Sunday Sermon text - Dare We Be Christians?

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Dare We Be Christians?

James Sledge                                                  July 24, 2011

Have you ever done a load of white laundry, and something dark got mixed in?  A single, red item somehow went unnoticed, and you open the washer to discover that everything has turned pink.  It’s amazing the way one, unseen thing can give you a new wardrobe.

Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven, the coming rule of God, is a little like that.  Jesus actually speaks of yeast and mustard seeds.  But mustard plants were generally not grown as a crop in Palestine, although the tiny seeds did find their way into the other seeds that a farmer would sow.  It was easy to miss such a tiny, dust-like seed mixed in with the larger grain.  Only later would the farmer realize that a fast growing mustard plant was now transforming his field into something quite other than he had intended.

And yeast or, perhaps more properly, leaven, is not the same product we buy at the store to use in baking.  Leaven is dough that has soured, that has begun to go bad.  Used carefully, it could intentionally be added to a new mix of dough to make it rise in baking.  But it could also make you sick if it was too far gone. 

In the Bible, leaven is almost always a symbol of corruption.  Leavened bread could never be used as an offering to God.  During Passover, not only was leavened bread forbidden, but no trace of leaven was allowed in people’s homes.  And Jesus himself speaks of the teachings of the Pharisees as leaven, something that corrupts and distorts the good gift of God’s Law.

But in the parables we just heard, Jesus speaks of God’s hoped-for new day as like a mustard seed that unexpectedly sprang up in the field, like leaven that has transformed the bread into something that is no longer fit to be offered to God, like a red sock that has turned the entire load of white dress shirts pink.

Perhaps it is a bit unsettling to think of the kingdom, the dream of God’s new day, as something that subverts and corrupts the order of things, especially for us Presbyterians.  We Presbyterians love things “decently and in order,” so much so that we sometimes seem to worship order and fear anything new.  An old joke asks, “How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?”  And the punch line goes, “Change?”

But today Jesus says the kingdom that has come near is like something subversive and corrupting that insidiously and almost imperceptibly works to change things.  And Jesus continues his surprising imagery in describing the Kingdom’s great worth.  Merchants, like the one who finds the pearl, were the used car salesmen of Jesus’ day, and the fellow who finds a treasure in someone else’s field either commits fraud or theft to acquire it.  I suppose Jesus is saying that the Kingdom is so desirable that we should risk anything to be part of it.

Unfortunately the Church has often marginalized this Kingdom.  We’ve not seen it at work in our everyday lives.  Jesus says the Kingdom, God’s rule, has come near, but we’ve hidden the Kingdom inside the Church walls or, more often, exiled God’s rule to heaven, and so exempted the world, and our daily lives, from its subversive, life altering impact.

Back in the 1980s, our denomination  began a formal peacemaking program.  We affirmed peacemaking as every believer’s calling, and  the General Assembly urged congregations to integrate peacemaking into their life and mission.  There is an annual Peacemaking Offering.  Resources were developed to study and discuss peacemaking, including a pledge that church sessions could approve and sign to declare they were a Peacemaking congregation.   Many presbyteries encouraged the congregations in their area to sign this “commitment to peacemaking”  occasionally announcing the percentage of congregations who had.

Now when you recall that Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” you might think that everyone would want to sign a “commitment to peacemaking.”  But in fact, peacemaking proved to be a contentious subject.  Might such a commitment put us in the same camp with anti-war demonstrators?  Might it be seen as unpatriotic or liberal?  Many sessions steadfastly refused to sign the commitment, and some argued forcefully that churches had no business doing anything that seemed to question defense policy or even hint at being unpatriotic.  After all, Christian faith is about personal salvation and going to heaven when you die, isn’t it?  It’s not about civil or governmental affairs.

Yet when Jesus shows up, his first words are about the Kingdom coming near.  Jesus uses a political image, and he says that the arrival of God’s rule , God’s new government, requires us to change, to repent, to begin living different sorts of lives now.

We Americans have little experience with kings and kingdoms.  And though we are sometimes fascinated by British royalty, we know them as mere figureheads.  But when Jesus speaks of  the Kingdom, he does so in a world where kings make the rules.  And proclaiming God’s kingdom is an explicit claim that God governs.  God is the central character in the life of the world and is at work in surprising, even subversive ways to bend history and the world toward God’s purposes.  But the world, and many of us, do not believe it.

It turns out that it is quite easy to believe in God without believing that God rules.  We can believe in God but still act as though the real rulers of the world are money, military might, political clout, etc.  We even speak of “the invisible hand of the market” and “the almighty dollar,” and these often exert more influence on our daily lives than God’s rule.

But not so with Jesus.  Jesus is so certain that God rules, his life is so saturated by God’s rule, that he lives and acts in surprising, subversive ways, casting his lot with the poor, the oppressed, and the sinner; undermining the powers-that-be as surely as leaven changes the dough.  Jesus is so certain that God rules and that the world is being aligned to that governance, that he is willing to give his life for it.

How absurd to believe that God is really in charge of history, that we cannot secure our future via military might or economic power.  How foolish to believe that God is on the side of the weak and the vulnerable, and that God’s will – not ours nor Wall Street’s nor some political party’s nor anyone else’s – is going to be done here on earth.  How ridiculous to believe that I become fully human only as I fully acknowledge God’s rule, and my life begins to be shaped by that rule in the way that Jesus’ life was.  And what an idealistic delusion to think that we as the Church could live together in ways that demonstrate and embody God’s rule for all the world to see.

