A Little Frightened of God

The LORD is king! Let the earth rejoice;
     let the many coastlands be glad!  
Clouds and thick darkness are all around him;
     righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne. 
Fire goes before him,
     and consumes his adversaries on every side.
His lightnings light up the world;
    the earth sees and trembles.
The mountains melt like wax before the LORD,
     before the Lord of all the earth.               Psalm 97:1-5

Despite the mention of rejoicing and gladness in the opening verse, the God depicted here is a little frightening. Clouds and thick darkness, consuming fire, lightening that causes the earth itself to tremble, and mountains melting like wax... it all sounds a bit scary.

A scary God is not real popular these days. Many of us who are Christians are downright apologetic about passages in the Bible where God is frightening, and I can't begin to count how many times I've heard someone explain that "fear of the Lord" means awe rather than actual fear. Well... perhaps.

When I look back on the adults who I admired and who were most formative for me growing up, they did instill at least a bit of fear in me. That includes parents, and especially one coach in high school. I would have done absolutely anything for him, and I knew he cared deeply for me. But he still scared me more than a little.

I don't know that my experience is universal. I do know parents who do everything they can so as not to give their children any cause to fear them. Usually this takes the form of being friends with their children. I know that such efforts are done out of love, but very often, such children are not only horribly behaved but also miserable. I'm not speaking in favor of corporal punishment and such, but even the most gentle discipline will evoke respect and a small measure of fear in a small child.

I take it as a given that God is quite a bit more beyond my comprehension than a parent is to a two year old. And so any god that doesn't evoke respect, awe, and yes, some measure of fear, is likely no god at all, certainly not the God of the Bible.

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The One Thing That's Needed

The violence and bloodshed in Egypt today is horrific. The last report I saw spoke of chaos with nearly 300 deaths, a number that seems likely to climb. When the so-called "Arab Spring" began over two years ago, many had hopes for something new and better in the Middle East, but such hopes have gone largely unfulfilled.

What went wrong? I'm no expert on the Middle East or foreign affairs. There are clearly many others who can better explain the historical, cultural, sociological, and systemic roots behind the depressing situation in the news today. But I do feel qualified to say something about the one thing that is needed.

That one thing is at the root of many troubles and problems in everything from personal relationships to national and international events. Almost all individuals, and all institutions, organizations, movements, governments, nations, and so on have at least one thing, often many things, that they cannot even contemplate giving up. The very idea of losing it creates tremendous anxiety and fear.

I moved to the DC area a little over a year ago, and I've never lived in a more anxious place. There are a lot of powerful and influential people and institutions around here, and there are even more people who work with and for them. And like the wealth of the man whom Jesus speaks to in today's gospel, power and influence and importance are terribly difficult to give up. And wanting to hang on to them or to acquire them make people act in ways that are toxic to good relationships, to building community, to creating trust, or bringing hope and peace.

Diana Butler Bass, who lives in this area as well, once commented on her Facebook page about returning from conferences in other parts of the country where things seemed much more civil and genteel. Her status update spoke of returning from the land of "Aloha" to the land of "Get out of my way, I'm more important than you." And I think that about sums up the anxiety I see here.

As I've too often experienced through my own actions, anxious people behave badly. That's why neither political party can stop trying to maintain whatever power it has even if the country suffers as a result. It's why nations do ridiculous things that lead to wars when their sovereignty or "national interests" feel like they have been threatened in some way. And it's why the Egyptian military felt it had to clamp down on protestors so its power and control would not be jeopardized.

I wonder what Jesus would say to Egyptian generals or Democratic and Republican officials or CEOs of large corporations or feuding spouses if any of them were to ask him what it was they needed for eternal life, good life, a better world, peace.  I suspect he'd say that they needed to let go of the one thing they are most terrified of losing.

And so we just keep doing things our way. Never mind what Jesus said. Perhaps that's why Jesus, in another place in Mark's gospel, quotes the prophet Isaiah. "This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me."

What's the "one thing" Jesus would say that you need?

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Too Busy to Listen

When I first began writing this blog, it grew out of my own spiritual practices. Reflections that came to me as I read the Daily Lectionary and spent time in prayer formed the basis of most blog post, and, to a large degree, continue to do so. But "going public" with these reflections changed them on some level. Not only are there some personal things that I'd rather not share, but just knowing that others may read them changes the process.

