Institutions, Communion, and Community

Doug Ottati, my very favorite professor from seminary, said on a number of occasions that all the salvific activity of God, the entire Jesus event, was about "true communion with God in true community with others." In other words, it is about relationship in cruciform shape. It's not just about me and God, and it's not just about getting along with others. Jesus' life, death, and resurrection means to create a transformed relationship with God within a transformed community of relationships.

This relational activity on God's part certainly has substance and content. There are standards of behavior, and there are calls to right living. But these are invitations to move toward something new and wonderful, not boundaries that declare who's in and who's out.

This boundary issue is on display in today's gospel. Jesus, as happens so regularly in the gospels, is enmeshed in conflict with religious authorities.  It is a recurring theme: Jesus is rejected by the good, religious folk of his day but very much at home with sinners and outcasts. And it seems likely that Jesus' focus on relationship is at the heart of this.

Religions inevitably acquire institutional components and functions. This is not entirely bad, and it is necessary to some degree. It is nearly impossible for groups larger than just a few people to function without some sort of organization, some sort of institutional structure.  But it is very difficult for institutions to nurture relationships. Relationships often seem threaten to institutions for they easily subvert institutional boundaries.

On some level, most congregations seem to sense this. The tendency for churches to speak of themselves as families points to it, although this family is often more dream or illusion than reality. I've seen a number of congregations that view having a single worship service as a measure of all being one big family or community.  But having 200 people all in one service doesn't make them family, doesn't put them in relationship with one another. On more than one occasion I've been in discussions with church leaders who have just declared, "We're really a family; we all know one another" only to realize they don't recognize any of several names put before them to serve on a church committee.

I think that congregations need constantly to reflect on the degree to which the institutional overwhelms the relational. Jesus' own encounter with the good, religious folk of his day should be a constant reminder that well-intended, sincere guardians of religious institutions can have more difficulty recognizing God in their midst than sinners and outcasts. This tragic tendency begs religious institutions to repeatedly ask themselves, "Are all our actions serving the goal of true communion with God in true community with others?"

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Moving, Sin, and Other Stuff

The moving van arrived at the church manse on Saturday morning. (The storm that left us without power until today complicated this only slightly.) We are moving from a home with a garage, a basement, and a large shed into a church manse with a small shed, no basement, and no garage. Let's just say there are lots and lots of boxes, along with a washer, dryer, and a good deal of furniture and lamps stashed away in the attic.

There nothing quite like a move to reveal the degree to which you are afflicted with the American idolatry of stuff.  (George Carlin used to do a hilarious comedy routine about us and our stuff. You can find it on YouTube.) My wife got rid of a lot of stuff before we moved to Falls Church, but still we will soon be looking for a home of our own in the area, one with a basement and garage so we can store all that stuff that won't quite fit where we are now.

And now, after several days offline, I look at the daily readings and see Paul talking about how we are no longer slaves to sin. In Christ we are freed from sin and become "slaves to righteousness."  And Jesus is all worked up about how the Temple has stuff being sold there, how it has gone from a "house of prayer" to a "den of robbers."

I'm not entirely sure exactly where these verses intersect with me and my stuff. But it does seem that in some ways I am still a slave to the ways of this world, thinking that I won't be happy without more and more stuff. And my life is often animated more by the stuff I have and the stuff I want than by a desire to do God's will. But of course some stuff is necessary for life, and knowing just where one crosses the boundary between necessary/reasonable and idolatry of stuff can be difficult to figure precisely.

I think that Christians like me, who grew up in what purported to be a Christian culture, sometimes have difficulty reflecting on how our day to day lives do or don't square with our faith. Because we were products of this "Christian culture," there is a certain presumption that typical, middle-class, American-dream values arein fact Christian.  All of our stuff is "God's blessings."

I've been talking with the Stewardship Committee here about a Fall campaign that moves away from fundraising and focuses instead on growing in faith through spiritual disciplines of giving and generosity. I want us all to reflect on the ways in which we struggle to be the generous disciples we are called to be because so much of our energy, efforts, and cash are devoted to stuff.

Paul promises that we can be set free.  We can become new creations, no longer bound by what marketers or ego or envy tells us we cannot live without. And surely we want to be freed and made new.

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Sermon audio - Standing Up to Goliaths

Sermon - Standing Up to Goliaths

1 Samuel 17:32-49

Standing Up to Goliaths

James Sledge                                                                                       June 24, 2012

Some years ago a church member came to me with a problem. Her child was planning to do something she thought foolish, and she was looking for some help from me.  This woman was very involved in the congregation.  She was an elder, a tireless volunteer at that church, and I always got the sense that she was serious about her faith.

