Sermons and thoughts on faith on Scripture from my time at Old Presbyterian Meeting House and Falls Church Presbyterian Church, plus sermons and postings from "Pastor James," my blog while pastor at Boulevard Presbyterian in Columbus, OH.
When you look at all the problems in the world, war, hunger, poverty, and more; when you observe the bigotry, partisanship, and hatred that seems so pervasive, a natural question to ask is, "How did things ever get this way?" I suppose that's the sort of question asked by Jesus' disciples when they met a blind man. "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
Knowing how things got the way they are can sometimes be very helpful in figuring out solutions. But often questions about cause are mostly about laying blame. Knowing whose sin resulted in someone's blindness does nothing to help the situation. Sometimes it may even have the opposite effect. If it is someone else's fault, it isn't my problem.
Why things are the way they are is an intriguing question that may be worth our time, but Jesus doesn't waste his time on it in our gospel reading. He dismisses his disciples' question by saying that the blind man is an opportunity for God's work to be revealed. I have my doubts that Jesus meant God caused this man's blindness just so Jesus could heal him. Rather I think that Jesus is so focused on the caring, loving, healing, transforming work of God that every such encounter is a moment of revelation, a moment when God's hopes and dreams for humanity can be demonstrated.
In the Western world, with our deep roots reaching back into Greek philosophy, we can sometimes become paralyzed by questions of why. We become so engaged in seeking to understand that we forget to act. I'm not trying to sound or be anti-intellectual. Faith seeks understanding, after all. But faith begins with a step, a movement along the path Jesus blazed.
Most of us aren't able to restore a blind person's sight, but most of us encounter situations every day that are at odds with God's hopes. We see people in need. We see people who are ostracized. We see people who are lonely. We see people who are hurting. The list goes on and on. And every one of those encounters is an opportunity for us to be agents of revelation, for us to demonstrate God's dreams for the world.
I've mentioned before that that those who use the phrase "the patience of Job" must never have read very far into the biblical book of Job. Job's patience quickly wears thin as he struggles to understand his suffering. His "friends" insist he must have done something to deserve his fate, but Job knows this is not true. And so in today's verses, he laments the fact that God pays attention to humans. He says life would be better if God would "look away from them, and desist, that they may enjoy, like laborers, their days."
What an interesting notion. Religious people are often trying to figure out how to get closer to God, how to improve the lines of communication, but Job wishes God would just go away and leave us alone. It seems to me that this is a popular option for many today. At least a lot of people seem content to live as though God had nothing to do with their lives. Not that many folks opt for outright atheism, but a lot are happy to assume that what Job wishes for is actually the case.
I won't claim to know why this is so. I don't think it's because the hand of God has weighed so heavily on them that, like Job, that wish it would go away. But I do wonder if the God they have met via some Christians and some congregations doesn't make a distant God seem preferable.
We church folks often look at our more secular neighbors and wonder, "What's wrong with them?" Sometimes I think we'd do better to ask, "What picture of God have we presented that makes them so determined to stay away?"
Why is it that so many "good, religious folks" who encountered Jesus dismissed him? How is it that people who were trying to be faithful to God, saw Jesus as a threat to that faith? These are hardly academic questions, and their answers say something about what might cause us to miss God at work in our midst.
How do we know when our religiosity (my spell check says that's a real word) draws us closer to God and when it actually pushes God away. If we assume that this simply can't happen, then I suspect we find ourselves in precisely the same place as those Pharisees, priests, and other religious leaders who found Jesus so problematic. Often we tend to minimize this problem by turning the Pharisees and priests into dastardly villains, people of such wickedness that they are nothing like us. But there is really nothing to support such a view beyond our desire for them to be nothing like us.
The fact is that many of Jesus' opponents objected to him not because they were terrible people, not because they set out to be enemies of God, but because Jesus acted so counter to their assumptions of what it meant to be good, religious folks. If we try to view Pharisees as the good, church-going, upstanding citizens of their day, who winced at the immoral behavior of those who never darkened the door of a synagogue, who thought their society would be a lot better off if people were more serious about keeping the commandments, who worried about a culture that was becoming less attuned to the faith because of the enticements of Greco-Roman hedonism, we may see that they are not so different from some of us. Which brings me back to the question of how such folks missed God at work in Jesus.
