VIPs and Outcasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sermon video: What Sort of Good News?

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

Sermon: What Sort of Good News?

Luke 4:14-21

What Sort of Good News?

James Sledge                                                                   January 27, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

A Little Ambiguity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Holding onto Paradox and Contradiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sermon audio: Sign of Abundance

Preached by Diane Walton Hendricks on January 20.


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

Must Be Crazy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

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

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

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

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

The Faith of Others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Egos and Community

When you've worked hard and done a good job, it's quite natural to have some pride in your accomplishment.  It also makes good sense to appreciate and thank those who have worked hard and done a good job. Never to hear a "Well done" makes such effort feel pointless, and even the Bible gives us that phrase, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

But then there is this line from today's epistle reading. "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works, so that no one may boast."  So that no one may boast... I take it that boasting marks some sort of line where recognizing hard work makes an unfortunate transition into egoism.

The warning in today's epistle is far from the only one in Scripture.  It seems that ego can be a real problem for people of faith.  This problem is the central one behind another epistle, First Corinthians. The Corinthian congregation was very animated and motivated by their faith.  The people diligently tried to hone and improve their spiritual gifts, but they also thought some gifts superior to others. They looked down on those who didn't have them and felt puffed up if they did have them.

The gifts of God became things that divided and destroyed community rather than building it up, which is why Paul tells them that the greatest gift is love. Paul's words about love being patient and kind and bearing all things are heard primarily at weddings these days.  Egos can cause problems in marriages, so that is not inappropriate, but Paul isn't speaking about romantic love. He is reminding the Corinthians that the greatest gifts do not puff up one's ego, they diminish it as the good of the other becomes more important than self.

This problem with ego continues to bedevil people of faith. Those who diligently strive to work out their theology in great detail so that it will guide them in faithful living look down on those whose theology is different. Those who have expended great energy and effort to worship God with the very best music and liturgy they can muster, look down their noses at others who are "less sophisticated" and do "bad worship."

You can probably come up with countless other examples where our egos lead us into ways more apt to produce division than unity, that create categories of "us" and "them." We Presbyterian clergy have any number of these. We like to point out our "educated clergy" who are required to take Hebrew and Greek, often with an implied slight to those uneducated clergy of some denominations and churches. And we don't always leave the slight implied.

I do think we should try to encourage hard work, and we should acknowledge the efforts of those who work hard. But when such encouraging or acknowledging moves into egoism and begins to create "us" and "them," when it fails to build community but instead creates division, something has gone amiss. And the cure, if Scripture is to be believed, requires gratitude, and it requires love. That's the Jesus kind of love.

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Irresistible Presence

"And immediately they left their nets and followed him."  That's what happens when Jesus calls Simon and Andrew to follow him in today's gospel, an event pretty much repeated with James and John.  That's pretty amazing.  I'm not sure if I've ever said to a church session or committee, "Let's do this," and immediately they all said, "Sure, that's a great idea. Let's get started."  Of course I don't really expect that to happen. I may suffer from messianic delusions as much as the next pastor, but I know I'm not Jesus.

The disciples' immediate response is amazing not simply because it is so at odds with my experience.  In the Old Testament, God calls quite a few people, and besides Abram (later named Abraham), they all have some reason they shouldn't say, "Yes." They need coaxing and reassuring.  But not Simon, Andrew, James, and John.

Considering what fumbling and bumbling followers these four often are, I don't think Mark's gospel is pointing to them as paragons of faith. Rather it is saying something about the presence of Jesus that is nearly irresistible. For those who encounter him and hear his call, the truly amazing thing would be to say, "No."

Which is all well and good until I began thinking about my own encounters with Jesus and my response to his call. I have very little trouble saying "No" to Jesus.  So either my powers of resistance are remarkable, or perhaps I've not really encountered Jesus.

It's that old problem I talked about before, knowing about Jesus versus actually meeting him.  Knowing that Jesus said, "Love one another" or "Make disciples of all peoples" versus hearing him say that to me. 

There's a hymn in our Presbyterian Hymnal that I will confess to disliking greatly, not for its music but for its words. It begins,

We walk by faith and not by sight; No gracious words we hear
From Christ who spoke as none e'er spoke; But we believe him near.

In my understanding of this verse and those that follow, this hymn describes faith as believing what the Bible says is true. But the Bible speaks of the Spirit making Christ present to us. The Apostle Paul speaks of us being "in Christ" and made new by that experience.  And on occasion he claims to have a word "from the Lord." Is Paul an anomaly, or did we modern, rationalist Christians take experience out of the faith equation? It certainly makes things much more neat and orderly if everything Jesus said is way back in the past, and the Spirit doesn't issue any new commands in Jesus' name.

I'm not advocating turning our brains off. Charismatic types have done great damage to the church and the faith throughout history. But if it is true that we can no longer hear any gracious word from Christ who spoke such words long ago, well no wonder the Church sometimes seems to be half dead.

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Faith Patterns

The daily lectionary moves to a new gospel today, taking up the gospel of Mark. A lot happens in these opening 13 verses: and introduction, John the baptizer and his ministry, Jesus being baptized, and Jesus being tempted for 40 days in the wilderness. All that in 13 verses. Of course that means that we don't get a lot of detail about the events, and there's more about John than Jesus. But I wonder if Mark doesn't give us something of a basic pattern for the life of faith.