Just as teaching and preaching are often the most beneficial to the one preparing to preach or teach, writing this blog often opens my eyes to something or provides me with a helpful spiritual insight. But the blog also intrudes on my time of reading scripture and praying. Too often, I find myself thinking about what I might say in the blog as I am reading the lectionary. I am formulating my post even as I read, as well as when I "pray," and as I imagine many of you have discovered, it is quite hard to listen when you are talking. That's just as true for the mental talking I find myself doing as I read.

When I read today's gospel about Jesus welcoming the children and saying, "Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” I found myself thinking about how I would need to explain that children were viewed very differently today than in Jesus' day. People might not hear Jesus anything like the people in the day of Mark's gospel without knowing that. But of course I had stopped listening at that point. I was so busy thinking about explaining what Jesus meant that I wasn't actually hearing him at all.

One of the great spiritual discoveries for me was learning the ancient practice of lectio divina, a prayerful reading of scripture that does not so much seek to understand it as to hear where and how it is speaking to me at that particular moment. It is so different from traditional Bible study or from methods of exegesis I learned in seminary to help me dig into a passage of scripture. Those have their place, but they also can sometimes encourage me to hurry to an understanding rather than simply to listen.

I read somewhere that the typical attention span of American adults is less than 30 seconds. That probably explains the way my mind can wander even in the midst of reading a passage from the Bible. But how are we to hear God speak to us if we cannot listen for more than 30 seconds without beginning to formulate our opinions and responses, or just letting our attention wander off somewhere else?

Sometimes the greatest spiritual gift I can receive is the ability to listen. That is why both lectio divina and contemplative prayer have been so helpful to me. (They were also something of a revelation to me in that I was unfamiliar with either a decade ago.) And my own spiritual life never gets so askew as when I am "too busy" for such practices, "too busy" to listen.

What is it that helps you to listen? What is it that keeps you from listening? Lord, help us to listen.

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Libertarianism, Freedom, and Servanthood

On today's Renovaré Facebook page, a status update included this quote from Martin Luther. "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." I suspect that this statement is befuddling to many, but it probably feels totally true to those who've experienced what Luther was talking about.

Unfortunately, American Christianity has often been marked by an embrace of the "perfectly free" but not the "servant of all" side of faith. Thus it is not unusual to hear Christians in America insist that no one can tell them how to live out their faith. Only those habits that feel right to them are valid. Indeed some Christians sound as if Jesus' message was primary message was one of personal freedom and libertarianism.

Today's gospel reading surely sits uneasily with such notions. Jesus makes perfectly clear that following him is a narrow path, one the from which the world frequently tries to deflect us. That is why Jesus uses graphic imagery to demand that we be careful about those things that would trip us up, as well as things that might trip up "little ones," presumably referring to people who are new to faith. What Jesus describes here is the absolute antithesis of unbounded personal freedom. Rather it is a path of great discipline for the sake of others and for ourselves.

In The Presbyterian Hymnal on my desk there's an old hymn entitled "Make Me a Captive, Lord." The verses are by George Matheson, and here are a couple of them.

Make me a captive, Lord,
And then I shall be free;
Force me to render up my sword,
And I will conqueror be.

My will is not my own
Till Thou hast made it Thine;
If it would reach a monarch's throne,
It must its crown resign.

I don't know that anyone can be convinced of the truth of such words. It is a gift of God's grace, an experiencing of the new creation we become in Christ. But it does not help create a climate open to such transformation when religion in America is so often hyper-personalized and individualized, when it celebrates personal freedom for the sake of personal freedom. I've even heard people proclaim that their right to bear arms and defend themselves is a part of their Christian freedom.

One way to talk about being "free" is to speak of being able to do whatever it is I want to do. Such freedom is only problematic when what I want to do is problematic. A classic understanding of God's grace, going all the way back to Augustine, is that God transforms our wills so that we want to do what God wants. This is pure freedom, but it looks totally different from freedom where our will has not been made God's own.

"A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." I think Luther really knew what he was talking about.

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Sermon: To Glorify God

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 (Luke 12:32-40)

To Glorify God

James Sledge                                                                                       August 11, 2013

Being a pastor, it should come as no big surprise that I have lots of books on worship. One of them opens with this little anecdote.

