Sermon: Drawing Near - Intimacy with God: the Contemplative Tradition

Mark 14:32-42

Drawing Near

Intimacy with God: The Contemplative Tradition

James Sledge                                                                                       August 10, 2014

I’ve mentioned before that while in seminary, I had the opportunity to visit the Middle East. It wasn’t the typical tourist trip, but we still did plenty of the typical tourist things. That included a visit to the Garden of Gethsemane. Not that anyone knows exactly where this famous garden was, but that’s the case for a lot of sites in the Holy Land.

The Garden of Gethsemane is on the list of popular tourist stops because most Christians are familiar with the story of Jesus praying there prior to his arrest. It is a famous event that has been depicted in countless paintings and movies. But as familiar and well known as it is, I had never noticed something remarkably obvious about the story until just the other day.

Mark’s gospel gives us an intimate picture of that night. We see sleepy disciples who cannot manage to stay awake in support of their friend and teacher at his moment of greatest difficulty. We see an anguished Jesus who struggles to fulfill his call, hoping and praying repeatedly for some other way to complete his mission. “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

Abba. It’s an Aramaic word that is a lot closer to “Daddy” than it is to “Father.” Abba was used by little children, a warm, familiar, intimate term. Jesus approaches God not as some far off, distant deity, but as someone with whom he has a close, intimate relationship. There is no religious formality here. Jesus pours out his heart to one he knows intimately as a tender and loving parent. He does so repeatedly, but Mark says nothing about God answering Jesus.

That’s the thing I had never noticed before. “Daddy,” Jesus prays and pleads. He gets up to check on the disciples, then comes back and prays and pleads again, “Daddy.” After another check on the disciples, Jesus prays again, but we never hear from God.

Mark’s gospel doesn’t say exactly how much time passed. Jesus mentions an hour, but I don't know how literal that is. Does he pray thirty minutes, an hour, two hours? We do not know, but in the end, Jesus is once again focused on his purpose. “Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”

What happened during Jesus’ prayers? Why doesn’t Mark, or the other gospel writers for that matter, tell us anything about what Jesus heard in those moments? What reassured him? What steeled his resolve? Does Mark not know? Or is it simply a level of intimacy not meant to be shared? Is it enough for us to know that Jesus has drawn close to God in prayer, as he had on so many previous occasions, and in those moments, what he must do became clear?

Prisons of Meritocracy

Reading today's meditation from Richard Rohr, I was struck by this.

The mentality that divides the world into “deserving and undeserving” has not yet experienced the absolute gratuity of grace or the undeserved character of mercy. This lack of in-depth God-experience leaves all of us judgmental, demanding, unforgiving, and weak in empathy and sympathy. Such people will remain inside the prison of “meritocracy,” where all has to be deserved.

It was that phrase, prison of meritocracy, that really captured my attention. I think it aptly captures much that is askew with the American psyche these days. It is why we can blame victims, assume that the poor are such because they are lazy, and we are not poor because we are not lazy. It is why the suffering of some people doesn't impact us as much as others -- they clearly are implicated in their own suffering by virtue of some flaw or miscalculation on their part. But this prison of meritocracy is also why we may be devastated by our own suffering or that of someone close to us. It is so unfair (unlike other people's suffering).

As a pastor trained in theology, I know all about the unmerited gift of God's grace, about "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." But I also imagine that I'm somehow better at understanding and receiving this grace. It is a Christian version of American exceptionalism, at least the form of it that understands such exceptionalism as residing in our being "better" than others.

Perhaps you've noticed that being good is hard to do all the time. Being "better" is even harder. Trying to live into the notion of being better and therefore deserving is indeed prison-like. There is no freedom to relax and simply receive love from another or from God. It must be earned. There is no freedom to embrace the portions of self and others that seem not so good or deserving. They must be purged, but when that proves impossible, they must be denied.

Surely some of the partisan nastiness in present day America arises from our need to be right and deserving. We must get things right, and once we do we must guard against those who are wrong, in other words, who disagree with us. If people who are wrong get elected, things will fall apart because it all  hangs on us getting it right. We get what we deserve, after all.

