Parson to Person -- by Rob Elder

I Went Down to the River to Pray

2012-01-08T19:10:00.000-08:00

I Went Down to the River to Pray

Sunday after Epiphany, Baptism of the Lord, January 8, 2012

Mark 1:4-11

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness,

proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

And people from the whole Judean countryside

and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him,

and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

Today is a good day to say a good word about baptism. I suppose any Sunday is really an appropriate day for a favorable word about baptism, but today we have heard scripture loaded with images of baptism, so it is a good day to speak about that which is often so close at hand that we may sometimes miss its significance.

Psalm 29 is among the psalms that use the imagery of water to declare the tremendous power of the word of God:

The voice of the LORD is over the waters;

the God of glory thunders,

the LORD, over mighty waters. NRSV

In the gospel, Jesus emerges from the waters of his own baptism and hears the affirming voice of God: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” While those words are especially meaningful in the gospel about Jesus, they are also words which are spoken to us all in a way. That is the declaration made at our baptism, yours and mine. If we are baptized in infancy or childhood, before we have had a word to say either one way or the other, God has declared his pleasure in us, his utter satisfaction that his creation in us is good, is worthy, that we are God’s beloved creatures.

The voices that we hear when baptism is celebrated these days in the church are like voices that have spoken such words over the centuries: “Child of God and child of the covenant, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” It is a phrase that has been intoned in the most solemn of christenings in the highest and holiest cathedral churches of the world, and whispered at furtive services of baptism in the hidden yet faithful churches of China and ancient Rome. It has been spoken in makeshift settings by riverbanks, and beside hospital gurneys, next to tiny bowls of water and on the shores of mighty seas. It is a phrase that says and promises much more than the person saying it can possibly foresee, or the person receiving the words can fully comprehend.

I sometimes have to smile when I am asked – as I often am – whether baptism shouldn’t wait until the “age of understanding,” when a child is 10 or 12 years old and can make his or her own confession of faith. While I can appreciate the hope that a confession of faith will some day be made by all the children of the church, I smile at the thought of some coming “age of understanding,” a chronological threshold by which time we will somehow comprehend what God is up to in the whole business of baptism. Even after years of considering what we are doing in the sacrament of baptism, I don’t pretend to understand it’s mystery fully, any more than I claim to know the whole of the mind of God.

Why does baptism matter? What are the voices speaking at baptism trying to say? A little drip of water, a few mumbled words? Baptism matters because it is a reminder that we are who God says we are, regardless what anyone else may say about us. Baptismal voices remind us that our true identity is not what we may choose for ourselves or what others may ascribe to us, but what God has chosen about us, and his word about us is always, “child of the covenant...” That is one reason baptism matters.

Scholars remind us that in Genesis,[1] the opening of that great first book of the Bible is no abstract statement about the origin of the universe. Genesis was committed to writing around the sixth century B.C., and was addressed to despairing people, exiled in Babylon, words telling of the God who comes to them, who can make what is good out of what is chaotic.

Scripture gives voice to a passionate declaration that God can be trusted even against contemporary data which includes every such human experience of dislocation and abandonment: sickness, poverty, homelessness, disease, injustice, unemployment, loneliness, warfare. The opening sentence of Genesis should be read with the emphasis placed not upon the object of creation – in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth – but upon the subject: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Affirming that to be true, what force could ultimately displace us?

We have all been thinking for many years now of those service men and women who continue on duty at this very moment on foreign soil, near to biblical Babylon, knowing that it takes only the slightest misstep, the merest provocation to begin an avalanche of fire raining down all over themselves and those around them. Why does baptism matter? Water baptism stands at this very time and gives voice to the truth that God is Lord, no matter to what lengths our world may go in denying it.

Does anyone else remember the film of a few years ago, called Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Viewing that film was the first time I ever heard the song “I Went Down to the River to Pray” that was arranged as the choir’s anthem today.[2] Seeing the river baptism scene in the movie, or any baptism on any given Sunday, we might be given to wonder, why does baptism matter?

I recall finding one answer to that question in a Flannery O’Conner short story, “The River.” In the story, a woman named Mrs. Connin is employed to care for the son of some wealthy but distant and uncaring parents. The boy’s mother is sick one day, and so Mrs. Connin takes the boy off to a riverside baptismal service of her church. Standing on the riverbank, they hear the preacher warning the crowd that if they’ve come for an easy miracle, if they’ve come to leave their pain in the river, they’ve come for the wrong reasons. “There ain’t but one river,” he declares, “and that’s the River of Life, made out of Jesus’ blood. It’s a river of pain, itself, to be washed away slow...”

Suddenly Mrs. Connin lifts the boy up in the air and asks the preacher to pray for the boy’s mother. But then, embarrassed, she whispers to the preacher that she suspects the boy has never been baptized, and the preacher commands her to hand the boy to him. “Do you want to be baptized?” he asks him. And when the boy says yes, he responds... “You won’t be the same again. You’ll count!”

Why is baptism important? It is a visible and verbal sign that we “count” to the people who stood with us, who stand behind us, for whom we stand, to all the people who name the Name by which our names matter, and most important of all, that we count to that One who was one day baptized by John into a ministry that would serve to save us all. That riverside preacher was right. When we know fully and finally what Jesus has done for us, we are never the same again. We count.

Jesus was baptized one bright day. I can hardly think that he ever again walked by the banks of the Jordan River – or any river – without thinking about that day when the skies opened and he heard the voice of God declaring his love and confidence. Today, if you happen to pass by the baptismal font, think on its water and remember that Jesus was chosen by God and baptized – and so are you; that God has chosen you, that his very word to and about you was once spoken over you “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” You will never be the same again. You count.

Amen.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation Commentary series, John Knox Press, 1982, pp. 24-25.

Worth the Wait

2011-12-25T20:10:00.000-08:00

Worth the Wait

Luke 2:1-20

First Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, Washington

Christmas Day, December 25, 2011

I bring you good news of great joy for all people:

to you is born this day ... a Savior...

Church doesn’t get much more joyful than this, does it? Christmas Day! and on a Sunday! Our scripture speaks of joy, as well as our other carols today. How could this service have possibly started with any other carol:

From Nazareth to Bethlehem

the far-off king sent Joe and Mim

traipsing down the country courses

riding mules, no rides on horses

money for king August raising

building roads with no delaying

“Tax all folks! No compromising!”

he decreed, most days, on rising

but people, mostly, made the trek

to get enrolled, and send a check

to pay for Rome’s grandest highways

rocks and concrete, roads and byways

Mary rode where old Joe’s feet tread

all the way to King Dave’s homestead

old Bethlehem, that’s where they went

it’s what they knew the gov’nor meant

they plodded slowly, not to race

except that there, on Mary’s face

old Joe saw squinting, wincing, pain

once, twice, three times, and then again!

he knew the child in Mary’s womb

was ready now to come, and soon!

on his way, precious baby boy

Jesus, the full-fledged child of joy

just in time, they got the spot right

Jesus Christ was cradled that night

all wrapped up and warm for sleep

set in a hay box, near the sheep

from sky above, going bonkers

nearby shepherds saw the honkers

angels, that’s just what they all were

singing, shouting ‘bout God’s favor

“Glory! GLORY!” they were saying

“Peace for which you’re always praying;

Here it is! That’s what we’re telling

can’t just say it without yelling!”

then, as fast as they had started

all the angels soon departed

the shepherds, too, got on their way

respects for child and mom to pay

Mary, Joseph, with the cattle

stood by Jesus ‘mid the prattle

of those shepherds’ story-telling

which they did now, (with no yelling)

all were amazed, each astounded

shepherds’ tales told, stories sounded

but Mary, stood, off to one side

thinking things, things like the long ride

down those rough roads, to Bethlehem

more roads to go, before they end

who knew back then, how Jesus saves

who knew the whats, the whens and ways?

no one, that’s who, but God on high

God knew for sure, this is the guy

Jesus, baby, in a manger

to bring folks home, not as strangers

but as fam’ly, all, God’s dear ones

short and tall ones, big and small ones

young and old ones, scared and bold ones

dark or tan ones, white as sand ones

all, that is the perfect number

God is thinking, when we slumber

dreaming sweet dreams of Christmas day

God loves each one in just this way

which is the point, of Christmas time

a lot of trouble, all to find

it’s no mirage, from things we ate

but miracle, well worth the wait

so tell it near and tell it far,

so wise kings foll’wing shining stars

and folks from all lands in between

come and see what we all have seen

Christ is born say hallelujah!

bringing great gifts here, right to ya’

all we need do is receive them

to be brothers, sisters to him

take them all now, those gifts, abroad

‘til all the earth will hear the laud

and honor to our Christ the King

on whom our deepest hopes take wing.

Amen.

Lead Gently

2011-12-04T14:31:00.000-08:00

Lead Gently

by Robert J. Elder

Second Sunday in Advent: December 4, 2011

Mark 1:1-8

Isaiah 40:1-11

He will feed his flock like a shepherd;

he will gather the lambs in his arms,

and carry them in his bosom,

and gently lead the mother sheep.

Of the scripture to be proclaimed over the four Sundays of Advent, the reading from Isaiah is one passage that seems custom-made for those who may be spending their pre-Christmas days wishing they could go to sleep tonight and not wake up until December 26th, those for whom the word “Christmas” and all it brings to mind are just misery stacked on hopelessness. It is a prophecy for those who dread encountering Currier & Ives Christmas scenes of happy hearths in comfortable homes where families love each other in perfect harmony, those who want to weep for the ways in which their Christmas will fall so miserably short of that unrelenting vision.

This is a section of prophecy in Isaiah that recalls the desperate and hopeless plight of the Chosen People in exile. To give it a modem twist – since the geography is virtually the same – it is as if the prophet identified completely with suffering exiles in modern Iraq, in the very same land where several thousand years ago, the remains of the nation of Israel withered away by the banks of the rivers of Babylon and longed for Zion.

This is the sort of desperation and hopelessness that Isaiah understood when, even as God called him to prophesy comfort to his people, he called out words any homecoming queen might say, looking at her corsage three weeks after the big event: “All flesh is grass...the grass withers, the flower fades!” The Chosen People were caught up in the temporary nature of human life, they began to see their destiny as entirely controlled by the transience that governs human life in general, and their lives in particular. Just as countless nations before and after them – like once mighty Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, Nazi Germany – they were a once-great nation that was destined to perish: all flesh is grass.

We know the feeling, most of us. And if we don’t know it yet, there will come a day when we will. Even though we may have known halcyon days when we were part of perfect families that gathered for perfect holidays – may know such days even now – we also know how true it is that such experiences do not last. Perhaps more often than we care to admit, we live in fear of the day when we will awaken to realize that an end of warm and happy home scenes has come true for us. In the final analysis, the fleeting nature of happy days often does not make them seem more precious – as we might like to think – but all the more depressing for their transience. A child, once the joy of our hearts, now perished and gone; a home, which once rang with the voices of aunts, uncles and cousins, now relentlessly silent in their absence; a set of bedrooms in a home, once filled with children and pre-Christmas bustle and excitement, now silent; a career which once offered such promise, now lying in tatters as we turn in despair to see about picking up the pieces. All this while everyone around us seems to be singing “tidings of comfort and joy“. What comfort? What joy? Why not depression instead?

“Comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her period of conscription has ended, her iniquity is forgiven.”

No wonder Isaiah balked at this command and tried to remind God that people are like grass, nations are like flowers that grow, blossom, then fade away. We may be so accustomed to hearing this beautiful passage in connection with Christmas and the singing of the music of Handel’s Messiah that we forget that it is a thoroughly Old Testament word. It is a word addressed to real people suffering real hardship; a people for whom the Messiah had not yet come. It is a word for people longing to regain the sort of balance John Calvin was thinking of when he wrote once that there are two great sins of humanity: one is to presume too much; the other is to despair too much. The truth seems to lie in that thin line between the two extremes.

While we may live in an age of presumption which supposes that human wisdom and technology will overcome every stumbling block, the people of Israel in the time of Isaiah had been in darkness, had veered away from presumption and were nearly given over entirely to despair. It was the deepest darkness we can imagine. And into that darkness came the word. Though the grass withers, the flower fades,

one thing remains

and the following nine words save the next fifteen chapters of Isaiah from being a despairing rehash of the suffering and laments of Job, transforming this prophecy instead into a towering testament of faith:

but the word of our God will stand forever.

I think it is marvelous that in granting this prophecy to Isaiah God did not attempt to erase the experience of the people. It nowhere says that your suffering does not exist, that your experience is not real, God does not deny the reality of the hardships we can experience, our causes for despair. Isaiah was called simply to declare that on top and underneath and all around the ever-changing realities of this world – both good and bad – there is something which stands, something which persists, something which lives on, something which cannot be defeated.

The word of God does not depend on Israel; Israel depends on the word of God. We can replace the name, “Israel” with any other name, and that sentence works just as well:

• The word of God does not depend on Rob; Rob depends on the word of God.

• The word of God does not depend on First Presbyterian Church; First Presbyterian Church depends on the word of God.

• The word of God does not depend on the good we can do; the good we can do depends on the word of God.

• The word of God does not depend on the Dow Jones average; the Dow Jones average depends on the word of God...

Remember all that Israel had lost in Isaiah’s day: land, nation, king, temple and the worship that took place there. All of it was lost tragically, brutally, finally. Even so, without any of the physical features of that which makes a people – land, government, temple – they still retained the word of God. Not a word as merely some words collected in a book, but the living Word of God to which a book may testify, and which, like the person of Jesus, has a life of its own.

