Sunday Sermon - Playing Christians

Spiritual Hiccups - Eat Me

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? 

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Sunday Sermon - Playing Christians

Playing Christians - August 22 sermon.mp3

Sunday Sermon - Playing Christians

Luke 13:10-17

Playing Christians

James Sledge               --              August 22, 2010

We Presbyterians, like other Protestants, are products of a 500 year old reform movement that said individual Christians should read the Bible for themselves, that God is available to each of us directly through Scripture.  But we live in a day when many Protestants rarely read their Bibles, and so polls show that most of us cannot name the 10 Commandments.  Still, I imagine that this one will sound familiar to many of you.  Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work.  But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

Sabbath is a pretty big deal in the Bible.  It’s there at the very start.
 In the first creation account, God makes everything in six days and rests on the seventh.  But apparently, Sabbath keeping didn’t become a really big deal for the Hebrews until they were carried off into exile in Babylon around 600 BC.  In a foreign land, the Temple and Jerusalem destroyed, Sabbath keeping became the primary way Jews maintained a distinct identity.  In Babylon, synagogue and Sabbath became the way that Israel preserved their faith and stayed close to God.

By Jesus’ time, there was a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem.  People could go there for religious festivals and to make offerings.  But synagogue and Sabbath remained important.  Especially for those Jews who thought Temple worship sometimes focused too much on ritual and not enough on living as God intended, Sabbath keeping, along with the commandments in general, was emphasized. 

Protestant reformers such as John Calvin shared a lot in common with these folks.  They thought that much of medieval Catholicism had become too focused on ritual and not enough on living as followers of Jesus.  And so Protestants tended to forego much of the ritual of Roman Catholic worship.  They also emphasized Sabbath keeping, now relocated from Saturday to Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection.

I grew up in a thoroughly Protestant South where Catholics were something of a rarity.  And our world shut down on Sunday.  I almost never heard the sound of a lawn mower on a Sunday afternoon.  And I still find it difficult to crank up my lawn mower on a Sunday.

The Sabbath keeping I knew as a child has largely faded from the American landscape, but it is enjoying a resurgence as a personal spiritual practice.  Many who are seeking to grow deeper spiritually, including some who are neither Jewish nor Christian, have discovered observing a regular day where the work and busyness of our world is set aside, where the focus is on God, on worship, on meditation and reflection, is a powerfully renewing, enlightening, and energizing thing to do.

Jesus himself observed the Sabbath.  He could regularly be found at the synagogue on the Sabbath, teaching as a traveling rabbi.  But Jesus also regularly found himself embroiled in conflict on the Sabbath, just as he does in our reading today when he heals a crippled woman.

Jesus ran afoul of the Sabbath rules, guidelines that had been formulated to help people properly keep Sabbath.  We sometimes misunderstand these rules, seeing them as petty legalism that valued rules over all else, but that really wasn’t the case.  These rules had all sorts of exceptions.  You could do work on the Sabbath to rescue a person or animal in danger.  But if the situation was something that could wait until sundown when the Sabbath ended, you were supposed to wait, the intent being to help people keep their focus on God.

But as well intended as the Sabbath rules were, they shared a problem inherent in just about every form of religious practice.  Practices originally designed to draw people close to God almost inevitably become the focus of the religion.  Even if they no longer serve their original purpose, people will persist in these practices, insisting that they are essential to the faith.  And that’s as true for us as it was for the leader of the synagogue who confronts Jesus.

That synagogue leader saw Jesus violating rules that had served the faith well, that were time honored methods for helping people keep God at the center of their lives.  And so he could not see God at work right before his eyes.  The very thing he trusted to keep him focused on God had, in fact, hidden God from him.

It can happen just as easily to us.  If you grew up in the church, you grew up with some sort of worship style.  You heard certain sorts of hymns and prayers.  Whatever sorts they were, they were originally meant to draw you into God’s presence.  And they have done and continue to do just that for many people.  But a style from a certain time can become a barrier to folks from another time unfamiliar with that style.  It can actually obscure God for them.  And when we decide that a particular worship style, a particular sort of music, a particular way of praying is the right way, we have begun the process of enshrining our way as an idol, forgetting that worship is about drawing near to God, encountering God, not about our tastes.  And this is not a matter of old versus new.  New styles of worship are as prone to this as old.

I think that a great deal of younger generations’ current apathy about the Church is because they see much about us that looks like that synagogue leader’s insistence on a time honored form or Sabbath keeping.  We seem more focused on what we’ve always done than on God. Often, that is a valid criticism of we churchy types. 

Those who have had it with churchy types whom they see as more concerned with going to church than being the church, will sometimes throw Jesus’ Sabbath fights back in our faces, telling us that we’ve perverted Church.  They say, “You should call off your worship services and go out and help the poor and needy.”  Perhaps they’re right.  Jesus does say that those who help the poor and needy, who visit the sick and the prisoner, who welcome the stranger, have done the same to him.

But in truth, Jesus never makes either/or distinctions between worship and serving others.  For Jesus, all of life is about drawing near to God.  Jesus regular spends time in worship and prayer, and it is his intimacy with God that impels him to demonstrate God’s love by curing the sick and embracing the sinner and the outcast. 

When Jesus responds to the synagogue leader who protests a Sabbath healing he says, “You hypocrites!”  Our word hypocrite comes to us directly from the Greek word in our gospel, hupokritai.  But the original meaning of this word is an “actor,” someone who plays a role.  And whenever our practices and traditions let us be religious without actually opening us to God and what God is up to, that’s what we are doing.  We’re playing Christians.

