Sermon: Falling into God

Philippians 3:4b-14

Falling into God

James Sledge                                                             October 5, 2014 (Stewardship1)

Seminary students sometimes have a bit of nerdy fun translating today’s Philippians passage. When Paul says the immense value of knowing Jesus has made all he once valued “rubbish,” the word he uses has a bit more shock value. One Greek dictionary defines it simply as “dung, excrement.” And so at least one seminarian in any class will inevitably translate it using a four letter word I can’t repeat here.

But what is it that would make Paul so thoroughly reassess his former life? Despite how large Paul looms over the New Testament, I’m not sure the Church – and especially the Protestant Church – has always had the best answer.

Heavily influenced by Martin Luther, Protestants have typically understood Paul’s experience, and so salvation and conversion, as rescue from some failed past. This was Luther’s personal experience. As a priest, he was racked by feelings of guilt, sure he could never follow Jesus well enough or confess his failings fully enough to be acceptable. But Paul’s writings on grace, on how restored relationship with God is a gift and not earned, freed Luther from his guilty past.

Five hundred years later, Luther’s notion of faith and salvation as this sort of rescue still exerts great influence on Protestant theology and thought, even if it fails to connect with many in pews. One reason lifelong Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, etc. say they’ve never had a “conversion experience” is because they understand it as rescue, but they’ve never really thought they needed rescue, having grown up in the church.

But it turns out that Martin Luther’s faith experience did not mirror Paul’s. Unlike Luther, Paul never felt oppressed by God’s law. He wasn’t seeking freedom from guilt and worry. In our reading this morning, he describes himself so, “…as to righteous under the law, blameless.” That doesn’t mean he thought he was perfect. It simply means he tried diligently to live a life ordered by God’s law, and could be forgiven when he failed.

But now that he is “in Christ,” Paul views everything from his past in a new light. And many of us have had a similar experience even if we’ve never had a religious conversion: the experience of falling in love.

Holy Waiting

For God alone my soul waits in silence;
     from him comes my salvation.
He alone is my rock and my salvation,
     my fortress; I shall never be shaken.  Psalm 62:1-2

I'm not very good at waiting. That doesn't make me at all unusual. We live in a results oriented culture. We want things fixed, straightened out and made better, and we want it right now. The coach, CEO, or politician brought in to work wonders often gives way to a new savior after failing to meet expectations. And school systems, companies, and church congregation sometimes jump from one fad to the next, ever hopeful that some new way will turn things around. Rarely do we do much waiting. Even more rarely do we wait for God.

"Be still and know that I am God," says Psalm 46. Stillness is surely a close cousin to waiting, and so we aren't terribly good at it either. Being still isn't productive. We need to do something.

And yet, many of us complain about the cost of our hectic lives. We lament the stress and anxiety of our age that demands more production, more results, more efficiency. But to what end? Why do we complain about how things are but seem so resistance to an alternative, even a holy one?

A fair amount has been written about what stressed out and anxiety laden places congregations have become in our time. Not that anyone wants this to be so. Indeed many hope that church would offer something better, yet we manage to import our hectic, impatient, productive ways into our congregations.

I fear there is a great deal of idolatry in all our busyness. We think nothing can happen unless we do it. God's not going to do it; it's up to us. It could be risky to wait for God. How long to wait? What if God doesn't come through? Perhaps it's better to believe in our concept of God than to wait for God and be disappointed. Such disappointment could be an existential threat to our faith. Better to believe in God but not expect anything much.

"For God alone my soul waits in silence." How do we learn to wait? More to the point, how do we learn to trust in something other than our own productive capacities? Perhaps it begins simply by acknowledging that there is a holiness to slowing down, to resting,  to stopping and waiting for God.

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For Just Such a Time

The book of Esther is surely one of the more obscure parts of the Old Testament. I remember once reading something that suggested the book existed only to give a reason for the Jewish festival of Purim. Many have noted that there is no mention of "God" or "the Lord" anywhere in the book. It seems almost oblivious to the Torah's understanding of what it meant to be a Jew, and it was far from a unanimous choice for inclusion in the sacred texts of Judaism (a process that ended several centuries prior to Jesus).