Living in the DC metro area, one thing I see scarce little of (and I include myself in this) is serenity. Rarely do I encounter people with an abiding sense of inner peace or shalom. Prison will do that to  you.

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On Our Own

In the somewhat humorous account of events leading up to Gideon's victory over the Midianites (today's Old Testament reading), God repeatedly trims the number of Gideon's warriors so that there is no way the Israelites can take credit for the victory. An initial force of 32,000 men is whittled down to 300. The final cut produced by sending home all who drank water from a stream by scooping it with their hands and keeping only those who lapped the water with their tongues, "as a dog laps." If this tiny force is able to defeat an army of more the 100,000, clearly it will not be simply because of their military might or cunning.

As I read this ancient story, I couldn't help thinking about how rarely those of us who serve as leaders in churches attempt things we can't possibly do on our own. Perhaps the story of Gideon engages in a bit of typical Middle Eastern overstatement and hyperbole to reinforce its point, but that is no reason to dismiss its lesson. After all, it is a lesson Jesus seeks to teach many times.

Jesus speaks of the gift of the Spirit that will allow us to know the same closeness to God that Jesus knows, that will empower us to continue his ministry to the world. The first followers of Jesus spread his message across the Mediterranean world in a manner that can only be described as explosive. People with no real training in management, leadership, or organizational skills somehow manage to spread churches throughout the Roman Empire, a feat nearly as impressive as Gideon's.

I once stumbled across a quote that I cannot seem to relocate which suggested that the seeming absence of the Spirit in many modern, American churches had much to do with our never attempting anything that required the Spirit's power to complete. To borrow from the Gideon story, we don't take on anything unless we are reasonably sure our forces are sufficient and our resources are adequate. 300 against 100,000 plus? Never! We might not even try it with 80,000.

I'm working on a sermon about being empowered by the Spirit. An obvious question for such a sermon is, "What have we done as followers of Jesus that we could never have have imagined doing on our own?" What have you or your community of faith done? And if you are struggling to come up with something, what might you be able to do if you knew that the Spirit would assist you?

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Sermon: Curing Restless Acquisition Syndrome - Sabbath and the Tenth Commandment

Exodus 20:8-11, 17

Curing Restless Acquisition Syndrome

Sabbath and the Tenth Commandment

James Sledge                                                                                       August 3, 2014

For all the attention that the Ten Commandments have received in recent years via court cases and movements to affix them to public buildings, I’ve never heard much discussion of the final commandment on the list, the one against coveting. That’s too bad because it’s one of the more interesting commandments. But it’s also understandable. What do you do with a commandment against wanting things that other people have?

Does God really get upset if I look at my neighbors nice, new Lexus and say to myself, “Man, I’d really like to have that car.”? What if someone finds her neighbor’s husband attractive and does a little flirting with him at a party? Where exactly are the lines with coveting? What exactly is the point of this command?

In truth, the command is not really a prohibition on wanting things that belong to others. The word translated “covet” refers not simply to desire, but inordinate desire, desire that leads to action and undermines the neighborly community that God dreams for humanity.

I think a lot of people assume that coveting is about people with less wanting what people with more have. But in the Bible, coveting usually works the other way round. It is about those with a lot wanting – and seizing –what belongs to those with little.

There are a number of coveting stories in the Bible. Some prominent ones involve kings, who have a lot. King David murders Bathsheba’s husband because he coveted her. But perhaps the epitome of coveting stories is the tale of Naboth’s vineyard, one of the cycle of stories around the prophet Elijah.

Naboth was just an ordinary guy who had the terrible misfortune to own a vineyard next door to King Ahab’s palace. Ahab thought it a choice spot to acquire, a great place to add a garden. And so he offered to purchase it. No real problem with the story so far.

But Naboth doesn’t want to part with his land, telling Ahab, “Yahweh forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance.” Naboth invokes God’s name because ancestral land was God’s doing. It was part of God’s design for a unique, neighborly community in which the wealthy would not acquire more and more, and the poor would not become destitute because hard times forced them to sell the family farm. God’s law even required that such land revert back to its ancestral family every fifty years, insuring that everyone would maintain a rightful share of the land. But of course the powerful and the wealthy, and especially kings, could usually find loopholes and ways around such regulations.