When you come to worship here, or any other church, do you encounter God?  Do you touch and feel the transforming, mysterious presence of the holy?  When you come to the Lord’s table, does God’s grace fill you and nourish you so that you long to share God’s love with others?  And if your answer is “No,” why do you think that is?

God is here!  The Spirit is moving in this place.  In Jesus, God seeks to connect with us, longs to connect with us.   Jesus is here, calling us to become his living body in the world.  The Spirit is here, helping us to hear Jesus’ call, and equipping us to do all that he asks.

Thanks be to God! 

Spiritual Hiccups - Breaking Barriers

Growing up in the Church, I heard today's reading from Acts many times.  Philip is directed by God to the Wilderness road where he meets an Ethiopian eunuch who is reading Isaiah.  Apparently this fellow is drawn to Judaism in some way as he has been to Jerusalem to worship.  The Spirit directs Philip to talk with the eunuch and the result is another Christian convert, baptized on the spot in some water beside the road.  Then Phillip, his work done, is magically whisked away.

As a child the images that caught my attention were Philip running beside the chariot, the exotic notion of an Ethiopian, and of course that moment when "the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away."  As a young child, I don't think I had any idea what a eunuch was, or why that might matter.

Eunuchs were forbidden from entering the Temple.  The Law of Moses clearly considered them unclean, right along with "those born or an illicit union."  And so this fellow Philip meets - better, who Philip is introduced to by God - has a couple of strikes against him.  He's a Gentile foreigner, and he's a eunuch.  What is to prevent him from being baptized?  Quite a lot actually.

It seems no coincidence that Isaiah is the prophet who envisions a new day when the foreigner and the eunuch will be welcomed, when the old religious barriers will be gone.  And this story in Acts announces that this promised day has arrived.  The Kingdom, God's Dream, the Beloved Community has broken into this world, and it is made visible in the life of the Church as those formerly excluded are now called brothers and sisters.

The image of Philip being snatched away by the Spirit of the Lord seemed wildly incredible to me as a child.  But I have come to realize that even more wildly incredible is when the Spirit helps Christians to see every one they meet as brothers and sisters, those whom God loves and calls us to love in order for the Beloved Community to be seen by all.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Scarce Resources

Right now I'm following a discussion on Twitter about the future of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and a lot of the conversation is related to scarce resources.  Strands in the conversation include how older pastors are being encouraged to retire later by the Board of Pensions, which of course makes it harder for new pastors to find positions.  There is also a strand about how we keep funding church camps, often at the expense of New Church Developments (NCDs).  Many younger pastors - quite rightly, I think - see NCDs as essential, but often people my age and older have great memories of their days at church camp, and so they vote to fund camps out of these nostalgic feelings.

When resources are scare, the question of how to allocate them is always difficult.  Many congregation, many families, and many governments are struggling with what to cut and what to retain.  All of which makes today's gospel reading of more than passing interest to me.  It's one of the several accounts of Jesus feeding a huge crowd with just a few morsels of food.  In today's account from John's gospel, Andrew responds to Jesus' question about how they would feed the crowd with, "There is a boy here who has five  barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?"

What are our meager resources in the face of such great needs?

There are two very different ways of understanding the stories of Jesus feeding the multitudes.  One insists it is a full blown miracle.  Jesus multiplies the few loaves and fish into an abundance.  Another view sees the story as a miracle of sharing.  Lots of folks in the crowd had food with them, but kept it hidden until Jesus began to share the boy's small offering.  When everyone shared, there was more than enough.

I'm inclined to view the second understanding as a modern, rationalist view of the story.  But I also think that the bigger issue is not which interpretation is correct, but whether we can act like either interpretation is true.  Can we trust that we have enough between us to do everything Jesus is calling us to do?  Or can we trust that Jesus will provide everything we need when we do what he calls us to do?  Seems to me that how we act looks very much the same whichever understanding of the story we believe, as long as we act out of trust.

None of this answers the question of whether to give funding priority to NCDs over church camps.  I think that is a question of call.  Is Jesus calling the Presbyterian Church to maintain its camps, or to start new faith communities that help 21st Century people learn to be Jesus' disciples?  (The way I frame this question betrays my answer.)  But I am convinced that when we are doing what Jesus calls us to do, there will be enough, and then some.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Us vs. Them

I mentioned yesterday how the early Christians thought of themselves as Jewish.  That means that the stoning of Stephen in yesterday's reading and the "severe persecution" against the church in today's verses are struggles of us versus us, not us versus them.  Nearly 2000 years later, Christians are accustomed to thinking of Jews as them, but that simply was not the case for the first generation of Jesus' followers.

I don't suppose battles of us versus us should be all that surprising.  If you look at our current political situation, or at the state of the church, the worst fights are often internal ones.  Republicans may want to view Democrats as them and Democrats do the same to Republicans, but of course we are all Americans, all the same us.  And we Christians can be our own worst enemies.  We demonize those who disagree with us in theology or practice.  We try to turn them into a them, but the fact is we are all imperfect, flawed followers of Jesus, all the same us.

We humans seem to need enemies.  We need an us that we can be against.  But Jesus comes breaking down all those us-them barriers.  He is scary to the authorities precisely because he upsets this status quo of us and them.  Worse, he calls his followers to mimic him, to reach out to them, to love them.  Jesus tells us to love our enemies.  Surely this is the ultimate undoing of us versus them.