Nonetheless, there is a line from today's reading in Esther that has always drawn me up short, "for just such a time as this." This is spoken to Esther when she states that she cannot help the Jews who are about to be annihilated. Even though she is queen, she is not permitted to approach the king without invitation. To do so is to risk death. (Esther is queen only because the king had gotten rid of her predecessor, and she has hidden her Jewish heritage from him.) But Mordecai, Esther's adoptive father, urges her to act, saying, "Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this."

For just such a time as this... In a sense, it is always just such a time as this. There are always events, situations, injustices, wrongs, and so on that need someone to act if they are to be corrected. And there is generally some risk to those who do act. Both the situations and the risks may be large or small, earth shattering or barely noticeable, but Mordecai's surely applies in all cases. Perhaps we find ourselves wherever it is we are "for just such a time as this."

Perhaps you or I are in a position to make a difference on something  as big as income inequality or racism. Perhaps we are in a position simply to help one person. But for any of us, at any given moment, there is something we can do if we will take the chance, if we will take the risk. For who knows? Perhaps we have come to where we are for just such a time as this.

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Sermon video from September 14: Ridiculous, Extravagant Love

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Sermon video from September 7: Struggling with Scritpure - A Life Founded on the Word

Audios of sermons and worship available on the FCPC website.

Acts of Extravagance

Any time I've read today's passage from the Gospel of John, I've wondered if Judas Iscariot really was a thief who stole from the disciples' "common purse," or if this was simply a bit of revisionist history. No doubt the fact that Judas had betrayed Jesus was a little embarrassing for the first Christians, and so there was no small temptation to demonize him.

Of course Judas' objection to the anointing at Bethany actually has a certain logic to it, and calling him a scoundrel doesn't really change that. (In Matthew and Mark, Judas isn't the one who objects. It's "the disciples" and "some who were there" respectively.) It's the sort of objection that is still raised today, often with merit. It's not unusual to hear questions about the expense of mission trips taken by church groups. "Think of all the good that could have been done with that money."

Sometimes mission trips are little more than thinly disguised mission-tourism. Such trips are almost never the most "effective" way to help the people whom such trips seek to help. But following Jesus never has been about what is most "effective." Mission trips can be transformative faith experiences for those who participate in them. (We in the church would probably do well to acknowledge this in our church budgets.) And being part of a mission trip can also be a dramatic act of love that seeks to give concrete form to one's faith.

Most of us have some experience with dramatic and extravagant acts undertaken because of love. The gifts and extravagances that people sometimes shower on the person they love are rarely the stuff of logical computation. Romantic and practical rarely go hand in hand. Love can never be reduced simply to what is effective.

Neither can faith. Faith is not necessarily illogical or impractical, but it is much more than these. It is relational. It is encounter. It is experiencing the almost unimaginable depth of God's love, an experience that is beyond practicalities and efficiencies. Like romantic love, it is overwhelming in its power, and so it calls forth acts of extravagance such as that celebrated in today's gospel.

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Sermon: Ridiculous, Extravagant Love

Matthew 18:21-35

Ridiculous, Extravagant Love

James Sledge                                                                           September 14, 2014

How many times? When Peter asks that question he is speaking of forgiveness, but his question could have been about a number of things. How many times should I help someone? At what point do I say “No”? How many chances should I give someone? What’s the limit?

But Peter asks about forgiveness. Presumably the forgiveness here is for something significant, not some imagined slight or inadvertent failure. Someone has sinned against another, has told lies about her, gossiped about her, cheated her out of something. And it has happened repeatedly. At what point does forgiveness turn into foolishness, making someone an easy mark and a target for more abuse? Seven times?

But what prompted Peter’s question? Perhaps one of the other disciples has done something that really riled him. Of course Jesus had just finished teaching about disciplining members in the church, telling them that when someone sins against you, you should go and point it out to the person. And if the person doesn’t listen to you, take a couple of others to talk to him, and if that doesn’t work put it before the congregation, and if the congregation can’t convince the person to behave, shun him.

All of this is meant to turn the person back, to ask for forgiveness and reenter life in the community. So maybe Peter is just following up, wanting to know how many times this process is to be used. Seven times?  I suspect that Peter thinks this is exceedingly generous. Perhaps he’s trying to score a few brownie points with Jesus by being so forgiving.

If he’s trying to impress Jesus, clearly he fails. Not seven, but seventy-seven. Or maybe it’s seventy times seven. Either translation is possible. Scholars say “seventy-seven” is more likely, but the over-the-top “seventy times seven” would certainly be in keeping with the ridiculous numbers found in the parable Jesus tells.

