I'll Never Forget You

Can a woman forget her nursing child,
     or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget,
     yet I will not forget you.

Isaiah 49:15

A recurring religious question is that of God's disposition toward humankind and the world. And at those moments when things seem to be unraveling, when all evidence points to a life or a world hurtling out of control toward destruction, it is easy to wonder how long God will tolerate such things.  Surely someday, God will have had enough.

Such a question is on Israel's mind as the prophet speaks.  Their experiences suggest that God has abandoned them.  Perhaps it is all their fault.  They abandoned God and so are only getting what they deserve. But still this is a terrible realization, and so Israel says, “The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.”  So it seems.

But through the prophet, God responds. "Can a mother forget her young child?" We would certainly hope not, and any who did would be considered a disgrace to mothering. But God insists that the divine loyalty toward Israel - and through them "all the families of the earth" - surpasses that of a mother toward her child.

Sometimes, amidst our trying to figure out all the particulars of the faith, or all the machinations of the church, we need to pause and  remember this.  "I will not forget you," says our God. "The most effusive love of the most caring mother pales by comparison to my love for you."

That is a promise worth remembering and revisiting on a regular basis.

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Grumpy Pastor

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
     to raise up the tribes of Jacob
     and to restore the survivors of Israel;
 I will give you as a light to the nations,
      that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

 Isaiah 49:6

I'm feeling a bit grumpy about the church and my denomination today, and attending a presbytery meeting yesterday has little or nothing to do with it. (Presbyteries are regional, representative governing bodies and my denomination's districts or dioceses.)  It turned grumpy when I saw another Facebook post about the proposed changes to our medical benefits.  I won't bore you with details, but like everyone, our denomination is dealing with the spiraling cost of healthcare. And the group that oversees our medial plan is proposing big changes, changes that seem to hit small churches and young pastors with children the hardest.

Now I should add that there are many things in our health and pension plan that lean the other way. Pastors who make less money pay smaller deductibles and their churches pay less for the same coverage.  And pastors making salaries below a certain point get treated as though they make more when pensions are calculated.  So traditionally we have tried to take good care those who labor in small churches earning small salaries.

But I should also add that such things were instituted in a past when Mainline denominations were quite well off and we had no trouble funding health care.  But now, as it becomes more painful and costly to provides such things, we are not so sure we can continue.  And to me it feels a bit like we're saying, "We want to love our neighbors, but only if it's not too difficult."

Sometimes we in the church are better at being an institution than being the body of Christ, and that's as true of local church governing boards as it is with the larger, institutional pieces of a denomination. We produce voluminous annual reports and statistics. We worry a lot about numbers.  When you meet people you don't know at a presbytery meeting and tell them the church where you represent, very often the next question is, "How many members do you have?"  (We pastors sometimes engage in what is jokingly called "steeple envy.") Numbers and statistics have their place and purpose, but no one has ever asked me, "So what is your congregation doing to share God's love?" And I'd be shocked if someone did.

"A light to the nations." The word "nation" here can also mean "peoples" or "Gentiles."  A light to others, to all people, a beacon showing the way.  But that is hard to do when our ways are indistinguishable for the world.

I'll admit to being overly idealistic at times.  That can lead to frustrations, but I really don't expect the church to be perfect or anything close to it.  We are a collection of human beings in all our sinful and broken glory. But one of our core faith claims says we are being transformed and made new, becoming new creations in Christ.  This is a process that does not come to completion in this age, but there has to be some visible evidence of it if the church is to be, in any significant way, the body of Christ.

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Giving Offense

"And they took offense at him."  That's what today's gospel says about the hometown folks when Jesus returns to Nazareth.  They are wowed at first, but then they remember just who Jesus is, and they "take offense," or more literally, "were made to stumble." (The Greek word is the root of our word "to scandalize."

Jesus offends or scandalizes a lot of people. That is sometimes hard to reconcile with the sweet, meek and mild Jesus I met in Sunday School and church as a child. How could this Jesus ever offend anyone, especially offend them to the degree they felt it necessary to kill him.  Even as an adult, it often seems to me that the church has tamed and domesticated Jesus to the point he is not at all threatening. But he is not all that compelling or enticing either.

Richard Rohr's devotion from yesterday quoted Bernard of Clairvaux regarding how we eat Jesus in the Eucharist and are likewise eaten by God. "If I eat and am not eaten, it will seem that God is in me, but I am not yet in God." Rohr goes on to note that modern, rationalistic minds are upset - I might add offended - by such language. And I do think that forcing Jesus, God, and faith into our rationalistic, logical slots can be one more way we tame and domesticate Jesus.  (I can say this even while embracing many of my own Reformed Tradition's issues with Catholic eucharistic theology and practice.)