When I graduated from seminary, a professor I was close to gave me a gift, a little book by Walter Rauschenbusch entitled, Dare We Be Christians?  It was written in 1914, another time when the Church was filled with confidence.  But Rauschenbusch, who had worked in a poor and destitute part of New York City known as “Hell’s Kitchen,” thought that the Church’s focus on personal salvation had undermined Jesus’ teachings about the Kingdom, and about our call to embody it.  And he asks if we dare believe the absurdity and foolishness Jesus declares to us and calls us to live out?

Dare we?  Dare we trust that the power of resurrection has be set loose in the world?  Dare we trust that God will provide and equip us to live in ways that transform others and the world?  Dare we become agents (red socks?) of the Kingdom Jesus says has come near?

Sunday Sermon audio - Dare We Be Christians?

Spiritual Hiccups - Saturated with God

Because I am a "second career" pastor, I had an normal life until I was in my mid 30s.  I had regular jobs and I was a regular church member who listened to sermons, served on a committee or two, and slept in on Sunday morning if I felt like it.  I was probably as religious as the average church person, which is to say that God did not really saturate my life all that much.  God did not have a great deal to do with my work life, or even with how my wife and I were raising our young children. 

But when God started to become more important in my life, when God started to occupy my thoughts on a more regular basis (why and how this happened is another story and not entirely certain to me), it wasn't all that long before I began to think about seminary and ordained ministry.  If God was going to be around all the time then obviously you need to be doing a job that was about God.

I am quite convinced that God did call me to go to seminary and become a Presbyterian pastor, but over the years I have come to understand a piece of advice that as given to me when I first announced I was thinking of attending seminary.  "Don't confuse God's call to an active life of faith with a call to become a pastor."

I think there is a tendency to assume that church and God's presence are close to the same thing.  And it is easy for pastors to consider church involvement as an accurate faith indicator.  After all, the way we responded to God's presence was to spend all our time at church.  Pastors and seminary students will even talk about our "call stories" as though we are the only ones who have them.  As a result we don't always recognize that some churchy things don't necessarily help folks live in God's presence.

Many of the Psalms are saturated with God's presence.  God's steadfast love is everywhere, and God's activity can be seen in everything from a wheat field to frost on a winter's morning (something that sounds quite refreshing during this heatwave).  For Israel and for Jesus, God is mixed into every facet of life, which is why Jesus cannot turn away from anyone in need.

There is an adage in the church business that when new members join they need to become involved in something more than worship or they are very likely not to stay members for long.  In many of the churches I have known the first thought in addressing this problem is, "Let's see if they'll serve on a committee."  Now I'm not badmouthing committees.  They do a lot of important work and some of them are very spiritual places, but this inclination to put folks on committees seems to me an echo of that trap we pastors fall into: thinking that lots of church activity is a sign of deep faith.

I wonder how churches might to a better job of helping members live lives that are saturated with God.  Obviously congregations would need programs (and likely committees) to organize such learnings and practices, but what if we focused less on our congregations and more on how we could help each other live out our faith beyond the church walls?  And perhaps this starts with pastors realizing that being saturated with Church and being saturated with God are not necessarily the same thing.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Christ Shaped Lives

 O LORD, who may abide in your tent?
          Who may dwell on your holy hill?
 Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,
          and speak the truth from their heart;
 who do not slander with their tongue,
          and do no evil to their friends,
          nor take up a reproach against their neighbors; 

The opening of Psalm 15 strikes a common biblical theme, that Yahweh desires "righteousness" or right living from those who would claim relationship with this God.  We Christians are sometimes prone to think that our belief or faith negates this need for righteousness.  But although Jesus brings God's love and forgiveness to sinners, he also calls them to new life.


Jesus models that new life for his followers, and it is much more than "being moral" or "being good citizens."  Jesus calls us to life with God at its center, a life animated by the love of neighbor, even when that neighbor is an enemy.  This is much more than adherence to basic community standards.  It is the radical reorientation of every facet of life.

Some wonderful theological discussions can be had around how God's love, grace, and forgiveness offered freely to all coexist with Jesus saying things such as, "Not everyone who calls me 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven."  Is it possible to fully experience God's love and grace without being transformed so as to live differently?  Can one truly love God and not live in ways that seek to please God?

Regardless, the life of faith cannot be lived entirely in one's mind.  It must be fleshed out in Christ-like action.  And that suggests that the label "Christian" should not be used with too much ease.  I frequently hear someone labeled a "good Christian fellow" when all that is meant is the person wasn't a scoundrel.  And when we say that America is a "Christian nation," do we really mean that our country embodies the radical reorientation of all life that Jesus models? 

When I grew up, part of the Christian, cultural veneer was saying the "Lord's Prayer" before sporting events.  All the footballs teams I ever played on huddled up and said this prayer before taking the field.  We prayed that God's kingdom would arrive, that God's will would be done on earth.  But I never got much sense that anyone really thought this needed to happen, that things needed to change and God's will needed to be enacted. 

