Astonished by Jesus

In today's gospel, we hear the tail end of the story of Jesus' encounter with a Samaritan woman at a well. We enter the story as the disciples return to Jesus and see him speaking with this woman just prior to her leaving. "They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman," not to mention that she was Samaritan.

They were astonished. Clearly this was not behavior they expected from Jesus. Now if this were the only time the disciples were surprised by Jesus' behavior, we might not be able to make much of it. But Jesus regularly surprises and confounds his followers. The very people who knew him best and who spent more time with him than anyone were often taken aback by the things he did, the people he hung out with, the things he insisted his followers must do.

How often does Jesus astound you? Perhaps that seems an odd question given that Jesus makes fewer personal appearances these days. But over the years I have occasionally been struck by the ways I have domesticated Jesus, fitting him in to very conventional slots that he rarely challenges, mostly because I never give him the chance.

It is amazing how, once we settle on an image of Jesus that works for us, we can keep Jesus shoe-horned into that image. I mentioned yesterday how we in the church have sometimes reduced following Jesus to faithfully attending worship. The discontinuity between the ways we live and act and what Jesus calls his followers to do can be quite striking, yet we often seem immune to being astonished by such discontinuity.

I suppose that those first disciples would have done the same thing if they had been able, but Jesus was too present to them and too new to them for such easy domestication. Perhaps that means it is more incumbent on us to seek out those moments where Jesus astonishes us, although we do not seem much inclined to do this.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the typical church-goer's lack of serious engagement with the Bible. Nothing is quite so challenging to the notions of Jesus and God that we construct for ourselves as the witness of Scripture. To hear Jesus or God speaking directly against notions that are dear to us can be a profoundly challenging experience.

Church doctrine can also be helpful here. Admittedly, Church doctrine can sometimes become nothing more than certain things you have to believe in order to be sufficiently "orthodox,"but it can also remind us of how our images of Jesus and church have strayed from any solid, biblically-based standard. I think of my own Reformed tradition's statement recommending "A faithful stewardship that shuns ostentation and seeks proper use of the gifts of God's creation." (See the Presbyterian Book of Order, F-2.05) This call to live simply for the sake of others is a faithful attempt to to do what Jesus asks of us, although looking at many church buildings I suspect the members would be a bit "astounded" to hear Jesus say anything of the sort.

So where has Jesus astounded you? How often does it happen at your congregation if you are part of one? I take it to be a given that if we are not astounded, surprised, and redirected by Jesus from time to time, the Jesus we are following is one of our own creating.

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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

It's a line filled with angst. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" Jesus speaks of a maternal longing for the children of Jerusalem, a longing for those who push away from his loving embrace.

I wonder if we should count ourselves among the children of Jerusalem. Those of us who claim to be Christians are surely her descendants in some way. The Church has often spoken of being heirs of God's promises to Israel. That seems to me a claim to be children of Jerusalem.

We certainly seem to have the "were not willing" part down pat.

I've been thinking a lot lately (and writing some as well) about how we in church congregations fail to incarnate Jesus and his ministry to the world. If someone unfamiliar with Christianity were to read the biblical gospels and write down a synopsis of what Jesus calls his followers to do, he would surly struggle to connect that with the primary activity of many congregations. 

Not that we never help the needy, the oppressed, the broken, or the poor. But often you have to look hard to find those things. The more obvious things we do are build buildings and hold worship services. Indeed many long time church folks speak of their church activity as "going to church," a phrase that accurately describes the primary primary focus of many church folk. Perhaps it is here, as much as anywhere, that we live out our heritage as children of Jerusalem.

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" Presumably, Jesus' angst filled longing extends to us as well. He longs to gather us in and show us the true way. Here his longing for us seems much like that of the father in the parable of the prodigal. Our failures do not turn Jesus against us. They simply pain him and cause his heart to ache with longing.

That, of course, means that reconciliation and joy are never more than a turn away. The moment we move toward Jesus and his priorities, he reaches out to embrace us in the heartfelt passion of lovers reunited.

So why do we keep insisting on our way rather than his?

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Light, Truth, and Roaches

I can never read today's gospel without thinking of roaches. The rainbow haired guy with the John 3:16 sign may occur to me as well, but my first thought is roaches scurrying off a kitchen counter when someone comes in for a late night snack and flips on the lights. If you've ever lived somewhere with a roach problem, you surely know what I'm talking about.