Her son was also a person of significant faith, having been very involved in the youth group at church before attending college. And he was quite involved in campus ministry there. In fact, the foolish thing he was planning to do involved a campus ministry mission trip.  The trip was to Haiti, and it was one of those times when Haiti had descended into political chaos.  The campus ministry organization had discussed cancelling the trip, but in the end, the decision had been made to go ahead with it.

Needless to say this mother was not happy.  Along with typical concerns for such mission trips – unsanitary conditions, tropical diseases, and so on – there was now the added the risk of political instability accompanied by violence. It was not too difficult for Mom to imagine some group thinking that kidnapping an American college student would be a great tactic.

However, this woman’s son truly felt called to take part in this mission trip. He was motivated by a deep faith commitment to help the poor, to take God’s love to people who lived in terrible circumstances.  And ultimately he did go, although his mother did succeed in getting the campus ministry group to take some additional safety and security precautions.

This story is far from unique.  I know of many cases where parents raised their children in the church and worried about them wandering from the faith.  But they were mortified when that faith led children to do something dangerous, called them into a low paying career, or caused them to adopt a lifestyle that didn’t fit well with the parents’ suburban, upper middle-class values.  These parents wanted their children to have faith, just not too much of it.

And that makes me wonder what David’s Mom thought about the whole Goliath episode.

Be Nice

A retreat leader once led an exercise to help a group of church leaders determine what their core values were. As a church, this group naturally assumed that their core values were somehow connected to their faith, but the retreat leader challenged them.   "What," he asked, "were the norms that, if you violated them, you would know rather quickly you had done something wrong?"

After a great deal of discussion, the group decided that there was a vague expectation of belief in God, but pretty much anything short of full blown atheism or Satan worship would not violate any real norms.  The only other norm or core value they could identify was something they labeled "Be nice."

After reading this account, I shared it with the governing board where I served at the time. At first they assumed that this would not describe that congregation, but after some discussion began to think that it did.  And they began to openly wonder whether or not this constituted significant enough core values for them to be the Church of Jesus Christ.

Now I certainly think the world would be a gentler place if everyone tried to be nice.  It is an admirable trait. But "Be nice" was not the core of Jesus' message as I understand it.Today's gospel even features Jesus talking about disciplining church members, an event I have never personally witnessed in a congregation. And I'm not sure if that is because such action was never warranted, or if it wouldn't have "been nice."

Now many of us have witnessed the bad side of enforcing standards. There have been terrible abuses of power against those who take unpopular stands or who are different from the majority. But I'm not sure that this problem is really fixed by "Be nice." (I wonder if there is a parallel to this with regards to evangelism. Sometimes the Presbyterian and Mainline response to the manipulative, coercive, and heavy-handed evangelism practices of other groups has been to do no evangelism at all. No danger of doing it badly, but is that what Jesus expects of us?)

Have you ever considered the core values of your congregation?  What are they, and where did they come from? And perhaps most importantly, are they what Jesus is calling your congregation to be and do?

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Similes, Metaphors, and Religious Arrogance

Similes and metaphors, by their very nature, allow for a variety of meaning.  To say something is like something else leaves a great deal up to the listener's experience of that something else. Those who use metaphor and simile have made a move toward art or poetry and away from scientific precision.  And for whatever reasons, much of what we know of God and life with God comes to us in this less than precise fashion.

But poetic rendering does not necessarily permit a "God is whoever or whatever I imagine God to be" proposition that is sometimes heard in popular religious thought.  God may be beyond our comprehension, and no image of God may be adequate. But if there is a God then presumably there are things of which it can be said, "God is like this and so not like that," or "A follower of Jesus should be like this and not like that."

Jesus says, "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." In making sense of this, a lot is riding on what a person thinks it means to become "like children." And this problem is compounded by a kind of religious arrogance (a perhaps peculiarly Protestant one) that imagines the Bible is written for us and addresses us directly.

If you want to see this in full blown form, consider how a great many people handle the book of Revelation as a book of predictions.  Some imaginative interpreters even claim there are accurate accounts of nuclear naval battles depicted in the book. (I tried, but I couldn't see it.)  But of course the book is actually a letter written to Christian congregations many centuries ago. And while it may have been intended for wider circulation than the congregations mentioned in it, if it is written for us, telling of the end of the world in our time, what were the original recipients supposed to do with it?