Ahab is none too happy that Naboth won’t sell, and he begins to pout. This allows Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, to enter the narrative. Jezebel is quite the villainess. I don’t know if that’s accurate history or if her nastiness is overplayed by the men who wrote the Bible. Always nice to have a woman around to blame. Just ask Eve.

Anyway, Jezebel points out the obvious. Ahab is king and can get what he wants. She then proceeds to manufacture a scenario where Naboth is falsely accused of cursing both God and Ahab, crimes punishable by death. And so poor Naboth ends up losing his life and his land, and Ahab, with Jezebel’s help, acquires what he was after, what he coveted.

Now Ahab has been a rotten king from the get go. And Jezebel had once tried, unsuccessfully, to have the prophet Elijah killed. But it is the events of Ahab and Jezebel’s coveting that finally cause God to pass judgment. Because of Naboth, Ahab’s lineage will no longer rule Israel, and Jezebel will suffer a particularly gory fate.

God in the Coin Toss

"And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was added to the eleven apostles." So ends today's lectionary passage from the book of Acts. Matthias, who is chosen by lot (something akin to drawing straws or flipping a coin) is to replace Judas as one of the twelve, the inner circle of Jesus' followers.

Using chance to make choices is hardly unknown to us. There was a close local election here recently requiring a recount, and the article explaining the process noted that a tie would have to be broken by coin flip. But this is a last ditch move when everything else has failed to produce a decision. We trust our own logic and decision making over chance in most instances.

In the Old Testament covenant established at Mt. Sinai, there was something called the Urim and Thummin, apparently a pair of stones that were used to "inquire" of God, that is some sort of holy dice that gave answers to burning questions such as whether to go this way or that, whether the king should make a certain decision or the other such as wage war or sue for peace. As I general rule, I doubt many of us would want our leaders throwing dice to make such important decisions.

I'm not arguing against careful and deliberate decision making, but I am wondering about how wisdom from outside of ourselves can be heard in our deliberations. I've seen far too much of the dark underbelly of Presbyterian decision making. We say that our Church Councils, whether the small ones in each congregation or the large one that oversees our denomination, are instruments of listening for God's voice. But all too often, especially in the larger councils, they look little different from the partisan politics of our day. Sides martial resources in order to win, and very little listening goes on. Each side already "knows" it is correct. In such a scenario, where is it possible for God to speak something that we don't already know? Maybe we need to bring the Urim and Thummin out of retirement.

Many centuries ago, St. Augustine said something along the lines of, "If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself." In a fundamental sense, faith is about trusting an authority outside of yourself. There is no avoiding the need to interpret an authority such as Scripture, but if, in our attempts to interpret, understand, and apply what we hear Jesus saying to us, what we hear never challenges or overturns some of our deeply held assumptions and certainties, I'm reasonably certain that God can't get a word in edgewise. 

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Faith Is for Losers

In today's gospel, Matthew shows us Jesus on the cross. Crucifixions were very public affairs, meant as horrible deterrents to those who dared defy Rome. They were usually located for maximum exposure, on a main thoroughfare or at a crossroads, insuring lots of people would pass by and get the message. Matthew tells us that those passersby taunted Jesus. The gospel doesn't identify them. We don't know if they were opponents of Jesus prior to this point. We know only that they passed by and said things such as, "Let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him."

I don't know, but I suspect that taunting of this sort  was a common feature back in the days of public hangings. Such a person is, by definition, a "loser" of some sort, and we humans often take pleasure in piling on when someone is down.

"Let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him." It's just a taunt, but I wonder if there's any truth to it. Would people have believed had Jesus miraculously descended from the cross? Surely they would have stopped taunting him.

My own conversations with God sometimes bear some similarities to those taunts against Jesus. In my case I'm not taunting so much as begging. "Do something impressive, and I'll have more faith. Fix some big problem in the world, and I'll find it much easier to do as Jesus says." Would I really?