Advent moves us toward Christmas well only if it moves us closer and closer to a recognition of our utter neediness before God. We are made increasingly ready for Christmas only if Advent makes us ever more aware that in the midst of all the impermanence of life, all the contingencies which are forever stripping us of that which we had hoped would last forever, there stands the abiding and purposeful Word of God, which the carol says is “now in flesh appearing.” It is the sort of truth which caused John to reflect in the opening of his gospel, “In the beginning was the Word...” There is something about God’s Word that goes beyond words, beyond books containing words, proceeding directly and unmistakably into life as we live it.

If it reminds us of anything, Advent reminds us that Christmas brings us not just one more nice feature among many other wonderful aspects of our faith but the single fact that saves us, the child who came in time to save the day, Jesus – word made flesh – without whom all was lost and irrecoverable. God is not silent, absent, uncaring. Quite the contrary. God is one who does for his people as outlined in the four verbs in the 11th verse: “He will feed his flock like a shepherd, he will gather the lambs in his arms, he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young. God feeds, gathers, carries, and gently leads.

The watchfulness of Advent implies this kind of care, the care of a nourishing, gathering, carrying, gently leading God who provides that ultimate hope which we cannot provide for ourselves out of our own passing strength.

One last thing I ask myself as I read this passage from Isaiah. I have some acquaintance with Old Testament history, and so I have often wondered how it was that Isaiah was able to speak these words before anything had happened to resolve the dilemmas facing Israel: before the exiled people actually returned to the Promised Land, long before they could go home and build a new temple. In the face of all that which weighed against them, Isaiah’s words sound as if the Word of God had already accomplished the rescue of this people from exile, as if the final salvation had already been accomplished, but I know that this is not true. How, then, could Isaiah utter such words of profound hope?

The advent, the coming of God, was to be proclaimed, then as it is to be today, even if its final consummation still lay in the future. In the end of the passage, praise is called for from the people as if help had already come, because the promise of God is as good as the execution of it. The promise that Jesus made to his disciples to be with them to the close of the age is every bit as good as if the close of the age were here today to prove him right. The full faith and confidence of the government of the United States is expressed in every dollar bill as a promissory note. How much more confident, then, should be the praise of the people of God upon receiving the promises of God?

A promise is to be born to us in this season, a promise like no other, a promise that will speak right to the heart of the most aching need we can lay before the throne of God if only we will have the courage to face that need and make our prayer known.

“‘Comfort, comfort my people,’ says your God. ‘Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,’” to Vancouver, to Ridgefield, to Portland, to Jerry to Vicki to Martha to Rick to Joe to Helen to every single Tom, Dick and Harriett, proclaiming confidently to them all that iniquity is pardoned, that the word of God will be born among them and will stand when everything else has fallen. This is a promise. We can rely on it. We can proclaim it to others. Hope is coming to birth in the world in Jesus Christ.

2011-11-27T17:46:00.000-08:00

How to Know What to Know

A Communion Meditation

First Sunday of Advent, November 27, 2011

Mark 13:24-37

But about that day or hour no ones knows...

And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.

The television interviewer, having taken a full 90 seconds to plumb the depths of some complicated issue like abortion or the Supreme Court nominating process with two people representing opposing viewpoints, turns to one and says, “We’re just about out of time. George, in the 15 seconds we have left, just what is the future of Western civilization as you see it?”

“We’re just about out of time.” If we think of it as more than a code phrase from television, meaning a commercial is coming soon, it sounds just a little ominous, doesn’t it? How does being near the end change things? How much time do we get, exactly? Is there any chance that – like the television interviewer – we will know when our time has just about expired, or will it sneak up on us, surprising us from behind, like a “thief in the night”? When we hear people talking about the “end of the world,” what do they mean? Is the world’s end the same as its conclusion, its finish? Or is the world’s end more analogous to the old catechism, which asks, “What is the chief end of man?” suggesting that the end is the goal, the purpose of time, not just its termination?

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus questions the assumption that people can know anything about the timing of the world’s finish. He declared that even he didn’t know: “...about that day or hour no one knows,” he said, “neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” I have to wonder about the authors of those Left Behind books which were rather popular a few years ago. They were forever predicting some cataclysmic termination of the world with all the assurance of a meteorologist forecasting dry weather for the Sahara. How do they know? If they claim scripture as their authority, why have they overlooked this passage? Jesus says even he won’t know the day or hour.

While Jesus doubted those who answer questions about end times saying, “Here!” he seems to confirm those who say “Near!” when he declared flatly, “This generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.”

What is he saying? It has been many generations since Jesus’ time. Anyone who has waited at the station for 2,000 years for a train that has not yet arrived may be reasonably certain that it is not coming, at least not in the way we had imagined. There must be more to this truth about the nearness of the kingdom of God, the coming of the Son of Man. What is the end of time exactly? Why is he telling the church this?

I am convinced that these are not intended to be passages of imminent threat or terror – which some would make them out to be – but rather words of hope and invitation.

Like the widow with only two remaining pennies, which she gave away, Jesus spoke to people who realized that reliance on themselves and their own tiny resources for salvation was useless. They knew their utter dependence on some other Word to save them, some Word beyond the words they could fashion for themselves. Like them, as long as we cling to the myth of our own self-sufficiency, we are doomed to misunderstand Jesus’ words.

This Word from the Bible affirms a world very different from our own world, a world in which God is in command, despite all appearances to the contrary. It is a world in which the “end,” the goal of God’s creation, will become apparent in God’s own time. This is a Word which speaks to us and says the kingdom is near in spite of the powerlessness, the disillusionment we may feel with our governing authorities, with the crazy-quilt process for such things as electing presidents, and with the ascendancy of world powers at odds with our own. Even in spite of our anxieties closer to home, when a sudden blizzard or hurricane cancels our travel plans, when we stand by helplessly as our child drives into the distance on their own behind the wheel for the first time, when the oncology report arrives and informs us we have cancer, God is still Lord of the universe, still ruler of God’s own creation, still near to his people.

Jesus declares that just when things seem lost, that is especially when we may know that God is truly near to us. The kingdom of God is at hand. It is near. Not as a threat, but as a promise. Not as an added cause for anxiety, but as an assurance that the outcome of all we do is not ultimately up to us.

Think again on the phrase, “We’re out of time.” Looking at it quantitatively, we think of time as a commodity. We have a certain amount of it. Some is gone, some remains. We keep careful track of the amount gone by, we record our birth dates and after age25 or so, we celebrate them every year with less enthusiasm. The amount remaining to us is a mystery, and apparently was just as much of a mystery to Jesus as it is to us. But look at the sentence qualitatively. “We’re out of time.” We are beyond time, we are living a reality of the kingdom of God which is not earthbound, not beholden to the stopwatch, not measured by the tick of the clock or the dating of half-lives of isotopes, but by the standards of eternity.

The Greeks had two good words for time. One was chronos, as in chronological, and it refers to measured time, the counting up of one day, one year after another. The other word, though, was kairos, and it refers to those points in time which are decisive, bursting with possibility. The end of chronos, or chronological clock-ticking time is of little concern to the biblical writers who cared not so much how the world began or will wind up as they puzzled over why.

What meaning is there in time other than its amount? Marking its passage chronologically will never tell us. We must look for the meaning of time in its kairos, in its decisiveness and our response to opportunities to decide. Paul said, “at the right time Christ died for the ungodly...”[1] He didn’t mean that particular hour in that particular day in that particular year. He meant that God’s mysterious plan for who we are and what we may be had moved to the decisive point when “word made flesh” also made sense.

Because of the ministry of Christ, we are spiritual people, outside of time, living over and above and beyond clock-bound time, and as such, we are near the kingdom of God, eternal time. Near, but not here, because we live in two worlds at once. We’re not there yet. We are not now fully in the kingdom of heaven. We have some distance, some time to go. But we know it is real, as real as the world we inhabit on every single day of our lives. We know all too well the world of deadlines, of schedules, and time-frames. But knowing Christ, we know that this is not the only time in which we are at home. We are also at home beyond time, in kingdom time, in the eternity for which Christ has made us fit.

[1] Romans 5:6

All Hands

2011-11-20T14:34:00.000-08:00

All Hands

Robert J. Elder

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Exodus 17:8-16

Aaron and Hur held up [Moses’] hands, one on

one side and one on the other side; so his

hands were steady until the sun set.

As the scripture passage was being read this morning, did you find yourself wincing just a little bit? Did you think to yourself, “Gee, I wish the kids were out of the room...”?

Holy War has been a topic much in the news for about a decade now, but not usually from a Jewish or Christian point of view. If we hear about holy war these days, we are more apt to hear about Islamic “jihad” than about ancient Israel’s “Holy wars” against the enemies of God’s people. There is little wonder why a passage such as this is so seldom a subject for preaching in the churches. I have a catalogue of over 800 of my own sermons that I have preached over my career in ministry, as well as more than 4,000 sermons by other preachers. I can search the catalogue of these sermons by title, or date, or scripture passage – which I did not long ago, and I discovered that not only had I never preached on this particular passage, but among those 4,000+ sermons in books, binders and on my computer, there was not a single sermon by other pastors on the passage either. Actually I am not surprised. Are you? Additionally, this Holy War text, along with most others like it in books such as Judges, are not included in lectionaries of readings for worship. But inasmuch as this is the sort of Bible passage that many people hold up as an objection to faith in the God of the Bible, I think it demands more from us than simple avoidance.

Preaching on a passage like this reminds me of an old story that circulates among preachers. I remember an older pastor sharing it with me when I was a young pastor, just beginning to find my preacing voice. It seems a young, brilliant new assistant pastor had arrived fresh from seminary to his first call in ministry in a church where an older, veteran pastor was the head of staff. The personable young upstart was an instant hit with the congregation, which might not have annoyed the senior pastor so much, had it not been for the younger man’s arrogance. After receiving thanks for a nice sermon, the younger man would invariably declare, “I can preach on anything!”

Finally, the older pastor had had enough. Instead of letting him pick his own subject the next time he was to preach, he went to his young colleague, intent on assigning him a subject that would be well nigh impossible, even for an expert. He told the young man, “I going to assign you the subject for your sermon this week.” The young man replied, with characteristic overconfidence, “Fine, I can preach on anything!”

“Good, then,” said the older man, “your subject for this Sunday is ‘constipation.’” The younger man staggered a bit, wondering where he would even find scripture for a subject like that. But he was determined not to show his uncertainty. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll get to work on it.”

When Sunday came, the older man left the chancel when it came time for the sermon, eager to see from the pews how this self-important young fellow was going to get out of this predicament. The young man went to the pulpit, opened the Bible, and said to the congregation, “Today, the pastor has asked me to preach about constipation...” There was an audible gasp from the congregation. He continued, “...and my text for this sermon is from Exodus 24: “When Moses went up the mountain, he took two tablets...”

That story is an oldie but a goodie among preachers. The problem for me today, though, is I can’t blame anyone else for choosing this passage from Exodus, I assigned it to myself! But I did so because I think difficult passages deserve our attention if we are determined to be a people of the Book. Among the reasons we need to understand them better is that:

· Such texts provide a chief point of objection that many make to following a biblical faith, especially among those who cannot abide what they sometimes call the “vengeful God” of the Old Testament;

· Such texts cause us to wonder how we can claim to have a foundation of faith that differs from other “religions of violence,” when such passages are in the Bible between the same covers that contain lovely words about the “Prince of Peace.”

The central explanation about this passage, and others like it, requires a degree of sophistication about God’s purposes over the expanse of scripture more than in a single story or a few verses at a time, especially as expressed in the first five books of the Old Testament. The Bible begins with stories of creation, and almost immediately, the forces that would thwart God’s purposes in creating the world make their entrance: Disobedience in the Garden, Cain killing his brother Able, Noah sailing off leaving the whole rotten world behind, and eventually, the people of promise, the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, finding themselves enslaved in Egypt, which had at first been their refuge. In Egypt we discover the Pharaoh countermands the commands of God in creation. While God said “Be fruitful and multiply,” Pharaoh instructs all male children of Israel to be killed, thereby seeking to thwart the very will of God.

God’s instructions concerning the Amalekites in our present passage emerge from a similar concern. God has willed a land for his people. Unlike those who would be Israel’s peaceful neighbors, the Amalekites, living to the south of Biblical Israel, were nomads with caravan routes to protect, and they attacked Israel when it was divided and weak, picking off those who lagged behind on their way to the promised land.[1] Apparently their behavior was merciless, and enmity developed between the two peoples. It’s important to remember this, God’s instruction concerning them, came after Israel had been attacked at a point of extreme vulnerability, when their very future as a people of promise hung in the balance, it was at this time that Amalek sought to exterminate them. It would not be too out of character to associate this with the extermination of Jews sought by Hitler. It was not all that many decades ago that we believed Naziism had to be eliminated, and it’s not too great a stretch to understand this Bible passage in the same way for the survival of the vulnerable Israelites. The Amalekites had followed in the footsteps of Pharaoh, seeking the extermination of Israel.

So then, what happened? You’ll have to read through more of the Old Testament to find out what eventually happened to the Amalekites. I’ll give you a hint, though: it wasn’t a peaceful resolution.[2]

In this account, it is important to see that Moses’ “hand” and the “staff” are all mixed up, which in its own way mirrors the necessity for the action of God to be in company with human action for the accomplishment of God’s will.

Which, as we have been wrapping up our fall stewardship efforts, reminds me of an old stewardship story that circuates among preachers.

