Rethinking Church

Yesterday I reflected on a God who sees a hungry raven and is moved to help. Today the gospel lection shows Jesus trying to get away by himself. But the crowds find him, and when he sees them, he is moved with compassion.  He heals their sick and later feeds the entire bunch, once again revealing a God who is moved by need. Yet the Church often seems focused more on other issues. The recent crack-down on nuns by the Vatican seems to me to place doctrine well above compassion, and that does not seem to be the God revealed in Jesus.

Not that there is any need to single out Roman Catholics. We Presbyterians have been engaged in theological and doctrinal wrangling over ordination standards for decades now. It has most certainly diverted time, energy, and money from missions of compassion and from acting as Jesus did.

Of course Jesus wasn't just saccharine sweet and nice. He scared people because he looked like a threat to those in power. But we Presbyterians are mostly a threat to ourselves.

It seems to me that the Church is very often focused mostly on itself. I don't want to diminish the considerable good done by Christians and the Church, but if you look at the typical church budget, you will see that it is mostly directed inward. It goes to fund worship that we like, music that we prefer, programs for our kids, fellowship events for us, and so on. Some of this is essential activity in cultivating a faith community, but a lot of it is a consumerist driven desire for the church to "meet my needs."

My own congregation is fairly typical on this. We have many wonderful things that we do, but when push comes to shove, we are driven more by what we want than the example of Jesus or what God wants. And I'm embarrassed to say the percentage of our budget that actually goes to mission.

We Christians say that we are the body of Christ, but I sometimes wonder what sort of glimpse of Jesus people get when they encounter us.  And that makes me wonder if we don't need to do some serious rethinking on what it means for us to be the Church.

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Pictures of God

W. C. Fields is quoted as saying, "I love mankind. It's people I can't stand." It's easy to be for something in principle but struggle to demonstrate it in individual, concrete encounters. Lots of people want to help the poor, but they wouldn't dare invite them into their homes. It can be difficult to reconcile the big picture with on the ground realities.

It strikes me that big picture notions of God don't always cohere with on the ground expectations of how God acts. It is common for people to speak of a loving God and then direct God's ire at those they don't approve of. And those who pride themselves on not denying God's love to anyone often don't expect that love actually to do anything. God's love is a nice concept, but we often seem to think it quite impotent.

What a contrast to the words of today's psalm. Young ravens cry, and God acts. I think that is a rather startling picture of God to a lot of people. Our images of God are often of a very removed and distant figure, not so different from the Deists' "watchmaker" god who designs and builds the universe, winds it up, and walks off. Such a god never says, "Oh look, a baby raven is hungry. Let me help."

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Offended by Jesus

Jesus' experience at Nazareth is not so unusual. Many of us have found ourselves trapped in old identities. I grew up in "the country" and there I was Rose and Ken's boy. Even as an adult, this is some way remained my identity. Likewise a bad reputation gained as a youth can follow someone around for years, sometimes preventing people from seeing the very different person that youth as grown up to be. And this same phenomenon affects groups, organizations, and institutions. Once people "know" who or what a group is, they respond based on that "knowledge," even if it no longer is accurate.

Years ago, the now defunct GM car brand, Oldsmobile, ran a series of ads that trumpeted the theme, "Not Your Father's Oldsmobile." Clearly this was an attempt to redefine their brand, to break free from what people already "knew" about them. (Given that Oldsmobile no longer exists, I'm guessing they were unsuccessful.)

When Jesus acts in ways that do not fit into what his neighbors already "know" about him, even though they are impressed, they take offense. Literally translated, they are scandalized by it. It's an experience that I imagine must be tiring for Jesus. After all, it still goes on all the time.

Lots of people, even ones who've had little experience with Christianity or the church, think they "know" Jesus. And we who are church folks certainly think we "know" Jesus, although depending on which church you go to, this Jesus can look remarkably different.

In the same way, people inside and outside the church "know" it is. We "know" what it's about and what it does. And if it acts in ways contrary to what we "know," we'll take offense, just as we'll take offense if someone speaks of a Jesus who acts contrary to what we "know."

Where do we get what we "know" about Jesus? About the Church? About what it means to be a Christian, a disciple of Jesus? And when we encounter something that offends our sensibilities about these things, how do we figure out whether or not we've just taken offense, just been scandalized, by Jesus himself?

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The Kingdom is Like...

"The kingdom of heaven is like... The kingdom of heaven is like... The kingdom of heaven is like..." so says Jesus.  I wonder if we modern folks wouldn't have gotten frustrated very quickly with Jesus.  "Don't tell us what the kingdom is like!  What is it?"