O Lord, who may abide in your presence?  Who may be a part of the new day you promise to bring?  Mold me and make me fit for your Kingdom.

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Spiritual Hiccups - God Intrudes

Graham Standish wrote in one of his books about the typical church meeting.  The committee or governing board gathers.  Someone offers a prayer asking God to bless the work they are about to do.  And then God is asked to wait outside, perhaps go get a cup of coffee, while they do their work.  After they are done, they will invite God back in as they pray for God's blessing on what just transpired.

In our staff meetings here, we try to avoid this pattern by spending a good bit of our time in reflection and discussion of Scripture.  This is not a quick devotion, but an extended time of seeking to hear what a text says to us and how this calls us to act or change or respond.  We then try to let this discussion flow into the items we need to cover.  But we can still manage in subtle ways to invite God out of the meeting as we begin to discuss some event, program, or activity in the life of the congregation.  Thankfully, God does not always oblige.

Today we were discussing this Sunday's gospel reading.  We spent a great deal of time listening to and discussing the first two parables of the reading comparing the Kingdom to a mustard seed and to yeast or leaven.  But as we made the transition from talking about God's sometimes imperceptible and even subversive activity the bring about the kingdom to talking about program logistics, God did not leave.

Somehow our programmatic discussions turned back onto our gospel discussions, and we ended up talking about how often in the life of the church we operate without much sense that God is at work to bring about the Kingdom.  Often we act as if the congregation is simply the result of our combined efforts, talents, activities, plans and strategies, etc.  In the operation of the church, in its programs, even in its worship, God can be nearly as absent as God is from many of our meetings.

As God refused to be absent from this morning's meeting, I became acutely aware of how easy it is for us to operate as if God was at the margins of our lives, or perhaps better, how hard it is for us to live as though God was the central character of our life stories, the essential actor without whom the entire story falls apart.  And we as a staff recalled how important it is for us to live in ways that model a different worldview than the primary one in our culture, one where humans and market forces and money and power are not the primary agents moving history forward.  Rather, God is.

It is easy to miss the mustard seed, to fail to notice the yeast doing its work.  It is easy to imagine that we humans are totally free and autonomous, masters of our own destinies, the most important characters in our own personal narratives, and the narrative of history.  Thank goodness that God occasionally intrudes and shatters such illusions.

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Sunday Sermon video - How To Tell Them Apart

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Spiritual Hiccups - Messy Pictures of God

Regardless of whether we are religious fundamentalists or secular humanists, we all have a worldview that was shaped by Enlightenment notions of logic and rational thought.  We share notions of larger truths and concepts even if we disagree over what those larger truths are.  And we who are the religious sort tend to fit our religious beliefs into a framework of larger truths and concepts.  Yet the biblical picture of God is not nearly so neat.  Its picture of God refuses to be confined to our neat, theological constructs, or to early creeds written by those with a Greek philosophical worldview.

Today's psalm is a good case in point.  It celebrates the greatness of God
who struck down the firstborn of Egypt,
          both human beings and animals;
he sent signs and wonders
          into your midst, O Egypt,
          against Pharaoh and all his servants.
He struck down many nations
          and killed mighty kings —
Sihon, king of the Amorites,
          and Og, king of Bashan,
          and all the kingdoms of Canaan —
  and gave their land as a heritage,
          a heritage to his people Israel.

Describing a deity who strikes down - that is kills - infants, calves, lambs, foals, and so on, paints a deeply troubling picture of God.  Yet that is the picture of God found in the Bible's foundational salvation story, the Exodus.  The God of the Bible is known through this special commitment to this insignificant people, Israel.  And while we may manage to construct grander pictures of God that smooth off the rough edges, when we go back to the stories of the Bible itself, we are faced with a God who refuses to be bound by our constructs, a God who is wilder, more unpredictable, perhaps even more frightening than we would prefer.

And the person of Jesus does not solve this problem for us.  Jesus is a maddeningly particular, historical figure.  He is a First Century Palestinian Jew with First Century notions of how the world works.  Western Europeans have tried to make Jesus "one of them."  Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus is familiar to most of us.  But of course Jesus is not some generic everyman who is all things to all people.  He is a dark-skinned, male Jew who gathers around him a band of working folks, outcasts, women, and sinners, managing to upset both the religious authorities of his own faith and the Roman imperial apparatus that controlled the region.  Yet still we insist that we meet God in this person who is born, who grows and learns, who remains Jewish for his entire life, and who causes enough trouble to get himself executed.

The Bible's picture of God is messy and particular, not generic and universal.  Yet in my own faith life, as I've noted here before, I have been inclined to understand God more as concept and premise than a messy, particular personality.  I wonder if I can let God out of the theological, doctrinal molds and constraints I have inherited and/or constructed.  I wonder if that God might not be a lot more real, a lot more alive.

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Sunday Sermon text - How To Tell Them Apart

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 (Jeremiah 29:1-7)

How To Tell Them Apart

James Sledge                                                       July 17, 2011

Most of you have seen the raised beds that we put in this spring, beds that are now filled with beans, tomatoes, peppers, squash, and –just to humor my southern roots – okra.  People show up faithfully each week to weed the beds, to water it, and to pick the produce.  Our small efforts are part of a growing army of community garden plots all over the city, and like us, many are taking their harvest to food pantries so they have some fresh produce.