There once was a pastor, who had been praying faithfully, night and day, for a solution to his church’s financial difficulties. One day, he looked up from his prayers in astonishment. “I have heard your prayers,” said the vision of the Lord now standing before him, “and I will grant your request: all the financial problems of your church will be solved. I have but one question for you: would you prefer a natural or supernatural solution to your problem?”

The pastor, a truly humble servant, replied, “Thank you, Lord, but I could never ask for a miracle, for that might draw attention to me. Please solve our church’s problem in a natural way.”

With that, the pastor looked up, and saw that the entire room was filled with stacks of hundred dollar bills, bars of gold, piles of diamonds, more wealth than he could possibly imagine. He was overwhelmed, and baffled at the same time; and so he prayed once again to God, “I’m very pleased about this, Lord, and please don’t misunderstand me, but I thought I asked for the natural solution.”

“That is the natural solution,” God replied. “The supernatural solution would have been for everyone in your church to have made a dramatic increase in their giving.”

But we know the reverse is really true, don’t we? The “supernatural” solution to Israel’s difficulties in the Exodus would have been for God to send lightning bolts against the enemies of Israel. The natural way was for God to empower the people, and for the people to respond in partnership with God’s own action, that together they might address and triumph over their difficulties. That is the natural way.

In our lives we are often struck by the difficulty of change, both institutional and personal, and how to cope with it. One guide through such changes as we know them is the experience of the people of Israel, journeying through the wilderness.

In one of the most intense crises of change we can possibly imagine – a military battle – Israel was attacked at a point of weakness by the Amalekites. Though at the time they may not have fully appreciated it, the Israelites had a secret weapon: the staff of Moses. The staff is a powerful reminder of God’s presence with them, but they can only receive the assurance of the promise as long as Moses can keep it in view, raised in the air for them to see.

Moses did become tired, he was only human, after all, and when his aides, Aaron and Hur, realized this, they rushed over to their leader and propped up his tired arms with their own. They stood on either side of him until the sun set, helping him hold his position, and by doing so, they assured their army of victory. Moses learned of the strength to be gained from other people in community, holding up the sign of the promise of God before the people.

For us, the ultimate staff held before us, strengthening us in our daily anxiety and struggle, is the cross of Christ, a special staff of God. Power has different, even contrasting, faces – today is a day called “Christ the King Sunday” on church calendars, a day to think on the rule of Christ over the world. God’s people claim that victory comes with God, not only through our beckoning, but through God’s act with our participation.

When we strive together to be the community of Christ that God has in mind for us in this place, we are deciding whether to hold up the Savior’s arms or let them fall. I say we hold them up, all hands, every one.

[1] Deuteronomy 20:10-18; 25:19.

[2] Here are a couple of hints: See I Chronicles 4:43 and compare I Samuel 15:1 ff.

Talented and Gifted

2011-11-13T15:00:00.000-08:00

Talented and Gifted

Matthew 25:14-30

Sunday, November 13, 2011

For it is as if a man, going on a journey,

summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them;

to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one,

to each according to his ability…

Among the many things that pastors are apt to hear in day-to-day conversations are phrases such as these:

· “Pastor, I’ve spent some time thinking about what I believe, but I don’t want to impose my beliefs on anyone else. So I don’t think much about evangelism because, to me, religion is a private matter.”

· “Uncle Albert may not have gone to church or said much to other people about religion and things like that, but I know he believed in God.”

· “Pastor, I have these friends who keep asking me difficult questions about my faith. I hope I have given them good answers. What? No, I haven’t invited them to come to church, I don’t want them to think I’m too pushy about religion.”

I know the feeling. So often, I get on an airplane (well, not that often) or find myself out in public someplace, and I am reluctant just to tell people about my vocation. Why? For the same reasons that many of us don’t want to tell others about our faith. It’s not so much because we think our faith is wrong or bad, but we’re just a little embarrassed perhaps, or we don’t want to come off as some kind of religious nut. We don’t want others to think we aren’t just “one of the boys or girls” like everyone else, we don’t want them to begin avoiding us, or failing to include us in the fun because they think we’re from some kind of strict religious cult. Or we don’t want to spend an entire flight to Denver or L.A. strapped next to someone who has an entire speech about things that are wrong – or right – about religious faith. For me, when I fail to own up to my faith, it is almost invariably because I am more worried about what people will think of me than about what they will think of my faith. I may say Christ is all important in my life, but my actions may often give lie to that claim.

So, when confronted with the opportunity to say something, we often say nothing, just keep our faith under our hats, so to speak, bury it and keep it safe, waiting until the next time we are at church, or with church friends, safe in the community that already knows what we are talking about, rather than risking it with people on the outside.

It is because this is as true for me as I suspect it is for many of you that the parable of the talents makes me more than a little uneasy. On the surface of things it appears to be a story of overly harsh judgment on someone who was anxious about investing in the stock market. Instead of risking his master’s money on Wall Street or in real estate deals, he got a tin can (a sizable one, since one “talent” was the monetary equivalent of about 30 years of wages for a working person) and hid the money in the back yard. He had nearly forgotten it by the time his master returned and asked about it.

Now, there’s always a danger of taking this sort of story too literally. Remember, this is not some sort of first century enthusiasm about capitalism. As is invariably the case with Jesus’ parables, it is a story about one thing that is meant to be applied to something else. And, of course, what Jesus had been talking about since the disciples first caught sight of him was that he had plans for them beyond his own ministry among them. He was going to cede to them each a portion of faith, and then he was going to be taken from them at the crucifixion. What they could accomplish with the faith he had left them would become a matter of a partnership between their effort and the continuing inspiration of his spirit.

So the story he told them here is not a story of an exceptionally strict and unreasonable master, but of a servant who should have known better than to let his entrusted responsibilities lie fallow. If we can make the connection even more obvious, we could say that almost the entire point of the Christian faith is that it is not a possession to which we may cling in the privacy of our prayer closets and the safety of our church sanctuary, but faith is Christ’s investment of his precious Word in us. What will the faith Christ has given to us yield? That is the question so much more to the point than whether we, in the privacy of our hearts, believe it or not.

Zephaniah the Old Testament prophet lived in a Godless time. He wrote ominous words in his prophecy, that God would one day make something resembling a house-to-house search:

At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps,

and I will punish the people

who rest complacently on their dregs,

those who say in their hearts,

“The LORD will not do good,

nor will he do harm.”[1]

They were those who said, “God will not bother to do anything.” We live in a time of such Godlessness, when the nicest thing most people can say about prayer is that it is something people can do when all else has failed, rather than as something we must do before we have any hope of anything whatsoever succeeding.

See why this parable of Jesus makes me a little squeamish? Opportunities to invest the word that Christ has entrusted to us emerge all the time, but the more we become accustomed to burying that word out of fear of ridicule, the less we will be able to see those daily opportunities as they arise.

I remember once spending the day with a group of fellow citizens learning about the criminal justice system in Oregon. During lunch, I sat with some of these new friends, as we all exchanged the sorts of pleasantries that we are likely to exchange with folks we don’t know all that well. Innocently, one of the fellows across the table from me asked what I had done over the weekend. Preachers aren’t as accustomed to this question as other people might be, since we are more accustomed to encountering the impression most people carry, that our weekends are filled with religious duties. So, almost without thinking, I began to tell him about my weekend, in which I had spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday with a group of folks from another church in our Presbytery, helping them to recall and share the stories of their lives and of their faith. It was a great weekend, so as I began to describe it, I suppose that in my enthusiasm I became a little more animated than I had intended, until after a few moments of describing the virtues of telling our stories to others so that the story of Jesus – interwoven into our lives – can begin to come through more readily and more visibly, I suddenly noticed that six or seven people were now listening to what had started out as a bit of friendly chit chat with one person across a lunch table.

And it struck me what had captured their now full attention from their casual gabbing about the menu or the events of the day. It was that name that I had named, the word “Jesus” that had arrested several people in their conversational tracks. I felt myself pulling back almost involuntarily from this unexpected audience until one women asked what was the purpose of sharing stories like that. I answered that I believe Jesus didn’t call us to a ministry of swallowing the right doctrine so much as faithfulness in pursuing his best interests. And Jesus is incomparably interested in the communication of his gospel to others. And further, I believe that the best way to communicate that gospel is to tell others about our encounters with it in our own common lives.

I realized, as I prepared this sermon, how strongly this parable speaks a similar word to us today. As Thanksgiving approaches, we need especially to be reminded that God’s gift can never be passively possessed. The gospel of Christ is not so much like a nerve as it is like a muscle. Once one of the neurons in our brains has learned something, it can hold on to it for years before ever being recalled again, as when an ancient memory comes back at some unusual and distant time. But the gospel is not like a vague memory that exercises little influence on our lives. It is more like a muscle, which if not exercised regularly, will atrophy.

This parable is one more story that declares that the ones who are ready to extend themselves for the sake of the Gospel will find their lives; those who wish to secure their lives by holding the gospel in their hearts rather than living and telling it in their lives, will in fact lose the very life they hope to grasp. Finding comes through losing ourselves and our self interest for the sake of Christ.

Jesus, like the master in the story, has very high opinions of our abilities in service to the Gospel. He entrusted his followers with his word not only two thousand years ago, but this very day. It is a word we must tell others or it will not get told. I hope that challenges you as deeply as it challenges me. We always want to be a fellowship that is open to visitors and new people. But opening our doors and hearts to visitors is only a fraction of the witness which Christ has entrusted to us. We meet the heart of human need every day, no matter who we are with. It has been said that preachers should preach to human pain because a broken heart sits in every pew. That is no less true of the places where you spend your days than where I spend mine. We all meet people every day who, if we take the trouble to know them, are touched by the sort of human hunger which only the ministry of Christ can fill. How can we justify withholding it from them out of fear for our own image?

Our challenge in this disturbing parable from Matthew is to touch this world of hopelessness with the life-giving and hope-filled word of Christ as we have come to know it. That way, as we give thanks at Thanksgiving for all that God has provided, we may respond to the challenge to us in having been provided with the ministry of Jesus Christ, the most precious gift of all.

[1] Zephaniah 1:12 NRSV.

That’s Snooze to Me

2011-11-06T18:01:00.000-08:00

That’s Snooze to Me

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: November 6, 2011

I Thessalonians 4:13-18

Matthew 25:1-13

These are two scripture passages that probably do not come up very often in devotional books and bedside Bible reading. I think you’ll agree that they are troubling passages, especially the parable about the ten bridesmaids. What is the deal with this story? The 25th chapter of Matthew starts out with the 5 wise and winning bridesmaids who do not share with the others, and they are held up as models of faith, and then the chapter ends with Jesus’ famous sheep-and-goats speech in which those who fail to share are sent off packing. People seeking easy consistency are never at home in Matthew 25!

Both passages make some passing reference to sleeping, and all references to sleeping in the Bible are fraught with mystery, wonder, and the invasion of the holy into our otherwise plodding lives, as when Jacob slept and in sleeping wrestled with an angel,[1] or when Peter dreamed a disturbing dream which sent him off with good news for the previously despised Gentiles,[2] or when Daniel interpreted the dream of the king.[3]

Our translation of the words from I Thessalonians uses the direct language of our modern everyday conversation: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brother and sisters, about those who have died...” But the Greek words for “those who have died,” literally translated, actually mean, “Those who have fallen asleep.” It strikes us as a sort of gentle, funeral parlor euphemism for death, which puts just a bit of space between us and our unavoidable end. But death is an ultimate sort of thing, from which there is no turning back, no waking up back in Kansas with Auntie Em. And the sleep-visions of the Bible are likewise ultimate sorts of experiences from which there is never any going back. Peter, once committed to bringing the gospel to the Gentiles, found he could not go back. Ananias, informed in a dream to minister to Paul, who up to then had been violently persecuting the church, did as he was told, and the church was never ever the same. Joseph, informed in a dream about the true nature of Mary’s son, married her, and there was no turning back. In each case, things which transpired during sleep suggested the coming of something of tremendous and world-changing significance.

So, it pays to be attentive when we encounter sleeping in the Bible – if that doesn’t sound too ridiculous. Stories involving sleep suggest something mysterious, that something to do with the presence of God is going on. So the maidens of Jesus’ parable: When they became drowsy due to the delay of the wedding party, as readers who know our Bibles, we know that when sleep time comes in stories in scripture, the presence of God is very near… so when those maidens are sleepy we should understand their drowsiness as a lively signal that something significant is in the offing! In this case, the very last time anyone expects a party to break out is at midnight. Midnight is when everyone is more likely to be going home, if they are not at home already. Midnight is the unlikeliest of times for the shout of celebration to begin the party.

Similarly, the congregation at Thessalonica, among the first of the new assemblies of faithful people ever to gather around the good news of the resurrection of Christ, could not fathom how some of their friends could already be dead when Jesus had not yet returned. What was to become of them? Paul, in his own wise way, referred to them as sleeping, not in order to deny their deaths, but to heighten the awareness that in sleeping the sleep of death, they were not at the end of the line, but rather, on the cusp of something incredible beyond their – or our – imagining.

Now, many people read the parable of the wise and foolish maidens in Matthew and assume it is about being prepared, a sort of Boy Scout Bible reading. The illustrations of that sort of sermon on the text are legion:

Bill Keene’s Family Circus cartoon a decade or so ago[4] has the little girl walking out the door and saying to her brother, “I’m gonna make a lot of friends right now – before I need them.”

