Sermons and thoughts on faith on Scripture from my time at Old Presbyterian Meeting House and Falls Church Presbyterian Church, plus sermons and postings from "Pastor James," my blog while pastor at Boulevard Presbyterian in Columbus, OH.
I grew up in the Presbyterian tradition, which means I am a child of the Protestant Reformation. For me this meant unquestioned assumptions about faith/belief as the foundation of any relationship with God, and about the Bible as the single authority for this faith. These two are linchpins of Protestantism: justification by grace through faith and Sola scriptura (Latin for Scripture alone).
And so it is not all that startling to hear that Martin Luther supposedly wanted to exclude the book of James from the Bible. After all, it said, "You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone," and Luther was the one who started the focus on grace and faith as the key.
Personally, I'm glad Luther failed in his quest. While I do hold to the the notion of right relationship with God being a gift, I regularly see the perversion James abhors at work among people of faith. And so we need James to remind us that faith that bears no fruit is indeed dead.
Today's readings from Habakkuk, James, and Luke all point to a God who is extremely interested in the shape of society. It is impossible to read such passages and conclude that religion is somehow unconcerned with politics. God cares deeply about the plight of the poor, the sick, the homeless, the oppressed. Biblically speaking, a private morality that does not share such concerns is not morality at all. A faith that does not seek to redress systems that favor the rich over the poor is dead.
Looking at the Bible as a whole, there seem to be two big issues when it comes to humanity's relationship with God. One is concerned with purity and God's holiness. The other is concerned with a just society that cares for the most vulnerable. In the Old Testament, larges sections of the law deal with each. Purity laws address right worship, avoiding idolatry, sexual mores, and so on, while other laws require landowners to leave some of the harvest for the poor, mandate care for widows and orphans (the most vulnerable of the ancient world), and call for the regular cancellation of debts and return of land to original owners (the Jubilee year). Some of the prophets worry more about the people's failure to maintain purity while others condemn the failure to maintain a just, compassionate society.
Among modern religious folks, there is a tendency for us to focus on one or the other of these. Some see religion as primarily a matter of purity while others see it primarily about social justice. And I wonder if this doesn't sometimes mirror the faith vs. works divide.
I think we are always better off when we integrate both of these biblical concerns rather than choose one over the other. Although it is worth noting that when Jesus finds himself in a situation where purity seems to conflict with social concern, he routinely ignores the purity rules. He heals on the Sabbath, touches those who are unclean, or eats with sinners, never mind what the rules say.
On a fairly regular basis I hear people comment on the beauty of our sanctuary. They may be first time worshipers or someone who has business at the church during the week or someone looking for a place to hold a wedding, but routinely people remark to me about how impressed they are with its Gothic style architecture. And occasionally, members of box-style mega-churches want to know if they can have their wedding here in a “real sanctuary.”
The first time I saw the church property some ten years ago, the sanctuary grabbed me, both the inside and outside of the building. But I suspect that our sanctuary would have looked quite unimpressive alongside the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple in today’s gospel replaced King Solomon’s which was destroyed by the Babylonians some 600 years before the time of Jesus. It was a huge, grand structure described as one of the wonders of the ancient world and was constructed by Herod the Great about 20 years before Jesus’ birth.
This marvelous piece of architecture is known today only by ancient descriptions of it. It was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, the only thing left a part of the retaining wall around the raised area on which the Temple itself stood. We know this as “the Wailing Wall.”
Even this Wailing Wall is impressive. So I can only imagine what it must to have been like for a Jew from the distant countryside, who had never been to Jerusalem, to visit for the first time during some festival and see that huge, towering Temple. No doubt it left many awed in the same way some feel awed when they visit St. Peter’s in Rome.
And so it is hardly surprising that those with Jesus couldn’t help oohing and ahhing about how wonderful it was, about what an incredible religious experience it was. Which must have made what Jesus said all the more stunning. “Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”
Imagine how people today would react if some sort of horrific event completely destroyed St. Peter’s. Or on a secular level, imagine that something destroyed the White House, the Capital, the Washington Monument and just about everything else on the National Mall in Washington, DC. What would people think? What would they say?