Now imagine for a moment that some devious soul went around to all these community gardens sowing them with weeds.  And worse, imagine that these weeds somehow mimicked the good plants, appearing to be vegetables themselves until they reached maturity, only then becoming distinguishable from the genuine vegetables.  .

That’s the situation in the parable Jesus tells this morning.  Our Bible simply says that an enemy sowed weeds, and I understand why.  Most of us wouldn’t know what zizanium was, though that’s what the parable actually says.  And even if translators used its common name, “bearded darnel,” that wouldn’t help much either.  But in fact, bearded darnel is a weed that looks very much like wheat and is difficult to distinguish from wheat until the grain heads form.  To make matters worse, darnel is mildly poisonous.  And so you can understand the desire to pull these weeds right away.  But the landowner says, “No.  Wait for the harvest.”

Over the years, this parable has often been used to say that the Church is a mixed bag, that we can’t worry too much about purity, but should leave that problem to God.  This interpretation goes all the way back to St. Augustine himself, and I’m perfectly fine with it to a point.  But when Jesus explains the parable, he doesn’t say that the field is the Church.  He says it is the world.  Now clearly the world, like the Church, is a mixed bag.  There are good, not so good, and really horrible people, and there is enough hate, violence and war to convince most people that evil is real.  But is Jesus saying that we are simply to accept this fact, that we are simply to let God sort it all out in the end?

I think such questions become more and more important for the American church as we find ourselves increasingly pushed to the margins of culture.  The days when Mainline theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr advised presidents and helped shape public policy are long gone.  Nowadays, even though our denomination still makes statements that Congress should do this or do that, stop this or stop that, no one really listens.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has suggested that the metaphor of exile is appropriate to describe where the Church finds itself in America.[1]  We have been deported from our comfortable homeland of the mid-20^th Century into a world that no longer works in ways we fully understand.  The stores stay open and the youth sports teams play games during our sacred worship times.  Public schools no longer serve as our agents or shape our children for Christian faith.  The landscape of America has changed dramatically since the 1950s.  And institutions such as the Presbyterian Church, which had their heyday in that time, find themselves aliens in a strange land.

When Israel is carried off into exile in Babylon, the people literally find themselves strangers in a strange land.  Exile produced a profound faith crisis.  How could this have happened.  Why had God abandoned them?  How would they survive? 

But into this anguish, the prophet Jeremiah writes to the exiles in Babylon.  “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”  And I wonder if there are not parallels between the prophet’s words and the parable Jesus tells.

The Hebrew exiles in Babylon had to figure out what it looked like to be faithful in a world where there was no longer a Temple, where the Ark of the Covenant and the promise of God’s presence had vanished.  And in ways less dramatic, we find ourselves needing to discover what it means to be faithful in a world that is much less "for us" than it once was. But Jeremiah says that the Israelites must be faithful within their new context.  Their future is bound to that world that is not “for them.”  And I think Jesus says something similar.  We must be faithful and bear fruit in a world not for us, amidst the weeds.

Exiles are always in danger of disappearing, of being absorbed into the culture in which they find themselves.  To keep this from happening, they must cultivate a distinctiveness, a peculiarity.  They must live in ways that set them apart, allowing them to maintain an identity the prevailing culture does not support.  For the Hebrews in Babylon, Sabbath keeping and the synagogue became crucial elements that marked them as different.  But what about us?

I think those ancient Hebrews may actually have had an advantage over us.  There was no denying they were in exile, no denying that they now lived in a world that was corrosive to their faith practices.  But we can deny our exile.  We can still speak of being a “Christian nation,” even if many of those people we count as Christian engage in no discernible activity, bear no fruit that would mark them as such.  We can say, “If only they would put prayer back in school.  If only our denomination got serious about evangelism.  If only… If only…”

But however much we might want to deny it, we no longer live in a Christian world; if by Christian we mean anything more than a little window dressing.  We now live in exile.  The people around us may not look all that different from ourselves, but fewer and fewer of them see any need to follow Jesus.  I’m not making distinctions of good and bad but simply between disciples, people who try to follow Jesus, and those who don’t.  And in this sense, we live in a field filled with a great variety of plants and flowers and weeds.

Fifty some years ago, before we found ourselves in exile, we looked at the American landscape and imagined it one vast sea of wheat.  We saw no need to be different or distinct or unique.  But if that was ever true, it surely is not now.  And in the very mixed bag of plants and flowers and weeds that we now find ourselves, the only thing that will distinguish us is the grain we produce, fruit that we bear.    

And that is what Jesus calls us to do.  He does not ask us to pull weeds.  Rather, he calls us to distinguish ourselves by the fruit we bear.  And that means seeking the good of all people, even the weeds.  We bear fruit by embodying God’s coming new day for the world to see, by loving our neighbor, by longing for and working for a better world.  We bear fruit by losing ourselves for the sake of that new world, and by taking up the cross, by not insisting on my own rights but instead being willing to give them up, even being willing to suffer, for the sake of others and for the hope of God’s new day.