A call to repentance, a response, a clear identity and the gift of the Spirit, then a time of testing all come prior to Jesus beginning his ministry. Mark does not directly address the question of why Jesus would need "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin," but Jesus certainly does repent, at least in the sense of changing the direction of his life. Jesus has lived well into his adult life without attracting any attention at all, but that will change dramatically in short order.

A call to change or repent, a response to that call, a clear sense that this is central to who you are and is divinely inspired and supported, and a time of testing or temptation... I wonder if Mark doesn't  provide us with a kind of prototype for the Christian life.

There was a time when I would have argued against such an idea. I grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and we tended to leave dramatic faith experiences to Baptists and other more "born again" sorts. Being nurtured in the faith from birth, we not only had no actual memories of our baptisms, but we were often taught that our faith was more about accretion than transformation. If repentance was part of the pattern, the change in direction was so slight as to be almost imperceptible, perhaps prescribing an arc that could be seen following a long passage of time, but there were no dramatic turns for most of us.

I now reject such thinking.  While it may indeed be that we trust in Jesus from such an early age that we can't speak of a dramatic conversion experience, being called to the work of ministry is another matter.  And all Christians receive such calls. More precisely, all who would follow Jesus receive such calls. The term "Christian" does not always imply actually following Jesus.

Jesus presumably grew up with some sense that his identity was rooted in God. Surely there were inklings and moments in his life prior to  his baptism where he felt that he had special purpose. Still, his life seems to have followed a road little different from other people in his community for nearly 30 years.  Jesus may have always been Son of God, but his life did not prescribe any smooth, gentle arc. It featured a screeching turn as God's call became clear to him.

I don't care for notions of a one-size-fits-all faith or for exact formulas that every person of faith must adhere to. But that does not mean there are no patterns that can be discerned, or that there are no normative sorts of experiences.  The Bible is full of "call" stories that vary greatly in their details. The call of Abram is quite different from the call of Moses or Jeremiah or the virgin Mary or the first disciples of Jesus or the Apostle Paul or of Jesus himself. But as different as they all are, the pattern outlined in today's gospel would seem to fit into each.

Have you experienced God's call in your life? If so, how has this pattern played out for you?

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Sermon audio: In Line with Us

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Sermon video: In Line with Us

Other sermons available on YouTube.

Sermon: In Line with Us

Luke 3:15-22

In Line with Us

James Sledge                             January 13, 2013  -  Baptism of the Lord

John the Baptist gets a curtain call today.  We just heard from him during Advent, as we do every year. In fact, John gets two Sundays during Advent. He’s there to help us get ready, to prepare for the coming of a Savior.  But now here he is again.  This time the focus is on his ministry of baptizing as we remember Jesus being baptized.

As a result, we don’t hear all of John’s message this time, don’t get called a brood of vipers, and don’t hear about the ax at the root of the trees, but we still get some sense of that. John says of Jesus, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”  I’ve always gotten the impression that John expected Jesus to kick butt and take names.

I wonder if John thought the world was beyond hope. Did he expect Jesus to show up, clean house, and start over with some righteous remnant?  Was Jesus going to institute a fiery version of the Noah’s ark story, wiping out all the bad with unquenchable fire?

John the Baptist was probably a pretty strange guy.  Prophet types often are.  But despite all his strangeness, I know a lot of people whose thinking is a good deal like John’s.  Sometimes mine is, too.

A lot of Christians proclaim a slightly modified version of John’s message.  “The world’s horrible, filled with all sort of terrors and cruelties and exploitation and needless suffering.”  John could point to Herod and Roman occupation and corruption in the Jerusalem Temple hierarchy and the way the poor always got the short end of things while the rich got richer.  Herod and the Romans are gone, but other than that we know all about the exploitive dictators and military occupations and corrupt religious institutions and the poor getting the short end of things while the rich do just fine. 

John expected Jesus to show up and fix things somehow, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. In the Christian variation on John’s message, fixing things is still not going to be pretty.  But now it comes mostly via evacuation.  Jesus comes with his winnowing fork and carries the wheat off to heaven. But the not so good and creation itself, well nothing but fire will fix that.

Liberals Christians sometimes burn less stuff, less folks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t adhere to the basic formula where the world is in some way hopeless and beyond redemption.

Something to Eat

Reading today's gospel made me think about how often feeding miracles shows up in the gospels. All four contain one, and Matthew and Mark have two.  Six miraculous feedings.  No missing that Jesus provides food for the hungry.

So many occurrences suggests this was a very well known story. No matter what sources a gospel writer had, there it was.  And Mark had two different accounts (apparently replicated in Matthew). Perhaps they were the same event via different sources, or perhaps they were stories of different feeding miracles.  Either way, Jesus feeding the crowds features very prominently in the story the early Church told.

Our course meals figure prominently in other ways. Huge portions of the synoptic gospels are devoted to Jesus' last meal with  his followers. A banquet was a well worn metaphor for the coming of God's reign. And the early Church came together around a meal.  (The typical dry cubes and thimbles of juice in the Lord's Supper I grew up with bore scant resemblance to such meals, much less to a banquet.)

Eating a meal with someone is a significant act. Most of us are pretty picky about who we invite over for dinner.  In our day of fast and easy food, we may not spend much time reflecting on the act of eating, but we still have favorite foods and restaurants. And while going to the movies is a safe first date, dining together at a nice establishment is a much more intimate event.

Church suffers a huge loss when the experience of worship is more like the movies or a concert than like joining others for dinner.  Not that movies or concerts cannot be deeply moving, but they lack the intimacy of a meal.  They lack the sense of receiving something one cannot live without, nourishment and companionship, community if you will.