One Sunday morning, a mother went upstairs to her son’s room to wake him for church.  Slowly opening the door, as it softly squealed in protest, she said, “Dear, it’s time to get up.  It’s time to go to church.”  The son grumbled and rolled over.  Ten minutes later his mother again went up, opened the door, and said, “Dear, get up.  It’s time to go to church.”  He moaned and curled up tighter under the blankets, warding off the morning chill.  Five minutes later she yelled, “Son! Get up!”  His voice muffled by the blankets, he yelled back, “I don’t want to go to church!”  “You have to go to church!” she replied.  “Why?  Why do I have to go to church?” he protested.

The mother stepped back, paused, and said, “Three reasons.  First, it’s Sunday morning, and on Sunday mornings we go to church.  Second, you’re forty years old, and you’re too old be having this conversation with your mother.  Third, you’re the pastor of the church.”[1]

The author, a Presbyterian pastor, shared the story to speak of the ambivalence many pastors feel about worship. I’ve noticed over the years that even those pastors who love preaching can still have very mixed feelings about worship. And I read somewhere that many pastors derive a kind of perverse pleasure from reading today’s scripture in worship. That’s rather odd when you think about it, what with pastors leading worship and all. But I suppose that most pastors worry at times about being complicit in worship that God doesn’t particularly appreciate; or worse,  complicit in worship that God hates.

Those of you who’ve been around the Presbyterian Church for long enough may recall the catechism that used to be taught to children and youth. The Shorter Catechism, which I received in a little pink booklet as a fourth grader, begins with a question about “the chief end of man.”  Written in the mid-1600s, the language is a bit dated, so I’ll paraphrase. Q. 1. What is the primary purpose of human beings? A. Humanity’s primary purpose is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever.

From a Presbyterian perspective, I think it’s kind of hard to argue with that. It makes perfect sense that Christians who have experienced God’s love in Jesus would want to live in ways that glorified God. But just what does it mean for us to glorify God? What does that entail?

No doubt worship is a part of this. The very term “worship service” speaks of our worship as serving God in some way. Which is not to say that God necessarily appreciates such attempts, not if today’s scripture is any guide.

Talking about Hunger to Hungry People

Today's gospel reading is Mark's account of the Transfiguration, where Jesus' appearance is transformed and Moses and Elijah join him for a little conversation, all in front of an awestruck Peter, James, and John. The three disciples are terrified and unsure what they should do. That must be why Peter grasps for something from the religious playbook. “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

These "dwellings" or booths would have likely been some sort of religious memorial to commemorate the event. Had Peter actually constructed them, they undoubtedly would have become shrines at some later date, and people would have come to worship there.

There is a religious tendency that wants to mark things and label them as significant. Then we can venerate them, meditate on them, talk about them, explain their significance, and so on. Sometimes this sort of tendency gets in the way of simply experiencing the thing. That seems to be the case for Peter. His desire to do something religious interrupts and gets in the way of the actual event. Fortunately Jesus, Moses, Elijah, and God all seem to ignore him.

I thought about the way our religious stuff sometimes gets in the way when I read Richard Rohr's meditation today. (I hate for this blog to sound like an ad for Fr. Rohr, but he has become a real spiritual guide for me.) He speaks of about the Lord's Supper or Eucharist and how we spend so much time trying "to 'understand' and explain presence. As if we could." He goes on to add, "Despite all our attempts to define who is worthy and who is not worthy to receive communion, our only ticket or prerequisite for coming to Eucharist is hunger. And most often sinners are much hungrier than the so-called saints."

The world is full of hungry people, both literally as well as figuratively or spiritually. And sometimes we religious sorts are more practiced at talking about  hunger than actually doing anything about it. I wonder if those who say they are "spiritual but not religious" are saying something about being hungry but not interested in talking about it.

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So When Did You Receive the Holy Spirit?

Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you first joined the church? That's a question no one has ever asked me, nor have I ever heard it asked of anyone else. But Paul asks such a question in today's reading from Acts.

I'm not sure what prompts Paul to ask. The persons in question are called both "disciples" and "believers." We are told nothing about them that would indicate any sort of deficiency. Did Paul ask this a lot, or was there something about these particular believers that gave Paul concerns?

If you went around and asked this of everyone in a church congregation, what sort of response would you expect? In my own church experience, I can't imagine people saying they had never heard of the Holy Spirit, as those believers tell Paul. The congregations I've been a part of used the Apostles' Creed with some regularity, and so people hear about the Spirit frequently. But I would not be at all surprised if quite a few people answered with the same "No" that Paul heard.