Certainly some folks would be talking about the end times. And that is precisely what comes to mind for those disciples who hear Jesus say the Temple will be torn down. And so they want to know when this is going to happen. “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?”
But Jesus does not answer their question. In fact Jesus always tries to deflect his followers from worrying about end times. He assures them that when it happens no one will be able to miss it. But in the meantime, his followers are not to waste time speculating on when that day will be.
How we act, how we live is not supposed to be influenced by whether or not we think the end is near. Our lives are supposed to show the world the hope of God’s coming kingdom. And Jesus tells his followers that when they face troubles, persecutions, and even death, these are not signs of the End, but opportunities. “This will give you an opportunity to testify.”
Actually, that’s not exactly what Jesus says. Bible translators like to clean up idiomatic phrases from the Greek or Hebrew, and I suppose that’s what they did here. But what Jesus actually says about all this trouble is, “It will lead you into testimony.” I kind of like the sound of that. Their suffering is not just something to be endured. It leads to something.
Our nation and many of its churches are going through some tough times of late. The bad economy has left many without jobs, and it has left many churches, not to mention many organizations that try to do good in the world, hurting for money. In the midst of all this, there is a temptation to view our troubles as ultimate troubles. Still, I’m amazed at the number of Christians who think that the global economic crisis is a sign of the end times. Christians, of all people, should know better.
We should also remember what Jesus said about Christians facing great difficulties. “They are opportunities; they lead to something.” At least they do for those who are willing to let the Spirit guide them.
When things are going badly, when money is short, when it’s hard to find much to be excited and hopeful about, the natural tendency is to hunker down, to hold on until things get better. But I wonder if that doesn’t miss the sort of opportunity Jesus mentions. Hunkering down probably doesn’t lead to much of anything.
But seeing hard times as an opportunity could lead to something. For individuals struggling to get by with less money, it could lead to a reassessing of what is important, of what really matters. It could lead to lives that are not so driven by success and things.
And something similar could happen in many congregations. Budget shortfalls could be an opportunity. They could lead to a new clarity about who we are and what God is calling us to do. They could lead to a new identity that better showed Christ to the world. They could, if we are willing to let the Spirit guide us.
For this congregation, today is the day when we ordain and install new elders and deacons to lead us in our worship and ministry in the world. As they take office they will make promises to God and to us that they will follow Jesus as they lead us. I made exactly the same promises when I became pastor. I was very serious about those promises and I suspect that they will be today as well. But just as Jesus warns his followers that they must rely on the wisdom that he will give them, so we also must rely on the Spirit, on the wisdom that comes to us.
But I know from experience, from watching elders and deacons at work, and from my own work, that we will be tempted to rely on our own wisdom. God does give us gifts and talents, and we are to use them. But if we do not rely on the wisdom Jesus sends us, we may well figure out creative ways to hang on and even to be “successful” but without the Spirit guiding us, it won’t lead to much. But when we allow God to work through us, Jesus insists it will lead us to the new life God desires for us.
The God I came to know growing up was constructed from two primary sources. There was Jesus, although he always seemed to me distinct from God in some way. And then there was a very Western, philosophical, conceptual notion of divinity. It was taught the Bible in church and probably knew it better than many people do today. But somehow God always seemed more idea, more concept than some One. And in my admittedly hazy recollection of worship as a child, the typical sermon was a reflection on some Pauline letter, a philosophical, theological treatise with an illustration or two.
I learned many Old Testament stories growing up, but for some reasons the God the Hebrews knew didn't impact my picture of God very much. The Hebrews had a complicated relationship with a complicated God. And I sometimes wonder if Christians' tendency to avoid the Old Testament is because we prefer to avoid these complications.