In case you’ve somehow missed it, there is a huge fight in Washington over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling in time for the Federal government to borrow enough money to pay the debts we already owe.  As often happens, this deadline makes a great place to play a monumental game of chicken where each side waits to see who will flinch first.  And in this game, the question is whether America’s growing debt should be fixed entirely by reducing spending, or if there should be tax increases for the wealthiest or the end of some tax breaks.

Now almost no one wants his or her taxes raised.  But I'm suspicious that the Jesus who says he comes to bring good news to the poor, who tells a rich man to sell all his possessions and give to the poor, would say to someone like me who may not be really rich but can afford a home, cars, TVs, computers, a motorcycle, that I should be more than willing to give a bit more in taxes so that the poor would have healthcare and we would not pass down too much debt to future generations.  And considering that Jesus said, "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required," I imagine that he would call those wealthy enough to live extravagantly to contribute extravagantly to help the poor, the community, and the future.

I’m not saying spending shouldn’t be cut.  I’m not talking about any particular tax structure.  But I am saying that bearing fruit for the Kingdom, distinguishing ourselves from the weeds, means living in ways that are at odds with the prevailing culture, that does not ask first, “What’s in it for me,” but rather asks first, "How will this impact the other, the neighbor?  How will this make the world a tiny bit more like God's dream for the world?" 

Those who are serious about following Jesus, about living the life of disciples, increasingly find ourselves aliens in a strange land, exiles surrounded by ways that are contrary to Jesus' call to follow him.  We may rail against this culture, but it is easy, even tempting, simply to fade into the world around us, a world that thinks Sabbath, and worship, and self-sacrifice, and loving our enemies, and taking up crosses to be pure foolishness.

But we are supposed to know better.

---

[1] See Walter Brueggemann, Cadences of Home: Preaching Among Exiles (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997)

Sunday Sermon audio - How To Tell Them Apart

Spiritual Hiccups - For Me?

According to the gospels, Jesus frequently found himself in controversies over the Sabbath.  Sabbath had become critical for the Jews while they were in exile in Babylon.  It had been a mark that allowed them to maintain a distinctive identity when exile in a foreign land threatened to make them disappear.

Jesus is a Jew who clearly observes the Sabbath, but he heals on the Sabbath and says to those who accuse him and his followers of violating Sabbath regulations, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”  What strikes me most about this line is not Jesus' lordship over the Sabbath, but his insistence that the Sabbath was made for us.

When I was growing up in North and South Carolina, notions of Sabbath were still strong enough that it was extremely unusual to hear a lawn mower on a Sunday.  Such reluctance to "work" on Sunday has largely disappeared, but if the Sabbath was made for us, then it stands to reason that we still need Sabbath in some way. 

Sabbath keeping has often degenerated into petty rule keeping, both in Jesus' day and in the days of my youth.  But freedom from petty rules does not change our need for Sabbath, for rest, for acknowledging that the world will not fall apart if we cease our activities, for trusting that things are safe in God's hands, allowing us to stop.

I've told the story many times of a colleague who was at an ecumenical pastors' lunch.  At her table, a discussion ensued about what day the different pastors took off, with Friday and Monday being the favorites.  But one fellow got a little perturbed at the talk of days off and exclaimed, "I never take a day off.  The devil never takes a day off!"

To which my fried replied, "God does."

God surely has much more to worry about than we do.  But God is able to stop, to rest, to be free from anxiety and worry, to simply enjoy the wondrous Creation God has made.  And such rest was made for us as well.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Boutique Hospitals for Sinners

In many larger cities, more and more boutique hospitals are being built.  These are usually for-profit hospitals that specialize in certain sorts of practices or surgeries such as joint replacements.  These hospitals are usually very upscale, feeling more like a high end hotel than a hospital.  Their appeal is obvious.  For those with money or insurance that will cover the stay, the amenities and service are top rate, but I do worry that such enterprises exacerbate a growing divide between haves and have-nots in our country.

I have often heard the term "hospital for sinners" used to characterize congregations.  The phrase is drawn from verses like those of this morning's gospel where Jesus responds to those criticizing him for hanging out with tax collectors and sinners by saying, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” 

Hospital for sinners correctly tries to express that church congregations are places to be healed, not collections of perfect folks.  Thinking of ourselves this way may help us be open to the needs around us, to be welcoming to those who would like to discover what it means to follow Jesus.

But sometimes we tend to be more boutique hospitals than general ones.  We want to help "sick" folks but not those with difficult problems or those without the resources to help fund our little hospitals.  I realize that I am over generalizing here.  I have been in many congregations that have the feel of a hard-scrabble, downtown, non-profit hospital - a place filled with all sorts of people with all sorts of problems.  But I think it fair to say that many congregations, certainly many Presbyterian congregations, tend to look more like the boutique sort.

I don't know that boutique hospitals are necessarily bad things.  And perhaps congregations that have a boutique feel are not necessarily bad things either.  But I have this notion that Jesus calls us to be a little more of a general hospital and a bit less the boutique.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Illness, Denial, and Healing

I was reading my daily meditation from Richard Rohr this morning (click here to get these meditation via email), and I was struck by the closing line, "You cannot heal what you do not acknowledge."  That is certainly true from a medical standpoint.  Most of us know someone who has ignored a medical symptom for months or even years.  But denial is a poor medical practice, and often such folk have let an illness progress so far that it is no longer treatable.