Theologians and scholars have a fancy term known as "the scandal of the cross" that speaks to my problem and that of the passersby who taunted Jesus. Crosses are for losers, and we want winners. Getting crucified means you're weak, and we like those who have power and know how to use it.

I wonder if we can fully embrace Jesus, or fully know God, until we can fully embrace weakness and crosses and those the world thinks are losers.

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Sabbath and the Gods I Serve

"Put away the foreign gods that are among you." So says Joshua shortly before his death. It is his last act of leadership to the people of Israel, renewing the covenant with Yahweh, the covenant first articulated at Sinai with Moses. But where do all these foreign gods come from?

Other gods and idols were expressly forbidden at Mt. Sinai. Moses had reiterated these prohibition to another generation of Israelites at the end of  his career, just as Israel was about to enter the land of promise. And if you know the Old Testament at all, you know that this problem pops up repeatedly. Israel is almost never able to entrust itself totally to God. People are always hedging their bets, finding others things that promise security, happiness, fulfillment, and so on.

Not that the Israelites are so different from me. There's always something that seems like a better thing to organize my life around than God or Jesus, something better to chase after than God. The Old Testament often speaks of this in concrete, golden calf form. The New Testament often equates idolatry with greed. I'm not as motivated by money as some folks, and so my greed is not always financial. I want acclaim. I want to be "recognized." I want to see results and make a difference.

Not that making a difference is such a bad thing, but it can become a substitute for God, something I pursue, something that drives me, and something that, ultimately, leaves me frustrated, disappointed, and unfulfilled.

I've been doing a sermon series on Sabbath of late, something inspired by Walter Brueggemann's book, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. It has led me to think a lot about the restlessness and busyness that characterizes our society. Very often this restlessness can't seem ever to stop and truly be still. And I am increasingly convinced that this is a telltale sign of serving one of those other gods the Bible keeps telling people to "put away." I say that because the God of the Bible both rests and commands rest.

When pastors such as myself serve a restless god who doesn't allow rest, our congregations are never quite good enough for us. Surely a better congregation would help us achieve what we want to accomplish. In such a view congregations become obstacles to pastoral success or stepping stones on the way to something better. And the living God who promises renewed life and daily bread gets lost along the way.

And so for me, Joshua's words on putting away foreign gods don't sound like archaic instructions to folks who may have picked up an idol at the local, Canaanite temple. Instead they are fresh, life-giving words that free me from the stressed out, anxious striving that too often characterizes life. They are gracious invitation that draws me once more into the rest and peace of God's provision.

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Sermon video: Divided Attention and Cluelessness

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon: Divided Attention and Cluelessness - Sabbath as Resistance to Multitasking

Amos 8:4-8

Divided Attention and Cluelessness

Sabbath as Resistance to Multitasking

James Sledge                                                                                       July 27, 2014

There’s an old joke about a preacher who, just before the sermon, performs the weekly ritual of taking off his watch and balancing on the pulpit so that he can see the watch face. A young boy, unfamiliar with this ritual, whispers to his father, “What does that mean, Daddy?” To which his father replies, “Absolutely nothing, son. Absolutely nothing.”

We preachers can sometimes drone on and on, oblivious to the need to wrap things up. But clock watchers in the pews are not always reacting to long winded preachers. Sometimes they simply have “more important” things they’d rather be doing.

Of course it’s difficult really to listen when you’re clock watching or paying attention to other things. I’ve heard claims that millennials, who grew up with the internet and cell phones, have brains that are wired for multitasking, but study after study has shown that when people, even young people, multitask, all tasks suffer.

Are you familiar with “phone stacking.” That’s when people who get together for a meal or coffee take out their smartphones and stack them on top of each other, agreeing not to check them until it’s time to go. If someone can’t hold out that long and must check email or update his Facebook page, he has to pay for everyone.

I’ve never actually seen this done, but it’s an intriguing idea. I say that as someone who has too often been guilty of checking my phone while in the midst of conversations with family or friends. More than once I’ve found myself embarrassingly lost in a conversation because my attention has been elsewhere. I’m trying to break free of my phone addiction because I know that I can’t really have a conversation while I’m checking my phone.