Israel understood that they had been "chosen" by God, but also that they have a covenant relationship with God that was contingent on their keeping their covenant obligations. But they also spoke of a God who commitment to Israel caused God all sorts of trouble. At times God seems to vacillate between punishing Israel for her covenant failures and continuing to be faithful to Israel despite her unfaithfulness. God can come across as a spouse in a bad marriage who can't decide whether to get a divorce or reconcile.
A small glimpse of this complicated relationship is in one of today's psalms.
You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle.
Are they not in your record?
Then my enemies will retreat in the day when I call.
This I know, that God is for me.
To say that God is moved by Israel's sufferings is remarkable when you think about it. God's emotional life is somehow invested in Israel, whose tears are collected and tossings are remembered. This is no conceptual divinity. This is a God who has for some reason chosen to have the divine life complicated by these human creatures, creatures who often turn out to make terrible covenant partners.
Some Christians consider these Hebrew images of God as primitive and not binding on them. The problem with such a view is that Jesus is the example par excellence of God's complicated life. God's commitment to Israel, and to humanity in general, draws God directly into the complexities and dysfunctions of human life. In Jesus, basic Western concepts of God-as-perfection are violated. God suffers. God dies.
When I think about it, my image of my parents as a small child had some similarities with my picture of God. It was a flat, uncomplicated picture. Parents were undisputed rulers of their small universe. There was nothing complicated about them. Of course such views gave way to more mature notions of parents as complicated individuals whose commitment to their children complicated their lives in countless ways.
Perhaps Israel's messy, complicated picture of God is not the primitive one, but the more mature view.
I've been blogging my thoughts and musings on the Daily Lectionary texts for some time now, and it has become an integral part of my day. Often it is a rewarding process for me as I struggle with the Scripture's claim on my life. But when I am looking at the various readings for a particular day, I often find myself saying "Nope, not that one." Sometimes a text is too complicated to handle in a few paragraphs, but sometimes it says something I just don't won't to address or that I simply don't like.
Today's reading from Joel speaks of God paying back Tyre and Sidon and Philistia because they have hurt Judah. Many passages in the Bible speak of God punishing, of God judging, and some of these passages present a picture of God that sounds almost petulant.
I think that most of us want a nice, clear, coherent picture of God, so most of us selectively read the Bible, finding those texts that fit the picture we have settled on. And considering the high levels of biblical illiteracy among Christians, many people's picture of God is cobbled together from a tiny number of texts and from popular notions of what God or Jesus is like.
Earlier this week I heard Walter Brueggemann speak of how rabbis treat the Hebrew Scriptures as something "thick, layered, and conflicted." Such a notion necessarily means that Scripture doesn't always have a clear, obvious meaning, that its meaning emerges as one wrestles with the layers and conflicts within it.
It strikes me that many of us try to project a picture of ourselves that is clear and coherent is the same way we do with God. We like to keep hidden certain facets of our selves. Most of us have a fair amount of messiness sloshing around inside of us. But we often admit it to no one, sometimes not even ourselves. Of course others sometimes know a person who is quite different from the image we have of ourselves.
I'm not saying that God necessarily has the same sort of internal messiness that we do, but I wonder if our aversion to such things doesn't make it difficult for us to wrestle with the messy picture of God that the Bible presents. Conversely, how much richer might our faith become if we would actually wrestle with the thick, layered, conflicted picture that the Bible gives us, and see what blessings might emerge.
I was the oldest of four children. We came in pairs. My brother and I were a year apart, and then after a several year gap, came another brother and sister, also a year apart. From my perspective as the oldest, I was absolutely convinced that those younger than me got off easy. To my mind this imbalance also grew worse as you moved down the line.
And so I can commiserate with the elder brother in Jesus' parable. He had worked hard all those years, always being "the good son." But now his spoiled, rotten, no-good brother had returned home after becoming destitute, and Dad rolled out the red carpet.