And so I found myself thinking about the sort of people who routinely are offended by Jesus in the gospels, as well as those who are not. Starting with today's reading, we have the people who thought they knew who Jesus was. To those we can add many of the good religious folks of the day, the religious establishment, and the Roman government. On the other hand, Jesus rarely seems to offend the outcasts, the sinners, the poor, and others whom the good religious folk looked down on.

Doesn't it seem that a faith that represents Jesus to the world would still have an offense problem with the same sorts that Jesus did. The dynamics of power and greed and institutions don't seem to have changed all that much from Jesus' day.  So it stands to reason Jesus would still confound and trouble those who think they know him best, the religious establishment, the powers-that-be, and so on. And so when a community of faith truly is the body of Christ, truly embodies Jesus, surely it will find itself giving occasional offense to such folks while attracting the broken, the outcast, the powerless, the sinner, and such.

It makes me wonder a little about the Jesus we church folk represent to the world. 

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VIPs and Outcasts

I've always loved today's story from Mark. (It gets picked up by Matthew and Luke as well.)  It's not the only place Mark brackets one story with two halves of another so that the stories end up informing one another in some way, and I suspect that technique has much to do with my appreciation of this story.

The combining of the two stories makes for a number of contrasts.  The outer story features a man named Jairus, a person of considerable influence and prominence who is a "leader of the synagogue," and whose daughter is gravely ill. The story sandwiched in the middle features a woman who remains nameless, who is cut off from her community because of an illness that renders her "unclean" and has left her destitute. In fact, she must secretly break the law in order to touch Jesus.

That Jesus goes with Jairus is not at all surprising.  Not only is the situation desperate, but the man is a VIP.  But in the middle of this mission of mercy, Jesus stops.  At first glance it is not at all clear he needs to do so.  The woman has received her secret healing and seems happy to leave undiscovered.  But Jesus stops to find her and talk to her. (I've always wondered how Jairus reacted to this unexpected delay, a question only heightened by my now living in the DC area, a place filled with VIPs and VIP wannabes who are always in a hurry and seem to think everyone should get out of their way.)

Perhaps Jesus delaying to talk to the woman is primarily a literary device, serving to highlight the woman's healing plus allowing time for Jairus' daughter to die, thus heightening what Jesus will do at the VIP's house.  But I think not.  Jesus calls her "Daughter," sends her away in peace, and speaks both of healing and restoration. ("Made you well" translates a word that literally means to save or rescue or restore.)  Jesus stops and makes sure this woman realizes what has just happened.  She is a daughter or Israel once more.  She is restored to full participation in  community.  She is no longer an invisible, untouchable, but a beloved child of God.  And Jesus pauses to do all this while a frantic father is no doubt beside himself at the delay.

I find it a remarkable story.  Jesus will not pass up this opportunity to give a woman more than she hoped for, to make sure she experiences the full implication of her encounter with God's love and grace, even when that leaves a desperate VIP pacing, perhaps fuming, on the sidelines. But the fact that Jesus seems particularly attuned to the needs of those like this unnamed, unimportant, unclean woman, does not mean the VIP gets left out. He is required to wait, and he must welcome a Jesus who is now unclean from this woman's touch into his home. But presumably such religious distinctions have become insignificant in this desperate situation.

I think it can be very difficult for the Church and for congregations to embody the Jesus we meet in this story, and I'm not talking about our inability to heal or raise people from the dead.  I'm talking about being genuinely with and for the good religious folk like Jairus but always ready to discover,  embrace, and restore the outcast, unclean, and broken among whom Jesus is so often found.  Even some congregations who do a great deal of good with the homeless, hungry, and needy, still see such people as others, as "them" to our "us."  And rare is the congregation where the Jairuses of the world sit side by side with people like the unnamed woman in today's gospel.

If the church is to be the living body of Christ in the world, it seems we should attract all sorts to us, from those like Jairus to unclean, unnamed outcasts like the woman with a hemorrhage.  So how do we set up our congregations, our mission, and our worship so that we draw all sorts and not simply those who look the same as us, act the same as us, and like all the same things as us?

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Sermon video: What Sort of Good News?

Others sermon videos available on YouTube.http://www.youtube.com/user/revsledge

Sermon: What Sort of Good News?

Luke 4:14-21

What Sort of Good News?

James Sledge                                                                   January 27, 2013

How many of you watched the inauguration on Monday?  It was a great day for a lot of people, a celebration of the good news of Obama’s win and a second term.  Of course it’s not necessarily good news if you are a Republican or you disagree with Obama.

If you are from Seattle, the outcome of a football game a few weeks ago was very likely good news to you, but for a lot of people around here it was a bitter pill to swallow.

