when pensions are calculated.  So traditionally we have tried to take good care those who labor in small churches earning small salaries.

But I should also add that such things were instituted in a past when Mainline denominations were quite well off and we had no trouble funding health care.  But now, as it becomes more painful and costly to provides such things, we are not so sure we can continue.  And to me it feels a bit like we're saying, "We want to love our neighbors, but only if it's not too difficult."

Sometimes we in the church are better at being an institution than being the body of Christ, and that's as true of local church governing boards as it is with the larger, institutional pieces of a denomination. We produce voluminous annual reports and statistics. We worry a lot about numbers.  When you meet people you don't know at a presbytery meeting and tell them the church where you represent, very often the next question is, "How many members do you have?"  (We pastors sometimes engage in what is jokingly called "steeple envy.") Numbers and statistics have their place and purpose, but no one has ever asked me, "So what is your congregation doing to share God's love?" And I'd be shocked if someone did.

"A light to the nations." The word "nation" here can also mean "peoples" or "Gentiles."  A light to others, to all people, a beacon showing the way.  But that is hard to do when our ways are indistinguishable for the world.

I'll admit to being overly idealistic at times.  That can lead to frustrations, but I really don't expect the church to be perfect or anything close to it.  We are a collection of human beings in all our sinful and broken glory. But one of our core faith claims says we are being transformed and made new, becoming new creations in Christ.  This is a process that does not come to completion in this age, but there has to be some visible evidence of it if the church is to be, in any significant way, the body of Christ.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Giving Offense

"And they took offense at him."  That's what today's gospel says about the hometown folks when Jesus returns to Nazareth.  They are wowed at first, but then they remember just who Jesus is, and they "take offense," or more literally, "were made to stumble." (The Greek word is the root of our word "to scandalize."

Jesus offends or scandalizes a lot of people. That is sometimes hard to reconcile with the sweet, meek and mild Jesus I met in Sunday School and church as a child. How could this Jesus ever offend anyone, especially offend them to the degree they felt it necessary to kill him.  Even as an adult, it often seems to me that the church has tamed and domesticated Jesus to the point he is not at all threatening. But he is not all that compelling or enticing either.

Richard Rohr's devotion from yesterday quoted Bernard of Clairvaux regarding how we eat Jesus in the Eucharist and are likewise eaten by God. "If I eat and am not eaten, it will seem that God is in me, but I am not yet in God." Rohr goes on to note that modern, rationalistic minds are upset - I might add offended - by such language. And I do think that forcing Jesus, God, and faith into our rationalistic, logical slots can be one more way we tame and domesticate Jesus.  (I can say this even while embracing many of my own Reformed Tradition's issues with Catholic eucharistic theology and practice.)

And so I found myself thinking about the sort of people who routinely are offended by Jesus in the gospels, as well as those who are not. Starting with today's reading, we have the people who thought they knew who Jesus was. To those we can add many of the good religious folks of the day, the religious establishment, and the Roman government. On the other hand, Jesus rarely seems to offend the outcasts, the sinners, the poor, and others whom the good religious folk looked down on.

Doesn't it seem that a faith that represents Jesus to the world would still have an offense problem with the same sorts that Jesus did. The dynamics of power and greed and institutions don't seem to have changed all that much from Jesus' day.  So it stands to reason Jesus would still confound and trouble those who think they know him best, the religious establishment, the powers-that-be, and so on. And so when a community of faith truly is the body of Christ, truly embodies Jesus, surely it will find itself giving occasional offense to such folks while attracting the broken, the outcast, the powerless, the sinner, and such.

It makes me wonder a little about the Jesus we church folk represent to the world. 

Click to learn more about the lectionary.