I suspect one reason so many young people find traditional worship unappealing is that it feels more like going to something than it feels like receiving something you deeply need.  The pendulum swing in my tradition back toward more frequent celebration of the Lord's Supper perhaps senses this lack. But I am not sure that simply doing communion more often, especially in services with lots of people, changes things very much.

I once new a church member who I liked a great deal. When he would leave Sunday worship, he often commented on my sermons.  If he had really liked one he would make a point of saying, "I really enjoyed the lecture today." I never objected.  I knew he meant it in the kindest possible way, but it always unnerved me a bit.

Jesus taught, he told stories, he healed, and he fed people and ate with them, and the early Church and the gospel writers seem quite captivated by the food part.  Jesus offers food for those who are hungry, and he gives it to his followers to distribute and share.

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Afraid

God is our refuge and strength,
     a very present help in trouble. 
Therefore we will not fear, 
          though the earth should change,
     though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; 
though its waters roar and foam,
     though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

Psalm 46:1-3

"We will not fear." So says the psalmist.  But the fact is that most of us live with a fair amount of fear and anxiety. If you read newspapers or watch the news, there are plenty of reasons for fear and anxiety. But you would expect people of faith to have less trouble with fear, wouldn't you?  After all, God is on our side.  And so we won't be afraid even if the earth changes, the mountains shake, and the waters roar and foam. Right?

Yesterday I read Tom Ehrich's blog post, "Speaking of Fear." Tom is a writer, Episcopal priest, and church consultant, and he was speaking of fears that often impact Christians and their churches.  In particular, he listed "fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of losing control, fear of conflict, and fear of change." These fears often paralyze church congregations.

When Jesus promises the gift of the Holy Spirit, he tells his followers that the Spirit will abide with them and strengthen them and teach them all they need.  Therefore we should not have troubled hearts or be afraid. And yet the fears Tom Ehrich lists do afflict us and keep us from doing what Jesus calls us to do. Churches are often afraid to try anything new or different, sometimes out of fear of change and sometimes over fear of failure. There are remarkable exceptions, but churches are often some of the most timid organizations around, afraid to try anything they don't already know how to do.

And pastors' fears can be just as problematic.  If we're not control freaks afraid of delegating anything, we are needy and afraid people won't like us, not daring to speak what we think to be the truth. Or our messiah complexes make us afraid that our congregations will lose their way if we don't make sure everything is done in theological or ecclesiastical purity.

All of these fears, I fear, have a common denominator.  All of them have difficulty trusting God with anything of much significance.  If we can't think of it, control it, manage it, and accomplish it all on our own, we're pretty sure, or at least very afraid, that it can't happen. Practically speaking, we do not believe that God is with is us in any significant way, and we certainly don't believe in any power or assistance from God the Holy Spirit.

1 John says, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." Perhaps the timidity and fearfulness of congregations and pastors is less a faith problem and more a love problem. We've never quite encountered God's love in so vivid and tangible a way that it has cast out all fear. We're worried, even afraid, that God might not love us so much that our failings couldn't drive God away.

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On Receiving a Scary Letter

Imagine that your congregation received a communication from a prophet who had just had a vision.  And that communication said, "Some of you are about to be put in prison on account of your faith. You will likely be tortured, and it will be terrible for 10 days.  But remain faithful until death, and you will conquer."

I'm not sure I can imagine such a thing.  It is so far outside any religious experience in our culture.  So if such a letter arrived at our church, no matter whom it came from, I would likely think the person a crackpot, some Tea Party sort who had gone completely off the deep end.

But what if, by some remarkable circumstance, I or you could be convinced that this communication was true?  Perhaps I'm wrong, but I feel reasonably certain that the vast majority of American congregations would lose over 90% of their members instantly.

The book of Revelation is a letter written to Christians facing just such difficult circumstances.  And unlike many modern Christians, they understood that this letter meant to assist them in remaining faithful under very trying circumstances.  It wasn't giving detailed predictions about the future or the end of the world.

Revelation was written in a very different time and to a very different Church.  Those Christians understood themselves to stand outside prevailing culture to some degree. They experienced a fair amount of tension between their new life in Christ and what it took to fit into Greco-Roman culture. 

When I was growing up, it was very difficult to separate Christian faith from the prevailing culture. There was a symbiotic relationship between the two, although I've often thought that the Church sold its soul in that bargain.  My Presbyterian/Reformed Tradition often spoke of Christ/Church as a transforming presence in the culture.  To be sure, some of that happened, but it cut both ways.

Over the years and centuries, Church became a very worldly institution, and like all institutions, it is often more fixated on preserving itself than anything else.  When the culture realized it no longer needed or wanted a symbiotic relationship with Church, the watered down thing we had become began to struggle without the stores and malls being closed on Sunday morning or religious indoctrination conducted by the public schools. (I think that the origins of the "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" I mentioned yesterday emerge from this transition.)

In the last 50 years or so, membership in Mainline churches has dropped by half.  And most who left did not join other denominations or mega-churches.  They simply left.  This group of "Nones," as some have labeled them, is huge and growing. "Nones" make up an estimated 20% of American adults, and the percentage is surely much higher among young adults.  But church congregations often seem blissfully unaware unless they are experiencing a big loss in membership and therefore worrying about how to get more people to come so their congregation can survive. 