We all know that. We cannot be fully attentive to another while multitasking. Not everything requires our full attention, but you cannot really worship if you’re checking your watch, you can’t really make love while watching the game on TV, and you can’t really pray while checking stock quotes. Multitasking is a hazard to most anything intended to be deep and intimate. That’s especially of true of relationship with God and the life God wants for us.

In our scripture verses this morning, the prophet Amos is upset with wealthy people over multitasking.. They are keeping up with the expected religious obligations. They are marking the sabbath, but all the while they’re watching their clocks and keeping one eye on their profit margins. Outwardly they are attending to God, but inwardly they are making business plans, figuring out what corners they may be able to cut, what deceptive practices they might be able to get away with, in order to make a bit more.

Amos lived in a time when things were going well for Israelites in the upper tier of society, owners and CEOs and those with big stock portfolios. But it was not going well for the poor, and Amos warns that this will be the undoing of Israel because Yahweh is a God with special concern for the poor and oppressed.

In our day, a lot of people, even religious people, doubt that God actually intervenes in history. But I don’t know that this makes us much different from the wealthy of Amos’ day. They obviously didn’t worry about God intervening or listen to Amos. He was amazed at how oblivious they were to the plight of the poor, but such cluelessness is a common trait of multitaskers who always have one eye on profit margins or their bank account.

Acquiring a Jesus Accent

I mentioned in a post earlier this week how even skeptical, non-Christian scholars can accept Jesus' betrayal by Judas as an actual, historical event. Why make something like that up? And surely the same can be said of Peter's behavior in today's gospel.

Matthew tells us that all the disciples deserted Jesus following his arrest. But it seems the Peter does slink along behind, at a distance, wanting to know what will happen to Jesus. And so it is that Peter gets spotted.

Someone remembers seeing Peter with Jesus. Peter denies it, but I imagine he was getting a bit nervous at this point. Then another person recognizes him, and Peter must deny it even more forcefully. He looks a bit a like a politician whose been caught in some misdeed but still hopes repeated denials will make it all go away. But then it happens again, and this person points out Peter's telltale accent. Now I have no idea what a Galilean accent sounded like, but it must have been distinctive. I'm guessing it was also looked down on by folks in Jerusalem, the same way some people look down on an accent from West Virginia or the rural South.

Peter is feeling cornered, and so he begins to curse and swear. Surely no one believed his denials at this point, but it didn't matter. The crowing rooster recalled for Peter his earlier boasts of bravery, and how Jesus had said he would act precisely as he had just done. And Peter exists the stage, weeping as he goes.

Like Peter, most of us are better followers of Jesus in our minds than we are in reality, but unlike Peter, we rarely get cornered. There aren't many times when people want to catch us for following Jesus. We're free to make public pronouncements of our loyalty to him within the safe confines of a church sanctuary, knowing full well that no one at work or school is likely to cause trouble by accusing us of  hanging out with Jesus. We will have no need to swear and curse. We can "believe in" Jesus privately and live our lives in ways that don't betray the rather strange ways he teaches.

Very often, we have nothing of a distinctive, Jesus-like accent like the one that gives away Peter. Our lives may not betray any significant association with Jesus or the way he lived and called his followers to live. I know mine often doesn't. I think that's why I was so struck by a blog post with the admittedly hyperbolic title, "The Only Two Questions Any Pastor Should Be Asking Right Now," by Lawrence Wilson. These two questions are: "How do I get people to imitate Jesus in daily life as opposed to giving intellectual assent to Christian ideas without exhibiting life transformation?" and "How do we transform the public perception of Christians as judgmental, anti-intellectual, and mean-spirited to welcoming, hopeful, and helpful, which is how the ordinary folk of Jesus’ day perceived him?"

Wilson says that there is a single answer to both questions, and it is to begin living as Jesus did. Or, to use my analogy from above, to begin acquiring a distinctive, Jesus accent as opposed to some beliefs about Jesus. That leads to what Wilson calls a "modest proposal" for transforming church and world.

