The Other & Where Are We Going?

"Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." These words from Deuteronomy are often referred to as the "Shema"from the Hebrew for "Hear."  (This is the only Old Testament verse I can actually recite from memory in Hebrew.) This command forms a centerpiece of Judaism, and many Jews affix them to their doorways, as Deuteronomy tells them to do.

Jesus reaches for this command when he is asked for the greatest commandment, linking it with another Old Testament command to love neighbor as self.  Linked together, these two speak of life animated by the Divine Other and by the human other. Quite a contrast to life organized around my wants and needs. But how on earth to move from the self-centered life to the other-centered life?

Today's meditation by Richard Rohr includes this. "The mystics’ overwhelming experience is this full-body blow of the Divine loving them, God radically accepting them. And they spend the rest of their life trying to verbalize that experience, and invariably finding ways to give that love back through forms of service, compassion and non-stop worship. But none of this is to earn God’s love; it’s always and only to return God’s love. Love is repaid by love alone."

The full-body blow of Divine love; now that's a phrase. And it speaks of an experience not easily transmitted by the methods of "Christian Education" I encountered growing up in the church. That is not to dismiss those as meaningless, but for all the information they imparted, they were modeled on the schoolhouse. And they did not speak the language of relationship or love.

This strikes me as the big challenge facing the church and congregations.  How do we provide the necessary information about God that is needed to distinguish those experiences that are of God from those that are not? And how do we help people be open to the experience of God that gives real meaning to their information about God? And while traditions like my own Presbyterian Church have historically done a very good job on the informational side, we seem to struggle on both counts now. We struggle with "Christian Education" even as we make sporadic attempts to do "Spiritual Formation."

To be sure, I have no magic solutions to offer. We seem to be in a time when the old is breaking down, but the new that will replace it is as yet very unclear. It is an exciting time with much experimentation going on. And it is a frightening time of dislocation where many hunker down with what they already know. But both the experimentation and the hunkering down can be, and often are, very self serving, without the Other-centered focused called for by Deuteronomy and Jesus.

Perhaps a good lenten discipline for many congregations would be to spend time reflecting on our focus. What is it that gives us meaning and purpose as a congregation? What is the "North star" that guides all that we do, and is it about the Other. This moves us into the language of "call." Call is always about an other, and it always draws us away from ourselves toward something else. But that makes call inherently frightening. Many people correctly intuit that a call in one direction by necessity eliminates a number of other directions, and many of us are loathe to narrow our options.

Speaking of focus, I feel very much that I am wandering around in this post, with no clear idea where I am headed. In that sense, these words mirror some of my worries for the church. Can we encounter the love of The Other and hear the call of that Other that pulls us away from ourselves and sets us out on the path we are meant for? Can our congregations hear a call that guides us clearly so that we began to realize where we are going, and also where we are not?

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Sermon audio: Listen to Him!

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Sermon video: Listen to Him!

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Sermon: Listen to Him!

Luke 9:28-43a
Listen to Him!

James Sledge                     Transfiguration of the Lord         February 17, 2013

Some of you may be familiar with French writer and philosopher Albert Camus.  Perhaps you read The Stranger in a high school or college literature.  Camus was an agnostic and a pacifist, but after witnessing Nazi atrocities, he became part of the French Underground during World War II.  Though agnostic, he was asked once after the war to speak to a group of Christians.  Speaking out of the horrors of the war and the Holocaust he said this.

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear; and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could arise in the heart of the simplest man.  That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.  The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally…  Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured.  But we can reduce the number of tortured children.  And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us?…

It may be, I am well aware, that Christianity will answer negatively.  Oh, not by your mouths, I am convinced.  But it may be, and this is even more probable, that Christianity will insist on maintaining a compromise or else on giving its condemnations the obscure form of the encyclical.  Possibly it will lose all the virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago.  In that case Christians will live and Christianity will die.[1]

I’m reading this from the book, Christian Doctrine, in a chapter entitled “Are You a Christian?  The Doctrine of Sanctification.”  Shirley Guthrie, the Presbyterian theologian who wrote this book, says that Camus, an unbeliever, challenges Christians to take seriously our own doctrine of sanctification.  Sanctification is about how we, who have been embraced, forgiven, and claimed by God as children, begin to live as such children, letting the Holy Spirit work within us to transform us so that we act more and more like true children of God.