Rohr was, of course, not talking about cancer or other maladies, he was talking about a different sort of healing.  He even used the phrase "defects of character."  And this was mulling around in my mind when I read today's gospel verses from Mark, where friends bring a paralyzed man to Jesus, lowering him through the roof to get him past the crowds.  Curiously, Jesus' first move is to forgive his sins.  Telling him to get up and walk seems to happen only as a way of validating Jesus authority to forgive sin.

Regardless, there is an interesting pairing of sin and illness in this story.  Perhaps that is simply because people in Jesus' day presumed that debilitating illnesses were brought about by sin.  The people who saw Jesus in action would have assumed a linkage between illness and sin, and hence healing and forgiveness.  Now personally I think it is a good thing that we no longer tend to blame people for their illnesses (though we're still learning on this one, with AIDS, alcoholism, and other addictions as cases in point).  But I wonder if we might not do well to think of sin, personal failings, greed, and such as sicknesses, as things that need healing.

And here I can be a lot like someone who ignores her medical symptoms.  My selfishness, my desire for the things a consumerist culture says I need, and the ease with which I can feel contempt for someone I disagree with don't seem all that bad to me.  I'm "normal" with regards to such things, not needing any treatment.  I don't need to go to the great healer and say, "Jesus, my captivity to a consumerist culture is keeping me from following you as I should.  Heal me!"

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Sunday Sermon video - Hope for the Harvest

Spiritual Hiccups - Losing My Religion

There have a been a couple of newspaper articles and a number of letters to the editor or late about billboards put up in Columbus by an atheist group.  The billboards are part of an "Out of the Closet, Nonbelievers" campaign meant to present local atheists as good, moral, contributing members of the community.  They feature pictures of an individual with a quote such as, "I can be good without God."

The ads have gotten extra attention thanks to one being placed on a billboard that was on a local church's property.  The outdoor advertising company moved it to another location after the church objected, and then had to move it yet again after the property owner at the new location objected as well.  Of course both moves brought more free advertising to the campaign with stories appearing each time in the news.

The news coverage sparked a just-what-you-might-expect run of dueling letters to the editor.  A couple were reasonable and well thought out, but most either noted all the bad things done in the name of religion or accused atheist of being relativists who by definition had no set standard (God) to fall back on.

Certainly Christians should know full well that religion does frequently have its dark side.  Our faith story features the execution of Jesus, brought about in part by religious leaders who wanted to squelch his message.  And today's reading from the book of Acts begins with a note about believers being "scattered because of the persecution that took place over Stephen..."  This persecution was a religious one, undertaken by religious people convinced that they were protecting the "true" worship of God.

Religious people can sometimes be the best possible advertisements for atheists.  Granted, atheist often ignore the huge amount of good that religious people do in the world because of their beliefs, but religious people just as often ignore the how problematic religion can be when it is used to justify hate, intolerance, a particular political agenda, and so on.

I wonder if this would be the case for Christians if we truly embraced Jesus' command to love one another, even to love our enemies.  I know plenty of Christians whose faith moves them to love others in ways that are truly remarkable.  But I also know quite a few whose faith seems to drive them to hate those who disagree with them.

I think this is why I have found myself drawn to the "emergent church movement."  Many of those in the movement have tried to move Christianity away from a "gospel of evacuation," faith that gets us into a heaven somewhere else, and move us toward preparing for the Kingdom Jesus proclaims is near.  And I am absolutely convinced that a focus on the Kingdom, on the transformation of this world, would do much to improve our image, not to mention make us more faithful.  Focusing on escape to heaven encourages us to see everyone in terms of in-or-out, to obsess about who is going to get promoted and who is not.  But while Jesus does speak of judgment, his most vicious critiques are for religious people.  And Jesus' last public teaching in the gospel of Matthew seems to depict a favorable judgment for non-religious folks who did the work of the Kingdom unawares (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, etc.).

One of the basic calling of all Christians is to be "witnesses."  Our lives, actions, words, efforts, and such are supposed to give evidence of Jesus and his coming transformed community.  In other words, we are supposed to be walking billboards for the faith and the Kingdom.  And in that sense, billboards put up by atheists are not our real advertising problem.  We need better ad campaigns broadcast by our lives.

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Sunday Sermon text - Hope for the Harvest

I Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Hope for the Harvest

James Sledge                                                         July 10, 2011

“A sower went out to sow.”  He scattered seed all about, rather indiscriminately.  It went everywhere, onto the pathway, into the brambles and weeds, onto rocky ground where nothing ever seems to grow.  When I put down some grass seed in my yard, sometimes a little bit gets on the sidewalk.  Some seed gets in the flower beds and other places it doesn’t belong.  But by and large, most of it stays in the yard where it does belong.  I’m not going to waste good seed.  But the sower in Jesus’ parable seems unconcerned with such waste.

As parables go, this one is fairly well known.  It’s one of the few that shows up in all four gospels, and to my ear, it’s not all that hard to understand.  I’m not sure we really need the explanation that goes with it.  This parable is true to life.  The message of Jesus is out there, but it doesn’t take hold everywhere.  And even when it does, sometimes it doesn’t last. 