Two old school Quaker elders were traveling once under a religious concern to a small rural meeting. On the way back it began to snow heavily and their carriage became stuck in a snowbank. The two elders finally made it to a farmhouse just as it became dark, and were welcomed for the night. But the house was cold, and their attic room was like an icebox. The older of the elders stripped to his underwear and jumped into a feather bed, pulling the blankets over him. The younger elder, feeling a bit embarrassed said, “Excuse me, Friend, but does not thou think we ought to say our prayers before retiring?” The other elder stuck one eye out from under the covers. “Son,” he said, “I keep prayed up ahead for just such situations as this, and so should thee.”

The well-prepared maidens remind us all of the sort of people who falling in the lake and beginning to drown, cry for help. You throw them a rope, they seize it, and then thank themselves for having been smart enough to have grabbed hold of it. That is like people who are self-congratulatory about their wisdom at having thought to follow Jesus.

The logic of such “Be Prepared” interpretations of that parable usually concludes by saying that we need to ready ourselves for the return of Jesus. But I have to ask, how does one prepare for such a thing? More than that, though, really, it is a bigger question, more like, “How does one adequately prepare for such a thing?” How would we know we were now prepared enough for the return of Jesus? This “Be Prepared” interpretation seems to conclude that the wise maidens, by bringing an extra quart of kerosene to the wedding, had been adequately prepared. But that’s a long leap of logic from saying that we can find some similar measure by which to determine that we are satisfactorily prepared for our airborne meeting with Jesus, to use Paul’s imagery.

In the parable, “notice how Jesus deliberately stands things on their heads. The five supposedly foolish girls, knowing they have been invited to a daytime wedding that will only last until the early evening, reasonably assess their needs … But the other five insist upon dragging along … bottles full of kerosene, just in case. Nothing could be more idiotic: they have complicated their lives by preparing for an utterly unlikely contingency.”[5]

As analogies to dragging extra kerosene to an afternoon wedding, I imagine a child wanting to take 300 pencils to school, in case everybody in school breaks theirs; or a friend invited for dinner who drags along his sleeping bag and a space heater just in case of a freak storm and a power outage; or an overanxious new driver stopping to fill her car up with gas every fifteen or twenty miles, in case there is a leak in the gas tank. It is an image of people who are hell bent on self sufficiency.[6] And the point of the gospel is that self-sufficiency breaks down, along with our need for it, in the presence of the Lord who has come to save us from having to try to save ourselves.

All of these things, the deaths of the saints in Thessalonica, the preparedness or unpreparedness of the maidens going to the party, all these stories make absolutely no sense unless we realize that they involve first the disciples’, and then the church’s recognition that the physical presence of Jesus was no longer going to be available to them, and, more than that, was going to be taken from them for a very long time: And it has been a long time, as we now stand at 2011 years and counting.

These stories remind us that if we were listing the ten worst problems in our church, every one of them is related to the delay of Jesus’ coming again. If people knew for certain that Jesus was coming tomorrow morning, we wouldn’t argue over the color of the church carpet or the size of the parking lot, would we?

A grace which spares us from a judgment which wouldn’t have happened anyway is not grace but just a sentimental sort of divine permissiveness. Either grace or judgment becomes distorted without the other. Jesus didn’t die to save us from a distant possibility that we might not be able to save ourselves. He died because it is a dead certainty, that like a five-year-old who falls into the river, we’re done for already and our only hope is to throw ourselves on the mercy of someone quite beyond our control to snatch us out of our predicament. Today’s parable functions on one level to remind us that our salvation, joy that it is, is quite serious business. Salvation can only be real if it saves us from an alternate, certain fate that is equally real.

But the parable functions on another level as well, on the level of the wedding banquet and the bridegroom’s presence at the party. We are reminded that “what we are watching for is a party. And that party is not just down the street making up its mind when to come to us. It is already hiding in our basement, banging on our steam pipes, and laughing its way up our cellar stairs. The unknown day and hour of its finally bursting into the kitchen and roistering its way through the whole house is not dreadful; it is all part of the divine lark of grace. God is not our mother-in-law, coming to see whether her wedding-present china has been chipped. He is a funny Old Uncle with a salami under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. We do indeed need to watch for him; but only because it would be such a pity to miss all the fun.”[7]

[1] Genesis 32:24-32

[2] Acts 10:1-48

[3] Daniel 2:1-48

[4] 11/7/1996

[5] Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of Judgment, Eerdmans Press, 1989, p. 161.

[6] Glenn David Macdonald Morison (United Church of Canada), Hazelton, British Columbia.

[7] Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of Judgment, Eerdmans Press, 1989, p. 166.

Doing Good and Doing Well

2011-10-30T17:14:00.000-07:00

Doing Good and Doing Well

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Matthew 23:1-12

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples,

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat;

therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it;

but do not do as they do,

for they do not practice what they teach.

Tomorrow is Halloween, or, to be historically and liturgically correct: “All Hallow’s Even.” In our culture in general and, sadly, among Protestants in particular, it is seldom remembered any more the night before the celebration of All Saints Day, November 1st.

For many years now, Protestants have celebrated the day nearest Halloween as “Reformation Sunday,” rather than focusing on a pasted-over old pagan holiday as a theme for our worship. It still works for me as long as we remember that the key phrase in the Presbyterian part of the Reformation that swept Europe over 400 years ago was “a church reformed and always reforming.” It seemed to the Calvinists and others in what came to be called the Reformed tradition of churches, that a reformation must always be under way in the church, to keep it from degenerating into habit, or empty formalism, doing what we do because we have always done it that way. Of course, uttering a key phrase and keeping it ever before the church are two different things. Like all churches, we have our struggles with the temptation to follow what have been jokingly called the Seven Last Words of the Church: We never did it that way before.

In our scripture passage Jesus spoke of the “Moses seat.” It sounds quaint, antiquated, doesn’t it? Yet if pressed to do it, we could think of several contemporary “seats” that today are more figurative than real: seats of learning, county seats, seats of government. These all come from times when learning or government actually, physically involved a seat, someone in charge occupied an actual, special chair or throne and from there issued laws, decrees, decisions. The Greek word for “seat” is kathedras, a word that moved directly into Latin in the word we associate with “cathedral.” We usually think a cathedral is mainly a really big church, but lots of really big churches are not cathedrals. And the reason is that a cathedral is a church where a bishop occupies the seat, the cathedras of authority. When the pope speaks ex cathedra, it means he is announcing an opinion “from the throne” that carries the full authority of his office. Professors occupy the authority of their own offices by what we still refer to as a “chair” at a university. The disciples knew that Jesus was about to commence teaching them when he sat down.

At the time Matthew’s gospel was being written down, it was the Pharisees who sat upon Moses’ cathedras in the synagogues. It was really a seat, a chair from which they delivered their sermons. It was a seat of authority. But as anyone in a position of authority can tell you, the Moses seat can also be a hot seat. The difference can be seen in this way: Put yourself in a place of privilege and you put yourself on the hot seat. Put yourself in a place of service and you put yourself on the Moses seat.

Whenever a person in a position of authority sees that position as a call to service, an opportunity to be helpful and useful for the sake of others – as in the best traditions of public service – then that person occupies the contemporary equivalent of the Moses seat. It is an authority that serves not self, but others.

On the other hand, whenever a person in a position of authority sees that office as an opportunity to lord it over others, to promote their own opinions rather than seek what is best for all, to see the seat of authority as a seat of privilege, then they place themselves not on the Moses seat, but on the hot seat – they set themselves up as targets for criticism, and rightly so.

Moses was the servant who never got to the promised land, but whose selfless service made it possible for others to get there. Compare that with the service of those who work as hard as they can to use a position of authority to make certain they reach the promised land ahead of everyone else.

In the Bible, true greatness generally seems to come from a place where it is least expected, from the lowly, the poor, the meek, the youngest child of Jesse rather than his oldest, from the baby in the manger rather than Herod sitting on his cathedras.

I recall once, several years ago, when a newspaper[1] quoted an official in the US State Department who said that poor people in third world countries cannot be helped much by means of financial aid or loans, because he believed that poor people are often poor due to a native inability to do any better. This sounded ominously like things that used to be said about minority groups and women in our country not that many years ago. A biblical concept of humility flies in the face of self-importance and jingoistic attitudes about the economic conditions of others trapped in oppressive social norms.

I have a friend who once occupied a chair on the faculty of a large state university. Some of his work in agriculture was internationally known. With all the honors and awards he had received, we can be certain that he was an authority in his field. But he liked to recount the story of the day that he, brand new know-it-all professor from the big university, was called out to a local farmer’s livestock yard to offer some advice on improving the conditions there for the farmer’s pigs. Other farmers stood around the holding pen, eyeing with suspicion the professor with his clipboard and scientific instruments and his air of infallibility. Their suspicions of his imperfection were confirmed when he stepped, with his 11 inch high boots, into a pen that was 12 inches deep in manure. It was a testimony to this man’s humility that he often told this story on himself.

The calling of a professor who holds that chair at that university is one of service to agriculture, and if he forgets that, if he begins to treat his position of authority as a privilege for himself and his own prestige rather than as an opportunity to be of help to others, then he has exchanged the Moses seat for something else altogether, in this case, a manure bath.

If as we read the story from Matthew’s gospel – with its famous “do what they say but not what they do” – if we find in it an occasion to feel rather superior to the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, then we have certainly missed the point. The portrait offered here of the Pharisees is a portrait of unbelief, which is a portrait that can be painted any time and any place. We need to remember that this story is not included in a Jewish book, but in the Christian New Testament, to serve not as a brick bat to throw at other people, but as a warning to all those who accept a call to service in the name of Christ. It details an attitude that it is not impossible to find in the Christian church, one that has indeed been found in the church in every age since the time of Paul. Karl Barth called it the “temptation to glorify themselves in their individuality by means of the Gospel rather than to glorify the Gospel in their individuality.”[2]

One portion of this passage about which I ponder is the brief reference to those who “make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long.” (v. 5) Really to appreciate this, it is helpful to know what a phylactery is, and why fringes were worn at all. But it’s not necessary. Anyone who has ever taken on a job or responsibility which called for a certain kind of dress or special uniform knows exactly the sort of human self-importance Jesus is referring to here. I’ll never forget the special day that I was able to put on a pulpit gown as an ordained pastor, something that is now becoming passé in many churches. Medical professionals take on special status in hospitals with white jackets or surgical scrubs, military personnel take on prestige attached to ranks worn on shoulders and arms. But we must remember how fragile all such outward marks of human importance really are.

A physician I know wanted to point this out to children in a children’s sermon once. He wore a white lab coat to the church chancel, and carried a black doctor’s bag. He asked the children if they knew what he did for a living by the sort of clothing he was wearing. They all shouted out that they could tell he was a doctor, but he said, “No, I’m a milkman!” and opened his doctor’s bag to give them cartons of chocolate milk.

No matter what they were, the Pharisees’ fringes were long and their phylacteries broad for the same reason that our automobiles are shiny and our good deeds are so often paraded around in front of others. We want to let others know how good or impressive we are, and in so doing, spoil the good that we try to do, call attention to ourselves instead of the Gospel, and so claim our faith as a call to self-importance rather than service. When Jesus says that there were folks who loved the place of honor, the best seats, don’t we have to admit that he is talking about us? Who wouldn’t want to be at the head table, why would anyone choose to have a rotten seat, when a good seat guarantees not only a good view, but the added benefit of demonstrating to others how important we are? One Bible scholar helped me keep this view in perspective when he titled his comments on our passage: “Jesus Condemns Jewish and Christian Pharisaism."[3]

A story is told about Dwight Eisenhower’s mother, who was the very essence of selfless Christian humility. It is said that during the second world war, while riding on a train, she found herself next to a very talkative passenger. Having no idea who Mrs. Eisenhower was, her seat mate took advantage of the long ride to talk endlessly about her son to one who was the mother of the Supreme Allied Commander, telling her how proud she was that he had been made a corporal. Finally, the realization came upon her that she had been dominating the conversation, and she said to Mrs. Eisenhower, “Tell me about your son.” Her entire reply was, “My son is in the army too."

Baptism has been called the ordination service that empowers all believers with the authority of the gospel. We are all called to be proclaimers of the Word of God with our words and our lives. Our faith is not a call to privilege so that we may lord it over others, but a call to service so that we may live for others, no matter who they are. I hope that the coming month of November, a month devoted to giving thanks, will provide us all with an opportunity to rededicate our lives to Jesus’ example of selfless service for others.

[1] “Debate over capability of world’s poorest ruffles US aid issue", Christian Science Monitor.

[2] Church Dogmatics , Vol. IV, 3, p. 888.

[3] The Good News According to Matthew , Eduard Schweizer, John Knox Press, p. 427.

The Main Thing

2011-10-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

The Main Thing

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Matthew 22:34-46

Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?

I had a friend once who reflected that the main thing in life is keeping the main thing the main thing. Leading a discussion on this passage at a Bible study once, I started our conversation by asking a question:

“What is the main thing?”

I didn’t give the question a context, like “When it comes to college football, what is the main thing?” or “If you want to stay healthy into your old age, what is the main thing?” or “What is the main thing to know about the gospel of Matthew?” To have selected a context for a “main thing” discussion would have made responses to the broader question too easy.

Just sitting here, without benefit of any boundaries placed on our responses, what is the main thing? Now, granted, in that Bible study we were sitting in a room with a dozen or so fellow church members expecting a Bible study to happen, so that in itself gave a preconceived context to the responses I suppose. But I didn’t say anything to prejudice replies. In answer to my question, “What is the main thing?” I received these responses:

· Jesus is Lord

· For God so loved the word that he gave his only son...

