Spiritual Hiccups - That's Gonna Leave a Mark

Today's reading from Genesis is another of those texts that makes little sense if heard from a literal bent.  In the famous story of Cain killing Abel, things in God's creation seem to be going from bad to worse.  First their parents get kicked out of the garden, now fratricide among the children.  It's a story that's the subject of frequent misinterpretation.  Cain's question, "Am I my brother's keeper," is often inverted to say the we are called to be our brother's (and sister's) keeper, which may be true but has little to do with this story.  Cain's question is a rhetorical one with a presumed answer of "No."  He is seeking to lay the blame on God here.

But the mark of Cain comes in for even worse misunderstanding.  (It's worth noting that the issue that leads to the mark seems preposterous at face value.  Cain is worried that, as a wandering fugitive, he will be killed, but this seems a foolish concern.  To date there are only four humans in all of God's creation, and one of those now lies dead.)  The mark of Cain is often understood to be a mark of shame, a visible sign of the curse God places on him.  Yet God says quite clearly that the mark is to protect Cain from reprisals by those he may meet.

The rather remarkable thing about all this is that despite the heinous murder Cain has committed, despite God's insistence that Cain will suffer for his guilt, Yahweh is still concerned for Cain, and takes steps to insure his safety.  Despite Cain's role in Creation's continuing downward spiral, God is still committed to him. 

People sometimes speak of the "wrathful God of the Old Testament," and there are verses that might seem to support such a view.  But there are likewise many passages where God's nature as both a God of judgment and a God of graces, mercy, and steadfast love is clearly visible.  Religious folks often want to resolve this apparent paradox and opt for either a God of judgment or a God of grace.  We struggle to hold to two in tension.  Indeed, in the biblical stories, God at times seems to struggle with this tension.  (Check out Hosea 11:1-11 for one such example.)

This tension is within today's reading, and I see the gospel enacted in the story of Cain and Abel.  We humans seek to go our own way, to make our own way.  We grasp for what we want, often with no concern about who gets hurt by our grasping.  In so doing we reap a world filled with animosities and hostilities.  There are consequences to us, and to all of Creation for our arrogance and hubris.  But God will not abandon us to our own devices.  God still reaches out to claim us.  As Christians we say that we are sealed, marked in our baptisms.  People don't usually associate the sign and seal of baptism with the mark of Cain... But I wonder.

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Sermon video - Ketchup on Black-Eyed Peas

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Spiritual Hiccups - The Truth of the Bible

One of the curses of living in the modern, scientific age is is the constriction of our notion of truth.  Truth has become synonymous with facts and figures.  Myth, by contrast, has become synonymous with falsehood.  Yet the writers of Scripture did not understand truth in our manner and did not recognize our distinction between truth and myth.

My Presbyterian tradition speaks of the Bible as a "unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ," but in our modern notion of truth, the validity of a witness is based on whether or not she gets her facts straight.  And so some who want to "preserve" the truth of the Bible insist that it is factually, historically, and scientifically correct.  But in what strikes me as a very strange twist, these protectors of Scripture (who often view science as the enemy of religion) have adopted science's definition of truth. 

Of course the problem with preserving the truth of the Bible in such a manner is that it creates insurmountable hurdles for anyone who pays much attention to what the Bible actually says.  Today's Genesis reading is a good case in point.  If we are to apply modern, scientific notions of truth to today's reading, we immediately must deal with God creating in quite a different order from what we read in chapter one of Genesis.  On top of that, we must take as historical, scientific fact that God created earthworms, blue jays, and alligators, thinking they might make a suitable partner for the man. 

We Presbyterians have tended to be less threatened by science than some other Christian groups, and we have tended to steer clear of the obvious problems with biblical literalism.  But we too have  found ourselves captive to a modern, scientific worldview.  And so at times we have used all the scholarly tools at our disposal to get to the truth behind the text.  We have searched for the "historical Jesus" and tried to understand the historical forces that caused biblical writers to say what they did.  But in the process, we sometimes acted as though the truth could not be found in the text itself.