In the staff meeting at this church today, I asked folks an identity question. (I borrowed it from a book on church planning by Kenneth Callahan.)  How would our neighbors finish this sentence?  "Falls Church Presbyterian, it's that church that___________." It's hard to know for certain if their answers accurately reflect what non-member neighbors would say, but I suspect they are fairly accurate.  Suggestions included something about our nice buildings, the Scouts that meet here, community events that we host, our great music program, or our once a month "Welcome Table" where we offer a free meal along with gift cards for a local grocery store and other items to people in need. 

As I looked over the list, it struck me that many congregations might have prompted a very similar list.  It also struck me that only the last item - and it was one of the last suggestions from the staff - had a direct connection to anything Jesus called us to do.

There are times when I wonder if the "institutional church" can actually be the Church. Sometimes it seems the best it can do is to house and nurture occasional episodes of Church, of Christ's body present to the world.  But the bulk of its energy and resources get tied up by the institution and its edifices, regardless of whether those do much to further the work of Christ in the world.

Perhaps I'm just having "one of those days" and being too hard on this thing we call Church.  What do you think. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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Pondering a Miracle

Upon reading today's gospel where Jesus turns water into wine, I have a profound sense that I am missing something. It seems a rather odd story for John's gospel, which is not all that big on miracles, instead featuring great speeches and teachings by Jesus.  But here is a spectacular miracle with no teaching at all.

More liberal types like myself sometimes get tied up in knots over readings such as today's gospel. We're troubled by the miraculous, especially a miracle so blatant as this one. It is so foreign to our scientific worldview, and there is no moral or spiritual lesson to be easily generalized from this episode. And so we have trouble taking this text seriously because to do so feels like fundamentalist literalism to us.
Banquets, wedding banquets in particular, get used in the Bible to speak of the abundance that God will provide, of the plenty and goodness that will mark God's coming reign. Surely today's gospel insists that even though Jesus' "hour has not yet come," God's abundance and provision are fully present in him. The steward in the reading remains blissfully unaware of this, attributing the abundance to some hyper-hospitality on the part of the groom.  But the disciples "believed in him." They saw God's abundance in Jesus, and so they could do nothing less.

But do we liberal and progressive Christians actually believe in God's abundance? (The question is probably valid for conservatives as well.) Can God provide in any real and tangible ways, or is God restricted to my interior life, and perhaps to something after death?

In her book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church, Kenda Creasy Dean discusses the normative faith of American teens, something a huge national study labeled "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."  This notion that there is a God, that we should be "good," that God sometimes bails us out of personal jams, and that we go to heaven when we die, is not something teenagers produced by perverting the teachings they learned at church, says Dean. Rather, this is precisely what they learned at church.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism doesn't know what to do with Jesus changing water into wine, nor with God entering into and transforming history. These sorts of things simply have no place in the benign, innocuous, "Christian-ish" notions that teenagers have learned because that is what many churches have peddled.

Another finding of that national study is that teenagers, by and large, don't have much animosity toward religion. They don't reject church as something bad. They simply cannot fathom why they would invest much energy in it. After all, believing in God, trying to be good, and praying now and then don't require church membership or participation. And why would anyone worship and sing songs to a vague, distant, not-really-involved-involved-in-the-world God?

When people encounter our congregations, do they encounter anything of a God who is bending the arc of history toward God's purposes, whose providence sustains the universe, and whose grace intrudes into human life and history?  Or do they find some nice people trying hard to do some good things and enjoying a little spiritual boost from the rhythms of worship, but without much sense that God is there and up to something. (I realize that I'm making an either/or question out of something where there is a huge continuum of possibilities.)

I frequently cite a quote I believe to come from someone at the Alban Institute (Roy Oswald perhaps?). Speaking on the troubles of Mainline churches this person said something to the effect, "People come to us seeking an experience of God, but we give them information about God."

It is very hard to share an experience of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It's a nice enough notion but not the sort of thing you would give yourself over to.  And if God cannot intrude into our lives and our world in ways that violate our expectations, that defy our notions of what is possible or plausible, if God cannot turn water to wine, then why are we church folk here? 

There's an old joke that goes, "What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian?" Answer: "Someone who knocks at your door but isn't sure why he's there."  And I sometimes wonder if many church congregations don't operate on a similar principle. We keep doing our thing, but we're not really sure why.

I know from serving three churches as pastor, and from working with a number of other congregations via denominational committees, that we often function as though God was not really part of the equation.  We say that we are doing what Jesus calls us to do, but we are no bolder in that work than we are at any other organization, from the workplace to PTA to Scouts to a local charity. We make decisions and undertake projects with absolutely no expectation that God/the Holy Spirit will add anything to the effort. If we have sufficient funding and volunteers and expertise, fine. Otherwise, it's just not possible.

But what if God's abundance and provision and grace really do enter into human experience in the person of Jesus?

I did not start out to write anything of the sort I just did. Strange where you end up when you stop to ponder a miracle.

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Sermon: Now What?

Matthew 2:1-12

Now What?

James Sledge                                                                           January 6, 2013, Epiphany

Our family went down to see relatives in South Carolina after Christmas.  We’ve always done Christmas at our house, and then traveled to the grandparents.  But now it’s over.  We made the drive back on Tuesday.  There are still remnants of Christmas morn lying around at the house, but more and more are being put away.  The tree is getting pretty dry.  Time to haul it out. When we had an artificial tree, we sometimes left it up till late January.  But no one acted like it was still Christmas.  Christmas is over, and we all know it.  Now what?