Given this, it seems unimaginable that the Church would engage in hate, that we would want to label this group or that group a them.  But of course we do.  Sometimes it seems that we are so busy being the Church or being Christians that we forget to be followers of Jesus.  We forget that "God so loved the world," which seems to draw a pretty big circle labeled "us." 

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Spiritual Hiccups - Resisting the Spirit

I'm back in the office after attending the wonderful "Church Unbound" conference in Montreat, NC. The very notion that the Church is bound in some way is an intriguing one. It says that we are chained, confined, or constricted in some way that keeps us from being the people God calls us to be. It says that we need to be set loose from something in order to answer our calling to be followers of Jesus.

Of course most of us are not all that keen on admitting that we are bound. Addicts resist admitting that their addiction controls them in some way. Micro managers often can't see the abilities of others because they can't let anyone else control anything. And all of us get stuck in ruts without realizing it.

The Church has these problems along with another.  We often assume that the things we do are somehow divinely ordained.  I've heard people say, "It isn't really worship without a pipe organ."  Of course pipe organs didn't exist for much of Church history, and most American congregations didn't have such organs until the early 20th century.

We all have our own preferences when it comes to worship style, mission emphases, fellowship events, and so on.  But what happens when our preferences get in the way of being the body of Christ?  And if we confuse our preferences with "how it is supposed to be," what then? 

In today's reading in Acts, Stephen's trial comes to an end, and he is stoned to death.  In that trial he accuses his accusers.  "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you  are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to  do."  Stephen was a leader in the new movement that sprung up after Jesus' death and resurrection.  This movement did not consider itself something separate from Judaism, but an integral part of it.  But what they were doing looked and felt different and new.  And this offended the religious sensibilities of some.  This wasn't "how it was supposed to be."  Therefore it was wrong and needed to be stopped before it caused too much trouble. 

Any time we resist something new that the Spirit is doing, we are bound by our expectations of how things should be.  Our "shoulds" become God, in a sense, become idols which bind us and keep us from following where Jesus calls.  What is binding you?

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Spiritual Hiccups - Concepts of God

In one of the Church Unbound sessions this morning, Brian McLaren quoted or, more likely, paraphrased William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury who died in 1944.  "If our concept of God is flawed, the more we worship the worse off we are.  We would be better off as atheists."  Where do we get our concept of God, and how do we know if it is flawed?  Most Protestants would say we check our Bibles, but I'm not so sure that's a simply task.

Today's readings may illustrate my point.  In one we hear a portion of the Samson stories about a warrior strongman who doesn't look all that different from Hercules.  In Acts we hear a recitation of the Exodus story, of  Moses being prepared to help lead Israel from slavery.  And then in John we see Jesus healing a royal official's son (from a distance) as a "sign."  So we have a strongman who "judges" Israel, a story of rescue from slavery, and a healing.  In the first, Samson doles out his share of death and destruction to Israel's enemies, presumably with God's blessings.  Then we hear of how God works to rescue Israel from bondage under the royal power of Egypt.  Finally we see Jesus who uses no weapons, but threatens the power of Rome by calling people to believe in him, to entrust themselves to a power other than the Emperor.


So the question arises, "Is God a god of violence who visits destruction on our enemies; is God a god who rescues the slave from the oppressor; or is God a god who heals and calls people to abandon traditional loyalties to nation or empire and become citizens of God's reign?"  


I won't for a moment pretend that these are the only three choices for a concept of God.  Nor will I suggest that all concepts of God are mutually exclusive.  But some concepts are.


A different question may be a way of getting at your concept of God.  "What is Christianity's primary message and purpose?"  The way you answer this question says a lot about your concept of God.  To look at one possible answer, if Christianity is supposed to provide a means of escape from this evil world and this messy, bodily existence, what does that say about God's relationship to God's creation?  If God is intent on destroying sinners and the earth, what does that say about the nature of God?


What do you think is the Christian faith's primary message and purpose?  Where did you learn that?  Things to ponder...


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Spiritual Hiccups - Church Unbound

I'm in Montreat, NC for the next few days at the Church Unbound conference.  Brian McLaren is a presenter so the conference will clearly have an "emergent" flavor.  In thinking about emerging Christianity and the Church being unbound, I was struck by a line in today's gospel from John.  It's part of the "Samaritan woman at the well" story.  The disciples have been away while Jesus has talked with the woman about living water.  "Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was  speaking with a woman."

I'm not sure we appreciate the shock of the disciples.  Rabbis did not teach or talk to women, not to mention a Samaritan woman.  In a world filled with boundaries, this woman was on the outside, and Jesus' crossing of that boundary was nothing short of scandalous. 

All religions create boundaries.  Perhaps they can be helpful at times, but Jesus went out of his way to cross them.  The religious boundaries that accrue over the years often become so much a part of the landscape that we don't actually see them, and so we are astonished when someone crosses one. 

The Church has lots of boundaries, many of them simply presumed to be the way things are, the same way the disciples presumed that Jesus shouldn't talk to a Samaritan woman.  And when boundaries become presumed, so taken for granted that they are like the air we breath, we don't even know they are there.  At least we don't until someone violates them.

What are the boundaries that are constraining the Church, that we must throw off if we are to be the body of Christ to the world?  One thing is certain, we will take offense when some of those boundaries are questioned or crossed, even when those boundaries are the very thing binding Church and Gospel.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Religious Certainty

In a new N. Graham Standish book I'm reading he talks about conflict in churches over worship.  As he discussed why worship and worship styles often leads to conflict, he said something about Baby Boomers tending to be ideological and thus prone to conflict.  Some researchers say that we Boomers tend to be narcissistic and have a very strong sense of our values being right, which of course means that others' values are wrong.