· Forgiveness

· God loves you

· Faith in things unseen

· Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

· Love one another, including your enemy

· Turn the other cheek

· Life together

Some great responses, really. Then I asked, “If a person who was a total stranger to us and to our ministry were to observe us for a morning here at church, what do you think they would say by their observations among us that we believe to be the main thing here?”

· Coffee

· Music

· Community

OK, I wasn’t depressed that no one said, “brilliant sermons,” because I am a realist; and I was only just a little despondent because words like “worship” or “Bible” or “prayer” weren’t mentioned, perhaps because that group might have been in a self-critical or a little bit of a smart-aleck frame of mind. But I think the exercise could be valuable in any church at any time. It might be good for all of us to think on those two items in our own personal devotional time in the week to come. We can give the first one a little more context, if we like:

1) What is the “main thing” in my life?

and

2) What would an outsider, observing the worship of our church fellowship, perceive to be our “main thing?”

There is an old story about the rabbi who was approached by two men arguing over payment for a chicken. The first one said, “This man bought a chicken from me. So he should pay for that chicken, right?” The rabbi answered, “Yes, you are right, he should pay for the chicken.” The other man said, “Yes, I bought the chicken from him, but since I did pay him, I should not have to pay him again should I?” Again, the rabbi said, “You are right, you should not have to pay him again.” At this point, the rabbi’s wife, overhearing the discussion, interrupted the rabbi, “Don’t be silly, certainly both men can’t be right.” And the rabbi responded, “Ah, yes, you are also right.”

C.S. Lewis once reflected that our theological questions are often as confounding as the answers of the rabbi: “Can a person ask questions which God finds unanswerable?” Lewis asked. “Quite easily... How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical questions – are like that.”[1]

Our Bible passage, as you must be realizing by now, involved Matthew’s recollection of a time when the Pharisees asked Jesus a question about the main thing: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” The main thing. Jews of the time were obliged to observe 613 laws, all of which were equally binding. This was a trick question. Choose one and you shortchange the others.

And if we’ve thought about it a bit, we might recognize that Jesus’ response begs the question, first, because he doesn’t choose from among the 613 obligatory laws, but chooses instead to recite what Jews call the shema,[2] and secondly, because he fails to single out one law from among the great commandments, and actually combines two instead: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Since Jesus connected the two disparate commands, saying the “second is like it,” it was made to sound as if the two commands are, for all practical purposes, one. Which, it turns out in Christian practice ever since, they are. Or should be anyway.

One great rule in debate, as Jesus knew instinctively, is this: If you decide to answer a question from someone trying to get the best of you in a discussion, always answer the question he should have asked rather than the one he did ask. In reply to a question about the greatest commandment, Jesus responded with two commands, a combination punch. The main thing was really two things, so inseparably bound together in his theological thinking that it would be impossible to have the one without the other. To love the Lord your God, without a commitment to love of neighbor? Impossible! To manufacture a love of neighbor without relying on the empowering love of God to carry it out? Unthinkable! Then comes some more of that biblically theological math that confounds us: “The two are one.”

To proclaim love for God while failing to seek the best for others is absurd. To attempt to love others without relying on the empowering love of God is a failed enterprise from the start. Going at either one without the other reminds me of an old Berke Breathed Bloom County comic strip in which Opus the penguin decides one day, through the strength of nothing but his own power, to give up television and become more learned. As he walked to the library he announced,

Attention, dark world of electronic gratification

I would like to announce my intellectualization!

No more tv! No boob tube-a-roo!

‘Twas turning my noodle to video goo!

Yes, there's something much better for smart chaps like me

From what I have heard, it's known as 'to read’!

Books! I'll read books! Be they large or quite dinky!

Straight from the shelves all musty and stinky!

Faulkner! O'Neill! Twain and Saul Bellow! ...

I think I'll curl up with a few of those fellows!

Yes, I'll soon be well-read! Such a fab thing to be!

I've allowed plenty of time, at least an hour . . . or three.

But, after standing, bewildered, surrounded, amid towering bookshelves reaching to the sky, closing in on him, the next frame finds Opus on the sofa, snacking in front of the TV set, a voice calling from the TV: Gilligan!

We all know what it is to begin with enthusiasm for something new, a diet, or an exercise program, or a self-improvement book, and then find ourselves a few days or weeks later, back in the old grind, nothing changed, Cheetos bags scattered around. That’s how it is when we resolve to love our neighbors as ourselves under nothing but our own power. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have heard versions of the ancient lapsed-church-member refrain: “Well, I don’t go to church, but I believe in God, and I pay my taxes, and I try to treat everybody fairly.” I wonder if God is flattered by our believing in him without ever speaking to him. Is that the way we would treat a relative we don’t even like very much? “Uncle Henry is a pain in the patootie, so I never speak to him, but I believe he exists, and that’s good enough for me.” I suppose Uncle Henry might be less than reassured that someone cares about him only enough to confirm that he exists.

If there is any way in which we in the mainline churches fail, it is probably in the area of our flaccid attention span concerning the biblical requirements of our faith: Sabbath observance, tithing, prayer, worship, study, commitment to the poor, these are all building blocks in the very most basic foundations of our faith, yet how often do we actually think about them? In a moral universe of self-orientation, everything – even faith – can become self-serving. Religion can devolve into narcissistic spirituality, a way to find peace…for me, a way to find fulfillment…for me, a way to discover meaning, happiness, prosperity…for me. The stewardship season – on which we have embarked in our church – provides an appropriate time to think on exactly whom and what we live for, and to reflect our answer to that question in our giving.

Jesus’ answer to the Pharisee’s question is less a matter of information than of formation. What is the main thing? What is it that most forms your life and mine, the mold around which we find our living and our thinking and our being shaped? It is less a matter of knowledge than of obedience and religious practice. The main thing is not so much having the correct answer as having the right direction, the correct orientation.

Clearly, Jesus was on to something: love God, love others, it’s not two commands but one, they stand together, as they must, they are inseparable. Loving the Lord our God with heart, soul, and mind reminds us that our worship, as well as our relationships, are not matters of what we get out of either. The living of our truest faith takes place “both because of and despite the needs, strengths and frailties of the people present”[3] in community with us.

[1] C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, New York: Bantam, p. 81.

[2] Deuteronomt 6:4

[3] Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

State Secrets

2011-10-16T17:38:00.000-07:00

State Secrets

October 16, 2011

Isaiah 45:1-7

Matthew 22:15-22

Senator Eugene McCarthy once made a rather cynical comment about his involvement in political wars over the years: “Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.” It’s a rather jaded point of view, one I’m not sure we should accept at face value. After all, politics are important. People’s lives depend upon political decisions made every day, and sometimes people can be hurt terribly, or made wealthy overnight by a simple whisk of the legislative pen.

Twentieth century filmmaker Boris Marshalov[1] once observed, “Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens – and then everybody disagrees.” Remember the story of the little boy who found his grandfather watching a political speech on television one day, and asked him, “What is he talking about, Grandpa?” To which his grandfather replied, “I don’t know, he doesn’t say.” Yet in spite of our inclination to scoff at politics and politicians – which is something of a national pastime – the Bible takes another point of view.

There is a key element in today’s reading from Isaiah’s prophecy: God’s use of human – political – means to accomplish his purposes. Now that thought, of itself, is hardly new, although some of us may be moved either to agree or disagree with it. Yet right or wrong, some people claim to have seen God’s will at work in the political arena for centuries. That view certainly isn’t abating in our time in which preachers appear in the political section as well as the religion section of news magazines.

We would do well to remember that when we begin talking about God’s use of human, political means to accomplish his purposes, we need to be awfully careful. War and civil strife are ugly enough, but probably no war is uglier than a religious war with the special kind of hatred that it can inspire: Sunni Muslims blowing up Shiite Muslims in the Middle East, a history of Protestants battling Catholics, these serve as just two reminders of that truth. Through history, the declaration that God has singled out certain political leaders for his work has been a reckless claim at best, lethal at worst. Governmental leaders with particularly ugly policies have often identified God’s will with their own political ends.

Allowing for that, one feature separates Isaiah’s prophecy concerning the Persian king Cyrus from all the political claims people have made on behalf of God throughout history. It is the claim that Cyrus – non-Jew, non-Palestinian, even non-Arab – Cyrus was God’s chosen servant, even though he was unaware of it. Cyrus did not make any claim to a special calling from the God of the Jews. Isaiah went to great pains to point that out when in his prophecy God speaks to Cyrus, saying:

“I appoint you to help my servant Israel, the people I have chosen. I have given you great honor, although you do not know me.” (v.4)

Twice, in the space of two verses, God declared he had chosen Cyrus for his special assignment, although Cyrus did not know God. Cyrus is described as God’s ‘messiah’ in the Old Testament sense – that is, the anointed one. This is a startling development, since obviously, such a description of an anointed king had, for all the previous history of the Jews, been reserved exclusively for their own kings. We can read where Saul was anointed, David was anointed, Solomon, Ahab, and all the rest. But here a foreign king received a title previously reserved exclusively for the kings of Israel and Judah. This sets the Cyrus oracle apart from any claims of contemporary political figures that they represent the will of God. Cyrus was unaware of that aspect of his role, and never claimed it for himself.

In the prophet’s mind, the formula seemed to work something like this:

[1] Cyrus exists for the sake of Israel, the people of God. That is, he

was going to be the one to bring about their freedom.

But…

[2] Israel exists for the sake of the nations:

“I do this so that everyone from one end of the world to the other

may know that I am the Lord... “ (v. 6)

We may add that the Church in our time – inasmuch as it lives up to its calling to be the ‘new Israel’ – also is called to exist for the sake of the nations. God is not unconcerned with the fate of nations, with the political foibles of humanity.

What we see in Isaiah is a whole new way to view a political servant’s ‘chosenness.’ Where all the other pretenders to the throne of grace have claimed for themselves that they are God’s chosen, here we have a radical Biblical doctrine that God chooses whom God needs, regardless whether they are even aware of it, regardless whether they may have passed kingdom entrance exams. Cyrus never claimed for himself the title of “Yahweh’s anointed”. He probably would have laughed at the thought that such a tiny, insignificant group of people as the exiled Jews would have thought of him in those terms. But that would not, in Isaiah’s mind, have made him any less chosen.

Jesus taught that where love is, God is. Similarly, Isaiah might have said, “Where justice is, there God is.” Cyrus was one of the most enlightened rulers the world has ever known, certainly he was one of the most benevolent conquerors. He did not carry conquered peoples off into exile, he did not burn their crops and sow their fields with salt. Instead, he returned exiled peoples to their homelands, allowed conquered peoples to remain in their own country, and is said to have captured overripe Babylon without a struggle. He cast himself in the role not of swaggering enslaver, but of liberator. No wonder he is so well-remembered by ancient historians. The Old Testament writers had ample reason to view him in a kindly light, since he allowed the return of the Jews to their homeland. But they went a step further, calling him the Lord’s anointed. Why?

I think it is because they realized that the God of Israel was much more than a national deity. If the Lord was any God at all, he must be a God of all the world, and his interest in the affairs of humanity must extend to all the people of the earth. Any person who served to liberate people from repression, to free people from tyranny, could be an agent of their God, whether aware of it or not. The old joke in the countries under former communist domination used to be that in Western democracies with capitalist economic systems, domination of people by people prevails, while under socialism it is the other way around. A political figure, called by God, would be a leader that set at liberty those who are oppressed by any system.

If it was a startling revelation to the Jews to realize that their Lord could use a foreigner as an agent of his purposes for history, it might be startling for us. It is possible that God is freeing people by agencies other than the CIA? It is possible that people in China are more or less content under their present rulers, regardless of our opinions of them, and that to the degree that the people are more free now than they were a few decades ago, that government may have served in recent times as an agent of God, since where justice is, there God is?

All this is to say that the God who loves each and every one of us from the moment we are conceived to the day we die will necessarily be concerned about the way we organize our political lives together. The God who is Father to Jesus Christ could not be any other way. God’s concern for justice necessitates an intimate interest in our affairs of state.

Still, the gospel message for today reminds us that our ultimate loyalty lies elsewhere than with our political loyalties, important as those may be. When Jesus said “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” he was bound to have offended the Pharisees whom Matthew saw as the devout, self-righteous, and self-appointed keepers of the purity of the religious house of Israel, who were very much opposed to the rule and taxation of Caesar. When he said, “... and render to God the things that are God’s,” he just as surely offended the operatives of King Herod, the sold-out, Uncle Tom collaborators who were perfectly happy to see heavy taxes levied on the Jews, since they got a cut of what was taken.

We may know that God’s will for the world can be aided or frustrated by our political process. We may know that God can use the most unlikely of agents to help in the establishment of his will. But above all, no matter who the king Cyrus or King Herod of our time turns out to be, we must know that such a king may only demand a portion of our loyalty, and that our ultimate loyalty must be to the King of kings, Lord of lords, the one who requires of us only that we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly in his way.

[1] Known for films in the 1940s, 50s and 60s such as Sentence of Death (1948) starring James Dean, and Terror in the City (1964) starring Lee Grant.

Dressed for Church

2011-10-09T16:34:00.000-07:00

Dressed for Church

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time: October 9, 2011

Matthew 22:1-14

There is a version of this banquet story in Luke’s gospel,[1] and it is more often read for preaching than Matthew’s edition for some reasons that become obvious if you just read them both.