Although many of us like to attach the Wise Men to the Christmas story, adding them to our nativity scenes, they are a post-Christmas story.  The shepherds are all gone.  The angels are all gone.  In fact, they never even made an appearance in Matthew’s gospel.  There is no stable or manger.  Mary and Jesus live in a house, and Jesus is no longer a newborn.  He crawls or perhaps even walks around the house, getting into things like any toddler does.

 In his gospel, Matthew doesn’t say very much about Jesus’ actual birth.  It is noted only briefly in the story of the angel telling Joseph to wed the already pregnant Mary. He took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus. Jesus has been born and been named with a name meaning “he saves.”  God’s anointed is here.  Now what?

The story of the Wise Men is a “now what?” story, and so it may be a good thing that the story has gotten attached to Christmas.  As much as we may enjoy the Christmas season and as much as it may touch us, there is a tendency simply to bask in its warmth, to drink in its hope and promise without ever asking, “Now what?”  But the story of the Wise Men won’t allow that.  It alerts us to choices that must be made, to powers that do not want God’s new day.  It warns us of danger.

It Can't Be That Simple

The metaphors are flying in today's gospel. Jesus is the gate, while others are thieves and bandits. Then Jesus is the good shepherd as opposed to a hired hand.  And bouncing around within these metaphors is an "I AM" that gets lost in English translations.  This grammatical structure, one not really available to English, is a kind of divine marker.  And so these become more than metaphorical description. They are windows into the heart of God.

And those windows reveal a divine motivation that has been clearly stated in John's gospel from early on. God acts out of love, "For God so loved the world..."  God acts in order to give life. God is willing to go to incredible lengths, willing to die for the sake of the sheep.  And God is not concerned only with my particular flock. God longs for our petty divisions to disappear once and for all.

It's all right there, so clearly, so simply. But if I preached a sermon and said only this, I would feel like I hadn't done my job.  I wouldn't have unpacked the text enough.  I wouldn't have been creative enough.

God loves the world. In Christ, God would go so far as to die for us. It's so plain and simple, but it is so hard to accept. It can't be that simple.  There has to be some catch.  I have to believe the right things. I have to be good enough to deserve such love. And surely God isn't talking about loving "them," whoever we understand "them" to be.

"I AM," God, is the gate, an opening to abundant life.  "I AM", God, puts my and your well being over divine welfare.  God willingly undergoes great anguish within the heart of the divine self for my and your sake, simply because of who God is. 

It can't possibly be that simple, can it?

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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

It is somewhat rare that I preach on the Sunday following Christmas.  Pastors often travel to visit family after Christmas day, and substitute preachers are in big demand on this first Sunday following the celebration of Jesus' birth.  And so I'm not sure if I've ever dealt with today's gospel in a sermon, and I'm not at all sure what I would say.

The first thing that comes to mind when I read these verses is the terror that Jesus' parents must have experienced. I once "lost" one of my daughters.  She was still preschool age and decided she would head on to the grocery store, our next stop, on her own.  I looked up from the shelves in the drug store to find she was no longer beside me. I looked on the adjacent aisle, and then the next, and then ran back and forth all through that store as a feeling of total panic began to rise up inside me.  For a brief moment I think I experienced the most terror I have ever felt. (In desperation I rushed over to the grocery store and found her getting the free cookie the bakery there gave to small children.) Jesus' parents must have felt what I did many times over. Rather than a few minutes, they could not locate Jesus for days. 

This is the only childhood story the Bible has about Jesus.  And while it does highlight the exceptional nature of Jesus, it also puts his parents through great agony. It's nowhere near so terrifying as Matthew's story of Jesus' family fleeing the slaughter of all the young boys in Bethlehem, but like it, Luke's account of Jesus' arrival quickly takes a troubling turn.  Maybe that is why our culture and our congregations, for all the attention we lavish on Christmas, turn away from it almost the moment the day arrives.  The Christmas story is not the saccharine sweet thing we want it to be. The story immediately encounters the world's enmity along with hints that following Jesus will demand loyalty exceeding that given to family, country, etc.

Our gospel says that Jesus' mother, Mary "treasured all these things in her heart."  I wonder what she found to treasure about this episode. I also wonder if this is the best translation.  Another possibility is that Mary "carefully remembered" all these things, and that seems more likely to me. She knew they were important, but I wonder if she would not have gladly given them up in order to prevent what would happen to her son.

I suspect that this sort of "treasuring" is an unavoidable part of faith. In a world that is out of step with God's ways, it is inevitable that taking up those ways will cause us pain and struggles over loyalties.  And if we do not realize this, we may have misunderstood the whole Jesus business. Maybe that is why Matthew and Luke (the only gospel writers who mention Jesus' birth) immediately attach dark and foreboding episodes to the story of Jesus' arrival.

It makes me wonder about the careful remembering that I need to be doing, the reflecting on things troubling and disturbing that I need to hold close if I am to understand what Jesus is asking of me.

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On Lighting Candles

I've never preached on Christmas Eve, but these were the "instructions" for the candle lighting at our service tonight.

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." In the darkness... On Christmas Eve we gather in the darkness. Some of us do so every year, but the darkness seems to press in a bit more this year.  Whether it is a dysfunctional Congress more bent on partisan bickering than actually helping the American people, or the terrible shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, or the horrible violence in places like Syria and the Congo, it is hard to deny the awful reality of the darkness.

If you were here last week for our Service of the Longest Night, you heard Diane remind us that the Christmas story is a dark story.  That sometimes gets lost in all the sentimentality and nostalgia and celebration, but it is still there. A couple forced by imperial power to travel, even though a birth is imminent. A birth far from home in a dirty and smelly place meant for farm animals. And as the story continues, this new family becomes refugees, fleeing those who would kill a newborn Messiah.