The same passage that talks about God so loving the world also speaks of a self inflicted judgment that reminds me of roaches fleeing the light. The Gospel of John loves the metaphors of light and darkness. It speaks of Jesus as the light that has come into the world, and today Jesus notes that people often prefer the darkness, fleeing the light lest it expose them for what they really are.

I find this to be true, both individually and corporately. We all have those parts of us we don't want revealed, that we hide and do not want light illuminating them. Sometimes there is nothing more difficult for us than to stand in the bright light of truth. We prefer the images we construct to the realities of who we actually are.

I thinks this becomes magnified in groups and organizations. Groups do not like to face their failings and shortcomings. We do not like the harsh light of truth, even on events of long ago. My own native South often chooses the remember the Civil War as a war between states, and it tells the story so as to minimize the role of slavery. We struggle with the notion that the South was wrong to start the war and fought it to preserve an evil institution that denied full humanity to people because of their race. Some even insist that the reasons for the war were good and noble. We just  happened to lose.

But this is not a problem peculiar to the South. People in the North have often pointed a wagging finger at southern racism while conveniently ignoring their own history of racism.  Some people in Japan still honor the war heroes from WWII while denying horrible atrocities committed by those same heroes. And churches, well we engage in this sort of behavior, too.

Not only do we like to forget the way our churches once participated in the ills of racism, slavery, sexism, etc. (we still participate in some), but we are often very good at avoiding any significant and deep self-examination in the present. We seem content to imagine that we are in some way doing God's work, and so it must be fine. And we often get very upset if someone points out our hypocrisies or the ways we fail to incarnate Jesus to the world.

The same Jesus who is the light that people avoid because they prefer darkness, also says he comes to testify to the truth.  But light and truth scare us. Better not to look too carefully. Better not to discover that Jesus' call to repent, to turn and move in a new direction, applies to us in the church as well.

This is strange when you think about it. Jesus comes because of God's great love for us, comes to call us to the life that God hopes and dreams for us. Surely we would want the bright light of God's truth to shine on us, that we might see clearly where we have gone astray, and see clearly where Jesus is calling us to go.

Wouldn't we?

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Sequestration, Church, and Call

Perhaps it's because I live "inside the Beltway" near DC, but sequestration is big, front-page news around here. The newspapers and newscasts are filled with stories about what may happen if this sequester actually happens. Some seem unconcerned, but a lot of folks use "the sky is falling" language.

If you're not familiar with this issue, it refers to big, automatic, across-the-board budget cuts that will kick in on March 1. The whole thing was dreamed up back in 2011 as part of a budget compromise. The idea was to create a threat of automatic cuts that were so draconian, so terrifying, that it would force Congress to make some difficult choices to head it off.  But with an extremely partisan, extremely dysfunctional Congress, apparently no threat is sufficient to produce results.

People on the right and the left can point to the foolishness of a sequester. The idea that the most well-run and essential programs will see reductions of exactly the same percentage as the most wasteful and non-essential programs is clearly ridiculous. But Congress seems incapable of making decisions about what is essential and what is wasteful, what should be preserved and what might be pared. It is a remarkable failure of leadership.

It is also exactly what many churches do when they create annual budgets. Many congregations have no list of priorities, no way of determining which budget items are critical and which are less so. And so when budgets get tight, we simply employ our own version of sequestration. It may be a bit less onerous to tell everyone to cut 2 or 3% compared to the larger cuts facing the US budget, but sequestration is sequestration.  And all versions strike me as a failure of leadership.

Actually, the leadership failure in churches strikes me as the larger one, even if the percentages are smaller, even if there are no cuts in a given year. That is because Jesus has given his followers a pretty clear list of his priorities. But church congregations are often very invested in a different set of priorities. And so using a sequester to make budget decisions not only avoids wrestling with hard decisions, it also keeps us from examining our skewed budget priorities.

The core of this problem is one of call, or more precisely, the lack of one. We leaders in churches have become much more adept at managing religious institutions than we are at hearing Jesus' call. Absent any real call, keeping things going replaces it. And truth be told, we often prefer it that way. In the Bible, calls are almost always frightening, risky things that take people from where they are to some place glimpsed only by faith. It's much safer just to keep the religious operation going, at least in the short term.