The term translated “good news” in the New Testament is the root of our word evangelism. But how many of you think of good things that need celebrating when you hear the terms evangelism or evangelical? For some Progressive Christians, the term evangelical is used almost as a slur. But why? Why would we react negatively to good news? Surely it is because of the particular content we have come to associate with evangelism.

What is the content of the good news, the gospel that followers of Jesus are called to share?  You would think that after all these centuries, this would be an easy question to answer, but there seem to be a lot of different answers. 

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the Christian gospel sometimes becomes about escape.  “Good news! Even though the world’s a crummy place and you may experience suffering and difficulties, if you just believe the right things, you will get a ticket to heaven when you die.”  Some have labeled this a gospel of evacuation. Liberal Christianity usually rejects the harsher requirements of this gospel, deemphasizing or completely leaving out the need to believe the right things, but it often maintains the evacuation part.  “Good news! God loves you and you’ll go to heaven.”

A Little Ambiguity

"The kingdom of God is as if... With what can we compare the kingdom of God?.. It is like..." Similarities and comparisons. Is that as close as we can get to the kingdom?

The modern, scientific age (which is perhaps now giving way to post-modernity) is all about precision and rationality and logic.  It is about empirical truth.  Not that we know nothing of things that don't fit easily into such categories; beauty or love for example.  Still, much of modern religious thinking has sought to work out its religious theologies and doctrines in great detail. Much of these doctrines and theologies are very robust, logical arguments explaining with great precision what it means that God is sovereign or that Jesus suffered and died.  And this drive to work things out just so hasn't very much room for ambiguity and uncertainty. It seeks clarity and certainty.

To which Jesus says, "as if, compare, is like." 

I have long found the rigid, religious certitude of some fundamentalists very off-putting.  However I have found some liberal reactions to this so vague as to be equally off-putting as well.  At times they seem to say, "Well since we can't say with absolute precision exactly how all this works, we can't say very much at all." And Mainline faith has sometimes been reduced to a vague belief in God and trying to be moral.

I wonder if we don't all need to get a bit more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.  For some that means letting go of the notion that they know the formula to the smallest detail like a pastor who once confided in me that he hated doing funerals when he knew the person was going to hell because he had not made a public profession of Jesus as Lord and Savior. For others it means being willing to point with conviction to something and say, "I don't know all the details, but I am certain that the kingdom is very much like this."

Which direction to you need to step in order to embrace a little ambiguity?

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Holding onto Paradox and Contradiction

I read Richard Rohr's daily meditation, and then I read the daily lectionary passages. Some days these compliment one another perfectly. Rohr was talking about how dilemmas, conflicts, paradoxes, and contradictions are a necessary part of scripture, and how we gain true wisdom only when we wrestle with such paradox and contradiction. Noting the "fragmented" nature of scripture he quotes Wendall Berry who says, "the mind that is not baffled is not employed."

Then came the morning psalm. "O LORD, who may abide in your tent?  Who may dwell on your holy hill? Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right."Such lines are not uncommon in the Bible. Only the pure and the righteous shall dwell with God.

Such talk is hardly restricted to the Old Testament.  Today's reading from Ephesians is also about purity. "Be sure of this, that no fornicator or impure person, or one who is greedy (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God."

 So God wants nothing to do with you unless you are pure and righteous. Only problem is Jesus says things like this to the good religious folks who worked very hard at purity.  "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you."

Have you ever noticed that Christians of both liberal and conservative stripes often feel a need to get rid of such biblical contradictions by emphasizing some and ignoring others? Some people's God is mostly concerned with purity and righteousness while other people speak of a God who seems not to care about such things at all, only wanting to embrace them and say, "There, there."

Strange that we expect humans to be complex and full of self contradictions, but we expect God to be a flat, two dimensional, cartoon character.  We think God should be easier to comprehend than our friend, partner, or neighbor.  What would Wendall Berry say about that?

I wonder what our faith might look like if we were more willing to hold onto the self-contradictions of scripture. (And perhaps even of God?)  If we took seriously God righteousness and holiness and mercy and forgiveness, how might that show in our lives?

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Sermon audio: Sign of Abundance

Preached by Diane Walton Hendricks on January 20.


Additional audios of sermons and worship can be found on church website.

Must Be Crazy

Jesus' family tried to stop him, to drag him back home because folks were saying, "He has gone out of his mind."  So it says in today's gospel. Jesus was acting strangely enough that people thought him possessed, and his family seemed to agree.  They thought it best to go get him and talk some sense into him. Fortunately this is no longer a problem. We in the church are free to domesticate Jesus as we see fit, to make him into a champion of middle class values and attitudes, perfectly at home with the status quo. 