I have heard the Spirit mentioned in Trinitarian formulas all my life. I've heard the story of the Spirit coming at Pentecost countless times. But as I was growing up in the church, I heard very little about the Spirit connected to the personal experience of anyone I knew. In the brand of Presbyterianism I grew up with, we pretty much left the Spirit to Pentecostals and other more "enthusiastic" sorts.

I'm not sure that the Enlightenment and the Holy Spirit play very well together. The Enlightenment is all about logic and reason, and Enlightenment forms of Christianity tend to explain and make sense of Christian faith. It isn't clear what to do with the unpredictable wind of the Spirit, swirling around where it may, stirring things up and prodding people to do things that don't always seem very reasonable or logical.

I think one of the inherent problems with liberal Christianity, a child of the Enlightenment if there ever was one, is a tendency to proclaim a belief system that is sometimes more philosophy than faith. It is a well thought out and helpful philosophy in many ways, but it may not really be alive. It may not be inhabited by the breath of God.

Did you receive the living breath of God when you became part of the church? If not, when did you? And if you didn't receive the Spirit, or if you just aren't sure, what does that mean?

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Sermon video: Trembling Home

Audios of worship and sermon available on FCPC website.

False Selves and Slamming Doors

Today's meditation from Richard Rohr begins with this. "We don’t teach meditation to the young monks. They are not ready for it until they stop slamming doors. — Thich Nhat Hanh to Thomas Merton in 1966"

Rohr is talking about how religion and spiritual practices can be places where the "false self" our egos construct can hide. All faiths and spiritualities are misused and abused by people who employ them to justify and support who they already are and what they want. One of the reason religion and faith is responsible for so much trouble in the world is that its adherents have very often not experienced the move Rohr is recommending, the experience the Apostle Paul describes as, "our old self was crucified with (Jesus)."

I know that in my own attempts at spirituality, very often I'm after spiritual validation and reassurance. Less often am I looking to be transformed, to have my true self uncovered. Despite the fact that Jesus insists on the need to deny oneself (I assume he's speaking of that false self),  I and many others vigorously protect and defend that self. And we who are practiced in the arts of faith and the church have learned how to use these in this project.

This morning's psalm opens, "For God alone my soul waits in silence." Perhaps I might restate this, "For God alone my self waits in silence," but in truth that's more rarely the case than I like to admit. More often, I want to enlist God in supporting and blessing what my self has decided. And on the corporate level, this tendency is even more problematic. God gets enlisted in the self-protective impulses of groups, organizations, movements, and nations. And there is little more dangerous than an ego-driven group, movement or nation that thinks God is on its side.

For God alone... Perhaps I could use this as a corrective mantra, spoken anytime I am feeling anxious about plans or ambitions I have, anytime I feel tempted to slam a door.

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Sermon: Trembling Home

Hosea 11:1-11

Trembling Home

James Sledge                                                                                       August 4, 2013

Nowadays they’re as likely to be on our smartphones or tablets as they are to be in an actual album with real pages, but wherever it is they’re located, most of us have had the experience of thumbing through a photo album. We’ve done a little reminiscing via photographs, have looked back and remembered a time when things were different, when we looked different, when the future perhaps looked different.

Now that both of my children are officially adults, having finished college and gotten jobs, it’s a bit more poignant for me to view pictures of them as babies, toddlers, or children. Different photos can evoke very different feelings, feelings of warmth, joy, and  happiness, as well as feelings of sadness and regret. On the child rearing front, Shawn and I were quite fortunate. We experienced the typical difficulties, but our daughters arrived at adulthood without a huge number of missteps on their part our ours. There were ups and downs, but still, things seem to have turned out pretty well.

On that count I feel quite lucky because I know that is not always the case. Things can and do go horribly awry in the course of raising a child. For those who’ve had such an experience, thumbing through those photos must be a great deal more difficult than it is for me. And when a child or parent has gotten caught up in their bad choices, and when this has led to estrangement, looking back at pictures from before all that, at a time of happiness, of great hope and promise for the future, must be terribly painful.

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son… it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms… I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.

God thumbs through the divine photo album and is distraught. God has loved and tenderly cared for Israel. The picture Hosea paints seems feminine and mothering. God has lavished Israel with affection and done everything a parent possibly could, but Israel has been a rebellions child from the beginning. The more God called, the more they went the other direction. They seemed hell bent on self-destruction and oblivious to all that God had done for them.