Though not a Christian, Camus is knowledgeable enough about the faith to expect this of the church, and he is upset when he does not see it.  He is frustrated by our failure to live out our faith claims. Interestingly, Jesus seems to share some of Camus’ frustrations in our gospel today, saying to his followers, “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?”

Perhaps more than any other gospel, Luke seems to have the Church in view as it talks about Jesus.  By the time Luke is written, hopes for Jesus’ immediate return have begun to wane, and the Church has to focus more on what it meant to be faithful in an indeterminate, perhaps long lasting, meantime.  And in this story of Jesus’ glory and identity being revealed to the Church – here represented by three of his closest followers – Luke speaks both of how the Church is to live in the world, and of frustrations over our failure to do so, frustrations not unlike those Camus shares.

It Is Necessary

On the heels of Peter's profession of Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus "began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering..." I'm not certain this translation picks up the full force of the line. A different translation might say that Jesus "began to teach them. 'It is necessary for the Son of Man to experience great suffering...' "

It is necessary. Jesus is not simply predicting what will happen but is stating what must happen, what is required to happen. There is some compulsion that drives Jesus toward Jerusalem and the cross.

It is conventional to speak of this in terms of a formula. Jesus must die in order to pay a price that would otherwise have to be paid by us. (Given how frequently this formula is cited, it seems rather odd that the Jews could be "blamed" for Jesus' death. After all, it was necessary.) But often this formula sounds terribly mechanical, and it seems to imply that God is somehow as trapped by this formula as we are.

I find it much more helpful to speak of this in terms of what is necessary to restore any broken relationship. Generally this requires reaching across the divide of  hurt and pain to attempt a reconciliation. The deeper and more profound the break in a relationship, the more difficult this becomes.  At some point, it may become so difficult, so costly, that no one can bear such cost, and there is no healing to be had.

"It is necessary" feels to me like a statement of the costs involved if there is to be healing. The divine human relationship might seem to be beyond repair, but God is willing to do what it takes, to bear the cost required. It is no simple formula, but it is still necessary, a necessity God willingly chooses to bear.

In a Bible study earlier today, we were discussing the Noah's ark stories. We noted that the reasons given for God wanting to destroy all those on the earth (see Genesis 6:5) are virtually the same reasons given for why God will "never again destroy." (see 8:21) God's relationship with us human creatures seems to precipitate an internal crisis within God, one resolved in both the Noah story and with Jesus in favor of restoration, redemption, and hope rather than judgment and wrath. (See Hosea 11:1-9 for a poetic depiction of this.) But this is costly for God.

It is necessary, and God seems determined to do whatever is necessary to woo us back. And when you think of what colossal screw-ups we so often are, including how badly we screw up the church, that is truly good news.

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Arguing with Jesus

The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, asking him for a sign from heaven, to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.” And he left them, and getting into the boat again, he went across to the other side.                          Mark 8:11-13

A lot of people seem not to realize this, but the Pharisees were not nasty bad guys plotting evil deeds while twirling their mustaches à la Snidely Whiplash. (For post-Baby Boomers, that refers to a 1960s Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon character.) The Pharisees were an educated and dedicated reform movement in Judaism, the forerunners of what became rabbinical, synagogue Judaism. They struggled against what they thought a corrupt Jerusalem Temple complex run by the priests, a struggle with some real parallels to the Protestant Reformation.

The Pharisees are not always portrayed negatively in the gospels, and they would seem to have had some natural affinities with what Jesus was saying and doing, yet they mostly end up in conflict with him.

Today's verses, and especially Jesus' reaction, might seem to indicate that arguing with the Pharisees was a common occurrence, one that had begun to wear on Jesus.  Not that arguing implies fighting. It was common for rabbis to engage in long discussion and debates. Indeed a great deal of Jewish writings catalog such discussions in a kind of doctrinal discussion project. But for some reason, this does not go well with Jesus as one of the discussion partners.