The letters of Paul and other epistles point to this same problem. With them we are reading someone else's mail, and because such letters were the only means Paul and others had to communicate with distant congregations, we are essentially hearing one side of a conversation. We are not always sure of the problem being addressed by a letter, and if we don't know what Paul is talking about when he instructs or corrects a congregation, we may misunderstand him badly.

That brings me back to becoming "like children." I have frequently heard people start talking about the psychological makeup of a child and how Jesus is calling us to emulate this. But if Jesus is actually speaking to the people in front of him 2000 years ago, doesn't it stand to reason that he expects them to understand what he says without the benefit of any psychology. The Gospel of Matthew is written not so many decades after Jesus lived, and so wouldn't its author have reported Jesus' words fully expecting his readers to understand what Jesus meant? And so doesn't it stand to reason that this simile depends on a First Century understanding of what is involved in becoming like a child?

This does not necessarily mean that all modern understandings of childhood are useless in understanding what Jesus is saying. But if we imagine there are no historical or cultural barriers to encountering Jesus, surely we will create for ourselves a peculiarly modern Jesus who would be unrecognizable to his first followers. Of course if Jesus came of us and not them, that may not be a problem.

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Sermon audio - Seeing as God Sees

Sermon and worship audios also available on Falls Church Presbyterian website.

Restless Hearts

 As a deer longs for flowing streams,
     so my soul longs for you, O God.
 My soul thirsts for God,
     for the living God.           from Psalm 42

"Our hearts are restless until they find rest in you."  So said Augustine of Hippo some 16 centuries ago. The book of Acts quotes the Apostle Paul speaking of a human inclination to "search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him..." Some writers in spirituality have said that this restlessness to find God is the beginning of spirituality.  And if you walk through the Spirituality section in your local Barnes & Nobles, or if you search the topic at Amazon.com, your will find ample evidence that this restlessness is as strong as ever in our "post religious" age.

This would seem to be wonderful news for the Church, this realization that, in a time of shrinking congregations, people are groping, searching, and longing for God. I think it is good news, but it does require that congregations become places that feel open, welcome, and inviting to those who are groping, searching, and longing.

Many of us in the Church grew up in a very settled religious landscape. People might experience a time of restlessness, such as when they went off to college, but there was a basic assumption that religious questions were settled ones. Restlessness was a phase some young people went through, but its primary religious implication was a period of time away from church.

But for a variety of reasons, old patterns of restlessness have broken down. The religious landscape itself is far from settled, and becoming older and more settled no longer means a return to church. Indeed, the term "return" no longer applies because many were never in church as children to begin with.  Restlessness, and particularly religious restlessness, is no longer a phase people go through at some predictable moment in their lives.  Rather it is a desire, a longing for something that is not fully known.

Congregations have a tremendous opportunity to assist people whose restlessness has them searching and longing. But I think that requires a subtle shift for some of us. It does not change our core beliefs or proclamation, but it does mean becoming more of a place for restless people. As I look back, my childhood notion of church is a settled place for a settled people. But in a new day and age, I think it needs to become more of a place where restless people can find their rest in God.

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Sermon video - Seeing as God Sees

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Are You There, God?

 Give ear to my words, O LORD;
     give heed to my sighing.
 Listen to the sound of my cry,
     my King and my God,
     for to you I pray.       Psalm 5:1-2

I had one of those nights that I assume all people have from time to time. I was trying to sleep, but my mind would not be still. Questions about how to handle this situation or that kept rearing their heads and insisting on wrestling with me. But these internal discussions seemed largely futile, leading nowhere. Contradictory options kept playing out in my head, but none seemed a good answer.  I would really have liked some clarity, some good guidance.

Being a pastor, one might assume that I immediately turned to God for help, but I must confess that I wrestled for some time without trying that. Funny how it sometimes requires desperation to move me toward God. But if I was expected a blissful, divine deliverance, none was forthcoming.

This morning's psalm may not be the best example (Try Psalm 22's "My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?"), but it is a reminder that even the writers of Scripture were quite familiar with what some have labeled "the absence of God."  They too struggled, turned to God, and found themselves groping in the dark, crying out without a response. And so they pleaded with God to listen, to heed their cries.

There is something comforting in knowing that people of deep faith struggle at times with God's absence (as Jesus did on the cross). But even more comforting is something else I share with the psalmists, the assurance that God's absence is not permanent. This assurance is born of previous experiences of God's deliverance and reliability, and virtually all the psalms of lament, those psalms that cry out to God in agony, resolve in praise for what God has done.