• In Matthew, the king’s gracious invitation to a banquet is received by a unique method of making a response: the invited guests seized the messengers who sought their RSVP to the king’s invitation and killed them. Perhaps they didn’t like the menu – perhaps they’d already had too much rare beef!

• Luke has no killing of the messengers in his version.

• In Matthew, an enraged king sends troops upon the offending townspeople and has their city burned to the ground.

• In Luke, the offended king merely tells his messengers to go invite someone else.

• Matthew also has messengers inviting the rabble of the street to the great banquet, but unlike the story in Luke, the king in Matthew’s version seizes someone who was brought from the street into the wedding feast and dresses him down (!) for sporting improper attire.

• Luke’s main point is that the gracious invitation of God is extended to everyone, regardless of merit.

• Matthew’s point, it appears, is anybody’s guess.

So what should we do? Read only Luke’s version of Jesus’ parable and pretend that Matthew was silent on the subject? Throw away Matthew’s version of Jesus’ story? I think, if we are willing to read with imagination, we can discover additional gospel truths in the version Matthew provides us, and, in the end, there is good news.

First of all, remember parables are stories, not descriptions of historic events. This is a story meant to teach. Additionally, it is an allegory, in which the characters and situations are meant to represent things: the king is meant to be understood as a stand-in for God, the son as Jesus, the wedding banquet as the kingdom of heaven, and so forth. You can probably figure out the rest just by giving it a little thought.

Both Matthew and Luke bring us the first main point of the story. The first people invited to the banquet refused the invitation, so then the king threw open the doors and invited everyone, “both good and bad” to come in and have a seat at the table. This reminds us of something we already know about our faith, which is that God’s grace is available to all, regardless of merit, that the son in whose name the banquet is offered has come to save the whole world and everyone in it. Walt Whitman’s poem, “Song of Myself” expresses this truth about the gospel and this story:

“This is the meal pleasantly set...

this is the meat and drink for natural hunger,

It is for the wicked the same as the righteous...

I make appointments with all,

I will not have a single person slighted or left away,

The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited...

the heavy-lipped slave is invited...

the venerealee is invited,

There shall be no difference between them and the rest.”

For Luke, the story ends there. The grace of God is extended to all sinners equally, “both good and bad” have been invited. Here is how Frederick Buechner sees the scene:

“...the champagne glasses are filled, the cold pheasant is passed around, and there they sit by candlelight with their white canes and their empty sleeves, their Youngstown haircuts, their orthopedic shoes, their sleazy clothes, their aluminum walkers. A woman with a hairlip proposes a toast. An old man with the face of [King] Lear on the heath and a party hat does his best to rise to his feet. A deaf mute thinks people are starting to go home and pushes back from the table...”[2]

In other words, when it comes to inviting every sinner to the banquet, we are likely to be surprised at the cast of characters who will be there in response to the inclusiveness of God’s invitation. But Matthew takes us further into the life of the church as we know it and have experienced it. Matthew looks around his church, filled with forgiven sinners, and wonders how people, so graced and embraced by God, can then come to do the will of God so reluctantly, so grudgingly. Beyond calling people into “the banquet” – the church – as both Luke’s and Matthew’s versions of the parable do, what should happen next, how, then, shall we live? This is where the additional parts of Matthew’s version come to life.

Matthew knew how easily the free and forgiving nature of God’s grace can slide into permissiveness. Once we have received the invitation to salvation which Jesus offers, there is always a temptation to think that we have done everything we can do. Some people think that religious faith is a matter of affirming a certain set of beliefs. Matthew knows that beliefs which do not lead to changed lives are dead in the water. This is the gospel equivalent of the letter of James, which declares that faith without good works is dead faith, as good as no faith at all, or even worse.[3] At least an unrepentant sinner has his faithlessness to offer as a reason for failure to respond to the graciousness of God, he needs to offer no excuses for his bad behavior: he never claimed a religious transformation of his life in the first place. But for believers, the transforming power of the gospel should result in changed lives, or else how will the world see the good news lived out in life?

I once heard about a female seminary student who received an assignment in a theology class to write a paper on the topic of “shame.” Inexplicably, she found the paper was too difficult to write. Personal feelings were getting in the way. One of her professors, with exceptional insight, discovered in talking with her that during the year she had been working in a church with a very charismatic pastor who also abused her sexually. It was difficult for her to write objectively about a subject which was so much a part of her present experience. There isn’t much that holds any church together apart from trust, from a shared commitment to make every effort to live by what we say, to back up what we profess to believe with behavior that seeks to match. That shared trust also presumes that when our lives fall short of our faith, we will confess our shortcomings, seek forgiveness and move on. The effort to match up our lives to our calling should always move us forward. So here, in this woman’s experience, at the center of the trust which a church needs to exist, was someone who violated trust and expected permissive grace to let him off the hook.

III

I’m not sure that Matthew’s gospel story is declaring that that pastor will burn in hell, but I can’t believe the love of Jesus is so permissive as to say this doesn’t matter. Someone, somewhere must turn to that pastor at the banquet and say, “What? You are in here with no wedding garment of righteousness? Get out!” That charismatic pastor had mistaken Jesus’ acceptance of all people, good or bad, as also condoning all behavior.

The parable is not meant to empower us to sit in judgment on others we deem unworthy to remain at the banquet, but rather to serve as a goad to us to examine our own worthiness, or lack of it. It is not meant to depress us with a reminder that we have fallen short, a fact of which any honest person is only too well aware, but to encourage us to press forward to ever fuller acts of faithfulness. Justification (the free grace involved in being admitted to the feast) is the first step of faith, the step that God takes toward us. The next step is up to us, and it is the process of sanctification, the goal being to aim at a life which is holy as a response to the holiness which has been given us.

When we’re getting dressed for church – in the spirit of this parable – we need to do more than put on our coats and ties, our shirts and slacks, our shoes and stockings, our skirts and dresses. We also need a special wardrobe, a garment that fits us for discipleship in the kingdom, one that Paul described in Ephesians when he counseled believers to prepare a new wardrobe for kingdom living:

Put on the whole armor of God...so that you may be able to...stand firm. Stand firm, therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet, put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these take the shield of faith...Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God.[4]

[1] Luke 14:16-24.

[2] Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, by Frederick Buechner, Harper & Row, p. 67.

[3] James 2:14-17.

[4] Ephesians 6:13-17.

Top Ten

2011-10-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

Top Ten

World Communion Sunday Meditation

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Exodus 20:1-20

I am the Lord your God,

who brought you out of the land of Egypt,

out of the house of slavery...

Over the years we’ve all heard perhaps more debates than we would have liked concerning proposed monuments to the Ten Commandments on public property, debates that often seem to generate more heat than light. Are the commandments simply common sense regulations, universally applicable across religions and cultures, which all people everywhere would do well to obey? On careful reading we have to say, the introductory statement suggests not. These were commands issued to a very particular group of people in a very particular time, which they then carried forward into their particular faith as a sort of standard of community behavior. What’s more, straightforward as they may seem, there is no consistent agreement on something so seemingly simple as the proper numbering. Even Christian groups argue about whether verses 3 and 4 comprise a single command or two. The final command in Exodus places coveting a neighbor’s house ahead of coveting his spouse, while the list in Deuteronomy has it the other way around.

From 1980 to 1985 I served the Presbyterian church in Port Arthur, Texas. During my tenure as pastor of that congregation we planned and built a new sanctuary. The name of the church had recently been changed to The Presbyterian Church of the Covenant because of its history. In 1979 two formerly separate Presbyterian churches in the city were united into a single congregation. They covenanted together to become one church family. Because the name of the church so purposefully included the word “covenant,” at the rear of the new sanctuary we commissioned stained-glass windows depicting the 6 biblical covenants.[1] Upon exiting the sanctuary, you could see on the far left the “rainbow covenant” window from the story of Noah, then the Abraham window, and, next to the door, the 10 commandments window, known formerly and very affectionately in that church, as the nine commandments window. You might wonder why nine commandments? The artist who designed the window – and it was a modern window for a modern sanctuary – said the Roman numeral “X” representing the 10th commandment was supposed to be there in your imagination, obscured behind a rough bunch of color that was supposed to depict the Sinai mountain. It didn’t matter, though, what it was supposed to represent. Most people who saw it said immediately, “Hey, how come only nine commandments?”

Before that window was altered by the stained glass company to include the Roman numeral for ten, lots of jokes were passed around local ministerial circles in the community to the effect that the Presbyterians were obedient to all commandments except one, and no one could agree on which one it was that we were free to ignore. My favorite explanation for the missing commandment came from the person who said it was missing because the 10th commandment was implied in the name of our church. Change a few letters and you get the Presbyterian Church of the “Covet-not.”

Lots of writers through the ages have had a lot to say about the commandments, however we number them.

H.L. Mencken, never a particularly religious man, once wrote, “Say what you like about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”

Once, at a National Press Association meeting several years ago, Ted Turner declared, in his usual, shy, understated way, “... We’re living with outmoded rules ... and I bet nobody here even pays too much attention to ‘em because they are too old. When Moses went up on the mountain, there were no nuclear weapons, there was no poverty. Today the Ten Commandments wouldn’t go over. Nobody around likes to be commanded. Commandments are out.”

Mark Twain once told of a conversation with a notoriously ruthless businessman, who said to him in passing, “Before I die I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land where I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud at the top.” Mark Twain reportedly replied, “I have a better idea; you could stay home and keep them.”

While it’s true that we may sometimes possess an uncritical desire to be free of laws and limitations, some sort of law is absolutely essential to the creation of any sort of community. Some things you have to be able to count on. Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Felix Frankfurter could be expected to speak for the importance of the letter of the law, and he once wrote, “If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.” On the other hand, speaking on behalf of the importance of the law’s spirit, former Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote “It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.”

Of course, biblical law is not to be confused with civil law. A God-created covenantal community was and is something new. The new thing, which came into being at Sinai, was a covenanting community based on trust and forgiveness, because that was the way God had determined to deal with the community. Freed Egyptian slaves were to acknowledge God by granting each other freedom under the law.

The old oversimplification that the Old Testament represents oppressive legalism while the New Testament supersedes law just isn’t accurate. It is inaccurate because Jesus himself said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”[2]

What this means as we approach the Ten Commandments in search for understanding is that the law is God’s gift to liberate the human community not to enslave it. To realize the necessity of law, we only need to turn the idea around and consider the chilling alternative: a community of people in which fathers and mothers need not be obeyed, killing is condoned, adultery is considered normal, thievery is not prohibited, lying is not unlawful. What sort of covenanting community of mutual trust would be possible under those circumstances?

The law provides boundaries for God’s people, while forming the very heart of Israel’s freedom. Oddly enough, it was failure to obey the very first commandment that most often seemed to be Israel’s undoing, that frequently led to failure in obeying the other commandments, that led to the re-enslavement of the people. “You shall have no other gods before me,” is the primary assertion in the law from which all the rest is derived, and the reason why placement of the 10 Commandments on public property rubs against the anti-establishment clause of the constitution in many people’s minds.

The 10 Commandments represent not only social faithfulness, as found in the last 6 commandments, but our very faithfulness to God. It is all of one piece. One cannot be faithful to God and faithless to neighbor. One cannot make an idol of bricks and sticks, or ministers, or church school curriculum, or a favorite set of hymns, or an accustomed seat in a pew, or flag, or country, or job, or even family, or school, or church, and expect to be declared an obedient servant, a free child of God.

True freedom under the law rests in obedience to the law in spirit as well as in letter. Jesus wanted to make this clear not just through his teaching, but in the offering of his life. In John’s gospel Jesus spoke of a new temple.[3] As the disciples reflected later he was referring to the temple of his very self in resurrected form. Those who try to live their lives by the 10 commandments, who know that Christ is our new sanctuary, also know what the church building is and is not. And they also know that the freedom of salvation in any age is not earned by obedience to the law, but by the saving, loving acts of God.

We gather today around the table in community with each other. The word for our celebration is based in community with its name “communion.” The very community we share is possible because of the loving provision of God’s law, and the perfect expression of it in Jesus Christ. So, of course, we gather on what we call “World Communion Sunday,” not only in community with each other here, but in community with our brothers and sisters gathered at communion tables down the block, across town, throughout the nation, and all across the world. The worldwide community of the faithful is possible because of the faithfulness of one man, Jesus Christ, whose perfection and self-sacrifice have saved us, and made justification through grace under the law possible for us all.

[1] The Covenant with Noah, Genesis 6-9; the Covenant with Abraham, Genesis 12-17; the Covenant with Moses and Israel, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5; the Covenant with David, II Samuel 7:8-16; the Covenant with Jeremiah, Jeremiah 31:31; Jesus’ covenant “sealed in my blood,” Luke 22:20, I Corinthians 11:25.

[2] Matthew 5:17

[3] John 2:13-22.

Low Carb Faith

2011-09-25T19:01:00.000-07:00

Low Carb Faith

Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Romans 14:1-12

Some believe in eating anything,

while the weak eat only vegetables.

I guess they had different things to argue about in churches in Paul’s day than we do in ours, such as what was on the after-church supper menu: “The weak eat only vegetables...”[1]? Come again? How is it that vegetarianism was singled out as a sign of weakness? Was Paul an Atkins diet guy, a three-meal-a-day meat eater, a man of low-carb faith? This is one of those times when it’s important to know the story behind the story.