Fortunately, much of biblical scholarship has recognized this and turned more of its focus back to the text itself.  Yet among rank and file Christians, I worry that there is a difficulty speaking of the "truth" of the Bible in other than modern, scientific, historical terms. 

I would never argue that the Bible is "fiction," but I do think we could learn something from great works of fiction that speak the "truth" to us.  Indeed art can sometimes speak to us at a much deeper level.  No one reads an encyclopedia in order to be touched or moved deeply.  No encyclopedia will every launch a movement.  And any good painter knows that his purpose is not to create something that looks exactly like a photograph.  A great painting shows you something that you likely would not have seen had you looked at the painter's subject.  It reveals a deeper truth, a truth that has a spiritual dimension to it.

If one amassed all the world's knowledge, she could still be far from the truth.  Strange that religious people would not know this well.  I sometimes wonder if the fascination with spirituality in our day isn't a longing for a deeper truth than can be found in either a literalist fundamentalism or a progressive, scholarly attempt to explain what the Bible means.  Perhaps it is a longing for a truth that cannot be known from any amount of correct information.

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Sermon audio - Ketchup on Black-Eyed Peas

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Sermon - Ketchup on Black-Eyed Peas

Mark 1:4-11

Ketchup on Black-Eyed Peas

James Sledge                                       January 8, 2012 – Baptism of the Lord

I grew up putting ketchup on my black-eyed peas.  In my home as a child, if we were having black-eyed peas, a bottle of ketchup went on the table.  I naturally assumed that most other people did the same.  Ketchup on black-eyed peas was just like ketchup on French fries.  If you could have gotten black-eyed peas at McDonalds, they would have asked, “Do you want ketchup with that?”

But when I got married, I discovered that this wasn’t the case.  My wife Shawn considered the practice downright odd.  She sometimes makes fun of me for it.  I’ve occasionally tried to explain to her what she’s missing, but to no avail.  In fact, I’ve even grow a bit self-conscious about it.  I still use ketchup in my own home, but I’m less likely to do so at a restaurant or a church dinner.

Sometimes our Christian faith is a bit like putting ketchup on black-eyed peas.   Not so many decades ago it was possible to be unaware of this.  We thought most everyone was Christian, that the culture was Christian, that everyone put ketchup on their black-eyed peas.  But such an assumption is becoming more and more difficult to maintain.  Some of us have even started to realize that there are some strange, odd elements to our Christian story that we had not noticed before. 

Today’s story of Jesus being baptized may be one of those oddities, although the oddity here is not just the story itself but also what is missing from the story.

Have you ever wondered what Jesus did before he began his ministry?  We don’t know for sure how old Jesus was at the time of today’s gospel reading.  You hear 30 years old a lot, but that comes from a stray remark by some of Jesus’ opponents, so I don’t know how much stock we should put in it.  Nonetheless, when Jesus begins his ministry, he’s old enough that nothing is ever mentioned about him seeming too young to be a rabbi.  So perhaps 30 years old is not a bad guess.

And therein lies the oddity.  Where has Jesus been for nearly 30 years?  What has he been doing all that time?  How is it that the Son of God can go completely unnoticed for that long? 

In all of the New Testament, there is almost nothing about Jesus except as an adult thirty something.  None of the letters of Paul or others show any awareness of Jesus’ youth or the circumstances of his birth.  Of the four gospels, two, including Mark’s gospel that we read this morning, introduce us to a full grown Jesus with no mention of birth or childhood.  Only Matthew and Luke make any mention of his birth, and Luke alone includes a single story about a 12 year old Jesus.  In that story people are amazed at Jesus’ understanding, but even here, Luke insists that Jesus is still growing in wisdom.  He is no all-knowing, divine figure masquerading as a human.

One thing all the gospels agree on is that the beginning of Jesus’ ministry is somehow connected to John the Baptist.  Jesus, who has lived such an ordinary life that no one has taken any note of him, that not even friends and neighbors from his hometown expect him to be anything special; this Jesus shows up where John is baptizing.  John is a rather odd fellow who dresses funny and eats strange food.  But he seems to have touched a nerve among many people near Jerusalem.  John was talking about changing your life to be ready for something big God was going to do, and people responded to his message.