To say the light shines in the darkness is no act of sentimentality. Rather it is a bold assertion that the light that comes as a vulnerable baby, the love of God that comes in vulnerability and weakness, is somehow stronger than all that darkness.

And so as we light our candles and bask in their glow, it is much more than an ooh-and-aah moment. It is an act of defiance in the face of the darkness, an act that says we trust and hope in the power of God's weakness and vulnerability over all the terrors of the darkness.

The light, the vulnerable light of a newborn baby, shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. Let us embrace that light, and carry it with us, that we might share it with a broken and hurting world that desperately needs it.

A Vulnerable God

We in the Church make far too much of Christmas, and far too little at the same time. We expend too much energy on Christmas extravaganzas and pageants that mirror the secular frenzy surrounding Christmas. Many seem to feel that Christmas-themed religious hoopla needs to keep up with the ever expanding secular hoopla.  I'm not sure why. Perhaps to hold on to some notion that all this energy is related to faith in some way.

But at the very same time, we sometimes get numbed to how remarkable the Christmas story is. The baby Jesus makes the briefest of appearances in the Bible, actually seen only in Luke's gospel. But the implications of that moment manifest themselves throughout the New Testament. God's love and power comes, not with earthquake and thunderbolts, but vulnerable and at risk.

What is more at risk than an infant? At Christmas God incarnate is totally dependent on others, just like all babies. Some Christians have always struggled with such notions, imagining that the baby Jesus wasn't like real babies. But nothing in Scripture would seem to support such a notion. A truly human baby, totally dependent on his parents, would grow to be a truly human adult who suffered and bled and died like other human beings.  He was, as the Apostle Paul wrote, God's power made perfect in weakness.

The notion of a vulnerable God seems to run counter to basic assumptions about God. God should be powerful, not vulnerable. So it's not surprising that the first big theological fight among early Christians was over the nature of Jesus' humanity.  Surely he only appeared human. God cannot be vulnerable or experience mortal jeopardy. And many modern Christians, living long after such debates were "settled," still struggle, picturing the biblical Jesus as some sort of aberration, a historical blip necessary to fulfill a salvation formula. But Jesus isn't like that anymore. And, they point out, when Jesus returns he will be just what you'd expect a god to be like, all powerful, no more meek and mild and vulnerable.

Expecting a returning Jesus who won't be such a disappointment in the godly power department seems to echo expectations of a conquering Messiah from 2000 years ago. But I think Christmas and the Incarnation reflect God's deepest nature. I see that nature on display in today's reading from the book of Revelation. Many presume Revelation to be violent predictions of God's coming wrath. But not only does Jesus still appear in it as one who is slain, but the closing of the book sounds much like the gospel Jesus.

"It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star." The Spirit and the bride say, "Come." And let everyone who hears say, "Come." And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

"Water of life as a gift" seems totally consistent with the vulnerable love we meet in the gospel Jesus, that story whose beginning we rehearse tonight. The story of a manger is the story of a God who enters fully into our vulnerabilities, who confronts the pain and brokenness of our world with a remarkably vulnerable love. We've still not fully embraced this love or this God. In many ways, we still prefer coercive power to vulnerable love.

Maybe it's just me, but sometimes the flash and pomp and magnificent displays of Christmas seem the sort of things that should accompany celebrations of worldly power such as coronations or inaugurations. There's a kind of dissonance between them and the story of a baby in a manger that reminds me of how I feel when I see the Pope, in all his royal finery, engaging in ritual foot-washing on Good Friday.

But even if the vulnerable baby gets lost amidst the bright lights and pageantry, he is still there. We just need to look beyond the pageantry and attend to the story itself. In the context of Rome's imperial might, a most vulnerable human act occurs, a birth. And this most vulnerable act occurs away from the safe confines of home, dependent on the hospitality of strangers who are able to provide only marginal accommodations. And there, God is.  There, with this act of remarkable vulnerability, God beckons us to become vulnerable ourselves, and to become bearers of God's love.

May you encounter the vulnerable God of Christmas as we remember and celebrate our Savior's birth.

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Sermon: A Strange Day in Zechariah's House

Luke 1:39-55

A Strange Day in Zechariah’s House

James Sledge                                                                                       December 23, 2012

It was a strange day in the house of Zechariah as two women, both pregnant, greet one another.  They are relatives of some sort.  I’d always heard that they were cousins.  The old King James translation says as much, but in fact, Luke doesn’t specify how they are related, only that they are.

They are a study in contrasts.  One is six months pregnant; the other hasn’t even begun to show.  One is old, too old to have children, so old that her pregnancy can only be described as a miracle.  The other is young, so young that she is not yet married in a culture where girls were often married by 14. 

As the door opens, the very pregnant, very old woman greets her very young, barely pregnant, barely out of childhood, niece or cousin or whatever she is. It must have been quite an encounter. They’ve not seen one another in a long time. Mary had just learned of Elizabeth’s pregnancy from the angel Gabriel.  Elizabeth has no way of knowing that Mary is pregnant, yet she knows.  Imagine the greeting, the screaming, the joy, the tears. 

Imagine poor Zechariah.  Two pregnant women in the house and he can’t even talk, struck mute by the angel Gabriel for not believing that he and Elizabeth would have a son so late in life.  I wonder if Zechariah headed out to the local tavern to escape the screaming and yelling and singing of these two pregnant women.