I don't know if this helps explain the deepening partisan divide in our country or not, but it may well contribute to it.  And the same sort of divisions are apparent in churches and denominations.  Of course Boomers are not the only ones who arrogantly conclude that their take on things has to be the correct one.  We all have values that we presume to be valid that will cause us to react against things that challenge those values.

The same was true of the Jewish leaders described in today's reading in Acts.  There is an unfortunate tendency to view the opponents of Jesus and his followers as cartoon villains rather than a mix of people with varying motives.  Some of them were only interested in preserving the status quo, but others were people of deep faith who were doing what they felt certain was the right thing to do.

Acts reports an interesting word of warning spoken by one of these Jewish authorities, a certain Gamaliel.  Gamaliel warned the other authorities against executing the leaders of the fledgling Jesus movement saying, "Keep away from these men and  let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human  origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able  to overthrow them - in that case you may even be found fighting  against God!"

I wonder how often we religious folks, acting out of our religious convictions, end up fighting against God.  If only every religious (and political) group had a few Gamaliels around to remind us of this.

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Sunday Sermon video - Investing in God's Dream

Spiritual Hiccups - Church in Decline

In today's reading in Acts, the Church is shown adding new believers right and left despite a general fear of persecution.  Today we find ourselves in a very different situation.  The Church is losing members right and left.  This seems to be the case by most any measure, whether it be the membership statistics of denominations, worship attendance figures from congregations, or polling statistics that show fewer and fewer Americans participating in the life of any congregation.

Interestingly, I occasionally hear people blame this decline on our culture's hostility to the Church, citing things such as "removing prayer from schools."   But even the most vocal advocates for America as a full-fledged, Christian nation would never argue that US Christians face the sort of hostility reported in the book of Acts.  No one gets arrested for saying, "Jesus is Lord."  In fact, state legislatures routinely invite local pastors to offer prayers, and pastors and Bibles are regular attendees at presidential inaugurations.  So why is it that the Church in Acts is growing while so many American congregations are declining?

I think a clue may be found in the language used by many Christians to describe the situation.  A great deal of angry words from Christians lament our loss of prominence and power in the society.  Such language seems to think of power as something that can be bestowed or removed by the culture.  But the power the Church displays in Acts is present despite all attempts of cultural authorities to stamp it out.  Where is that sort of power in our churches today?

It is an interesting contrast.  The Church of the First Century had no official powers, no legitimizing endorsements from the culture, but it was alive with divine power.  The Church of our day is accustomed to walking the halls of cultural power, to being propped up and supported by the culture, but often we seem dead when it comes to spiritual power.  And I'm pretty sure that no official, cultural, or societal power will be able to resuscitate us.

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Sunday Sermon - Investing in God's Dream

Sunday Sermon - Investing in God's Dream

August 8 sermon.mp3

Text of Sunday Sermon - Investing in God's Dream

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 & Luke 12:32-40

Investing in God’s Dream

James Sledge                                                        August 8, 2010

I recently ordered a book by a Presbyterian pastor about helping people encounter the Holy in worship.  The opening chapter began with this little anecdote. 

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

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

The book’s author tells this story to highlight the ambivalence many pastors feel about worship.  A lot of pastors enjoy preaching and enjoy teaching but find worship unsatisfying. 
When I did my seminary internship, the pastor of that church was getting fairly close to retirement.  And he told me one day that when he retired he would likely not attend worship anywhere for a year or so.

I was too surprised by this admission to ask him to explain exactly what he meant.  I presume that he still planned to pray, to read the Bible, to serve God in some way.  But for some reason he wasn’t going to attend any worship services.

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices, says Yahweh… Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile… I cannot endure your solemn assemblies with iniquity.  Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.  Seems God can be more than a little ambivalent about worship, too.

Now granted our worship is quite different from that of the ancient Hebrews.  No animals are slaughtered; we pay little attention to the cycles of the moon; nothing is burned.  Yet I think fundamentally, our worship has much in common with those Israelites.  For many of us, worship is something that we do to help maintain our standing with a distant, far-off God, a God who is not much involved in our daily lives.

I know that’s not true for everyone.  Some of you experience God as very active and present in your life.  But on the whole, I’m not sure Presbyterians act like this is so, and the Church’s worship has not acted like it either. 

Perhaps I can clarify by asking a few questions.  Who is Jesus?  What was his message?  Why did he travel about the Judean countryside healing, teaching, and gathering followers? 

Very often, people answer such questions in terms of Jesus as Savior, the one whose death somehow rescued us.  And more often than not, this rescue is understood in terms of going to heaven.  In other words, a far-off God in a far-off heaven rescues us from this messed up earth and our limited bodily existence for something better, somewhere else.

Yet Jesus speaks of God’s kingdom not as something far-off, but present.  Both Jesus and Isaiah speak of God as extremely concerned about the earthly plight of human beings, and Jesus speaks of a kingdom that has already begun to emerge in his ministry, and which we are called to be a part of now.

Unfortunately, the Church has too often lost sight of this, has thought in terms of a far-off God and so has confused the Kingdom of God with heaven.  When that happens, religious focus becomes other-worldly and more about beliefs and status than about God’s dream for a new earth.  It is about whether we believe the right things about this far-off God so we can get into that far-off heaven.