We’ve seen it many times.  We all know people who grew up in the Church but want nothing to do with it as adults.  We’ve seen people join the Church and get involved for a while, but then gradually withdraw and finally disappear altogether.  We’ve seen other priorities take precedence, from work to hobbies to youth soccer.

Even though most of us know next to nothing about First Century, Middle Eastern agricultural practices, we can nod our heads in agreement with what Jesus says.  “Yes, yes, that is certainly true.”  But once we’re done nodding, what more is there to say?  Does this parable have anything to teach us?

The first hearers of this parable had a very different background from many of us, but I’m not talking about their familiarity with farming.  I’m talking about their experience of the Jesus movement as a small, marginalized affair.

The very early Church was an all Jewish operation that never managed to attract more than a small minority of fellow Jews.  And by the time that Matthew writes his gospel, while Gentiles were beginning to be welcomed into the Church, Jewish Christians were having to make a very difficult choice.  They were being forced out of many synagogues.  They still considered themselves Jewish and wanted to continue going to the synagogue and being a part of their own worshipping tradition, but the synagogue leaders insisted that to do so they would to have to stop saying, “Jesus is Lord.”

This parable is first heard by people who wonder why things are going as they are.  Why haven’t more people joined them?  And what is going to happen  if more and more believers decide to deny Jesus so they will be welcome at the synagogue?”

By contrast, we American Christians have long been a huge majority.  But the decline faced by many churches in 21^st Century America has begun to give us a small taste of what Matthew’s congregation must have experienced.  And as we move deeper into what some have called a post-Christian world, we may do well to listen to Jesus’ parable with ears more like those who first heard it. 

One thing the parable does not tell us is why the gospel bears fruit in some and not others.  The parable does not explain the mystery of why some soil is good and some is not.  But the parable does paint picture of faithful discipleship.  When we compare what happens in the different types of soil, an image of discipleship emerges marked by understanding, perseverance, and a single-minded focus on the work of the Kingdom.  This is not an “I’m a Christian because my parents were” sort of faith, but a faith that knows and understands the message of the faith.  It is a discipleship that perseveres and stays focused and committed in the face of both persecution and temptation. 

Now persecution is not something American Christians know much about.  But the temptations that draw us away from following Jesus are everywhere, and they most surely have grown more plentiful over the last 50 years or so.

I once read the book Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, both then professors at Duke Divinity School.  In the first chapter they write of this new world of increased temptations where Church now lives, saying half-jokingly that this world began one Sunday evening in 1963.  On that day, one of the authors was among seven members of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church in Greenville, SC, who agreed to go in the front door of the church but then slip out the back to go see John Wayne at the Fox Theater.  “On that night,” they write, “Greenville, South Carolina –the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world – served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church.  There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free rides.  The Fox Theater went head to head with the church over who would provide the world view for the young.  That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish.”[1]

Whatever the exact date, our culture has decided that it will no longer till, weed, and water for the church.  No longer will the culture funnel people our way so that we need only to open our doors on Sunday to fill the pews.  And when the culture decided it would no longer prop us up, discipleship stopped being the easy thing we had tried to make it, and it began to be what Jesus understood it to be, something requiring deep understanding, and real perseverance and commitment in the face of all sorts of temptations and inducements to live and act some other way.

Jesus understands discipleship as living and working for peace in a world that prefers violence and war.  Discipleship is seeing the face of Jesus in the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed in a world that says, “Look out for number one.”  It is seeking the good of others in a world that worries about my rights and preserving advantages for my group.  It is a willingness to sacrifice my good for the good of the other in a world where millionaires want and get tax breaks.  It is hungering and thirsting for righteousness, for things to be as God would have them in a world that simply accepts business as usual.

It is easy to look around at this world and despair for both the Church and the world.  Who will want to follow Jesus in a culture that assaults us non-stop with the message that what we really need is to be beautiful, rich, young, powerful, independent, tanned, cool, secure, with instant access to endless diversions and entertainment?  And how will we ever deal with the world’s problems when neither politicians nor voters can look beyond their short-term, selfish interests to do what is best for everyone?

It indeed is easy for those who hear Jesus’ call to despair and think it not worth all the effort.  Reasons for despair were even greater in the days of Matthew’s gospel, when both the religious establishment and the might of imperial Rome envisioned a very different world than the one Jesus called his followers to build.

But Jesus speaks his parable of the sower directly to these difficulties that threaten to draw his followers into despair.  This parable is, above all else, a parable of hope.  It describes a foolishly extravagant sower, who goes about in a world filled with rocky soil, hardened paths and hearts, choking weeds and thorns, and scatters seed everywhere.  This extravagant sower is not at all deterred by the knowledge that so little seed will make it to maturity, because the seed that does find good soil produces thirty, sixty, a hundredfold. 

Jesus tells the crowds, and tells us, that we should not be surprised that many choose not to follow him.  There is much in the world that draws people away from the commitment, single-mindedness, and perseverance that Jesus asks.  But from those who do steadfastly follow, the results are spectacular, thirty, sixty, a hundredfold. 

From those few who work tirelessly for the Kingdom, the promise of justice and peace, dignity and hope for the poor and oppressed, the triumph of love over hate, and a world where all have enough, can begin to be seen.  And if such a promise seems foolish in the face of how things are and the way the world works, remember; the world, the way things are, and the powers that be were all absolutely certain that Jesus was dead and gone on Good Friday, and that he would never trouble them again.