I also wonder why Mary went to see Elizabeth.  Is she seeking reassurance, going to confirm what Gabriel told her about Elizabeth and so confirm what Gabriel said about her own pregnancy?  Is Elizabeth is the one person who can understand, who she can talk with about these strange goings on?  Is Mary just scared, wondering why she ever said “Yes” to Gabriel, wondering what she will do when she starts to show?  Is she wondering how to tell Joseph?  Did she come to sort all of this out, or perhaps to borrow some maternity clothes.

As I said, it was a strange day in Zechariah’s house.  All these things going on.  All these unanswered questions, not to mention the more run of the mill questions about morning sickness and mood swings and midwives.  So much to discuss and talk about, yet we hear none of that.

Mary walks in, and Elizabeth’s baby jumps in her womb.  I still remember putting my hand on my wife’s abdomen and feeling a kick.  It’s an amazing thing, to feel that life moving.  You might even call it miraculous, but it’s a fairly routine miracle.  It happens all the time.  I’ve heard people try to interpret these fits of activity.  Some say that a loud noise can trigger it.  Some try to predict a child’s gender based on how vigorous the activity is.  Some claim that spicy food can send their child into all sorts of flip and flops. 

Elizabeth has a different take on her baby’s movement.  It’s a rather novel interpretation , but Luke tells us that she is filled with the Holy Spirit, so I suppose it is to be trusted.  Elizabeth fairly screams out to Mary, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”   And she calls Mary “the mother of my Lord,” all because her baby jumped or kicked.  As I said, it was a strange day in Zechariah’s house.

Curses and Blessings

Finally the Daily Lectionary starts to talk about Christmas, or at least giving us the preliminaries.  Zechariah the priest and his wife Elizabeth are getting on in years, but they have no children.  This can be extremely difficult for couples in our day, but in Elizabeth's time, a woman's worth was measured by children. She was, in ancient biblical parlance, cursed.

But as so often happens when God acts to bless or save, the story moves through those one would least expect. The messenger who prepares the way for a Messiah will come from this cursed one, this one who has endured disgrace because of her childlessness.  Strange that the Bible sometimes speaks of barrenness as a curse where God has closed a woman's womb, but then those "cursed" wombs become instruments of blessing.

Even though God routinely works this way, Zechariah (and we?) has trouble believing it, leading to his being rendered mute.  It seems a fit of pique by Gabriel.  People in the Bible routinely ask for a sign when they have a divine epiphany.  Moses asks for several.  Perhaps we shouldn't consider it entirely as punishment.  It would be a daily reminder to Zechariah of God's blessing on him and Elizabeth. Even before his wife began to show, he would not be able to forget or question God's promise. Sometimes I wish God would give me such an unavoidable and unambiguous sign as this.

Zechariah is an interesting case.  He is a priest, an important person in important circles.  But his wife is "cursed." And as this new chapter in salvation history unfolds, the angel Gabriel will go through even more unexpected channels - a not yet married teenager from a backwater town. 

In a few days, we will celebrate another Christmas in our decorated sanctuaries with all the musical fanfare we can muster.  Television will broadcast Mass and services from huge cathedrals with magnificent choirs and ornate finery.  And we'll hear these old stories of a God who goes through back channels and brings blessing and hope in unexpected ways, through unexpected people, even those who are "cursed." And we'll rejoice as we remember the birth of one who became cursed for our sakes.

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Frightened of Atheists

I confess that when I read the Daily Lectionary passages (I'm subscribed so that they are emailed to me each day.), I almost never make it to the Evening Psalm.  I read the morning psalms and other passages on most days, but stop at the gospel. I almost never make it back in the evening and didn't mean to do any differently today, but as I finished the gospel, my eyes caught the beginning of Psalm 53. "Fools say in their heart, 'There is no God.'"

I've heard a lot of Christians who seem terrified of atheists. I've never understood this, but some of them seem to think there is no bigger threat to faith than atheists. It's as though the fact of some not believing is contagious.  I'm a little suspicious that the mere fact of atheists opens a window they would rather not acknowledge, poses a question that they are afraid to consider for themselves.

There certainly are many things that work against a meaningful and deep Christian faith, but I'm not sure atheists are a significant one. I could perhaps understand feeling sorry for an atheist, hoping he might come to realize what he's missing out on, but even the more obnoxious and militant sort, those who try to convert others to their view and belittle people of faith, pose little threat to faith that has any substance.

I've heard Psalm 53 quoted as proof that God is as repulsed by atheists as some Christians are, but the psalm doesn't seem to speak of atheists at all. The fools of this psalm say there is no God "in their hearts." Nothing here about public professions of non-faith.  The psalm's ire is directed at those whose actions betray an inner disposition that doesn't acknowledges God. It does not address the sort of atheists some Christians seem to fear so much. Rather it addresses the sort who belong to churches and perhaps even attend them with some regularity but whose lives produce little evidence of being shaped by God's priorities.

The prophets and Jesus, not to mention a few psalms, regularly chastise religious folks, and almost never for failing to do worship correctly or for believing the wrong doctrines. They save their ire for those who faithfully maintain worship and religious observance but do not live in ways that demonstrate God's concern for the lost and least, the vulnerable and oppressed, the outsider and the lowly.

Most of us have likely known some atheists or agnostics whose lives seemed to reveal hearts that are canted toward God, or at least toward the desires of God.  I wonder what the psalmist would say about such folks. If they are not fools, are they in some ways wise?