I wonder if this might be because Jesus won't play by the normal rules. He refuses to be just one more rabbi adding a bit to the discussion stew. He insists he knows and has authority that the other rabbis don't. If so, no wonder these discussions ended badly, with the other rabbis demanding a sign, proof that Jesus had such authority.

I don't say any of this as a knock on those rabbis,  nor on Judaism past or present. In fact, I find this to be a very active pattern in many churches today. Jesus not being physically present, it is carried on via more indirect methods. We engage in arguments with Scripture, with doctrine, with tradition.  Much of this discussion is a good thing, helping us be in conversation with something living and dynamic, helping us hone our faith and understanding.  But sometimes this discussion ends poorly, like Jesus' with the Pharisees. 

Jesus starts to insist that we must follow him and seek God's will more than our own and we get testy. We're happy to listen to Jesus and consider what he has to say, but we'll be the judge of whether it is of any great merit. We're not any more ready than those Pharisees to grant Jesus that sort of authority over our lives.

As one who places myself well to the left side of the faith spectrum, I have to admit that this particular "arguing with Jesus" problem is a favorite of us liberals. (Conservatives have their own ways of misconstruing Jesus, ways we liberals are quick to point out even as we ignore our own.) We liberals are happy to enter into conversation and discussion with Jesus - and most anyone else for that matter - but we struggle actually to accept Jesus as more than a wise conversation partner.

The are probably many reasons for this. But whether we think ourselves too smart and educated, see things in too nuanced a fashion, or simply recoil from anything that reminds us of "God said, I believe it, that settles it," we end up participating in that good ole bugaboo, idolatry.

Idolatry is simply about placing our trust in things other than God. And while the word "idol" may conjure up thoughts of molten images, the most successful idols are much harder to spot. Family and country make passable idols. Church can be an even better one. Reason and intellect will do fine, too, and these have the added advantage of appealing to people regardless of what they think of church.

Now I will admit to engaging in a bit of hyperbole and generalization to make my point, but I do think it a most interesting question to ask, "Who or what can exercise some degree of authority over you life?" To some degree, that is your god.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting blind obedience to any doctrine or any particular church stance. I think Jesus is more than happy to get in there and have a great discussion, even argument with us. I just hope those arguments don't end with Jesus shaking his head and  sighing deeply in his spirit.

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Enough with the Worship

This morning I was reading from Paul's letter to the Galatians, and I was struck by this line.  "You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years."  Paul is chastising them for abandoning their new life in Christ and returning to something old. Perhaps this refers to Jewish festivals or perhaps pagan ones. Either way, we church folks have our special days, months, seasons, and years. (We're in "year C"by the way.)

I also came across this in today's meditation by Richard Rohr. "Most of us just keep worshiping Jesus and arguing over the right way to do it. The amazing thing is that Jesus never once says, 'Worship me!' whereas he frequently says, 'Follow me.'" And that reminded me of this passage from Amos. "I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies." That's God speaking by the way, who goes on to say, "Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

It must be one of those days when I can stop making connections, because I found myself thinking back to Paul's words to the Corinthian church from Sunday's sermon, famous words that said without love (that's Christ-like, self-giving love) all else we do is meaningless.  "Noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" is one of Paul's illustrations.

Yet despite all this, church in American remains focused heavily on worship. As a pastor, I can mess up a great many things, but if most people are happy with the worship, I will get by. There's a reason we get referred to as "preachers," and people joke about us working one day a week.

I don't have anything against worship, and indeed my tradition thinks it of vital importance. But when people of faith define that faith by private belief and attendance at worship, we have moved into the territory of the quotes above.  

When it comes to this, the now largely finished Christendom role that traditional, mainline churches once played is a huge albatross around our necks. In that former time, we imagined ourselves partners with the culture in a Christian enterprise. We could concern ourselves largely with worship in the mistaken notion that the culture itself was somehow forming people to live as disciples and providing them with opportunities to serve. Being a "good citizen" was very nearly equal to "discipleship."