Paul’s words refer to folks in the first century church who would eat only vegetables because they had religious scruples involving the consumption of meat, most likely meat that was first offered to idols in temples to various gods, then sold in the open-air markets afterward. It was a common practice by which temple priests raised money in the the ancient world. The problem for some Christian believers with the consumption of meat from the markets was that you could never be sure that the meat you had purchased hadn’t first been offered up as a sacrifice to some deity. So apparently, there were folks who just decided to forego meat altogether. We know that Paul wasn’t one of them, in fact he seemed to see it as a sign of weak faith: since he didn’t believe pagan gods existed, he had no problem eating meat, whatever its source.

The issue seems distant from our frame of reference now, doesn’t it? As with many church controversies over time, this one eventually faded into virtual irrelevance.

Church people across the centuries are famous for our ability to major in minors. If it was decided that meat-eating was inferior to vegetable eating, what do you suppose would come next? Vegetable comparison, that’s what: broccoli’s superiority to celery, maybe, or green beans over summer squash.

A low carb carnivore himself, Paul nevertheless saw the need to change the subject.

I love the way our passage begins, the first word of Paul’s instruction to them is one of my favorite New Testament words: “Welcome.” Now, we all want to think of ours as a welcoming church, though it strikes some people – I know it does – as a side issue, not the main thing. But it is not a side issue in the New Testament. Just check the forms of the word “welcome” in any Bible concordance and see how busy it keeps you looking up all the references. My concordance lists 59 places in The New Testament where it is used. It is used more frequently than the word “praise” in the New Testament, more than “compassion,” more than “healing,” and more than “comfort.”

This is good news, really. Few of us think of ourselves as healers, probably, few claim to be world-class praisers or are recognized for the vast comfort and compassion we hand out to others. But what does it take to be a welcomer? Well, not all that much, just about anyone can do it, all it requires is an extended hand, a heart that is opened just a crack wider, and perhaps saying the word out loud to others every now and then: “Welcome!” Not a difficult task, yet it receives very high praise as an act of pure gospel in the New Testament.

Undervalued, that’s what I think it is. So, Paul says, “Welcome...” But welcome whom? If we are supposed to throw the door open, roll out the red carpet, get the guest room ready, whom is it for? Well, that’s the difficult part in the church, isn’t it? Church is like family, you don’t get to choose your family, your family chooses you, at least sort-of. First our family chooses us, then they are stuck with us. In the church, we are the collection of people who have decided to throw our lot in together in this place to be a church. Maybe we have an idea of the way our fellow church members ought to look, how they ought to act, what sort of clothes they should wear, the kind of manners they should have when they are here, whether or not they should have bacon and eggs or granola for breakfast, and maybe sometimes we look around ourselves here in this sanctuary and mutter under our breath, “Well, whatever I had in mind for the way a church family should look, this sure isn’t it!”

Paul reminds us with that opening word that welcome comes before everything else. We don’t get to choose the way our church family looks because welcome is the first word, not some qualifying test. You are welcome here. Whoever you are, whatever baggage – literal or figurative – that you carry in here, you are welcome. Maybe you favor a different hairstyle, maybe you like to say your prayers in Portuguese, or Gaelic, maybe you wear the same tie every Sunday, maybe you don’t own a tie, maybe your blouse could stand ironing, maybe you have just a tad too much starch in your blouse, maybe you find gospel hymns objectionable, maybe gospel hymns are your favorites, maybe you prefer a church filled with stained glass windows, maybe you prefer a church with no windows, maybe you think the organ music is too loud, maybe you think the organ music can’t be loud enough, maybe you wish that ministers would do away with their black robes, maybe its the robes that make you feel you are in church, maybe you think a hundred other things and others think a hundred things that are just the opposite.

No matter, the first word to us, as it was to those Romans in this 14th chapter, is “welcome.” If we were to wonder about our main task in the church, we wouldn’t have to go a lot further than that one word.

Now, what was Paul adding to that word? Well, just the sort of thing I have been describing. The Roman church was filled with Presbyterians, that is, people who were entirely willing to disagree about anything and everything! Some in the church had been Jews, some had been pagans, some may have been a mixture of the two. Some members might have had scruples about eating meat because most of the meat you could buy had first been offered to the gods at one of the hundreds of pagan shrines. So some would just rather not eat meat than chance to eat something which had been made an offering to a god they didn’t believe existed.

Of course, being Presbyterians, others disagreed, saying that meat offered to gods they didn’t believe existed anyway would do no harm, so they ate meat. Paul called the vegetarians the ones who were “weak in faith.” Sounds pretty critical on first glance, but there is another way to look at it. Paul wrote to the Corinthians also and he used this word “weak” this way: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world...”[2]

Hmmm, sounds as though weakness comes with higher recommendations than we might first have thought. There’s more: Paul also wrote, “For [Christ] was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we are weak in him, but in dealing with you we will live with him by the power of God.”[3] Paul also wrote, “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.”[4]

So when he counsels us to welcome those who are weak in faith, it could just be that their weak faith has eclipsed what we thought was the strongest part of our own. The lesson in that is that we are not worth much to the kingdom on our own, we are meant to be a sociable church, an hospitable community of saints, a gathering of the faithful, not a collection of lone rangers who pay each other little heed, and reserve contempt for those we judge to be weaker or lesser in some way.

Here is the rub: Paul said, “Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.” Wow, how lucky for them, the Lord will come along and make them stand, unlike those of us who are able to stand on our own strength...er...no, that wouldn’t be it, would it? No, standing on our own strength is definitely not the main subject of the gospel, not even encouraged in its dark little side chapels. No, before God we all are the weak ones, is that not true?

Anyone who thinks they are strong enough to stand before God will one day learn their error. How wonderful that Paul encouraged the building of a fellowship that recognized this from the outset, and set about creating the church as an hospitable place where the welcome did not wait until we became strong, the seat in the pews is not reserved for those who already know their Bible, the singing of the songs is not the personal and private domain of those who know the songs of faith already. If you are today in a church for the very first time ever, you cannot be any less welcome than the person who has occupied a pew here every single Sunday for the past fifty years.

Paul said, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.” Exactly. If we did, who would need a church? Who would need welcome, who would need to gather? Faith would be a matter of thinking good thoughts, or obeying certain rules, but it would be something we would accomplish on our own. No, Paul says we do not live to ourselves, and it is a lesson that no people on earth have a harder time learning than Americans, who like to think of ourselves as up-by-our-bootstraps people, self-made, rugged individualists. In the face of this sort of thinking, Paul simply holds up a mirror of ourselves in our death masks. “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”

The only hope for us is that we live and we die to the Lord. We throw ourselves on the mercy of God in our living and in our dying, and we join in humility with others in the fellowship, whether their hair is parted the way we like it or not, like a beleaguered ship full of sailors for whom the only hope is the Lord who calms the sea for them and leads them safely home.

Why is welcome such an important word? Why do we do this thing, why do we say hello to each other and offer blessings in the beginning moments of our worship, why are we called so forcefully to be a fellowship of welcome and hospitality? It is because we have been welcomed. Carrying a load of trouble? We are welcome in this place where we may set our troubles down. Burdened by a backlog of bad things in our lives which we regret? We are welcome here, regrets and all. This is our home because we have nothing to prove here, only our humble prayer for the love of God and our extension of that love to each other is needed here. That is why we do what we do, for the love of God.

[1] Romans 14:2

[2] I Corinthians 1:26-29

[3] II Corinthians 13:4

[4] II Corinthians 11:30

Many Gifts

2011-09-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

Many Gifts

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Romans 12:1-8

We have gifts that differ

according to the grace given to us.

Once, a couple of years ago, I decided to drive up to Seattle to visit my daughter and her family. I left our house in Salem around 4:15 and called as I left to tell them I’d be there by about 9 PM. Somewhere south of Wilsonville, traffic slowed to a crawl. It was stop and go in all three northbound lanes, for no particular reason except the same reason that you can’t put two feet into a single shoe. There were just too many cars on the road to fit. So I sat back into the now-you-move, now-you-don’t traffic jam driving for the next several hours. I had my first of many regrets of the day that I hadn’t driven a car with an automatic transmission, as I shifted up and down repeatedly through the gears, mainly the lower ones. It was stop-and-go, with go never reaching more than a few brief 30 mile per hour spurts, until we were well north of Vancouver, Washington. I realized I was going to be at least a half hour later getting to Seattle than I had thought. Maybe the trip would be OK after all. I settled back to cruise along at the posted speed limit...

... until I was just south of Olympia, when we returned to the previous stop-and-go, now 5, now 20, now 10, now 2 miles per hour, seldom reaching speeds over 30, with some complete stops lasting minutes on end, until we were well north of Federal Way. I kept praying for the wisdom to remember to buy a train ticket next time, not because it gets there any faster, which it sometimes doesn’t, but because at least you can snooze or read through the delays. I arrived at my daughter’s house a full hour and twenty minutes late, just in time to say goodnight as we all got in our PJs and went to bed.

I don’t know how you respond in these overstuffed traffic situations. My method is usually to spend the stop and go periods in the passing lane, and just stay there, paying no attention to the fact that the other lanes sometimes move faster, sometimes more slowly. I don’t see much purpose in jumping lanes to try to gain a few car lengths when no one in any lane is moving faster than 10 MPH, and you can see cars bumper-to-bumper all the way to the horizon. But I have observed that patience in traffic is not widespread. There are so many lane jumpers. They wear me out. ZOOM! they jump in front of the car to the left, barely squeezing in, as that lane moves ahead a few hundred feet. Then they notice the lane they had been in begins to move, so ZOOM! they jam back in. The result over a half hour of stop-and-go driving is that they gain maybe a few hundred yards – along with muttered death threats from folks who are trying just to move along in an orderly way. I have to say, I quietly smile with guilty satisfaction when someone, who has jumped in front of me in my lane for a few hundred feet, then shifted over to another lane, only to be stopped abruptly, that moving past them when my lane begins to move again brings a brief, bitter sort of satisfaction.

I’d like to think that most of these lane jammers would not think of shoving their way to the front of the line at a movie ticket booth, or during a wait for a ride at the fair, so what makes it OK to do it in a car?

Apparently they are not all that reticent about pushing themselves to the front in lines where others wait patiently. A friend of mine recently wrote about similar behavior by unruly people in the informal lines that form at Starbucks coffee shops during peak hours. There are always those who think that no matter how many folks are in line ahead of them, their order will be placed at the head of the queue, and they sometimes try to grab each coffee out-of-turn as it comes from the baristas, forcing other customers to claim their orders from their grip, all the while complaining bitterly about the indignity they are suffering at having to wait their turn, earning the enduring enmity of those who have come to know the informal rules of play at Starbucks.

These folks could all be poster children for the “everything revolves around me” generation. Advertising picks up on this, focusing the majority of ads toward strictly personal preference, without regard to the effect on others. One person has suggested that a better description of our current third millennium would simply be to call it the “ME-lennium,” a time when the individual and individualism are valued above all else.

Of course, while we’d like to think this sort of ultra-individualism might have bypassed the church, which was founded by One who said, “Where two or three are gathered, I am there,” but we’d be wrong. My own numerous generation, now that we are approaching or are already into our retirement years, are still known with the increasingly ridiculous-sounding name “Baby Boomers.” And we are particluarly skilled at the business of privatizing religion and faith, and setting that example for our children and grandchildren. The online humor newspaper, The Onion, has even spotted this trend, running a tongue-in-cheek satirical piece not long ago about a new fashion in religious upbringing with a headline reading, “More Kids Being Home-Churched.”[1] Many folks of my generation – as well as others – follow private religious quests, or seek some source within themselves to find a private connection to a higher power that will bring a satisfying spiritual life.

While this may be the way chosen by some, it is certainly not the Christian path. The Christian faith has always found its natural home in community, where, while we may have a very personal relationship to God through Christ, we do not have a private one. We are not alone. We are in this together. “Where two or three are gathered in my name,” said Jesus, “I am there among them ...”[2]

Even after two thousand years of knowing this to be true of our communitarian faith, there are still plenty of us who just don’t get it. Often, over my years in ministry, I have heard departures from this line of thinking from members and visitors alike. Visitors sometimes arrive at the church with a checklist of things they want to get out of their church affiliation, and being a selfless member of a community that takes notice of the needs of others doesn’t often make the list. To be fair, oftentimes even long-time church members carry a similar list around in our heads, and if we don’t find that this church gives us the payoff we want, well we believe we can just drop out of this community and keep on shopping until we find a place where the ministry of the church caters to us personally – unaware, like the frustrated speed-demons I encounter in traffic, that sharing this road less traveled with others along the way is among the most basic of requirements of answering the call of Christ.

Of course, we should receive ministry through the community of faith, we should be able to turn to our church family and find support in crisis, guidance in difficult times, a sense of extended family when we need one, comfort when we are hurting. But we need, in equal or greater measure, each to find our own way in the community to offer the same things we need to others when they need them. We cannot always be recipients, we must also be practitioners of the ministry of Christ. Our place is as one among many in the community.

And, similarly, one of the marvelous things about being in this community of faith is that it is but a portion of a much larger community. The ministries of the Presbyterian Church (USA) extend around the world, on every continent. One example: one seminary intern I worked with a few years ago, preceded her seminary education by giving her time as a mission volunteer for an extended assignment in South America, just as our own Kristi Van Nostran has been doing in Central America on our behalf. I think of this every time I hear someone speaking in a superior way about belonging to a “non-denominational” church, as though denominational organizations and affiliations were signs of some sort of weak or inadequate witness, somehow less representative of the real gospel. The reverse is really closer to the truth, in my opinion. Back when Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana and Mississippi, within a few hours I found messages in my e-mail from our denomination, informing me of the emergency management personnel of our Presbyterian Church (USA), already in place to receive funds, and organize volunteers.