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Beginning to Dream Again

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
     the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
     and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
     their young shall lie down together;
     and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
     and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.
They will not hurt or destroy
     on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
                                                                    as the waters cover the sea.     Isaiah 11:6-9


They will not hurt or destroy...  What a wonderful vision. What a wonderful dream. But is that all it is, a vision, a dream?

A world without violence certainly seems like a dream. Most of us don't dare imagine such a thing. We'd be happy with less violence, with only occasional hurting or destroying on a small scale. Not hurting or destroying at all, even in just one city? That seems impossible.

I wonder if only prophets can see such things.  I don't restrict prophets to the Bible. I'm certain Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophet.  He dreamed things that many could never imagine happening.  It hasn't happened all the way to what he dreamed, but even non prophets like most of us can see it partially now.  I suppose that's a bit like the first Christians beginning to glimpse what Isaiah had dreamed.  In Jesus they saw enough to join with Isaiah saying, "Yeah, I see it now, too."

Jesus was certainly a dreamer and a prophet.  He read a passage from Isaiah, "(The Lord) has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." And when he'd finished reading he said, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

All the oppressed weren't freed, and the year of God's jubilee didn't really take hold in full, but Jesus could apparently see it, the way that only prophets can.  And those who drew near him began to glimpse it, too.

But somewhere along the line, Christianity lost sight of its dreams. Maybe it was when it became "Christianity," and institutional religion rather than simply followers of the dreamer, Jesus. Regardless, we traded in Jesus' dream of a new day, what he called the kingdom of God, for a ticket to heaven if we believed the right things. We relocated Jesus' dream to another place even though Jesus clearly was able to dream it and see it right here on earth.

The Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians that no one can say Jesus is Lord without the Holy Spirit. (I assume he talking about actually meaning it and not just saying the words.)  And he insists that all members of the body of Christ are given gifts of the Spirit, including some who are given the gift of prophecy.  I think we would do well to discover who they are in our churches, and see if they can't help us begin dreaming again.

Even within church congregations, we often seem unable to imagine anything but the possible, the things we can manage on our own, the things that seem reasonably doable. No visions and dreams, just doable action plans, the same sort of things devised in company offices and corporate boardrooms.

We say "It's only a dream" to dismiss something, to write off an idea as impossible. But prophets, including the prophet Jesus, dream dreams.  And they call us to catch their dreams, their visions.

God, we need some dreams.  Help us to dream again.

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What To Do?

I'm still not sure about what I preached yesterday.  I don't mean I thought it was a bad sermon (at least no worse than the norm). Rather, I'm not sure if it was the correct response to the horrific events of Friday.  Should I have spoken more directly to the events? I really don't know.

I had already written a sermon on John the Baptist, and perhaps I didn't want to "waste" it.  But I did think it fit is some ways. It talked about the "What then should we do?" question asked by those who came out to John in the wilderness, those John called snakes. Maybe I wasn't specific enough, but I think that question is an appropriate one in light of the Sandy Hook shootings.

John says, "Bear fruit worthy of repentance." And some of the specific actions he recommends begin to equalize society. Those with two give to those with none. It has a rather socialist feel to it, as does a great deal of Luke/Acts.  And this is the repentance, the change John calls for to get ready for the one is who coming.

Today's gospel lection describes Jesus' arrest. It ends with Jesus saying to the authorities, "But this is your hour, and the power of darkness!" Darkness still seems to be exercising a great deal of power.  So what does it mean to stand for the light at such a time?

Perhaps yesterday's sermon only hinted at it, but I do think the question, "What then should we do?" is about how to stand for the light. It is about bearing witness to the light, to a new day, a redeemed society, a different world. And contrary to many religious voices, this new thing does not involve a going back. It is not a nostalgia for bygone days.  It is a hope for days that have  never been, at least not fully.

"Putting God back in the schools," whatever that actually means, does not get ready for the light in any significant way. That is so much religious window dressing, the very sort of thing that prompted John to say, "Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor.'" John wants to see something much more substantial, much more concrete.

Exactly what needs to happen with regard to better gun regulations or better access to mental health care will require serious discussion and debate, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that an essential move toward the light is less concern about me and my rights and more concern about the needs of the other, including the safety of young children. 

In the Apostle Paul's famous words on love (not romantic love by the way), he says love is at the top of the list, above faith and hope. And love "does not insist on its own way." At some fundamental level, rights are about protecting people and not running roughshod over them. But at the level they often operate in our society, they are about "I want it my way, and I don't care what impact that has on anyone else."

I don't have well formed answers for how events like those of last Friday could happen or why God didn't intervene in some way. That we are about to celebrate the birth of a Messiah born into a hostile world, nearly killed himself as a child, and finally executed by the state with assistance from his own religion, surely says something about God's way of entering into our world.  But yesterday, I wanted to hear from, John who yells at people, "Do something!"

We may never be able to fully answer the "Why?" questions, but we can surely set about making such events less likely.  We can surely create a world where it would be much more difficult to shoot scores of people, and we can surely create a world where it is easier to get effective mental health treatments for those who need them. Just as we could create a world with less poverty and hunger if we truly wanted to.  And that sounds to me just like what John the Baptist says we need to be doing if we are to "get ready."  We cannot bring the kingdom, that hoped for new realm of God, but we can point toward it. We can aim in its direction.

There is still darkness, and its time is not fully run out. But it did its best against Jesus and failed. And so we who follow him must surely be about the work, the doing, of that which reveals light.

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Sermon video: Of Snakes and Imperatives

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