Often when people hear the "Parable of the Prodigal Son," they focus on the love of the Father who welcomes home this undeserving son who has realized the error of his ways. But I find myself drawn to the very poignant end of the parable. It concludes without resolution, the elder son standing outside the celebration as his father pleads with him. Did the elder acquiesce and go in? Did he storm off? Jesus doesn't say.
I grew up in a nice middle class home where I really never wanted for much. I may have thought I had to do more work around the house than some friends (and some younger siblings), but my life was pretty good. I played sports, had a horse, was taught to water ski by my father, fished in a local pond, took my turn hand-cranking the ice cream churn on birthdays, and so on. Still, it seemed to me that my younger siblings had it better and got off lighter. I worked harder and got less for my efforts. It wasn't fair.
"That's not fair," is a favorite lament of little children, which almost always arises from feeling they've been shortchanged in some way. We humans seem acutely sensitive to others getting more or getting the same with less effort. And I wonder if this doesn't grow out of a view of the world and life that is profoundly different from God's. We operate out of the view that there isn't enough to go around. And if that is true, then we need to be careful about getting our share.
But if that view is entirely false, if God is a God of abundance, then such worries are foolish, like toddlers squabbling over who has the bigger piece of cake when both have been told they can have seconds, and even thirds.
I grew up with a very static picture of God. By static I mean things such as unchanging, immutable, immovable, and so on. And while there is some warrant for this picture in the Bible, it comes mostly from Western, philosophical notions of God as the embodiment of perfection. And perfection, by its very nature, cannot change. To change, to become different, would be a move away from perfection.
Interestingly, the ancient Hebrews did not view God this way at all. In the Hebrew Bible, God is incredibly dynamic, even emotional. God gets angry, God is pleased, God makes plans, God changes plans, God brings punishment, and God relents from punishing. In some places God is even said to "repent" of plans to punish.
In today's reading from Joel, the prophet calls the people to change their ways, to come before God with weeping and mourning and fasting. "Who knows whether (God) will not turn and relent?"
In the gospel reading, Jesus tells his parable of the lost sheep in response to questions about his hanging out with sinners, ending with this. "Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance." Perhaps it is not obvious, but if God experiences joy, then it seems that God can become happier than God was, which presumably means God can become unhappy. And all of this describes a dynamic rather than static God, a God whose relationship with creation and humanity costs God something, cost God what scholar Walter Brueggeman calls "a disturbed interior life."
I wonder if this isn't a much more helpful way to speak of the cross. Rather than some sort of sacrifice that God had to offer in order to placate Godself (When I say it that way I like the idea even less.), the cross is the embodiment of God disturbed interior life, the tremendous cost God endures in extending grace to us.
When we think of "costly grace" rather than "cheap grace," we are usually talking about our accepting God's favor without it requiring anything of us in return, without it changing us. But it seems that grace costs God quite a bit as well.
Letting go of a static picture of God challenges my Western notions of God as the very embodiment of the concept of perfection. But not only does a dynamic God appear to be a lot more biblical, the hope of a relationship with a dynamic God seems a lot more plausible.
When we hear about Jesus calling his first disciples, we are told, "Immediately they left their nets and followed him... Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him." And in today's gospel, Jesus turns to the crowds and says, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." Then after a couple of illustrations about calculating the cost of something before undertaking it he adds, "So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."
Following Jesus means letting go of other things. It means turning loose of what had been the best hope for security, for protection, for belonging. In the hyperbolic style of Middle Eastern speech, Jesus' instruction to "hate" actually mean to "love less." Still, there is a shift of loyalty, which requires old loyalties to recede.
I was at my local presbytery's "Church Professionals' Retreat" for the last couple of days. It featured Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann talking about how renewal comes out of loss, but how it requires grieving and lamentation for God's new possibility to become visible.
I wonder if Jesus isn't speaking in a similar way here. He is not saying that families and possessions are inherently bad things. But just as a successful marriage requires "hating" (in the sense of loving less) parents and siblings and shifting one's primary love to a spouse, the new life that comes from Jesus requires a similar shift.