But over and over Jesus tells us to get ready for the coming kingdom here and now.  Jesus begins his ministry by calling people to repent, to turn around and change direction because the kingdom of God has come near.  Jesus does not come to rescue us from earth but to proclaim the good news that God will not abandon creation.  God wants to restore and redeem creation, and Jesus calls us to begin living in new ways, ways that conform to that new day.  And so when Jesus speaks of selling possessions to help others and having treasure in heaven, he’s not talking about reserving spots in a far-off heaven.  He’s talking about investing ourselves now in God’s dream for the world. 

When God is in some far-off heaven and Jesus comes to take us there, his parable about alert slaves ready for the master’s return is usually understood to speak of death.  You never know when you might die, so you’d better have things in order.  But Jesus is talking about the Kingdom, God’s new day. 

Early this year, we began the Appreciative Inquiry process here at Boulevard, which gave birth to our Dream Team which is now giving birth to the groups and activities described in the Dream Team material in your bulletin.  When the Dream Team first began to talk with members and to listen for how our strengths helped us hear where God is calling us, I was intrigued by what emerged.  There was interest in more small groups and more community involvement, but in concert with these was a desire to grow spiritually and to do mission.

Now spirituality and mission can be pretty vague terms and can mean lots of things to lots of different people.  But to my mind, spirituality is all about drawing closer to God.  Spirituality presumes that God is not far-off in some distant heaven, but that God is present to us, available to us.  And the Dream Team seems to have tapped into a hunger we have to connect better with God, with Jesus.  And this cannot help but connect us with what God wants and what God is doing.  Deep spirituality gives us eyes to see God’s coming new day.

And when we see it, we long for it, for things to be set right.  To use the biblical term, we hunger and thirst for righteousness.  And so we begin to work for things to be set right.  We begin to invest in God’s future, to give our money and time and energy to mission that reveals that coming new day to others.  Yes, poverty, hunger, violence, hatred, and oppression can seem intractable problems, and it is easy to become frustrated, to trade God’s new day for belief in a far-off God who rescues us for some far-off heaven.  But when we drawn near to the Master, as we experience his transforming love in our lives, we know he is at work here.  We know he is bringing that new day, that the Kingdom will break through when we least expect it.

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”  Jesus is calling us to find our places in that Kingdom, to invest ourselves now in God’s dream for a new day.  Where is God calling you to be a part of it?

---

[1] N. Graham Standish, In God’s Presence: Encountering, Experiencing, and Embracing the Holy in Worship (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2010), 9.

Spiritual Hiccups - Expectations

Many of us are familiar with the phrase "from the wrong side of the tracks."  In the South where I grew up, you could see this quite literally in some small towns.  A train track often bisected the town, and it was pretty obvious that there was a more desirable side and a side that was less so.  Jesus was from that side.

In today's gospel reading,  Jesus is gathering followers.  He calls Philip who in turn recruits Nathanael.  When he tells Nathanael that they have found the promised Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael replies, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"  Fortunately Nathanael went with Philip to see for himself.

It is nearly impossible to go through life without developing ideas about how things are.  Such notions are necessary for organizing our lives, but they are also problematic at times.  These notions let us make quick judgments and respond quickly.  They allow us to look at an array of choices and quickly refine the list down to manageable size.  But as necessary as they are, they often mislead us, and when the become fixed and rigid, they form prejudices of all shapes and sizes.

Our notions of how things are lead to expectations.  When someone says she's a lawyer, people already have a set of expectations about what kind of person this is.  When I tell someone I'm a pastor, I can often see the wheels his head turning and those expectations registering.  Often I engage in a preemptive strike of sorts, quickly clarifying that I may not be the sort of pastor they expect.  And I when people find out I drive a motorcycle, some of them have great difficulty reconciling that with their expectations.

Most of us have expectations of lawyers or pastors that aren't really accurate for large numbers of either group.  And I suspect that most of us have notions and expectations about Jesus that aren't terribly accurate either.  Jesus is an extremely well known figure in our society, but people seem to know a lot of different Jesuses.  There is meek and mild Jesus, Jewish rabbi Jesus, kindly healing Jesus, sword wielding warrior Jesus, and more.  Often these different Jesuses have little in common with any pictures of Jesus we find in the Bible.  They are more the result of what different people are hoping for.  Very often Jesus becomes the embodiment of our expectations about God.  Jesus becomes the embodiment of our religious hopes, dreams, fears, and frustrations.

But if the Bible is clear about anything, it is clear that God is not like us, that God acts in ways that are not our ways.  And so it would seem impossible that God would not regularly defy our expectations, act contrary to those expectations, and seek to transform those expectations so that we become more like God.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Bible Contradictions

Many people are familiar with gospel accounts of Jesus calling fishermen on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.  Andrew, Simon Peter, James, and John are among those called from their former life as fishermen to  "fish for people."  But John's gospel tells a completely different story.  Andrew is a disciple of John the Baptist who hears the Baptist say Jesus is Lamb of God.  Andrew then follows Jesus, and he goes and brings his brother Simon to join them.

There is no reconciling these very different accounts if we read the Bible as history, as a reference work filled with accurate (from a modern, western point of view) information.  We are left with deciding that one of the accounts in accurate and the other wrong.  But that poses insurmountable problems for most Christians, and so some resort to elaborate notions of some pristine biblical text that has been lost, while the Bible we now have has been corrupted in some way in its transmission down through the centuries.

To my mind, a much more fruitful line of thought is to realize that the biblical writers weren't trying to pass down history.  The New Testament was written for communities of Christians, not to convert non-Christians.  The writers weren't trying to tell people the story of Jesus, but to help them better understand its significance.