What are your religious assumptions about what it means to be Christian, about how we encounter God, about what God is up to in the world and how we connect to that? And if Jesus showed up, would he fit those assumptions? Would the Jesus who hung out with outcasts and riff-raff, who saved his harshest words for good religious folks, who never let a religious rule get in the way of helping someone, would he not offend good church folks like us?
I enjoyed a delicious dinner last night at the Noor Islamic Cultural Center as part of their Ramadan Iftar. A large crowd of non-Muslims joined Muslims as they broke their Ramadan fast at sundown. My dinner table included a couple of fellow Presbyterians, one Jew, a couple of young Muslim men, and a non-Muslim friend of theirs. I ended up in a long and very enjoyable conversation with Omar, the OSU sophomore seated next to me. We agreed that I would read the Qur'an and he would read the Bible and we would help each other understand what we read. Both of us lead pretty hectic lives. It will take some effort on both our parts to honor that agreement. Pray for us.
In the course of our discussion, I found myself thinking about the way people of faith sometimes encounter one another. Even when both are committed to interfaith dialogue, we come with our own truth claims, and for Muslims, Jews, and Christians, those claims are rooted in a text. Dialogue can often break down over claims about the truth of my text versus your text.
I suppose that is unavoidable to some extent, but I also wonder about the degree to which this emerges from a modern, Western mindset. Enlightenment, rational thinking often seeks a right answer. Empirical data support or undermine different possible answers, leading to the conclusion that this answer is right and that answer is wrong.
This sort of thinking works very well for some sorts of questions, such as whether or not this medicine will help people with a certain disease, but I increasingly doubt its effectiveness in handling matters of faith.
As a pastor, I do my share of weddings, and when I meet with couples for "premarital counseling" (I hate the term but don't know what else to call it) I usually ask them to tell me about why they want to get married. Their answers used to surprise me, but after 15 years I've come to expect it. Almost never do couples tell me about deep feelings, about things they can't quite name, about a knowledge that isn't really in their head. Instead they talk about the traits they admire in the other. "He's kind and loyal, always there for me." "She's friendly and just listens when I need to vent." I'm sure that's all true, but for the life of me sometimes it sounds like they're describing their dog.
Sometimes it seems that we've taken sacred texts that are meant to touch and transform the heart and treated them like empirical data. And when that happens we end up talking about something that is beyond beauty, that is beyond simple knowing by the intellect, as though we were describing the most mundane sort of thing. On top of that, interfaith discussion can become little more than a conversation about our different sets of empirical data.
I have some hope that we are moving beyond the Enlightenment, beyond modernity, into an age when we may learn to view "truth" as something more complex than right beliefs, as something that embraces paradox and even contradictions. Maybe Omar and I can work on that.
I was at a church conference a couple of weeks ago that attracted quite a few pastors under the age of 40. In the course of the conference we had a very interesting intergenerational discussion that grew out of frustration some of these younger pastors felt with us older pastors.
Now I don’t much enjoy thinking of myself as older, but the fact is I was born in the late 1950s. I’m old enough to be a father of some of those younger pastors. But I’m also a Baby Boomer, and we Boomers are a rather narcissistic lot. We think the world revolves around us, and one of our conceits is insisting that we’re not getting old. A Boomer coined the phrase, “50 is the new 30,” a phrase those younger pastors find particularly irksome.
I learned this in that intergenerational discussion. The discussion happened because a conference leader wondered why so many younger pastors had stayed outside during a previous open discussion. Seems many felt discounted and found it difficult to get a word in. They felt that older pastors pushed them aside and monopolized discussion. And so a discussion was held where we older folks had to just sit there and listen for the first hour. And we behaved, remaining silent, a task eased somewhat by a keg of beer. We listened as they spoke of what they saw happening in the church, of their dreams and frustrations.