The old, King James rendering of Proverbs 29:18 reads, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." That's actually a bad translation, but it is true nonetheless. When there is no vision, no clear sense of where God is calling us, we will meander and eventually waste away. The more accurate translation of the NRSV still hints at this. "Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint." Where there is no voice guiding us, we will go our own way, unlike those in the second half of the verse, "but happy are those who keep the law."

"How we've always done it" is not the law, nor is it a vision or a call. What keeps the members happy is not a prophetic vision that keeps people on the right path. So how do we let vision, call, the Spirit invade our little religious operations?

Religious Marketplaces

Today's gospel story of Jesus "cleansing the Temple" is often understood in simplistic, black and white terms. Those selling animals and changing money were crass, commercial interlopers, intent only on making a little money off religion. They clearly violated any reasonable standards regarding what was and wasn't appropriate in "God's house." Actually, probably not.

First of all, these folks are not in the Temple proper.  They are in the courtyard, and they are providing a real service. Pilgrims who journeyed long distances to the Temple usually did not have the Jewish coins required for making offerings. The money changers allowed them to convert the money used in the regular commerce of their homeland into that accepted at the Temple. Congregations that offer credit card giving or online giving provide a similar "service" to their members.

So too the animals being sold allowed pilgrims from far away to travel without needing to carry with them an animal for sacrifice. This even allowed poorer pilgrims to partner and purchase an animal together. Churches today often offer books for sale that will be used in a class or small group or hold fellowship meals which can be purchased at reasonable cost. How different are these from allowing pilgrims to purchase their sacrifice?

(In all this, it may help to remember that the Temple did not function quite like our churches. People did not "go to Temple" on a regular basis.  Many might go there only once in their lives, and these animals and money changers helped insure that such pilgrims could navigate the Temple's rituals.)

But if money changers and animals for sale were reasonable allowances to help pilgrims, why does Jesus get so upset? Various answers have been suggested. Perhaps Jesus is rejecting the sacrificial system itself, or maybe Jesus wants to reform a system that had become overly ritualistic and not focused enough on relationship and encounter with God. Whatever the precise answer, Jesus clearly thinks the Temple apparatus has gotten sidetracked from its core purpose.

So what might Jesus say on a visit to our church buildings and sanctuaries?  After all, we do have a lot that comes from the marketplace. We have yard sales and car washes at the church to fund the youth mission trip. We pass the plates each week to collect offerings of money. We have annual "Stewardship Campaigns" which more often than not are pleas for people to "give more so we can fund those programs that you enjoy." What could be more marketplace than expecting people to pay for what they like and use?

And if Jesus is upset over things that distract people from the core purpose of encounter and relationship with a parental God, what would he think of worship services that a reasonable person might mistake for a show, a concert, or a performance. And such performances even come complete with a tip jar, a pretty brass one with a velvet bottom, but a tip jar nonetheless.

Worship services are obviously not the only thing congregations do, but worship is by far and away the event with the most member participation. It is also the event that outsiders are most likely to encounter, and so it is often the event that most defines who we are. And so if the church is supposed to incarnate Christ to and for the world, it seems fair to ask if someone attending one of our worship services is likely to encounter anything resembling the biblical Jesus.

I happen to think that regular worship is an integral part of following Jesus. He did, after all, call us to love the Lord our God with all our being.  But Jesus also demanded that we love our neighbor, with a special emphasis on the poor, the marginalized, the weak, the outsider, and the afflicted. And you don't need to look very carefully at the typical church budget to figure out that we expend the vast majority of our resources on the loving God side, or more precisely, on worship. Whether our worship actually "loves God" is a question in its on right. (See Amos 5:21-24 for a scathing critique of worship that God does not like at all.)

We live in a consumer culture, one where people who are the churchy sort will speak of "church shopping." It is not uncommon to hear church leaders speak of "catering to our customers." So how do we make sure we don't or haven't become little more than a religious marketplace?

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Sermon video: Since You Are a Child of God...

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Sermon: Since You Are a Child of God...