So, it seems, did Jesus.  For some reason, Jesus goes out with all those other people who were hoping for God to do something big.  Maybe Jesus was hoping the same thing.  Of course it turns out that Jesus is that big thing.

People have speculated as to Jesus’ own sense of who he was prior to his baptism.  Many of us are so accustomed to thinking in Trinitarian terms, where Jesus is God, that the idea of Jesus not being fully aware of this divinity seems strange.  But especially in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ baptism seems to be a key moment for him.  Notice how the coming of the Holy Spirit is a private moment for Jesus rather than a demonstration for the crowds.  And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  These words seem spoken for Jesus’ benefit.  Did the Holy Spirit descending on him awaken something in him?  Did it open his eyes to who he truly was and what that was going to require of him?

When we were discussing this passage the other day in our staff meeting, Jeremy, our music director, recalled an episode from Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz.  In it, a woman named Laura is having something of a spiritual crisis.  She is not a Christian and doesn’t really believe in God, yet she is speaking with Miller, looking for some sort of help from him.  And he encourages her to open up to God, to ask God for grace and forgiveness. But Laura finds such an idea odd, and she says:

“I can’t get there.  I can’t just say it without meaning it.”  She was getting very frustrated. “I can’t do it.  It would be like, say, trying to fall in love with somebody, or trying to convince yourself that your favorite food is pancakes.  You don’t decide those things, they just happen to you.  If God is real, He needs to happen to me.”[1]

John the baptizer announces that there is one coming after him who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.  I baptize with water so you will get ready, he says.  But the one who is coming will make God happen to you.

Has God happened to you?  We Presbyterians say that if you’ve been baptized, God has happened to you.  We don’t say God can’t happen to you if you haven’t been baptized, but we do insist that God happens to you in baptism.  Yet many of us seem blissfully unaware of any such happening.  We’ve missed it somehow, settling instead for a comfortable God of habits and assumptions, an unexamined picture of God we picked up somewhere, like me thinking everyone puts ketchup on black-eyed peas.

When Jesus is baptized, God happens to him, and he takes up his true identity as Son of God, going from anonymous unknown to someone causing so much trouble they have to execute him to shut him up. 

In our baptisms, God promises to happen to us as well, to pour out the Holy Spirit on us so that we discover our true identities and our calling as daughters and sons of God.  Has God happened to you?

---

[1] Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003), p. 53.

Spiritual Hiccups - Invaded by Heaven

If you go to a Christian funeral, there is a very good chance you will hear the following verse from John's gospel. "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die."  A few years ago, these verses were a part of the New Testament passage used for one of our denomination's "ordination exams." These are taken by those seeking to be ordained as pastors, mostly seminary students.  I served as one those grading the exams, and a question in the exam on the John passage asked whether or not this passage was actually appropriate for funerals. 

In the exams that I graded, most all the test takers struggled with this question, and I heard a similar report from other exam graders.  In nearly all cases, the problem arose from understanding resurrection and eternal life to mean nothing more than going to heaven when you die.  But biblically speaking, resurrection has nothing to do with souls winging their way to heaven.  Resurrection was something that was supposed to happen "on the last day," as Martha says quite clearly in today's gospel.  And so when Jesus says, "I AM the resurrection and the life," (The peculiar Greek grammar of Jesus' "I AM" is supposed to remind us of God's personal name.) he seems to be saying that the promise and hope and power of that last day has come into the present.  Those who are "in Christ" can began to experience a new quality of life, a new life born of the Spirit, here and now.

One of the exciting things going on in Christian faith right now is a recovery of a gospel of the Kingdom, of God's coming reign, a gospel that had been supplanted by what Brian McLaren has called a "gospel of evacuation."  This gospel says that if you have faith in Jesus, you will get evacuated from this earth (which is apparently beyond hope), and relocated to the paradise of heaven.  But of course Jesus never says any such thing.  He says the God's reign has "drawn near."  And the Apostle Paul speaks of creation itself longing and groaning in labor pains for the new thing that is coming. 