While being a good member of one's community can indeed by a way of living out faith in Jesus, there is plenty Jesus calls us to that our communities often prefer that we wouldn't do. While this would seemingly be obvious to anyone who as actually read the gospels, the fact that some faithful church people endorsed racially based slavery as God-ordained, fought against civil rights, and think defending the right to bear arms is a Christian duty points to how easily the obvious gets overlooked.

Still, we in the dwindling mainline church keep focusing on worship, often to the point of everything else being tokens. We keep expecting that if we do good worship people will keep coming because that was what we did in Christendom. But if anyone asks us how to experience the Spirit's help and guidance or what it actually means to follow Jesus, we stammer, suggest they talk to someone else, or tell them about the new, informal worship service we are planning.  And then we wonder why things are going so poorly for our brand.

Since I'm making so many connections today, here's another one, from a piece by Jack Haberer of the Presbyterian Outlook which begins, "The bad news is that the older generations have wrecked the church. The good news is that newer generations are poised to resurrect it — that is, to support Jesus’ resurrection program." (If you're curious you can read the editorial here.) 

I wonder if this realization by Haberer isn't critical to traditional churches.  We have to quit thinking of ourselves as wonderful, sacred bearers of God's timeless, heavenly truths, and admit that we need resurrecting. While there is plenty in our tradition that does have value and worth, that is a faithful expression of what it means to follow Jesus (By the way, some of these new generations of resurrection folks are much more keenly aware of our traditions' merits than we in them are.), there is much that is nothing but old, tired habit that we have made idols.  And increasingly, younger people who are looking for a living faith with a living God are rejecting our human-made idols that have proven as inert as the ones Old Testament prophets railed against.

There's an old adage about the church being a hospital for sinners rather than a club for saints. Even though I'm not sure we really believe that, perhaps we need to take it one step further and recognize that it is not only we individuals who need healing. The institutional church that we create could use some critical care.  Now where are those defibrillator paddles?

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Sermon video: The Greatest Gift

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Sermon: The Greatest Gift

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

The Greatest Gift

James Sledge                                                               February 3, 2013

I’m guessing that many of you have heard this passage from 1 Corinthians before.  Maybe my experience is skewed by being a pastor , but I’ve heard it a lot, mostly at weddings. I don’t keep good enough records to say this with any certainty, but I would be surprised if I haven’t used this passage in at least half the weddings I’ve done.  And in a number of weddings that didn’t use these words on love, the couple was making a conscious decision to do something different from what they’d seen at all their friends’ weddings.

Paul is not talking about marriage or romance, but his words can speak to the sort of love required to sustain a marriage.  But I doubt that many couples who choose this passage realize its real meaning, though that may be as much the church’s fault as anyone’s.

____________________________________________________________________________

If you were having some significant difficulties with someone who was very important to you, and this person wrote you a long, heartfelt letter trying to resolve the situation, what would you do?  That may seem a rather odd question.  Most of us would read the letter.  And it would have to be incredibly long not to do so at one sitting. Certainly we wouldn’t read it a few paragraphs per day, sometimes skipping around rather than going from beginning to end.

Yet this is precisely what we do with the letters in the Bible, which is why so many people have heard Paul speak on love without having the foggiest notion of why he felt the need to do so.  This lack of context leads to all sorts of interpretive mischief. Shortly before our passage, Paul writes this about the Lord’s Supper.  For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.  People routinely suggest that this is about mystical presence in the elements, but when you read what comes before and after, Paul makes quite clear the “body” he is talking about is the church, the community of faith.

So too, the words we heard this morning address concerns outside the reading itself.  Paul is concerned about divisions within the community of faith. In particular, he is worried about divisions that arise from some members thinking they are better than others, and in the Corinthian church, this seems to have happened around spiritual gifts.

I'll Never Forget You

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

Isaiah 49:15

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

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

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

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

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

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Grumpy Pastor

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

 Isaiah 49:6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Giving Offense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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VIPs and Outcasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sermon video: What Sort of Good News?

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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

More audios of worship and sermons on church website.

Sermon video: In Line with Us

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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.