Arguing with Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Enough with the Worship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Sermon video: The Greatest Gift

More videos available on YouTube.

Sermon: The Greatest Gift

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

The Greatest Gift

James Sledge                                                               February 3, 2013

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

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

____________________________________________________________________________

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

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

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

I'll Never Forget You

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

Isaiah 49:15

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

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

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

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

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

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Grumpy Pastor

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

 Isaiah 49:6

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Giving Offense

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

VIPs and Outcasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Sermon video: What Sort of Good News?

Others sermon videos available on YouTube.http://www.youtube.com/user/revsledge

Sermon: What Sort of Good News?

Luke 4:14-21

What Sort of Good News?

James Sledge                                                                   January 27, 2013

How many of you watched the inauguration on Monday?  It was a great day for a lot of people, a celebration of the good news of Obama’s win and a second term.  Of course it’s not necessarily good news if you are a Republican or you disagree with Obama.

If you are from Seattle, the outcome of a football game a few weeks ago was very likely good news to you, but for a lot of people around here it was a bitter pill to swallow.

The term translated “good news” in the New Testament is the root of our word evangelism. But how many of you think of good things that need celebrating when you hear the terms evangelism or evangelical? For some Progressive Christians, the term evangelical is used almost as a slur. But why? Why would we react negatively to good news? Surely it is because of the particular content we have come to associate with evangelism.

What is the content of the good news, the gospel that followers of Jesus are called to share?  You would think that after all these centuries, this would be an easy question to answer, but there seem to be a lot of different answers. 

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the Christian gospel sometimes becomes about escape.  “Good news! Even though the world’s a crummy place and you may experience suffering and difficulties, if you just believe the right things, you will get a ticket to heaven when you die.”  Some have labeled this a gospel of evacuation. Liberal Christianity usually rejects the harsher requirements of this gospel, deemphasizing or completely leaving out the need to believe the right things, but it often maintains the evacuation part.  “Good news! God loves you and you’ll go to heaven.”

A Little Ambiguity

"The kingdom of God is as if... With what can we compare the kingdom of God?.. It is like..." Similarities and comparisons. Is that as close as we can get to the kingdom?

The modern, scientific age (which is perhaps now giving way to post-modernity) is all about precision and rationality and logic.  It is about empirical truth.  Not that we know nothing of things that don't fit easily into such categories; beauty or love for example.  Still, much of modern religious thinking has sought to work out its religious theologies and doctrines in great detail. Much of these doctrines and theologies are very robust, logical arguments explaining with great precision what it means that God is sovereign or that Jesus suffered and died.  And this drive to work things out just so hasn't very much room for ambiguity and uncertainty. It seeks clarity and certainty.

To which Jesus says, "as if, compare, is like." 

I have long found the rigid, religious certitude of some fundamentalists very off-putting.  However I have found some liberal reactions to this so vague as to be equally off-putting as well.  At times they seem to say, "Well since we can't say with absolute precision exactly how all this works, we can't say very much at all." And Mainline faith has sometimes been reduced to a vague belief in God and trying to be moral.

I wonder if we don't all need to get a bit more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.  For some that means letting go of the notion that they know the formula to the smallest detail like a pastor who once confided in me that he hated doing funerals when he knew the person was going to hell because he had not made a public profession of Jesus as Lord and Savior. For others it means being willing to point with conviction to something and say, "I don't know all the details, but I am certain that the kingdom is very much like this."

Which direction to you need to step in order to embrace a little ambiguity?

Click to learn more about the lectionary.

Holding onto Paradox and Contradiction

I read Richard Rohr's daily meditation, and then I read the daily lectionary passages. Some days these compliment one another perfectly. Rohr was talking about how dilemmas, conflicts, paradoxes, and contradictions are a necessary part of scripture, and how we gain true wisdom only when we wrestle with such paradox and contradiction. Noting the "fragmented" nature of scripture he quotes Wendall Berry who says, "the mind that is not baffled is not employed."

Then came the morning psalm. "O LORD, who may abide in your tent?  Who may dwell on your holy hill? Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right."Such lines are not uncommon in the Bible. Only the pure and the righteous shall dwell with God.

Such talk is hardly restricted to the Old Testament.  Today's reading from Ephesians is also about purity. "Be sure of this, that no fornicator or impure person, or one who is greedy (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God."

 So God wants nothing to do with you unless you are pure and righteous. Only problem is Jesus says things like this to the good religious folks who worked very hard at purity.  "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you."

Have you ever noticed that Christians of both liberal and conservative stripes often feel a need to get rid of such biblical contradictions by emphasizing some and ignoring others? Some people's God is mostly concerned with purity and righteousness while other people speak of a God who seems not to care about such things at all, only wanting to embrace them and say, "There, there."

Strange that we expect humans to be complex and full of self contradictions, but we expect God to be a flat, two dimensional, cartoon character.  We think God should be easier to comprehend than our friend, partner, or neighbor.  What would Wendall Berry say about that?

I wonder what our faith might look like if we were more willing to hold onto the self-contradictions of scripture. (And perhaps even of God?)  If we took seriously God righteousness and holiness and mercy and forgiveness, how might that show in our lives?

Click to learn more about the lectionary.