This notion of domesticating former revolutionaries struck me yesterday as I watched the President's inauguration on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.  Amidst the frequent references to Dr. King, I was struck how he has become a sanitized revolutionary, remembered for platitudes easily embraced by most all decent folks nowadays.  There was little to see of the Dr. King who spoke out against the Vietnam War, who questioned American capitalism, and who blasted white, middle-class Christianity.

While in a Birmingham jail, King wrote an open letter to fellow clergy, especially to white pastors in more liberal churches whom King had supposed would be natural allies, but who instead told King to slow down, to stop acting so impatient (so crazy?)  Here's a piece of that letter.

So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent -- and often even vocal -- sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

I was especially struck by that last line of the paragraph about young people's disappointment.  Judging by the number of young adults who want little to do with church in our time (now at a third and rising for those under 30), King could just as easily be speaking of the twenty first century.

It is strange the way the church so often becomes defender of the status quo. After all, our founder was persecuted and killed by the status quo.  But for some reason we imagine our status quo to be sufficiently "Christian." And those who do claim the culture has fallen away so far as to earn God's ire measure this in trivial things such as "prayer in school" or with regards to the right stance or hot-button social issues.  Nearly impossible to see in any of this is a Jesus who was at home with prostitutes and other ne'er-do-wells but who frightened to death many of the good, church-folk of his day.

I have yet to meet anyone who would seriously claim that the world has been transformed into anything resembling the vision Jesus proclaimed of a Kingdom of God, a new realm where earth looked like heaven, all things done just as God would have them. And yet the church, as Dr. King unhappily discovered, is often the biggest defender of the status quo has. This is so commonplace that there is an old joke about the 7 last words of a dying church being, "We've never done it that way before."

I wonder what would happen if the church became a little less beholding to the status quo or to "how we've always done it, and a little more shaped by the pattern of Jesus and how he lived. Actually, I think we know and that is what keeps so frightened of change.  We're afraid people would say, "Those folks must be crazy!"

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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

Water into wine.  Even people who've never been to a church have probably heard about Jesus turning water into wine. It's a pretty whiz bang sort of  miracle, but I'm not sure its significance is much appreciated.  Often the story gets drawn into discussions about religion and alcohol, or about whether or not to believe in miracles.

I heard a very good sermon on this passage today from Diane Walton Hendricks, the pastor for spiritual growth here at Falls Church Presbyterian. She pointed out that this story is about God's abundance, about how God steps in when it seems there isn't enough, enough resources, enough money, enough political will,  enough hope, enough time, etc. (I will post the sermon on this blog later in the week.)

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has written on "the liturgy of abundance, the myth of scarcity." He points out that consumerism is all about scrambling to acquire things of which there aren't enough to go around. But the biblical narrative is one of enough for all, enough to go around. And in his first "sign," Jesus demonstrates this promise of enough, or God's abundance.

Much of public discourse and politics these days is about scarcity and about how to deal with it.  Who will get left out?  What essential services must be cut? In a nation of incredible wealth, our lives are often shaped more by the myth of scarcity than by any promise or liturgy of abundance.  Seems to me that one of the most important things a follower of Jesus can do is to expose and counteract that myth by proclaiming and living in ways that bear witness to the hope and promise of God's abundance.

The Faith of Others

I've always been both enticed and bothered by today's gospel reading, the story of a paralyzed man who is lowered through to roof to get around huge crowds. It's one of those favorite Bible story episodes I remember from my childhood. But as an adult I was troubled by the notion that Jesus only heals the man to prove to the scribes that he has the authority to forgive sin.  Does that mean if no scribes had been there, Jesus wouldn't have healed the man?

But something different struck me on reading the story again today.  It was the initial motivation for Jesus to act.  "When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, 'Son, your sins are forgiven.' ” Not the paralytic's faith but "their faith."

A well known phrase in the gospels is Jesus saying "Your faith has saved you," or "Your faith has made you well." (These are just different translations of the same Greek.)  But in today's reading it seems Jesus should say, "Their faith has saved you/made you well." 

American Christianity tends to be highly individualistic, but in this gospel a person is both forgiven and healed because of others' faith.  That reminds me of another biblical phrase that can be translated more than one way. A lot of Protestants are familiar with passages such as Galatians 2:16 which says, "A person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ." But the Greek of this sentence can just as easily be translated, "...through the faith of Jesus." So are we saved, justified, healed by our faith, or by his?

Part of Paul's insistence in such passages is that our new and restored relationship with God is not something we accomplish.  Rather it is a gift.  But very often we Protestants simply turn faith into a different sort of work or accomplishment.  We decide to believe certain things and so God must reward us.  But what if it's more like the story of the paralytic in today's gospel?  When Jesus saw "their faith," he forgave the man.  When God saw Jesus' faith, he forgave us?

If this is in fact the case, then what does it means to live a life of faith?

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