How Things Got Like This

Save me, O LORD, from my enemies;
       I have fled to you for refuge. Teach me to do your will,
       for you are my God. 
Let your good spirit lead me
       on a level path.                 Psalm 143:9-10

Though I've not lived there in over a decade, I think of myself as a North Carolinian. So I have been distressed at some of the goings on in my homes state as the legislature has sought to curtail funding for education and make voting more difficult, along with other things that have greatly damaged NC's reputation as a "progressive southern state."

I try to make room in my worldview for a wide range of political ideas, and I have often times discovered some treasured position of my own to be ill-informed or incorrect. Yet I find myself dumbfounded by the mean-spirited tone, the outright lies, and the seeming lack of concern for others that has been spewed by some NC politicians. And as probably happens with anyone who worries about the state of the world, I wonder how it is things get this way. How is it that people can act in such ways without even a hint of remorse or self-doubt?

Such a question can be extended to all sort of areas. Just this week an FBI sweep arrested 150 pimps and rescued over 100 children used as prostitutes. The FBI called child prostitution as "persistent threat" in our country. How can this be? How can so  many seemingly normal people be involved in such reprehensible behavior?

I'm not comparing NC politicians to people involved in prostitution. These are two very different things. The only commonality I'm thinking about is one that all humans seem to share, a capacity for excusing the unsavory things we are inclined to do. Those engaged in child prostitution obviously have this capacity in grotesque proportions, but the capacity itself is regularly on display in all sorts of smaller ways. The amount of hate and violence that has been perpetuated over the centuries by those professing Christian motivations is an all too common, and often all too grotesque, example.

All of this may seem totally unrelated to the verses of Psalm 143 that open this post, but it was those verses, along with a little prod from Jesus in today's gospel reading, that got me thinking about NC legislators and pimps.

The psalmist seems to expect a couple of things from Yahweh because Yahweh is God. The first is salvation. No surprise there. We religious sorts are forever asking God to rescue us for all manner of things, some major, some minor, some beyond trivial. But the psalmist expects something else because God is God. "Teach me to do your will, for you are my God."

In my experience, we Christians are often more inclined toward trying to convince God to do our will than we are at wanting to be conformed to God's. And so we more liberal sorts expect God to have liberal leanings while conservatives assume God is a conservative sort. This of course means that we think fixing the world is about enough people seeing things the way we do.

But the psalmist wants to be taught God's will. This would seem to presume we don't simply know it on our own. We need to be taught it and led into it. Jesus says much the same thing, and he cautions us about how easily religious traditions substitute our own will for God's. According to Jesus, that's because we all have a "defiling" capacity within us. Yet most of us would like to think that such a capacity is only a problem for those other folks.

"Teach me your will, O God. Show me your ways." Surely a prayer that all of us should pray, as well as a reminder that our own ways need adjusting if they are to conform to God's. As the late cartoonist Walt Kelly said all too well, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

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That Could Never Happen

In yesterday's gospel, Jesus fed thousands with five loaves and two fish. Today he walks on water, and I love how nonchalantly the narrator reports this. "When he saw that they (the disciples) were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea." Well of course. How else would he have done so?

Some years ago I recall reading a Bible commentary that suggested this episode might be a misplaced resurrection story. I don't recall details, but this scholar seemed to think that such an event couldn't have actually happened with the actual person Jesus.

Scholars have given similar treatment to the feeding of the 5000, with that miracle cast as one of sharing. Jesus got all those folks to share what they had hidden under their robes in something akin to the folk tale, "Stone Soup."

Such biblical scholarship has largely fallen out of vogue in recent decades, but it is easy to see its attraction. Most all of us have notions regarding what is and isn't possible, along with ideas about what God is like and how God does or doesn't act. Most all of us have some sort of boundaries which we don't expect even God to violate.

Perhaps your or my boundaries are fairly accurate, but perhaps they are not. And I can't help wondering what sort of God it is who is fixed by my boundaries, who is not free to surprise me or act contrary to my assumptions.

I suspect this is particularly a problem for people like me who like to figure things out and understand how they work. I like things to be explained with a fair amount of precision and clarity. I'm very much a product of and comfortable with Enlightenment logic. Only in recent years have I begun to get more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, and it is still easy for me to slip into old patterns of right and wrong, possible and impossible.

I'm not suggesting that one must read everything in the Bible as a real, historical occurrence, far from it. But I do wonder how much we constrain God from being at work in our lives and in our congregations by our certainties about what can and can't happen.

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