For some people, the leaving home that comes with marriage and adulthood provokes a profound sense of loss. But if a marriage is to thrive, somehow goodbyes must be said, old ways must be abandoned. There is loss that must be experienced in order to move to something new.
If someone "hates" (loves less) spouse rather than mother or father, the marriage is on shaky ground. So, says Jesus, trusting money or possessions to provide us security, happiness, fulfillment, or meaning makes it nearly impossible to discover our true humanity, our true selves in life as Jesus' family, as God's children.
Our culture works very hard to sell us the lie that we can have it all, and that chasing after it all is what we should do. But Jesus insists that abundant life, true humanity, salvation, is about letting go of some things so that our lives can move toward their truest destiny.
When I around 13, my brother came home with the comedy album, “George Carlin: Class Clown.” This album contained the famous routine, “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” and so we had to be a bit careful about letting our parents overhear it. But it also had a number of routines focusing on Carlin’s upbringing as an Irish Catholic.
Like many rebellious youth, Carlin had found the absurdities of religion, well, absurd, and he and his friends probably made life miserable for the nuns and priests who ran their parochial school. On the album he describes how they would try to trip up the priests by asking questions such as, “If God is all powerful can God make a rock so big God can’t pick it up?’
Or they would take a simple, straightforward rule, and then surround it with fantastic circumstances to confuse things. As an example Carlin explains that Catholics were required to receive communion at least once between Ash Wednesday and Pentecost. Not doing your “Easter duty” was a mortal sin. And so the question for the priest goes, “Father, suppose that you didn’t make your Easter duty, and it’s Pentecost Sunday, the last day. And you’re on a ship at sea, and the chaplain goes into a coma. But you wanted to receive. And then it’s Monday, too late. But then you cross the International Date Line.”
I thought of Carlin when I read the trick question that the Sadducees pose to Jesus. Just like Carlin, they take a simple, straightforward requirement of the law, and then place it into a set of bizarre circumstances. The law in question is something called levirate marriage. This law required the brother of a man who died without heirs to take his widow as a wife. The purpose of this law was primarily to give that dead brother offspring so that his line would continue on. But it also meant that these widows, who were extremely vulnerable in ancient times, would not simply be left to fend for themselves.
Now admittedly, levirate marriage is an odd concept to us, and so this whole discussion can be a bit hard for us to follow. But just as people in that day had different understandings of marriage, of men and women, they also had different understandings of resurrection.
Luke points out that the Sadducees say there is no resurrection, but neither they nor Jesus understood resurrection to be about going to heaven when you die. The Sadducees were what you might call fundamentalist traditionalists. They said that if you couldn’t find it in the Law, in the five books of Moses, it just wasn’t so. They tried to maintain beliefs that were the norm in Judaism back in King David’s time, one of those being that the only way you lived on after death was by having progeny, offspring who carried on your line.
But later Judaism drew on the prophets to envision a day when God did something wonderful and new, when a new age dawned. When this new day came, when God created a new heaven and a new earth, there would no longer be the sound of weeping or the cry of distress. And along with this hope grew a parallel hope that when God’s new day came, there would be a resurrection of the dead, and all the righteous dead would participate in the wonder of God’s new kingdom. The Sadducees rejected these later “innovations,” but the rest of Judaism had embraced this idea of resurrection, this idea of resurrection as an event in history. And this is what’s being discussed when the Sadducees try to trick Jesus. On that day, when all the dead are raised, “whose wife will the woman be?”
But Jesus rejects their question outright. All the layers of circumstance, the seven different husbands, don’t matter because resurrection is not at all what they imagine. On that day, says Jesus, old categories won’t matter because nothing will be the same. In that age they shall be “like angels,” which really tells us next to nothing. Most of our images of angels are not found in the Bible. And so we are left with Jesus saying that in the age to come, those who are raised will be nothing like they are now, but not really telling us exactly what that means.