A conceit of the modern era is that everything can be explained. We haven't figured it all out yet, but we will. Modern people do not do so well with mystery. (Some argue that post modern folks do better, but that's another discussion.) It's no coincidence that Unitarianism was a modern, Enlightenment undertaking. And while that movement was in part a reaction against wars and violence in Europe that seemed to be driven by competing religious doctrines, it was also a move away from mystery. Its god was high concept: rational, logical, and not engaged in human affairs or natural events. 

But I do not mean to pick on Unitarians. Most Trinitarian Christians have God safely secured behind walls of doctrine, logic, and a thoroughly modern, scientific worldview. Even fundamentalists, who may view science as an enemy, see the world and God through this scientific, modern worldview, where truth is about demonstrable facts. (Belief in supernatural "facts" has little to do with embracing mystery.)

Jesus begins his ministry with the proclamation, one shared with John the Baptist, that the Kingdom has come near. Clearly this Kingdom has to figure prominently in the work of the Church, but the Kingdom is like... Its arrival, its actual shape, our place in it, etc. are shrouded in mystery. But we don't care for mystery so we have decided we will turn this thing we cannot fully embrace or understand into something plain, clear, and straightforward: going to heaven when we die. No mystery required at all. Unitarians, Trinitarians, and even those who aren't religious at all are happy to embrace such a notion.

Who in their right mind would start a religious movement around something only partially grasped and hidden in mystery? "The kingdom of heaven is like..." No church consultant would ever let that become a centerpiece of a congregation's life and ministry.  So where does mystery live in the Church?

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Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching (Trinity) Sunday

I have a lot of colleagues who would be perfectly happy if there were no Trinity Sunday on the Christian calendar.  Certainly doing a Trinity sermon can pose challenges.  Because the the term Trinity never occurs in Scripture, Bible readings for this Sunday sometimes have fairly strained relationship to this central, Christian doctrine.  And then there is the basic logical problem of 1+1+1=1 that leads many, even many preachers, to relegate this doctrine to "only of interest to academic theologians" status.

I am not dealing with such problems myself this year. Our congregation is doing a lessons and carols styled journey through the Christian year, and so there is no sermon today. But I am in some ways sorry not to be preaching on Trinity Sunday. Despite the obvious challenges , I think the doctrine provides some very practical help when it comes to envisioning God.

A seemingly universal, religious tendency is to render God manageable. As a good Calvinist, I know that we humans love our idols, substitutes for God that are much more willing to do our bidding and much less inclined to challenge us or frighten us or demand that we change. But a Trinitarian God resists such attempts if, for no other reasons, the difficulty we have explaining and picturing this God.

Of course most of us are not really Trinitarians. We are functional Unitarians. You can promote any member of the Trinity to top status and make the other two junior partners, but my Presbyterian experience has been almost entirely a Unitarianism of the Father sort.  God is Father and Father is God.  Consider how people began their prayers.  Rarely do they pray to Jesus or the Spirit.  "Father God" is even a popular opening. Jesus and the Spirit are not discounted, but they don't have the full godhead credentials for some reason.

Now there are plenty of people who are Unitarians on purpose, but that is not the issue on my mind. I'm talking about Presbyterians who today sing "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty" with great gusto.  They don't flinch singing "God in three persons, blessed Trinity," but when it comes to relating with God, this goes out the window.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who called God the great iconoclast who keeps shattering our images of God so we can replace them with better, but still incomplete ones. And the Trinity keeps chipping away at our too small images of God, forever reminding us that God is always beyond, fuller, more than we can ever imagine.

Sermon video - Pregnant with God's Nevertheless

Sermons also available on YouTube

Dealing with Weeds

There is an unfortunate tendency among us liberal Christians to act as though sin and evil are not real problems. There are only environmental factors, lack of education, poverty and desperation, etc. This tendency is not as strong as it was a century ago when many liberal Christians expected "progress" to bring the kingdom, but it is still one of our biases.  And so we sometimes think it quite easy to follow the lesson of today's parable.  We have no difficulty leaving the field a mix of wheat and weeds.  After all, weeds are just disadvantaged and misunderstood.

Now I don't mean to make light of the very real impact that social forces have in shaping our world and in shaping individual's lives. There are countless human problems that can and have been addressed via education, increased opportunities, social reforms, and so on. But these cannot address a more fundamental problem with the human condition. There is something inherently tragic and self-destructive about us. We are quite proficient at doing the wrong thing even when we know full well what the right thing is and know it is in our self interest to do that right thing. We have a tendency toward greed and covetousness that only seems to get worse the more that we have.