One: Begin to think of salvation as the transformation of your entire self from death to life rather than as mere forgiveness for sin with a ticket to heaven.

Two: Stop telling people outside the church how they ought to behave and give full attention to the transformation of your own soul.

That’s it.

When Christian people live lives marked by hope, joy, and a fresh, new way of living, we will be transformed people, and we will transform the world.

Not sure I can say anything to improve on that.

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Convincing Others to Sin

(Apologies for the obscure Reformed humor.)

A line from today's reading from Romans really grabbed my attention. "Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin." Of course Paul is not uttering pithy statements for someone to retweet. Rather this is part of a much longer discussion on not judging one another, a discussion rooted in the new freedom Paul has found in Christ.

Americans tend to think freedom means being able to do whatever we want, but Paul has a very different view. Paul has been freed to love as God loves, and so his freedom can never be the cause for any other person' harm. In a sense, Paul's new freedom has bound  him and made him captive to his neighbor. The issues Paul worries about, clean and unclean foods, circumcision, and whether Saturday or Sunday were special days, don't get us very worked up. And so Paul's statement, "Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for you to make others fall by what you eat,"has little contact with our lives. Still, the concept is easily transferable.

I think Paul's warnings especially applicable to those of us who fancy ourselves good theologians. It is an admirable thing to struggle with the Bible and faith seeking fuller understanding. "Eureka!" theological moments can be deeply gratifying and even life-changing. They can also lead to no small amount of arrogance.

When we've figured something out or gotten where others haven't yet gotten, we naturally want to help them join us. But there is also a tendency to look down on those who don't see things as we do, to view them as theological simpletons. Even if we are correct, little good is likely to come of such arrogance. I wonder how often my own attempts to shape someone into my view of theological purity did more harm than good as I ignored "what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding" in order to get people to do what I "know" is right. And according to Paul, if I somehow manage to cajole them into going along with me, but in their hearts they aren't convinced, I've actually led them into sin. So much for theological purity.

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Humility and Doing the Right Thing

Today's gospel reading features Judas' betrayal of Jesus. It's an event that even the most skeptical scholars are inclined to view as historical. Why, after all, would Jesus' followers ever make up such a story? It's difficult to put a positive spin on the fact that Jesus hand-picked a follower who turned on him.

Presumably Judas' actions were well enough known that all the gospel writers felt the need to make some sense of what he had done. I take it that the different and sometimes contradictory ways the gospels describe Judas, his act of betrayal, and its aftermath, reflect varied attempts to understand such events.

Despite the various pictures of Judas, I feel comfortable saying that he wasn't simply an evil monster. He clearly was drawn to Jesus and his ministry. He clearly had some affinity for Jesus and his teachings. Who knows whether he became disenchanted with Jesus or if he thought he could force Jesus to act decisively by placing him in jeopardy. Perhaps he was even motivated in part by financial gain, but surely he had some "good" in mind. He saw his actions as the right thing to do, just as some of the Jewish authorities most certainly did.

It's a sobering lesson in just how wrong people can be while doing what they are certain is correct. Consider how Paul, the most prolific evangelist in the New Testament, saw followers of Jesus as a threat to true faith with God prior to his own dramatic encounter with the risen Christ.

Right now, many Christians "know" that same sex marriage is a dire threat to our society while others "know" that discrimination against their LGBT brothers and sisters is an affront to the gospel. Many Democrats and Republicans "know" that the other party is hellbent on ruining our country. Many Israelis and Palestinians are sure that the other is the bad guy. And most all of us "know" that if we could get others to see things our way, the world would be a lot better off.

None of this relieves us of the need to make our best judgments about right and wrong, moral and immoral, true to the way of Jesus and not. But it does recommend to us a humility that does not traffic well in the civil, political, religious, or international discourse of the day. Hubris gets much better traction. Not too long ago, some Americans were expressing their admiration of Vladimir Putin because of his.

I have no illusions about teaching the ways of humility to any of the world's powerful people. I'd be content if I and other leaders in my congregation could learn it. And if we could do that, who knows what it might start.

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