Now I suppose it is true that every new generation feels put upon by their elders, but I think that the self absorbed tendencies of Baby Boomers may have taken this to new levels. In our narcissistic insistence that we are the center, that we are still young, we younger pastors scarcely see these younger pastors. If we are still young, what are they, still children, still waiting for us to admit they have grown up and have much to offer the church?
Now I hope I’m not over generalizing about entire generations based on the discussions of a group of pastors, but I do know that when we are focused on ourselves, we don’t see others very well. Focus on self hinders our vision. And I think that is why Jesus pairs two seemingly independent sayings about banquets, one on humility and one on hospitality.
Jesus came from a culture that was big on hospitality. In the ancient Middle East, in a time before hotel chains and restaurants, travelers were often dependent on the hospitality of strangers. The Old Testament, the only Scripture Jesus knew, was filled with commands to welcome and care for the stranger, the alien, the traveler. But Jesus took hospitality to a whole new level.
There seemed to be no boundary Jesus would not cross to show love, care, and concern. Lepers, beggars, the poor, outcasts, the unclean, foreigners, and those who were considered too sinful to be part of the community, Jesus reached out to them all. And I think it was because he saw them all, really saw them, met their eyes so that he could not miss the pain, the suffering, the rejection, the hurt in those eyes. And when he saw them that way, he could not help but give himself to them.
And I think that is where Jesus’ parable on humility comes in. When Jesus shares his advice about sitting in the lowest place and being honored when you’re moved up, this is not simply a piece of advice for parties. Our reading says explicitly that it is a parable, a story with meaning larger than the simple elements it contains. And so going to the end of the line, the bottom rung, the last place, must be a metaphor that speaks of far more than how to get noticed at parties.
I have long been convinced that Jesus was the most fully human person who ever lived. He was so fully alive because he knew total communion with God, and he was fully present to others. There was a radical humility about Jesus. Everyone he met was important, someone he wanted to be with. Jesus was never looking to move up the social ladder. He was never trying to figure out who he could ignore because they were unimportant and didn’t matter. Jesus was perfectly happy to sit at the last table at the banquet even if the host never saw him there and invited him to move up.
And this radical humility of Jesus is what lay behind his radical hospitality. Because everyone he met was important to him, he saw them deeply. For Jesus, no one was ever a faceless “them.” They were all fellow human beings who needed his help. Sometimes they needed healing; sometimes they needed correction, but no one was faceless and invisible to him. And when we squirm hearing Jesus tell us to invite the poor, the lame, and the blind to our dinner parties, in part it is because we realize that many of those folks are indeed invisible to us, a faceless “them.”
No doubt most of you are aware of the furor surrounding plans to build an Islamic Community Center near Ground Zero in NYC. I hesitate to wander into this minefield, but I think it has something to teach us about humility and hospitality. Beyond the misinformation about a mosque at Ground Zero when it is a community center open to the general public containing a mosque 2 blocks from Ground Zero, I understand the emotions behind this issue. I understand that reasonable people can disagree about how close is too close for a big new development. But listening to conversations on the issue, one thing has become clear to me. Many of us view Muslims as a nameless, faceless “them.” We don’t look into individual eyes and see hurts, pains, hopes, dreams and want to reach out. We just see a “them.”
That’s not what Jesus called us to do and be. When Muslims as a group are made outcasts and demonized, then they are precisely the people Jesus calls us to reach out to. For Jesus, every human being deserves to encounter God’s love. For Jesus, even his enemy deserves God’s love. And as the body of Christ, we are called to show that love. But we can’t love the world in general. We embody Christ’s love by seeing others as he saw them, by reaching out to them as he did.
In a few moments we will celebrate an infant baptism. It will be a wonderful, joyous moment. But it will also be a small, first step in doing what Jesus called us to do, helping people become his disciples by teaching all that he commanded. And so we must be a school of love, a school of radical humility and hospitality, a school that teaches the way of Jesus.
So here’s your homework, I want you to pay attention to the people around you, on the sidewalk, at the store, beside you at the traffic light, at work, in the school cafeteria. I especially want you to notice those who are others, who are different, who you might label “them.” Perhaps it’s the unpopular kid at school who others tease, the person of different ethnic background or social status, the person who is a lot older or younger, the person whose eyes you normally try to avoid. I want you to look into their eyes and see the joy and the pain, the hopes and the rejections, the dreams and the wounds. See the fellow children of God who just may need you to reach out if they are to experience some real, tangible sign of God’s love.