When Jesus first told this parable, he used examples that were familiar and easily accessible to his listeners. But we do not live in a world of kings settling accounts with slaves, and none of us has ever received a paycheck that was in written out in talents or denarii, so maybe a bit of updating is in order.

What Comes of Remembering?

There a numerous posts on Facebook today that say "Remember," accompanied by images of the twin towers or first responders or simply the date, 9-11-2001. It's hard to imagine that many who were much more than infants don't remember. I was getting ready to teach the first weekday Bible study class of the fall in a congregation where I was the "new" pastor. A person arriving for the class shared the first, confusing reports of a plane hitting one of the towers.

Many people can remember exactly where they were when they first heard the news of a terrorist attack, a phenomenon similar to previous generations recalling the shooting of JFK or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It is seared into our memories. Remembering is not something difficult. And so the real question is, what comes of our remembering?

I attended a funeral today. There was a great deal of remembering there, and most all of it brought smiles to people's faces. There were tears as well, but the remembering was a comfort. I expect that those who lost loved ones on 9-11 do some remembering of this sort today. They recall those taken from them too soon, and they hold tightly to their memories.

Remembering can also give us wisdom and help us not to repeat mistakes. One would hope that our nation learned some things from 9-11 and its aftermath. Hopefully we will not repeat some of the intelligence failures that preceded it. And hopefully we will not repeat some of the foolishness that followed because we were hurt and angry and wanted revenge.

Remembering also has an unseemly side. Being in relationships with others requires a certain amount of forgetting, at least of the pain another has caused us. As Harriet Ward Beecher once said, "I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note - torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one." Holding on to old hurts and grudges is a destructive sort of remembering that can make life bitter and joyless.

So what sort of remembering is our remembering on this anniversary of 9-11? No doubt it is a mixed bag, but I want to urge and pray for remembering that does not stoke anger and bitterness and fear, because this sort of remembering is toxic, especially so to those who practice it. We should remember and honor those who died, as well as remember and draw wisdom from those events and the way they have changed us. But remembering that seeks to hold onto anger and hatred makes us no safer, and it diminishes us and crowds out more helpful remembering.

As a follower of Jesus, I am called to a life of love, not one that is captive to anger and fear and hatred. I do no honor to Jesus, or to those who died on 9-11, if my remembering helps me fear my Muslim neighbor or hate someone who wears a turban. I only rob myself of the joyful life Jesus invites me to live.

I will remember 9-11. How could I not? I will recall those who died because of others' unwillingness to let go of hate and anger and fear, and I will weep. But I will not let my remembering cause me to  hate. One of the things I remember clearly from those days after 9-11 was a service at the National Cathedral where the preacher cautioned us not to be drawn into the darkness that had assailed us, "lest we become the evil we deplore." And I will not let my remembering lead me toward the darkness, for in Jesus, I am called to be a child of light.

And so, as I remember the horrific events of thirteen years ago, I will also remember that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. I will remember the wonders of creation, the kindness and love I have received from others, the wonderful relationships with family and friends, and the love of God that surpasses my wildest imagination and is stronger than all darkness, even death itself. And I will live, and I will love, and I will appreciate the all the good in my life. And I will not hate, and I will not be afraid.

The Pursuit of Happiness and Letting Go

Happy are the people who know the festal shout,
    who walk, O LORD, in the light of your countenance;
they exult in your name all day long,
    and extol your righteousness.
For you are the glory of their strength;
    by your favor our horn is exalted.
For our shield belongs to the LORD,
    our king to the Holy One of Israel.      Psalm 89:15-18

Happy are... Most of us would dearly like to know with certainty how best to finish this sentence. We long to be happy. We have our own versions of "If only..." that would insure happiness. Many are dedicated to the "pursuit of happiness," but not nearly so many seem to have caught it.

In his devotion for today on contemplation, Richard Rohr says we are caught in old patterns that we do not even recognize. (I think the Apostle Paul's writings on being slaves to sin speak of something similar.) And so rarely do our pursuits lead us where we hope to go.