---

[1] Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abindgon Press, 1989) pp. 15-16.

Sunday Sermon audio - Hope for the Harvest

Spiritual Hiccups - Answer Me, God!

"I love the LORD, because he has heard my voice and my supplications."   So says the opening of Psalm 116.  So how do you love the LORD when God doesn't hear your voice or answer your cries?  This psalm is one of many that speak of loving God because of God's mercy, faithfulness, and steadfast love, because God helped or saved or rescued.  So what happens when God seems to have abandoned you, when the patterns and practices of faith that have sustained you stop working?

I suspect that most people for whom faith is a big part of their lives have times when God's absence is terrifyingly real.  Even Jesus cries out that God has forsaken him while on the cross.  At such times a happy, cheery faith is impossible, though several other options are available.  We could conclude that God is angry with us and has abandoned us because we deserve it.  We could conclude that our original faith was a mistake, that God doesn't do the things we thought God did or that God doesn't even exist.  We could conclude that we were wrong about the character of God, that God is not abounding in steadfast love and mercy.  We could conclude that God is simply forgetful or capricious.

Surely Christians experience God's absence as much as the people of the Old Testament did, yet we seem strangely unwilling to engage God as our ancient forebears did.  We seem curiously unwilling to call God to task, to beseech God to remember and act faithfully.  Even we Protestants, who speak so much of God's grace, seem happy to presume than any problem that we have in our relationship with God must be of our making, must be our fault.  Many people of faith seem so intent on protecting God's reputation that they will not hold God responsible for anything.  Or perhaps they are protecting their own fragile faith rather than God's reputation.

I have said many times that there is more honest faith in angrily shaking a fist at God than in a laundry list of pious platitudes.  And I am as mystified by church folk who claim never to doubt or question God as I am by married couples who claim to have never argued or uttered a harsh word to one another.

Now certainly the mystery of God, life, and creation is such that we will never fully comprehend it.  And so we will undoubtedly misread, misunderstand, and misconstrue God's actions.  But simply to keep smiling sweetly and say, "All is well," is dishonest.  And no relationship can be built on such dishonesty. 

God, I love you because.  Jesus, I follow you because.  I have entered into the faith relationship because.  And when I can't find or feel that because, things get a little shaky.  At such times, we need to be able to say to God, "Show us the because.  God, please, show us the because.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Trying To Get Home

Many Christians know the story of Jesus appearing to a pair of his followers as they walked the road to Emmaus on the evening of the Resurrection.  The term Emmaus has become synonymous with spiritual awaking or discovery.  But we know nothing about Emmaus.  We do not know where it is, nor do we know why these two were headed there.  Perhaps it was a stop on the way somewhere else.  Perhaps it was home.  Regardless, I'm inclined to think they were headed home, home to Emmaus or someplace beyond it.  They had heard the report from the women of the empty tomb and a vision of angels saying Jesus was alive.  But despite this report, they have left Jerusalem.  They are headed back somewhere, presumably home, going back to their old lives.

It is not unusual to yearn for home, especially when life has unraveled, when things are not as we would like them.  We would like to go back to a place where we are secure, where we understand how things work, where life makes sense.  Longing for "the good 'ole days" is a form of wanting to go home.

Yesterday I wrote about "Cemetery Churches," congregations where one is unlikely to find the living Christ.  But later in the day I was rereading the Walter Brueggemann book, Cadences of Home, which uses the metaphor of "exile" to speak of the church's loss of special status and influence in American culture.  He says that similar to Israel's exile to Babylon, this exile is only partially our doing.  Our exile is not entirely our fault.  We share some blame.  We have not always been a faithful church, but there are also cultural forces at work beyond our failings. 

Seen from this perspective, perhaps my cemetery churches might more charitably be understood as communities that have not come to terms with exile.  They have been cut loose from their moorings and find themselves in a land they do not really know.  And like the two disciples headed to Emmaus, they seek to return, to go back home.

But we cannot go back to how things once were any more that those two disciples could return to a pre-Easter world.  Like them, we are called forward to something new, but I suspect that moving forward requires mourning our loss, naming our exile. 

In my own denomination, accepting this exile is difficult for many.  Some conservatives, like Old Testament Deuteronomists, insist that our decline is entirely our own fault, a failing that can be corrected if only we will be more orthodox and less accommodating to the secular world.  But more moderate and liberal Presbyterians like myself often reject such a view, but we too suspect that if we only did things better, we could get back home.  We are unwilling to mourn and lament our exile.  We keep looking back, and so we miss the power of resurrection in our midst.

When the disciples on the Emmaus road meet the risen Jesus, all thoughts of getting home are forgotten.  They immediately return to Jerusalem and head toward an uncertain future.  It is something new that God will bring out of death and exile.  It is the new home of God's coming reign, the Kingdom.  This no pie in the sky when we die, but God's will enacted here on earth.  It is a dream, even an impossibility.  But it is the only home that lies ahead of us rather than behind.

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Sunday Sermon video - Who Are You Meant To Be?

Sermons with better video quality can be found on YouTube.

Sunday Sermon Video - Who Are You Meant To Be?

Sermons of better video quality can be found on YouTube.