In the case of John's gospel, his story of Andrew and Simon Peter becoming disciples is his way of explaining how John the Baptist fits into Jesus' story.  John the Baptist was very well known and still had his own disciples long after his death.  All four gospels understand John's work to in some way prepare the way for Jesus, but each of them explains this is somewhat different ways, with the fourth gospel being strikingly different. 

Most all Christian I know want to be spiritual people.  We know that faith and communion with God are not things to be acquired by normal, worldly means.  So why do we insist on treating the Bible as though is were a worldly book rather than a spiritual one?  The truth of the Bible is not ahistorical.  It is rooted in real, historical events.  But receiving its truth is not a matter of having all the right information.  It is a matter of letting the Bible open us to God.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Empowered by the Spirit

In today's reading from Acts, Peter and John encounter a lame man who asks them for alms.  Peter explains that they have no money, but he will give them what he has.  And he promptly heals the man "in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth." 

Throughout the gospels, the power of God in Jesus allows him to heal people.  And following Jesus' resurrection, the disciples receive the Holy Spirit, and they too can heal in the same way Jesus did.  God is present in them in much the same way God was present in Jesus, which is why Paul can speak of the Church as the body of Christ. 

So where is that power today?

Some Christian groups explain that there was a time when the Spirit was active as we see it in Acts, but that period ended in biblical times.  That makes for a convenient explanation, but I'm not sure what basis this explanation has.  The Bible speaks of all the faithful having the Spirit, and Paul says the Spirit allots spiritual gifts to all.  Paul isn't talking about our natural talents either.  These are gifts that the Spirit imparts so that we can be the body of Christ, so that God is present in us.

But modern Christianity, especially Western Christianity, has wedded the faith to our rationalist, Enlightenment views.  For many of us, Christianity is more akin to a philosophy.  It is a set of beliefs we agree to, and any power connected to those beliefs is deferred until some future date, usually when we die.

But the Church cannot be what we are supposed to be if we are simply a belief structure or philosophy or moral/ethical system.  If God is not present in us, if the power of the Spirit is not evident in us, we are not the Church.

When you attend worship, or when you read your Bible, what expectations do you bring to that activity?  Do you expect to encounter God's powerful, holy presence there?  Do you expect to be transformed and equipped to be the part of the body of Christ the Spirit has a designated you to be?  And if most of us don't expect such things to happen, should we still claim to be the Church?

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Sunday Sermon - Addiction Test

Sunday Sermon Available on YouTube

I'm having trouble with the video upload to my blog, but the sermon can be found on YouTube.  A link is to the right.

Spiritual Hiccups - The Church and The Bible

Today's reading in Acts describes the beginnings of the Church. "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people."

I'm struck by these descriptions and how different they sound from most Christian congregations I've seen.  First, there is a serious, intense commitment, not the casual Christianity so often seen today.  Second, there is a sense of power in this Church.  There are "wonders and signs" done by the apostles, not to mention all the members having received the Holy Spirit.  And this has evoked a general sense of awe among the entire population.  All this has turned the Church into such a distinctive and different sort of community that it produces "the goodwill of all the people."  Sometimes the mission work of the modern Church impresses those outside the Church, but too often the Church is viewed with contempt and disgust by outsiders because of our petty squabbles, the way we often mirror the worst of our society, and our general failure to be the community of love we are called to be.

Strangely enough, I think a great deal of this harks back to the way we have come to read the Bible.  When we read the Bible primarily as a collection of information, it often becomes the source of division and contention.  How we access this information and how we interpret it become the dividing lines between denominations and theological traditions.  What we believe after reading the Bible compared to what they believe form boundaries that separate us and them.  And naturally those who don't believe the Bible in the first place are completely on the outside.

In the end, being a Christian often becomes mostly a matter of what one believes.  Certainly what one believes is important.  Those first Christians clearly believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead.  But I would argue that what made the Church in Acts so different was not so much what they believed but the power of God that they experienced in their midst.  And now we've come back around to a blog from few days earlier where I mention this quote.  "People come to us looking for and experience of God and we give them information about God."

I'm not sure if our informational reading of the Bible is symptom or cause.  But I'm not sure it really matters when it comes to fixing the problem.  When we begin to read the Bible more spiritually, seeking to meet God there rather than learn certain facts, that cannot help but change our notions of what it means to be Christian. 

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Sunday Sermon - Addiction Test

Addiction Test - August 1 sermon.mp3

Text of Sunday Sermon

Hosea 11:1-11; Luke 12:13-21

Addiction Test

James Sledge                            ---                          August 1, 2010

My father was a fairly strict disciplinarian, and I have tended to follow him in that regard.  I think it is important for children to learn discipline, to hear the word “No” from time to time, to discover that there are consequences for bad choices.  But while I think discipline important, some of my biggest regrets as a father grow out of it.

The problem is not discipline itself.  My regrets come from those times when I allowed discipline to turn into a power struggle, a test of wills.  Too often , I allowed these to become battles that I was going to win no matter the cost.  But such victories rarely tasted very good.

Many years ago, I read a book by J. B. Phillips entitled Your God Is Too Small.  The book talked about how our images of God often get in the way of truly experiencing or knowing God.  The first half of the book contains thirteen unreal or too-small images of God.  The first is God as resident policeman, followed by God as parental hangover.  And I suppose that many of us occasionally think of God like a policeman looking to catch us doing something wrong, or like a father who is going to straighten us out whatever it may take.