It seems rather odd to me that so many Christians, who know very well the creation story where on the sixth day God looks out and judges the whole shebang "very good," somehow conclude that this same creation has gotten so badly off track that it is beyond God's power to rescue and restore.

"I AM the resurrection and the life."  God's power to restore, redeem, and make new has burst into the present.  Heaven is not some distant evacuation zone for those who qualify.  Rather heaven has invaded creation, intent on conquering it through love.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Where's Your Pride?

The local high school football team had a good season this past Fall, and so it was more common than in years past to see "Bobcat Pride" emblazoned on cars.  High School football is long over, but I saw one of those cars the other day, and it made me wonder a bit about the things that we are proud of, especially when I consider this morning's psalm.  Here's a verse from it.

  Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses,
     but our pride is in the name of the LORD our God.

 This verse struck me as a bit odd at first.  Why would one be proud of God, or of God's personal name?  (The "LORD" in the verse is a reverent, deferential rendering of the divine name, YHWH.)  The psalm obviously draws a contrast with those things that normally produce pride: successful football teams, children who get scholarships, or, in the case of the psalm, powerful military technology.  Pride is normally associated with our accomplishments or the accomplishments of those we love.  In the cases of football teams and military might, we often view those as extensions of ourselves.

So how does one experience pride in God?  Is it like pride in our team, being impressed because God did a great job?  Perhaps I'm obsessing over a single word in a psalm, but this is in part prompted by a line from St. John of the Cross I saw quoted in one of Richard Rohr's Daily devotions.  It says, "God refuses to be known; God can only be loved."

Pride most often seems to go with things we love, self, team, country, children, etc.  But the psalmist's pride is not in any of these things.  It is "in the name of the LORD our God."  Perhaps that is because the LORD is the one the psalmist loves more than all others.  So where's your greatest pride?

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Spiritual Hiccups - Something New

This is my first blog post of a new year, and so it seems appropriate to think about newness.  Today's reading from Ephesians speaks of newness.  It says "to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness."  But is this newness something done to us or something we become by doing the right things.  The Ephesians passage is a bit vague on that.

I've never done them much myself, but the new year is a time when many make resolutions, promising to change in some way and therefore become something new.  The idea that we can start fresh is a compelling one and an idea at home in the Christian faith.  After all, God continually reaches out to us, beckoning us to new life and relationship.  But is this newness our doing or God's?  New Year's resolutions are clearly about our trying harder and becoming a new and better version of ourselves, a self who is lighter and leaner, healthier, nicer to one's spouse, no longer smokes, etc.  This is a newness that we do if we have the tenacity to stick to our resolutions.

I heard a Christian being interviewed on the news the other day with regards to her support of a certain presidential candidate. In explaining her position she said, "As a Christian, I believe that people can change."  Certainly Christian faith speaks a lot about people changing, but where does that come from?

If you've spent much time in a church congregation beyond coming on Sunday, you likely know how good churches and church members are at figuring out what they cannot do.  Be it the mission project we can't afford, the class a person knows she could never teach, or the new worship service we don't have the resources and talent to pull off, we are good at saying "No" to newness.  And it seems to me that very often an implied theological statement lies hidden in our "No."  It says, "Newness is dependent on us."  Of course quite often we seem to prefer the old, and even when we don't, we aren't sure we have what it takes to change things.

In Isaiah 43, God speaks through the prophet to exiles in Babylon saying, "I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?"  What an interesting question for the prophet to ask?  What newness of God is springing forth around us?  Do we not perceive it?  And if not, why?

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Christmas Meditation video: Another King?

Christmas Meditation: Another King?