I find most people operate not out of “consciousness,” but out of their level of practiced brain function, which relies on early-life conditioning and has little to do with God encounter or grace or mercy or freedom or love. We primarily operate from habituated patterns based on what Mom told me, what went wrong when I was young, and the defense mechanisms I learned that helped me to be right and good, to be first and famous, or whatever I may want to be. These are not all bad but they are not all good either.

All of that old and practiced thinking has to be recognized and accounted for, which is the work of contemplation. Without contemplation, you don’t see clearly. Everything is all about you, and you just keep seeing everything through your own agenda, anger, and wounds. Isn’t that most people you know?  Few ever achieve much inner freedom. Contemplation, sadly, helps you see your woundedness! That’s why most people do not stay long with contemplative prayer, because it’s not very glorious. It’s a continual humiliation, realizing, “Oh my God, I did it again. I still don’t know how to love!”

We need some form of contemplative practice that touches our unconscious conditioning, where all our wounds lie, where all our defense mechanisms are operative secretly. Once these are not taken so seriously, there is finally room for the inrushing of God and grace!

The psalmist, the Bible, and Jesus, all speak of being happy or fortunate or blessed in terms that rarely make sense according to our typical patterns of pursuit. Yet even we who seek to follow Jesus rarely seem to break out of these patterns and embrace those of Jesus. We just can't quite trust that organizing our entire lives around loving God and loving others (whether they "deserve" it or not) is a very good plan. We are indeed captive and trapped by our old patterns, with little of the "inner freedom" Rohr says can come to us through contemplative practices that let us see more clearly who we really are.

Some of Richard Rohr's language seems very odd to Mainline, American Protestants. Coming out of a Western, philosophical worldview - to which was later added an Enlightenment, scientific perspective - we are part of a long heritage of domesticating Jesus and faith into a series of beliefs and doctrines we can agree to. But Jesus himself sounds much more like Rohr, speaking of self-denial, losing oneself in order to find true life, of dying in order to become something new.

In our pursuit of happiness, most of us tend to be graspers and grabbers. Our consumer culture is founded on the notion that acquiring more will finally make one happy. (This mostly leads to an insatiable addiction to more.) But Jesus calls us to a life of releasing and letting go. In loving as Christ loved, in forgiving as he did, in serving others as he did, we unclench our grasping hands and begin to discover what it truly means to say, "Happy, fortunate, blessed are..."

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Sermon:Struggling with Scripture - A Life Founded on the Word: The Evangelical Tradition

Luke 24:44-49

Struggling with Scripture

A Life Founded on the Word: The Evangelical Tradition

James Sledge                                                                                       September 7, 2014

In his wonderful little book entitled Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, Eugene Peterson shares an illustration borrowed from the great 20^th Century theologian, Karl Barth. “Imagine,” he begins, “a group of men and women in a huge warehouse. They were born in the warehouse, grew up in it, and have everything there for their needs and comforts. There are no exits to the building, but there are windows. But the windows are thick with dust, are never cleaned, and so no one every bothers to look out. Why would they? The warehouse is everything they know, has everything they need.”

But one day a child takes a stool over to one of the windows, cleans a bit of the dust and grime off, and looks out. There are people outside, walking on the streets, people no one in the warehouse ever imagined even existed. The child calls his friends over, and they crowd around, looking out at this strange world they have never seen before.

They notice that people outside are pointing up at something and talking excitedly. The children at the window look up, but the only thing above them is the warehouse ceiling. After a while, watching people point up and get all excited about nothing becomes boring, and the children tire of it.

But of course the people in the street aren’t looking at a ceiling. They are looking up into the heavens, seeing airplanes or birds or storm clouds. The people on the streets are gazing into the heavens, but “the warehouse people have no heavens above them, just a roof.”

But what might happen, asks Peterson, if one child decided to cut a door in the wall and go outside? What if she was able to convince some other children to go with her, and they discovered the sky and far-flung horizons they had never imagined? Karl Barth said that this is the sort of thing that happens when we really engage and enter into the Bible. “We enter the totally unfamiliar world of God, a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond us. Life in the warehouse never prepared us for anything like this.”