I don't understand acknowledging the basic problem to lead to a pessimistic outlook. Instead is like an alcoholic or addict admitting his fundamental problem as the first step inrecovery. It is acknowledging that I need help, that I need "saving." I cannot be who I am meant to be without help from God and others.

Jesus' parable presumes that when we are transformed and made new in him, we will no longer feel quite at home in the the world as it currently operates. We will be fundamentally out of sync with many of the forces that drive society, politics, economics, and so on.  And I think that it is only when we experience this strong dissonance with the world that Jesus' parable begins to resonate. Only when we recognize that the way of Jesus is in deep conflict with the ways of the world do we face the dilemma of the slaves in the parable who want to do something about the weeds. Only then do we recognize that parable is not about tolerance or those who are simply different, it is about a tolerance of those who are our enemies.

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Church as "Family"

The term "Church Family" is very familiar to many of us who grew up in church.  This was likely the most common way the congregations where I learned church self-identified. Ask church members to describe the congregation and the word family was sure to be used.

I assume that this metaphor of family drew on positive aspects of family life, people who loved you and cared for you, etc. But of course there were negative pieces to the metaphor as well. And these probably are more problematic for churches than they are for real families. Families are rather closed systems. One does not join a family. You are either born into it or marry into it. And while things are changing today with more blended families and interracial families, on the whole, families tend to all look the same.

Churches often amplify some problematic aspects of family. In some congregations, you can be a member for years and still get treated like an outsider, not fully a member of the family. Church congregations are often made up of folks who all look very much the same. And not only is racial diversity a real problem for many congregations, but class diversity, income diversity, cultural diversity, and so on are problems as well.

I have recently become pastor at a vibrant congregation that, thankfully, has more diversity than I've typically experienced in Presbyterian congregations. But if you don't like classical music and you aren't at a certain income level and you don't lean a little toward the "progressive" side of politics, you may not feel that you really fit here.

Someone told him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”  But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”   Matthew 12:47-50

I suppose the Jesus sanctions the use of the family metaphor for the church, but it is a significantly redefined picture of family. The likeness of this family is not about race, ethnicity, culture, income, etc. It is about discipleship, about doing God's will. Now I imagine that just about any church would embrace the idea that doing God's will is integral to being a Christian. But I suspect that more often than not, doing God's will is not what binds congregations together as families.

If we're going to sing songs in worship, I suppose there is no avoiding that worship at one place may appeal to someone more than worship somewhere else. But I still wonder. What is it that really defines us as a congregation? What notion of family, or some other metaphor, creates and shapes us? And where does God's will fit in all that?

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Where Did This Come From?

One of the difficult things about being a new pastor in a congregation is figuring out what changes to make. I take it as a given that changes must be made. This is a continual, ongoing process. The kingdom, God's reign, has not yet arrived, and we must be continually open to where the Spirit is leading us.

However, it is often quite different to differentiate between the Spirit's leading and personal preferences and inclinations.  Incoming pastors arrive with notions of what works well and presumptions of what is needed. Likewise, congregations have notions of what works well and presumptions of how things should be.  And it can be very easy for pastors and congregations each to assume they know best what is appropriate for their particular congregations. But such "knowledge" doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the Spirit's guidance.

In today's gospel, Jesus shows up at his hometown, and people are astounded. He makes a big impression, but then they start thinking about who he is and what they already "know" about him.

"Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power? Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?" And they took offense at him.

Most church folks have notions and expectations about how to do and be church. The more serious we are about church, the more rigid such expectations and notions often become. Pastors and other dedicated leaders in congregations are perhaps most prone to such problems. So how are we to sense the guidance of the Spirit who - like the wind - "blows where it chooses," who - like Jesus - often shows little respect for how we've always done it or how we're sure it should be.

 I'm more than a little suspicious that if we've never had our religious certainties upended; if we've never felt threatened and dislocated regarding our religious habits, we're doing a remarkably good job of hiding from the Holy Spirit.

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Sermon - Pregnant with God's Nevertheless

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 1:1-14

Pregnant with God’s Nevertheless

James Sledge                                                                           May 27, 2012 – Pentecost

I suspect there are very few pastors who have not had a conversation like this one.  “Pastor, we raised our children in the church.  We tried very hard to bring them up in the faith.  But now that they’re grown and have children of their own, they want nothing to do with the church.”

Or this one.  “Pastor, how are we supposed to keep our teenager engaged at church?  He doesn’t like Sunday School.  He hates worship.  And he thinks youth group is a waste of time.”