I know this is a difficult homework assignment for a lot of us. But it’s actually a beginner’s lesson, not nearly so difficult as inviting “them” home for a meal as Jesus instructs us. But if even this beginner lesson seems a challenge, don’t despair. This school of love goes on for a lifetime. And were all here, and the Spirit is here, to help one another in our lessons.
Our local paper, The Columbus Dispatch, has an article this morning on the split occurring in the Lutheran Church as more conservative congregations break off from the ELCA to form a new denomination. Such a story is hardly surprising. We Presbyterians have our own, similar movements. But just once when I read about such things, I would like to hear someone say, "We disagree over the meaning of Scripture, and so it seems best to stop fighting over that and form separate groups." But instead the quotes normally read like the one in today's article. Explaining that the split was over bigger issues that gay/lesbian ordination, a spokesperson for the new NALC said, "Also at play is a misunderstanding of what authority - Scripture or 'the mood of the times' - should guide the church."
In today's reading from Acts, we are in the middle of the account explaining how Peter comes to understand that distinctions of clean and unclean do not matter for those following Christ. While many current Christians are unaware of it, welcoming Gentiles into what was a Jewish faith community caused serious divisions in the early Christian movement. Jewish Christians continued to follow Torah, and saw no reason for Gentile converts to do otherwise. Those who would become part of the Jesus movement would need to become Jews, with males being circumcised, women undergoing a ritual cleansing, and both observing the dietary laws.
But the Apostle Paul saw things differently. He championed the view that emerges in the Acts story about Cornelius. Those Gentiles who accepted Jesus' gospel were to be baptized and welcomed into the faith as Gentiles. The old distinctions were gone. Problem was, the Jewish Christians claimed to have Scripture (which at that time meant what we call the Old Testament) on their side. The division in the early Church was severe, and many believe that Jewish Christians orchestrated the arrest and eventual execution of Paul. And I have little doubt that these Jewish Christians were certain that they were following the authority of Scripture, unlike this crazy Paul who was coming up with all these wild innovations that threatened their deeply held faith. In other words, they followed the plain truth of Scripture while Paul perverted it.
Interestingly, similar arguments were used 150 years ago in defense of slavery. Many theologians and church people, both north and south, were convinced that slavery was sanctioned and supported by the Bible. Thomas Cobb, one of the founders of the University of Georgia Law School wrote in large letters on his home when SC seceded from the Union, "Resistance To Abolition Is Obedience to God."
In the novel Nellie Norton: or, Southern Slavery and the Bible, (written by a Protestant clergyman and published in 1864) the title character is a young, naive New England girl who believes slavery to be a cruel abomination. But on a visit to Savannah with her mother, through encounters with slaves and discussions with Southerners, she comes to realize how wrong she has been. After all, as the pro-slavery people she meet point out, "The Bible is a pro-slavery Bible and God is a pro-slavery God." Also, "The North must give up the Bible and religion or adopt our views of slavery."
And there it is, the same tired argument. Those who disagree with me have thrown out the Bible. To borrow from the Lutheran bishop quoted in my local paper, they have traded the authority of Scripture for the "mood of the times."
Sometimes I think it no small miracle that the Christian faith survives and thrives. How many times have people of deep faith been found to be standing squarely in opposition to God? And apparently they have had good company all the way back to the very first generation of Jesus followers.
Sometimes I wonder if we haven't gotten this Bible thing completely wrong. Rather than trying the follow the Bible, maybe we would be better served if we simply tried to catch a glimpse of the God hinted at by all the various stories, rules, songs, and accounts. Maybe we would be much better off if we quit trying to find support for our views, and simply tried to get to know Jesus a little better. Maybe if we spent more of our time trying to know Jesus more deeply, trying to draw nearer to him, we'd all be a lot less sure that we know exactly what he'd say about every hot button issue of the day.