Peterson concludes this picture saying, “Typically, adults in the warehouse scoff at the tales the children bring back. After all, they are completely in control of the warehouse world in ways they could never be outside. And they want to keep it that way.”[1]

Disturbed by Faith

"A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last. Do you fix your eyes on such a one? Do you bring me into judgment with you? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one can. Since their days are determined, and the number of their months is known to you, and you have appointed the bounds that they cannot pass, look away from them, and desist, that they may enjoy, like laborers, their days.  Job 14: 1-6

If Job lived in our day, perhaps he would be diagnosed with clinical depression. Job thinks life would be better if God simply let him alone. I wonder how common such feelings are for people of faith. I know that some people fear such feelings and view them as a threat to faith. Job's friends who seek to "comfort" him would seem to fall in this camp. But God has nothing but criticism for these friends when God finally makes an appearance toward the end of the book.

It is surprising how many people have a Joel Osteen sort of outlook on faith. They see faith as one more consumer item to make their lives better. "God just wants you to be happy," say the Osteens, but Job would not seem to agree. Neither does Jesus, and he isn't suffering from depression.

I think one reason that faith can sometimes feel more disturbing than comforting is that it seeks to reshape us in ways that are ill suited for the world in which we live. God's ways, the ways of the kingdom, the ways Jesus teaches his disciples, are perfectly suited to a very different world. It is a place where love reigns, where forgiveness is freely offered, where revenge is never sought, where the strong and powerful act as servants, where the last are first, where divisions of race and class and nation and clan disappear. This, of course, is very different from the world where we live. All too often, it is also very different for the communities we call congregations.

However, people who go far enough in this faith walk, who are truly reshaped and transformed by it, become something remarkable. They become more and more Christ-like, more and more in tune with God's ways, and yet still able to live comfortably, even joyfully, in this world of ours. I'm not there myself, but I have witnessed it in others. I've seen people who's egos have receded, who live lives that are centered on God and display God's love, and yet they are able to love and embrace this broken world of ours without getting frustrated or angry at its un-Christ-like shape.

I wonder if such folk understand salvation in a way that I have only begun to grasp, an experience of God's love and grace so deep and full that they can love and embrace others without needing to fix or correct them first. A love that can simply love, and wait, and hope.

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God's Call and Protection from "This Generation"

“Because the poor are despoiled, because the needy groan,
   I will now rise up,” says the LORD;
  “I will place them in the safety for which they long...” 

You, O LORD, will protect us;    
  you will guard us from this generation forever. Psalm 12:5, 7

As I meditated on this morning's psalm, Psalm 12, I found myself reflecting on a bit of verse 5 (see above.) I'm sure I've blogged on that verse before, on God's special consideration for the poor and needy, on their groaning being what finally moves God to act. And for the life of me, I could not understand why I would be drawn to this verse. Perhaps it was simply that I already agree with it that made it compelling to me. But if God is speaking to me through Scripture, surely it is to do more than simply confirm what I already know to be God's deep care for the poor.

Then I read the psalm a final time, and this time I was drawn to a completely different place, to a pair of words I had not even noticed before: "this generation." The psalmist speaks of God's protection from "this generation," and I found myself wondering just who "this  generation" was.

Likely candidates would be rulers or Israel who are blasted by the prophets for neglecting the needs of the poor, or perhaps the wealthy attacked by those same prophets for living lives of luxury and acquiring more and more wealth while the poor languished. But what does any of this have to do with me?

One expectation of a "spiritual reading" of Scripture is that God speaks through such reading, seeking to draw our attention and move us to act. So why would God direct me to "this generation?" What was God saying to me and what would God have me do?

This generation... In our generation, inequality in America is growing. The reasons for this are complex, but still there are many in "this generation" who work tirelessly to maintain every advantage that they can, and who seem to care little about whether or not the poor are despoiled or the needy groan. These people have great influence with political leaders and can bankroll political campaigns as never before. And if God stirs against "this generation" because of the plight of the poor, should not the Church as well?

Certainly my faith has shaped my politics, and I've usually been quite open about those politics and how they connect with my faith. But I have tended to shy away from any sort of political activism. Some of this comes from a realization that people of faith can be deep and sincere in that faith but come to different political stances. But some of it comes from a personal timidity about such things. I want people to like me, and so I don't - at least not intentionally - do things I know will infuriate some.

And now I find myself serving a church in the shadows of the nation's capital, a short Metro ride from that capital. Here I am, a pastor not much inclined to be politically activist in a congregation which itself has little history of such activism. And God sets words about "this generation"  and the plight of the needy squarely before me -me, one who is called to lead the body of Christ. Dare I ignore it?

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