Angels are part of our Christmas celebration, but like bows on packages, are mostly decorative. In his sermon, "Gosh, Some Angels," Walter Brueggemann says we need to take another look at angels. Perhaps this may help us rethink our understanding of Christmas. (from Luke 2:1-20)

Christmas meditation - 12-25-12.mp3

Spiritual Hiccups - My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad

As we draw close to Christmas, this morning's psalms seem jarring next to images of a babe in a manger, of shepherds, angels, and nativity scenes. Psalm 18 speaks of being in danger from enemies and crying out to God.  And God responded to that cry.



Then the earth reeled and rocked;
   the foundations also of the mountains trembled 
   and quaked, because he was angry. 
Smoke went up from his nostrils, 
   and devouring fire from his mouth; 
   glowing coals flamed forth from him.

It is easy for some to dismiss such images of God as something archaic, a violent God of the Old Testament unlike the God of love we meet in Jesus.  But I've noticed that most children who come from homes with loving parents where they feel safe and secure assume that their mother or father would whip all comers in order to protect them.  And I wonder if that isn't what we see in this psalm.  The childish boast that "My Dad can beat up your Dad" grows out of the sense of security children experience, and the psalmist seems to know something similar.

If one has experienced a security in the love of God, in God's parental care, it is pretty easy to think along such lines.  In an ancient world inhabited by many gods, it is hardly surprising that some Old Testament passages sound a bit like, "My Dad can beat up your Dad."

Jesus does nothing to undermine the idea of God's parental-like love.  Jesus repeatedly calls his followers to trust themselves to God's care.  But Jesus does redefine what God's power looks like.  The Apostle Paul calls this "power made perfect in weakness."  And Jesus made clear what Israel (and the Church in our day) often forgot.  God's parental love was not restricted to them.  Indeed the call of Abraham was so that "all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

I felt very safe and secure as a child, and I probably thought my Dad could beat up some others.  But to my knowledge, he never did.  The safety and security of parental love is generally not experienced in such things.

As we celebrate the birth of one born to "save," we would do well not to reject an image of God as one who can and does protect and provide.  The child born in a manger is not just a nice philosopher who teaches a good way to live.  He is God's power unleashed for us.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Seeing the Future

There's a car commercial running on television where the wife excitedly tells the husband that they are having a baby.  As they celebrate this announcement, a strange look comes over the husband.  He has just thought of something, and it quickly becomes apparent just what.  He has a sleek, two-door sports car, and they are about to have a baby.  (If you've not seen the ad, its for a "four-door sports car.")

There is a sense in which the father in this commercial sees the future.  Nothing particularly dramatic about it, but he knows that a baby means a different life than the one he now has.  And he must begin planning for that new day.

I think that biblical prophets are more like this father than they are psychics who promise to tell you your future.  True, they've been given a bit deeper sense of what is coming than this dad, but they are not really predicting the future in the sense most people mean by that phrase.  Rather they know God intimately enough that they know where things will end up when God acts.  They know the character of God and so they know what will happen when God shakes things up.

That's what is going on in Mary's song in today's gospel.  Mary's going to have a baby, and she knows that this baby will have a much bigger impact than the typical one.  This baby is part of God's plans, and so she can sing her prophetic song just as surely as that father can see the need for a four-door car. 
  "(God) has brought down 
         the powerful from their thrones,

     and Lifted up the lowly;  

  he has filled the hungry with good things,

     and sent the rich away empty.

  He has helped his servant Israel,

     in remembrance of his mercy,

  according to the promise he made 

         to our ancestors,

     to Abraham and to his 

         descendants forever."

God has; not God will, but God has.  This is not so much a prediction of the future as it is a realization of what God's future looks like, a realizations that is so  real for Mary that it seems already accomplished.  As many have noted, prophets' sense of what God is up to is so vivid that they often get their tense wrong.

I think that people of deep faith always have a bit of this vision of the future within them.  It is why they can actually love their enemies and work for a better world even when that work costs them dearly and does not show the sort of results our culture validates.  

We're about the celebrate the birth of Mary's baby, as we most certainly should.  But for that celebration to mean much, we also need to see a bit of the future that Mary sees.  

Can you see the future?  God's future?

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