Such conversations sometimes lead to reminiscing about those days, not so long ago, when stores were closed and the sports teams didn’t play on Sunday.  When I was growing up the schools didn’t schedule games on Wednesday nights because of Wednesday night prayer services.  It sure was nice when the culture cleared the table of everything else and said, “The only sanctioned activity right now is church, and we expect you to participate.”

But that’s not our world, and in a very real sense, the church finds itself in exile.  Church has been unceremoniously cast out from the center of culture.  Church is increasingly pushed to the margins and, all too often, to the margins of our own lives.  Some even proclaim that Church is dying. 

The prophet Ezekiel has a vision where he is brought out and set down in the midst of a valley, a valley filled with bones.  If we’re familiar with the bouncy, “Dem Bones” song, we may miss the horror of the scene.  It is a battlefield, perhaps even the scene of a massacre.  There was a slaughter so complete that no one was left to bury the victims.  The bodies were stripped of valuables by those who killed them, then left for buzzards and other scavengers.  Finally, the sun baked and bleached the bones.  There were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry.

“Can these bones live?”  What a strange question.  Of course they cannot.  But at least the prophet has the good sense not to say so to God.  “O Lord Yahweh, you know.”

Last year a group of conservative, Presbyterian pastors wrote an open letter to our denomination expressing their fears about where we were headed.  The phrase in the letter that caught the most attention, that became a shorthand term for the letter, said that the PC(USA) is “deathly ill.”

A local pastor, Maryann McKibben Dana of Idylwood Presbyterian, recorded a video responds to this letter. (You can view it at her blog, The Blue Room.) 

What I Really Need

Today's gospel is one of those passages that has always made me a bit uncomfortable. People bring a paralyzed man to Jesus, presumably for healing. Jesus is impressed by this act of faith on their parts and responds, not by healing the man, but by saying, "Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven." Only after some biblical experts complain that Jesus is doing what only God can do does Jesus actually heal the man.  And so the healing seems motivated less by compassion and more as a proof.

Now I suppose that Jesus' compassion is more than evident in numerous other passages, and Matthew may simply be making a point that has little to do with Jesus' actual motivations. Nonetheless, I can't help wondering what Jesus thought this man most needed. Did he need forgiveness, restoration and peace with God, more than he needed to walk?

I also wonder about myself.  What is it that I most need from Jesus?  There are certainly times when I feel an acute need for restoration and forgiveness, but more often these are quite a ways down my needs list - or at least my wants list. 

When our children were very small, we often did not give them what they wanted because we knew it was not what they really needed. Recalling this reminds me of a time when Jesus told a rich man exactly what he most needed.  "Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, 'You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.' "

I know that's not what I want.  I hope that's not what I really need.

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Hi, My Name Is ____, and I'll Be Your Host

At my first meeting in my new presbytery, there was a time before the actual meeting for break-out groups on different topics. I went to one on hospitality led by Henry Brinton, pastor at Fairfax Presbyterian. He has a new book entitled The Welcoming Congregation: Roots and Fruits of Christian Hospitality.  During his presentation he said something along these lines. "Members must start to think of themselves as hosts rather than guests."

I have yet to meet the church congregation that did not describe itself as "warm and friendly," but that warmth and friendliness is often difficult for an "outsider" to encounter.  In every church I've been a member or served I've heard people share their experience of attending worship and standing around in a fellowship time afterwards while nary a soul speaks to or even acknowledges them. In a day when it was somewhat safe to assume that most people were church goers, this may have had little impact other than to turn away a potential member. But in a day when larger and larger percentages of our population have little or no church experience, such a lack of hospitality may well be how that person meets Christ. And even though our congregation may speak of a Christ who embraces the outsider, the outcast, and the marginalized, a guest in our worship may find scant evidence of that.

Brinton's comment about church members understanding themselves as hosts rather than guests, goes to the heart of what Christian hospitality is.  It is less about warmth and friendliness and more about realizing that each of us is called to be Christ to others. But all too often, the consumerist mindset of our culture has transformed the church. We go to get something, to be served. Staff and leaders are hosts who are supposed to wait on and care for those who come.

Today's reading from the letter to the Ephesian church has a famous line where the writer says the Jesus gifts each of us "to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ." ("Saints" refers to all believers, not a select few.) The work of ministry is a communal task. Some of this work requires special gifts, but Christian hospitality is not one of them. Some of us are more outgoing than others, some of us can strike up a conversation with a stranger easier than others, but I dare say there is hardly a one of us who does not understand how to be a good host.

The problem of hospitality - or the lack of it - in many churches is not a lack of skills, it is a problem of perspective. If you are a churchgoer, when you head to your local congregation on a Sunday, do you understand yourself as going, at least in part, to engage in the work of ministry?

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