By nature I tend to be something of a control freak. This is often a real liability as a pastor, stifling the efforts of other leaders in the church. And it also poses a deeper, spiritual problem. It gets in the way of true faith. Faith is about trusting something outside myself, trusting God. By definition that means giving up control. Richard Rohr's daily meditations this week focus on the theme of paradox, and today's piece spoke to this problem of giving up control.
So when we speak of paradox, I’m trying to open up that space where you can “fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31), because YOU are not in control. That is always the space of powerlessness, vulnerability, and letting go. Faith happens in that wonderful place, and hardly ever when we have all the power and can hold no paradoxes. Thus you see why faith will invariably be a minority and suspect position. (Click here to read the entire meditation.)
As I think about my own difficulty giving up control, I wonder about Rohr's comment on faith always being "a minority and suspect position." Indeed our culture mitigates powerfully against faith as an absolute trust in God. Many speak of America as a Christian nation, but we trust our security not to the LORD who "builds up Jerusalem" (see today's Psalm) but to a massive military complex. In faith the psalmist can sing, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea." (Psalm 46) Yet fear drives much of American life. We fear terrorists, those who are different from us, those who disagree with us, etc.
If letting go and discovering faith is indeed a minority position, then perhaps the most faithful thing those who would embrace faith can do is to make a powerful minority witness. I say I am, or at least strive to be, a person of faith. And so I will strive to be a person who is not afraid, who discovers joy in turning over my fears to God, and who learns to live without needing to control.
I while back I wrote for several days running about Scripture engaging us in holy conversation rather than being a set of absolute rules and edicts. Today's reading from Job draws me back to these thoughts.
One of the problems with treating the Bible as some sort of divine reference set is that it requires very selective reading of the Bible to maintain such a view. There are many devout Christians who, when they undergo great pain and suffering, wonder what they have done to deserve it. They presume that their struggles are related to being out of favor with God. Such a notion will find plenty of support in the Bible. The book of Deuteronomy is littered with the phrase "so that it may go well with you," this going well always a byproduct of keeping God's commandments. But to Deuteronomy's theological certainty that God's blessing and curse springs directly from how one keeps the Law, Job raises its voice to say, "Now wait just a minute!"
Job is good and righteous. Even God says so. Yet Job is visited with all sorts of horrible pain and suffering. And contrary to quaint sayings about the patience of Job, the Job found in the book bearing his name rues the day he was born, shakes his fist at God and demands an explanation for how it is he can suffer so despite being a righteous man.
The book of Job stands as a kind of protest, a minority report if you will, over and against the more accepted theology behind Deuteronomy. And unless we are willing to say that one book is right and the other wrong, then it seems to me that we should say that Scripture itself is engaged in a conversation about the nature and shape of faithful life, a conversation in which we are called to become partners.
I receive a daily meditation via email from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who founded something called "The Center for Action and Contemplation" in Albuquerque, NM. (If you are interested you can sign up to receive these emails by clicking here.) In last Friday's meditation, he used some very provocative language, drawing on St. Bernard of Clairvaux's commentary of Song of Songs.
He said that we are the mutual food of one another, just as lovers are. Jesus gives us himself as food in the Eucharist, and the willing soul offers itself for God to “eat” in return: “if I eat and am not eaten, it will seem that God is in me, but I am not yet in God” (Commentary 71:5). I must both eat God and be eaten by God, Bernard says. Now this is the language of mystical theology, and is upsetting to the merely rational mind, but utterly delightful and consoling to anyone who knows the experience.
This is strange language to my ear, but not really any stranger than the language Jesus uses in today's verses from John. "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them."
Neither "eating" nor "abiding" are the sort of thing I learned growing up in the church. Of course I heard both words used in terms of the Lord's Supper and in terms of God present to us by faith, but this never had the visceral sort of feel I get from hearing Jesus or Bernard.
Modern Christians in the West have often made faith a mostly head thing. This is even more true of Presbyterians. So where do we encounter God on a more visceral, incarnational level? For us "from-the-neck-up" Presbyterians, how do we worship in a way that helps people meet a God who doesn't remain a disembodied concept, but who, in Jesus, gets involved in the mundane, profane, messiness of human existence?