If you pick just the right Bible verses, you can construct just about any God you prefer, but on the whole, I think the prevailing image of God that emerges from the Bible is not God as cosmic cop or an overly strict father, not a God who wants to catch or punish anyone. 

Look at the picture of God in today’s reading from the prophet Hosea.  The situation is one that seems custom made to provoke an angry-father sort of response.  Israel has done everything possible to anger God.  Despite all the blessings they had received, they ignore God’s law, they worship idols, they won’t listen to the prophets,  and they mistreat the poor.  What is left for God to do but come down on them and come down hard?  Indeed as Hosea speaks for God that seems to be the inevitable outcome.  But then we hear God say, “How can I give you up Ephraim?  …My heart recoils within me; my compassion grow warm and tender.  I will not execute my fierce anger… for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.”

I will not come in wrath.  Yes, there is a need for discipline.  Yes, there are consequences for bad choices, but in the end, God does not come in wrath.  And nothing embodies that more than Jesus.  In Jesus, God responds to human waywardness, human refusal to align our lives with God, our brokenness and sin, with love and mercy beyond imagination.

Still, there are some Christians and some forms of Christianity that take Jesus and plug him into a formula that is still filled with wrath.  In this formula an angry God looking to dole out some serious punishment shows up, but if you believe in Jesus you get a pass.  You get “saved” from God’s wrath and get to go to heaven.

I’m not quite sure where this comes from.  After all, if Jesus is our best glimpse of God, then his love and compassion and willingness to give himself for others must be part of God’s nature.  Surely Jesus isn’t one face of a split personality God.  So surely being saved isn’t about saving us from a wrathful God.

The Bible says that you and I were created in God’s image, a God the Bible says is love.  So wouldn’t it make sense to think Jesus saving us is about healing, about restoring that image of God in us so that God’s kingdom might be seen in us and among us?  And while save and heal may sound like very different things to us, the Bible often uses the same word to speak of both.

So if saving us is about healing and restoring us, how does that happen and what does it look like?  It happens when Christ dwells in us, when the Spirit fills us.  And when that happens it is visible in our lives, visible clearly in our relationship to money and possessions.  Jesus says so quite plainly.  In fact Jesus talks about possessions and money more than any other topic.  And it’s right there in today’s reading.  “Be on guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

Whoa! Hold on! Our culture and economy would beg to differ.  Our whole world is built upon convincing people that even though the car they have is fine, they need a new one, even though their closet is full of perfectly good shoes and clothes, they need more.  Our consumer driven culture and the advertising industry attached to it preaches non-stop that our happiness depends on having more.  And we’re hooked.  We’re addicts who have to have more and more.  Of course we never quite get enough.  No matter how much we get, we need more.

Now I don’t think Jesus expects that none of us should have anything.  He obviously owned clothes himself.  His band of followers clearly had money to buy food and such.  Peter owned a home where Jesus sometimes stayed.  Jesus actually seems to have been a pretty fun guy.  He obviously drank because he’s accused of being drunkard.  And he attended dinner parties in folk’s homes, enjoying the comforts of those homes and the food and drink his hosts served.  But still he talks repeatedly about this problem of money and possessions, this addiction that our culture pushes on us so incessantly.  So what are we to do?

I wonder if the analogy of an addiction might not help us here.  For example, lots of people drink alcohol without it interfering in their lives.  But there is a point where the need for alcohol becomes a problem, where it drives a person’s life in ways that are destructive to just about every facet of life from relationships to employment to health and so on.  Very often people whose lives are being controlled by this addiction cannot see it.  Their longing for alcohol is so consuming, such a burning desire, nothing else seems as good, as wonderful.

Maybe we should think of Jesus as someone doing an intervention for the possession addicted asking, “Don’t you want to be freed from anxiety over never quite having enough?  Don’t you want to be freed to truly love others and give yourself fully to others?  Don’t you want to discover a sense of self worth and well being that isn’t threatened by every advertisement for some cool new thing you don’t have?  Then I’ll help you reorient your life so it’s rich toward God.”

So how do you know if Jesus is speaking to you this way?  It’s actually pretty easy.  You look at your checkbook and credit card statements.  You look around your house, in your closet and garage.  You check your calendar.  You look around and see where God fits in all this.  Is God a priority when it comes to how you spend your money?  Or does God get a little something if there’s anything left after you feed your addiction?  And when you do give something to God, is it a joyful experience like giving a special present to someone you love, or is it done begrudgingly?  When you look at yourself this way, what do you see?

I want to ask you to do something today when we take up the offering.  I know that for a lot of people this is one of the most mundane, even profane things we do during the worship service.  Thank goodness there’s usually music to distract us.  But today I want this time to be a time of spiritual reflection.  Regardless of whether you put anything in the plate when it comes by you, regardless of whether or not you are a member of this congregation, I want you to look at that plate and think about what it says about your relationship with God, about how your life is or isn’t rich toward God.

And if it turns out that that you’re addicted, that you’ve relegated God off to some tiny corner of your life, don’t worry.  God does not come in wrath.  God loves you, and Jesus comes to save you.

Thanks be to God!

Spiritual Hiccups - Still More on Holy Conversations

I once heard someone from the Alban Institute say that one of the problems mainline congregations have is, "People come to us looking for an experience of God, and we give them information about God."  On a day when the reading from Acts is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, I wonder if the way we approach the Bible doesn't sometimes contribute to this problem.