Now since Sadducees don’t expect a resurrection to begin with, they presumably borrow a picture of resurrection from popular notions of that day, popular notions that Jesus dismisses out of hand. And that makes me wonder. Are our notions of resurrection and the age to come drawn from the good news Jesus proclaims, or are they popular notions that Jesus would dismiss?
Think about popular understandings of resurrection, about life after death and heaven. Think about your own. There are many possibilities. There’s the ever popular getting your wings at the pearly gates and becoming an angel image. There are various images of heavenly, pastoral bliss. There is the gazing down on loved ones below image. There are images of a vague spiritual well-being or bliss. You perhaps have others. Interestingly, none of these are in the Bible. When the Bible speaks of resurrection or of the age to come, it resorts to simile and metaphor, to the wolf living with the lamb, to swords beaten into plowshares, to something so new and so wonderful that it cannot be accurately described.
I’m not trying to shatter any dreams here. Rather, I’m wondering if we haven’t sold resurrection woefully short. I’m wondering if Jesus’ vision of a new day, of God’s kingdom, of the age to come, boggles our minds so that we settle for something we have an easier time processing, things pretty much as they are now, but simply relocated to a better locale, to the nicer neighborhood of heaven.
I recently had a conversation with someone of deep faith, discussing how we seem to have replaced Jesus’ good news of the Kingdom with good news of going to heaven. This person acknowledged my point, but went on to say that he did not see how even God could straighten out this world. Yes, he said, the Bible does speak of a new heaven and new earth, of a New Jerusalem here on earth, of a redeemed creation. But just look at the world. It’s as messed up now as in Jesus’ day. So perhaps heaven is the best we can hope for.
Perhaps it is, that is unless we can see something that lets us hope for more. And that is precisely what the prophets and Jesus do. They see something other people cannot. It’s in our reading from Haggai this morning. Haggai says, “Look at the ruins of Jerusalem. Aren’t they a dump? But take courage for I see God at work!”
You know, prophets are really strange dudes. I know lots of people think that what makes a prophet a prophet is telling the future, but biblical prophets aren’t really about predicting the future. Rather they glimpse a reality that other people aren’t able to see.
When you think about it, Jesus is a pretty strange fellow, too. And he sees things other people don’t, which is perhaps why Luke’s gospel calls him a prophet. Jesus keeps saying, “Look, the kingdom of God has come near.” And when they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, his followers see it, too. And they form a strange new community, the likes of which the world had never seen. And Jesus invites us to join them, to see as they see.
Lord, send your Spirit. Let us see what we’re missing.
I've got the television on as I type, watching a college football game. College rules don't allow the same sort of end zone celebrations seen in the NFL, but the players still strike poses, flex their muscles, and pat themselves on the chest. Some of it is genuine celebration, but mostly it's a "grown up" version of "Look at me, look at me!"
Our culture is filled with variations of this. People who quietly do their jobs without getting much notice rarely advance to the top of their company. You have to call attention to yourself. In my denomination, when pastors are looking for a new position, it works much like a secular job search. We have to sell ourselves, trumpeting our strengths and minimizing our weaknesses so that a search committee will "Look at me!"
It's behavior that comes naturally to many, very similar to behavior in other animals. Just watch a nature program that shows males posing and strutting as they seek to attract a mate.
So what do we do with Jesus' words in today's gospel? "For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."
Our culture doesn't value humility, probably because our culture is all about striving to make it, to get ahead. At its very core, it is a culture of anxiety. In our anxiety, we are perpetually worried about whether or not we've been noticed, about whether or not we're getting the credit we deserve.
Wouldn't it be nice to live life without worrying, without anxiety? Wouldn't it me nice if we could simply focus on doing what God calls us to do, trusting that what we need would come to us? That is, after all, what Jesus tells us when he says in another place in Luke, "Instead, strive for (God's) kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well."
We believe in Jesus, and we want to follow him. But we sure have a hard time trusting him, don't we.