Luke 4:1-13

Since You Are a Child of God…

James Sledge          Service of Healing and Wholeness          February 17, 2013

I don’t have much experience with services of healing and wholeness. This is my first. And I suspect some of you may find such events a little new age or trendy.  And yet… most all of us have those parts of us, those pieces of our lives that are broken, tattered, that get in the way of living fully. Most all of us have areas where we struggle to be whole, even if we don’t think of it as a religious or spiritual problem.

Sometimes the church hasn’t been much help, speaking of faith as purely a belief thing and confining the spiritual to a narrow little slice of life, divorced from work, physical health, politics, and so on. Sometimes we’ve even acted as though physical bodies are a spiritual problem. If we could just shed these bodies and our base, carnal humanity, becoming purely spiritual beings… But then Jesus comes along, quite content with a human body, quite content to be human, and he comes offering wholeness.

Actually, if you were to flip through the four gospels in our pew Bibles, you will not find the word “wholeness.” For that matter, you won’t find the word anywhere in those Bibles, but wholeness is in there.

Have you ever noticed how Jesus sometimes says, “Your faith has saved you,” and other times, “Your faith has made you well”? In fact, Jesus says exactly the same thing in both cases, but translators feel the need to make a distinction when Jesus is physically healing someone. In our worldview, saving and healing are different, even unrelated things. In our un-integrated, some might say dis-integrated lives, sometimes Jesus is playing doctor; sometimes he’s playing priest. 

But Jesus will not separate the spiritual from the physical, and so healing and salvation are simply different sides of the same coin.  And very often, our Bibles would do well to translate all of those verses, “You faith has made you whole.”

Jesus comes offering us salvation, healing, wholeness, but in our broken, divided, dis-integrated ways, we struggle to combine these things. Salvation is a future thing, we think.  Healing is about now. So what is wholeness? I think there are some insights into wholeness in today’s well-worn story of Jesus tempted by the devil.

Set Apart for a Reason

The word "holy" is a strange one. In popular speech it rarely refers to anything good.  It's used as a general exclamation. "Holy ____!" Or it's used to speak negatively of who think too highly of themselves regarding the morals or the like, as in "holier than thou." Only at church is it about something good, and here it has a more specialized use, often to speak of God. We talk about the Holy Spirit and some people begin prayers, "Holy God." 

So what to do with the opening line from today's Old Testament reading. "For you are a people holy to Yahweh your God." Given the common notion of the Church as the continuation of God's people Israel, presumably this could be read to say the Church is supposed to be "a people holy to Yahweh." (The notion of the Church as a continuation of Israel can be found in the New Testament book of Acts, and I have  no problem with the idea. However this has often been read to mean that the Church replaced Israel, which I do see as problematic.)

So what does it mean to say that we church folk are to be holy in some way? That might be an interesting thing to explore as a Lenten project. Just how is my or your congregation supposed to be holy?

It may help to realize that one meaning of the word is "set apart." Part of this set-apartness is about purity, but it is also about being set apart for a special purpose. Israel is called to be a holy people because the are set apart with a special calling.  That goes all the way back to Abraham who is called so that, through him, "all the families of the earth shall be blessed." In a similar way, the Church is set apart to be an instrument of blessing, to incarnate Jesus, the one who comes for the sake of the world.

Perhaps because for many centuries we labored under the delusion that we live in a Christian culture or nation, this notion of being set apart was hard to realize. If everyone is Christian, what does it mean to be set apart. I actually think it still means something significant, but it is easy to see how such a notion withers when we presume everyone else is Christian, too.

Unfortunately, the loss of any sense of our holiness (i.e. set-apartness) robbed congregations of a strong sense of mission and purpose. So we turned inward, and many congregations lost any significant identity around being set apart, called to bless the world, or existing for the sake of the other. But without such an identity, the Church loses much of its reason for being and much of its vitality.

How is God calling your congregation to bear divine blessing to the world? How have you been set apart as a special people who are to be a blessing to others and the world? For church people, those are absolutely critical questions.

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And Also Many Animals

I have always loved the book of Jonah, and I especially enjoy its ending, and unanswered question. The final phrase, "and also many animals," has always struck me as memorable, a bit odd, funny, and a little ego-deflating.

If you don't know the story of Jonah, or if all you know is he was swallowed by a big fish, it is a remarkable tale. Unlike other biblical prophets, Jonah leaves us with no record of anguished pleas for Israel to mend its ways and turn back to God. In fact, the book is not really about any historical prophet. If anything, it is a satirical story told to make a point.