When our primary concerns revolve around what the Bible says, whether it is historically true and so on, we are focusing on what information is contained in the Bible.  The problem with this is it seems to reduce the faith to knowing the right information.  But as the reading from Acts shows, even disciples who were taught personally by Jesus, who witnessed his ministry first hand and experienced his resurrection, were not able to be the Church until the Spirit lived in them.  The Apostle Paul spoke of something similar, of being in Christ and so something completely new.

How might we approach the Bible so that it could be an encounter with God rather than information about God?  Approaching Scripture as a conversation partner rather than a reference source may be a good start.  But we need to go further and realize that Scripture can speak to us beyond the words on the page, to expect that Scripture has more than information to impart.

Interest in "spirituality" has grown tremendously in recent years.  I believe that, in part, this arises out of the failure of informational approaches to the Bible.  Practices such as lectio divina, divine or spiritual reading, provide means of encountering the text rather than asking what information is there.  Scripture becomes a conversation or prayer partner in which God is experienced, in which new insights and guidance are found quite apart from what a casual reader of the text might see.  This is a rather different kind of knowing from the typical, Western, rational sort of knowing.  (A web search on dectio divina will provide you with numerous articles on it and suggestions for how to practice it.)

I could read every book ever written about a historical figure, be it George Washington, Alexander the Great, Amelia Earhart, or Jesus, but I will never actually know any of these people on the basis of this information.  Knowing about someone and knowing someone are very different things.  And I believe the Bible, set free from being a reference or history book, has the power to help us know God.

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Spiritual Hiccups - More on Holy Conversations

In his fascinating book, A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren says that Christians of all stripes tend to use the Bible as a legal constitution.  Considering that we Americans are the product of a constitutional system of government and law, this is hardly surprising.  And so we use the Bible like a legal reference tool, searching for sections that pertain to the subject at hand.  Worse, we often use it as a reference, searching for those sections that support what we already believe, have planned, etc.  And so at various times and places, the Bible is pro-slavery and anti-slavery; it's for women as pastors and against it, and so on.

But was the Bible ever intended as such a document.  In the previous two days, I've mentioned historical contradictions in the Bible, and one of the variant story's of Judas' demise is a reading for today.  And today's Old Testament reading features the judge, Deborah. She's leading the people of God and giving orders to the military commander, despite the fact that other biblical passages would seem to frown on such a role.

An obvious problem with the Bible as constitution is the fact that such documents were unknown to the biblical writers.  They had laws, of course, but not foundational documents that undergirded those laws.  Their foundations lived in narratives, in stories.  Stories and myths were their primary vehicles for talking about who they were and who God was.  (I use the word myth not in the popular sense of untruth, but in the classic sense of stories that explain the beginnings of creation, peoples, etc.)  Because such stories were used to explain and define, historical accuracy was never their primary purpose.  And so you can find - especially in the Old Testament - stories that contradict one another lying side by side.  For example, read the stories connected to Noah.  If you pay attention you will notice differing accounts that report contradictory numbers of animals on the ark.  There are also two Creation stories with differing orders of creation

Stories, by nature, make poor legal reference material.  We understand this when Jesus tells us a parable, but for some reason we expect the Bible as a whole to abide by our modern notions of truth and accuracy.  But if we can set those aside for a moment, how might we come to the Bible in a more productive manner?  Perhaps the notion of Holy Conversations may be of some help here.

If I see the Bible, with its variety of stories, poems, hymns, laws, proverbs and so on, as a divinely inspired collection that grows out of various faithful people's encounter with God, perhaps I can enter into a conversation with these various folks from various times and places.  (Brian McLaren suggests thinking of the Bible as a "community library," with many thoughts and views on faith, not all of them in lock step agreement with one another.)

Interestingly, John Calvin, the father of my own Reformed/Presbyterian Tradition, modeled what I'm talking about when he took up the issue of lending money at interest.  We modern folks have forgotten that this was once a burning religious issue.  Christians were barred from being bankers because of the biblical prohibitions on lending at interest up until Calvin's day (the 1500s).  But when Calvin looked around the city of Geneva, where he served as both spiritual leader and city manager, he saw how fledgling small business enterprises needed capital to start small factories.  But those pesky biblical prohibitions made it difficult to raise such capital.  A constitutional reading of the Bible was of little help to Calvin.  Finding verses that supported lending at interest was nearly impossible.

But Calvin didn't use such an approach.  Rather, he engaged the Bible in a conversation.  He tried to understand how those biblical prohibitions functioned within the story of Israel and then the Church.  And in this conversation, he came to the conclusion that these prohibitions were not a matter of God being against lending or interest per se, they were protections for the vulnerable and poor.  But Calvin wanted to use lending to fund business that would employ the poor and raise their status.  And so he concluded that lending (with certain restraints to prevent hurting people) was in keeping with the original prohibitions.  He readily admitted that the Bible did not permit lending money at interest, but he claimed that in allowing just that in Geneva, he was upholding the fundamental concerns of God for the week and oppressed, the poor and the widow.

When you read the Bible, what sort of book or resource is it for you?  Do you see the larger narrative and library, the different parts in conversation with one another?  Or do you read verses in isolation like a legal code?  I have to admit that preaching can encourage the latter.  Each week there is a short snippet of Scripture from which I am to draw biblical truth.  I won't claim that it's making my preaching any better, but more and more I am seeing the entire Bible as a part of every sermon, with the verses for that Sunday raising their voice to speak within the great cloud of witnesses, each of whom have some insight to share with us.

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