If you are anything like me, there are times when the problems of the moment capture your attention so fully that it is difficult to see past them. In that moment, there can seem to be no options, no help, and a kind of paralysis sometimes sets in. But in my experience, God is faithful, even though I often am not. I do know there are people who suffer in ways that I cannot comprehend and for which I have no easy answers.  But with the sort of struggles that so often paralyze me, I invariably end up looking back and wondering why my difficulty seemed so overwhelming.  Sometimes I even think I hear Jesus asking, "Why did you doubt?"

Are you there, God? Ah, yes, there you are.

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Sermon - Seeing as God Sees

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

Seeing as God Sees

James Sledge                                                                                     June 17, 2012

Let’s be honest. Unlike Samuel, most of us would have gone ahead and anointed Eliab. I know that I would. If I had somehow been paying enough attention that I heard God in the first place and went to Bethlehem looking for a new king, I’m pretty sure that Eliab would have seemed an answer to prayer. Here’s the one! Pour the oil on his head. Glad that’s over. Can’t believe we found a new king so quickly.

We Presbyterians have our own version of Samuel.  Because we’re big on representative government, Samuel is not one person but rather a committee – a nominating committee to be precise. We have nominating committees charged to find those called to be deacons and ruling elders, and we have pastor nominating committees to find the person God is calling to be a teaching elder or pastor. Like Samuel, these committees are charged to find the one or ones that God already has in mind, and we use fancy words like discernment to make clear that the task is to hear and sense the Spirit guiding us to the one God has already chosen.

Now clearly I’ve had some recent experience with this congregation’s pastor nominating committee, although I did not see how they went about discerning and deciding. I’ve not been here long enough to see an officer nominating committee at work.  However I have seen them in a number of other congregations, and I’ve talked with enough pastors about how it works in their churches to have some sense of what is typical.

The stereotypical officer nominating committee works like this. A group of folks, including representatives from Deacons and Session, are cajoled into this task. Often people are chosen to represent some of the different groups and interests in the congregation. It is common to have someone from Presbyterian Women, someone from the youth, and so on.  Then this group is “elected” at congregational meeting.

Then comes the hard work. A first meeting is set, and nominating committee members arrive with pictorial directories in hand.

Clarence the Cross-Eyed Bear

I've used this title before in a post, but I couldn't help myself.  I'm not sure where the title comes from. There was a Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion character that was popular many years ago. Perhaps familiarity with this lion got conflated with the song "Gladly the Cross I'd Bear" to form Clarence, the sight impaired bear. Regardless, this apparent child's misconstruing of a Christian song has lots of company among adults who have distorted Jesus' words just as badly.

The term "my cross to bear" is a common one, even outside the Christian faith.  It has come to mean little more than some difficulty to endure.  The strange thing about this phrase, it least in my experience, is that it is most often used by people to speak of a difficult they have no control over. Be it some illness or chronic condition, ungrateful children, a crummy job, or countless other examples, these crosses are not something people picked up willingly. Bearing crosses has come to stand for patient endurance, but it seems to have nothing to do with self-denial.

The words of Jesus on bearing the cross are all about self-denial. When Peter objects vehemently to Jesus saying he is going to Jerusalem to die, Jesus reprimands him and then insists that following him requires a willingness to act contrary to self interest and take up a cross.

Now it occurs to me that there are plenty of Christians who willingly, in ways large and small, deny themselves in order to do what the think Jesus asks of them. It may simply be denying themselves some consumer item in order to give more money to the church or some ministry or cause. Or it may involve much larger sacrifices such as giving up a high paying career to run a non-profit that does the work of Jesus.

But while most congregations have shining examples of cross bearing, individuals who take on burdens they did not have to for the sake of Jesus and the new day he heralds, congregations themselves often have much more difficulty with cross bearing and self denial.

When congregations or their governing bodies discuss new ministries or new directions for the congregation, there is almost always an absolute assumption that no decision should endanger or injure the church in any way. In a parallel to most other institutions, congregations have a very strong survival instinct, and they almost always discuss what they should do or are called to do from that standpoint.  And so while individual members may embrace the call to deny self and take up their crosses, congregations seem less likely to do so.

Our denomination's Book of Order speaks of the Church's calling in its opening pages. "The Church is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of losing its life." (F-1.0301) But in practice, the Church is very unwilling to lose its life. In its practice, the Church very often sounds much like Peter, who responds to Jesus' willingness to take up the cross by saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." Clarence the Cross-Eyed Bear.

So... how does a sense of self-denial and a willingness to take up the cross, something many church members know well how to do, become a core part of who we are as congregations?

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