Jonah is an unwilling prophet who, when called by God to go to Nineveh (capital of Israel's hated enemy the Assyrians), immediately heads in the opposite direction. Following a series of mis-adventures, including that fish, Jonah is finally re-directed to Nineveh. There the reluctant prophet utters a single sentence. "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"

If Jonah were an actual prophet, he would be the most successful in all history. Hearing Jonah's brief oracle, all Nineveh repents, and then so does God. That's actually what is says in the Hebrew. After observing the Ninevites 180 turn from evil, "God repented of the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them."

This infuriates Jonah. He is so upset that Nineveh didn't get its just desserts that he wants to die. The rest of the story, like the beginning of it, is about Jonah's unhappiness with God. Following  his upset at the sparing of Nineveh, he is equally upset at the death of a bush that gave him some shade, again so upset he wants to die. This leads to that remarkable ending where God remarks about Jonah's upset over the death of a bush. “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

I saw a post on Facebook this morning from a fellow Presbyterian pastor complaining that Lent was simply one more bit of Christian navel gazing. I don't share his total disdain for Lent, but I have to agree that it can become terribly self-absorbed, not unlike Jonah and his bush. But that is true of religion in general, a tendency that the book of Jonah skewers with masterful satire. We imagine the world is askew because it isn't sufficiently focused on our little troubles. Never mind the thousands upon thousands who don't know their right from their left, who don't have shelter or enough food, who live under constant threat of death or exploitation, "and also many animals." Never mind what God's concerns are.

On this Ash Wednesday, as we enter into the season of Lent, perhaps we should let Jonah serve as a cautionary tale. If Lent does not help us turn more fully toward God and neighbor (both human and animal?), then perhaps it is only Christian navel gazing.

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All by Myself

It was hard to miss yesterday's announcement about the Pope "retiring." It was all over the internet, led network newscasts, and was the big headline in this morning's Washington Post.  Now admittedly, this is not as big a deal for me as it is for Catholic brothers and sisters, but I read with some interest the articles discussing how the tenure of the last two Popes had populated the College of Cardinals with thinkers similar to Benedict XVI. This of course virtually guarantees no real change because these Cardinals will elect a new pope committed to the same policies, at least according to these articles.

I'll leave to others questions of what needs or doesn't need to change in the Catholic Church. I'm more interested in questions of what allows or causes such change. If, for example, I accept the desire of some Catholics that the church modernize and shift views on celibacy, women priests, and so on as change that would be faithful to what Jesus wants, should I then simply despair that this can't possibly happen with the current College of Cardinals?

For me, this is not an academic question about another denomination. It is a more fundamental question about who the "players" are when a group of Jesus' followers think change is required in order to be faithful. Are decisions about change purely a matter of people's opinions on whether such change is good or bad, or does God ever weigh in and push things in a particular direction? Some of those articles I read yesterday quoted people who seemed to share two assumptions. Change would be a good and faithful thing. God certainly Isn't going to do anything to overcome the institutional resistance to such change.

I'm not making fun of Catholics on this. I see such assumptions all the time in the church, and I very often find myself captive to them as well. When I see changes that I believe are critical needs for the church, I can despair because I don't think there is any way I can rally and convince enough people to overcome the inertia of how things are. And very often such thinking betrays my assumption that God will do nothing to help, that the Holy Spirit will not inflame any hearts or inspire any action. (I'm also very impatient, but that's another issue.)

In today's first morning psalm, this line appears twice, "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God." And the second morning psalm includes this. "Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help... Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God." Clearly the psalmist speaks out of different assumptions.

In his book, Becoming a Blessed Church, Graham Standish says that many mainline churches succumb to what he calls "rational functionalism" which precludes anything that isn't empirical and logical, that assumes that the Spirit does not act and miracles cannot happen. He also suggests that such assumptions have robbed the mainline church of much of its vitality.

I wonder how often my own assumptions cut me off from what God is doing? Do some people in a church need to be attentive and open to the Spirit for the Spirit to act, and if so, how many? Will the Spirit work through me or a congregation that won't cooperate, or will she move on to those who welcome the Spirit's help? Are we trapped in a logical, predictable functionality, or is something wonderful and new truly possible?

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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?

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Sermon audio: Listen to Him!

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