In church as well as in life itself, we cannot extend ourselves very far without being firmly grounded in some community. We cannot find our place or fulfill our spiritual longing without realizing that we are a part, not the full essence, of the body of Christ. Though we each make the body more complete, none of us has the capacity to know God fully or follow in complete faithfulness. For this, we need each other.

Paul was on target as he made the analogy between the church and the human body. We are not meant only to enjoy the diversity of gifts we find in the church, we are to depend on them, we need each other. Only by sharing the gifts we bring to the community – teaching, singing, praying, supporting, advocating, caring, welcoming, showing hospitality, giving, leading humbly, following faithfully – can we experience God in our midst. Each of us has something of value, something essential to add.

In the last two words in today’s reading Paul says, “in cheerfulness.” Cheerfulness isn’t half as enjoyable if there is no one to share it with. Here at First Church, in our community of faith, we grow and learn and serve and mourn and dance for joy and play together. It’s the way we come to discover the joy of knowing God.

So smile at someone today. It’s a gift everyone has to share.

And, oh, when you do decide to change lanes, please use your turn signal!

[1] “More Kids Being Home-Churched,” The Onion, September 14, 2005 | Issue 41-37 http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40517.

[2] Matthew 18:20.

Search and Rescue

2011-09-11T15:48:00.000-07:00

Search and Rescue

Luke 15:1-10

Robert J. Elder

September 11, 2011

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them,

does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?

Writing sermon titles for preaching every Sunday is sometimes a challenge, maybe even harder than writing sermons themselves. I was looking over the scripture for today some time back, and seeing the words about going after the one sheep that was lost brought to mind a thought for a title: “Search and Rescue.” And then it struck me what the words “Search and Rescue” would call to mind for us this morning, on the 10^th anniversary of that awful day. I remember that week very well, I recall that every day our televisions greeted us with the video footage of rescue workers meticulously piecing through rubble. Hundreds of men and women working 24 hours a day, regardless of cost, in hopes of finding one more survivor amid the wreckage of what was the World Trade Center.

Survivor. That word calls to my mind a sort of entertainment that I once hoped would soon fade from the public fascination. No luck. In fact, I have heard that a special 90 minute Survivor is scheduled to air this coming week on CBS – check local listings. It strikes me now as the antithesis of what we saw 10 years ago in New York and Washington D.C. The television show, Survivor – I’m sure you have all heard of it even if you may not have watched it – brings together a hand-selected group of people. Their task is to outwit, outlast, out maneuver all the others in the group until they are the last one standing. This has been our modern idea of entertainment for many seasons now: Survivor, The Weakest Link, Lost, so-called “reality” shows.The programs work on the premise that it is entertaining to watch people deceive, manipulate, and outwit others, make group decisions to throw others out, all within a philosophy declaring, in the end, it is every man or woman for him/herself. I think it represents a sort of anti-gospel destruction of community, the pitting of one against another, with the ultimate goal focused on the individual, the final winner.

I would have wished that one good outcome of our national tragedy 10 years ago might have been that we think in a new way about such things. Perhaps there is still hope, perhaps there yet could be a new television show or two, called Everyone Survives!, or, perhaps, Community.

In our new show, a person would find themselves alone on a deserted island. They might have some resources with them, a bit of food, or perhaps a special skill or tool. But their skill, tool, resources would be practically useless to them unless they can find others with complimentary abilities, tools, or resources which they lack. Let’s say the first person we see has some matches and access to kindling and wood. They build a fire. Their task then would be to look for others, and, on finding them, to welcome them to their campfire and begin building a social bond. Every member would count in this TV program, and the loss of even one would be unacceptable, would, in fact, threaten the survival of the group as a whole.

Difficulties which would carry interest in the program along would include the well-known fact that where two or three are gathered together, there is almost always a disagreement about something. The challenge would not be how to dissolve community and win all alone, but how to maintain community in spite of the difficulties that any of the members would bring with them when they were found. It would be great if some of the people to be found on the island did not speak the same language, had different racial and social backgrounds, or the usefulness of their ability, tool or resource might not, at first, be readily understood. How to bind up the sick, how to make sure everyone has enough to eat, is warm and dry, how to deal with the one who complains all the time, how to limit the power of the one who wants to control everything, these would be among the interesting challenges for the participants on the show.

Perhaps several groups could be underway at the same time, and the unknown quality to judge the success of one group over another would be measured by the willingness to welcome group members who happen to bring no apparent ability, tool, or resource with them. This could be a secret compassion test, to see how these communities go about seeking the highest goal of including rather than excluding, even when it is not always apparent that including everyone is useful.

I might watch such a show, rooting for the success of community in the face of threats to its existence.

A friend of mine wrote that we would do well, as we think on the stories of the lost sheep and coin, to recall Abraham’s conversations with God (Genesis 18:16 ff.). Sheep and coins can’t really be blamed for being lost, they just go around doing things that sheep and coins do when their human overseers fail to pay enough attention. But lost people, that’s another matter. Remember Abraham bartering with God, pleading with him to spare the sin-filled city for the sake of the handful of righteous ones who might be there, expanding the odds of Sodom’s survival, first bargaining God down from 50 righteous to 45, then 40, 30, 20, 10. God agrees to spare the city if only 10 righteous people are found there. Oh, if Osama Bin Laden had only undertaken the same search in the World Trade Center towers.

But Jesus’ parables take us beyond even that standard. It turns out, in his teaching, for the sake of just one righteous – Jesus – God spares the whole earth. The mathematics of mercy strain our comprehension, our belief in bottom lines, of acceptable levels of loss. My friend asked, “If God is holy, how can God stand the likes of us? If God is so merciful, how can God be holy?”[1]

“You have heard it said,” Jesus appears to say, “that one bad apple spoils the barrel, but I say to you, one good apple saves the barrel.” We have in these stories from Jesus the affirmation that the renewing power of good exceeds the corrupting power of evil. This is the only way we can live in community, by recognizing that we can come together for good, even in the face of horrendous, overwhelming evil. We spend lots of resources separating ourselves from evil, we build prisons, we establish and maintain armies, police departments, security forces. We want not to have to associate with those whose claim to righteousness is less than ours, we, like the fussy leaders of Jesus’ day, are concerned about the company we keep. They saw that Jesus welcomed sinners and ate with them. Others may see us at the same task and wonder if Christians have all their marbles.

Leaving aside for the moment all the Sunday school artwork about this story depicting Jesus in a sparkling white robe, carrying a sweet little freshly-bathed white lamb on his shoulders, and remembering instead that adult sheep in the wilderness are not only stupid but big, heavy, and smelly, not to mention that they represent dollars on the hoof to their owners, I had to re-ask myself Jesus’ initial question: “Which of you does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost?” I realized that if Jesus were telling me this story, I would have to raise my hand. Which of you would not leave ninety-nine valuable sheep at risk in the wilderness in order to go after one stray? Me! I wouldn’t do it!

Why did Jesus tell these little stories? To whom was he telling them? Jesus told these stories to the grumbling religious leaders of his day who were put off by his willingness to eat with villainous traitors and pagans. Those leaders were like we are. Some people you just can’t help. Some people are just goners. Some religious people, then and now, were willing to cut their losses, make utilitarian decisions about people. There are just some folk who are destined for the old lost-and-found box. Lost, for sure, but chances are good they will never be found again.

There are lots of souls in the lost and found, bleeding in Libya, suffering desperate oppression under the Taliban, but especially they are right here with us in Vancover if we learn to look the right way. And Jesus spins for us a little story about a lost sheep and a lost coin and the kind of kingdom of heaven thinking that, like firefighters in New York, never fails – never fails – to make a mad rush to save what is lost without remembering to stop and count costs. 99 out of a hundred may be a good percentage on an exam, but it still leaves out one, and God desires the salvation of every single one. It may not be our arithmetic, but it is God’s new math. For in God’s sight, people are not sheep, and certainly more precious than coins, and there is literally no extent to which God will not go to find what is lost.

Once the President of Southern Methodist University was stopped by one of those religious zealots on the streets of Dallas, Texas.

“Are you saved?” she demanded to know.

“I think so,” replied the president.

“That’s not good enough!” she announced, “you have to know so!”

A little undone, the president pulled himself to his full height and declared, “Madam, I am the president of Southern Methodist University, and therefore president of Perkins Methodist Theological Seminary as well.”

“That’s OK,” she allowed, “you can still be saved!”

One of my favorite authors over the years has been Annie Dillard, and in her first – and most famous – book, she wrote,

“When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason, I always ‘hid’ the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.”[2]

In the end, Jesus’ parables are stories about the way God seeks out the lost, not the way we would go about doing it. And in the end, the joy which characterizes the heart of these simple stories of finding is the key to knowing the joy which fills God’s heart when any person turns to Christ in faith.

Where are we to draw the line between righteousness and sinfulness? We look at Jesus, and suddenly we see. The line is drawn, not between ourselves and others, but between Jesus and us. He is righteous, we are not. That is all. We are the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the good news is that, like those brave fire fighters in New York ten years ago, the one who is left standing will come looking to save us.

[1] Bill Leety, in an unpublished paper presented to the January 2001 meeting of the Homiletical Feast.

[2] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Bantam, 1974), pp. 15-16.

Those Who Have Never Been Told

2011-09-04T15:38:00.000-07:00

Those Who Have Never Been Told

Romans 15:14-33

September 4, 2011

Those who have never been told of him shall see,

and those who have never heard of him shall understand.

Many things may crowd into our consciousness this morning, with the onset of Fall just around the corner. They crowd into mine anyway, maybe they do into yours too. Some among us will be having to deal with children returning to schoolrooms and fall activities, jump-starting lives from the doldrums of August into the frantic pace of fall. Soon will come the first fruits of planning by our education and music program people for the months to come – so much riding on this coming week in our homes and in our church!

Then, before we get entirely carried away by our own little family and church program concerns, our world in microcosm, the memory of September 11, 2001 invades our collective consciousness this coming week, and we are reminded that next Sunday, 10 years will have come and gone since that horrible day, and that so many things that we were as a people and as individuals have changed in countless ways large and small because of that day. Life often does that, throwing our careful plans and preparations out the window like so much confetti.

Then there are these word from Paul, which, taking into account the swirl of events around us, seem to me almost as fresh as if they had been written last night.

In most ways, Paul strikes me in this chapter, near the end of his letter to the Christians in Rome, as a man who believes he knows the nature of his calling, and who has a fairly clear sense of his future. Doesn’t it seem that way to you? He knows the shape of his own calling in ministry, his gifts for the task, when he says, “I have written to you rather boldly...because of the grace given to me by God to be a minister of Christ to the Gentiles...” and “Thus I make it my ambition to proclaim the good news, not where Christ has already been named...Those who have never been told of him shall see, and those who have never heard of him shall understand.” Paul was confident that he was called to take the gospel to those who had not heard the name of Jesus before.

Paul seemed to have a fix on the shape of his future when he wrote, “But now, with no further place for me in these regions, I desire, as I have for many years, to come to you when I go to Spain. For I do hope to see you on my journey and to be sent on by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a little while.”

Paul reflected that there was only one thing remaining to be done before he set out for Rome, tossing it off almost as an afterthought, as if he rechecked his shopping list and said “Oh yes, and before I come I have this one remaining little task to do...” He wrote “At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the saints; for Macedonia and Achaia (pronounced a – KEE’ – ya) have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the saints at Jerusalem.”

As was the case for us after September 11th, it turned out for Paul that the present task invaded all his future plans and rearranged his dead certainty about the nature of his calling.

Paul knew his calling. He knew he was called to be an apostle to the Gentiles, to take the message of salvation through Christ to people who not only had never heard of Jesus, but in many cases were totally unfamiliar with the God of Israel. He is absolutely clear about that, he knew his gifts, and he felt sure about the way God intended him to put them to use.

Still, when Paul said that he was ready to move westward in the Mediterranean world because there was “no further place for me in these regions,” his statement strikes us as incredible. By the time Paul was declaring there to be no further place for his ground breaking ministry in “these regions” (think of the modern countries of Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, the former Yugoslavia – when he mentions Illyricum, we should think of modern Kosovo), there couldn’t possibly have been more than a few thousand Christian believers at most in the entire area! In the cities to which he had gone, the number of believers was tiny in comparison to the population in general. Yet as a church planter, Paul believed the churches had to develop their own continuing evangelism efforts. He was a planter, not a cultivator. He knew his calling.

Paul had a fix on his future. Paul looked right past the present task of carrying the offerings of the Gentile churches to Jerusalem and had firmly fixed his sights on his next mission, on Rome as a staging area to take the gospel to Spain. Here was a man with a plan!

But it turned out that the present task, his journey to drop off the offerings of the Gentile churches in Jerusalem, turned into the vocation that defined the rest of his ministry, not his certainty about the nature of his calling, nor his carefully laid plans for the future. The present rearranged the remainder of his ministry.

If you remember the story of Paul from his letters in the New Testament and from the account of his work in the Book of Acts, you will recall that while this letter we read this morning was filled with his immediate future plans to visit Rome and then Spain, what actually happened after he put this letter in the mail was that he went to Jerusalem, was promptly arrested by the authorities there, was very nearly killed, and then languished in jail for two full years before he was finally sent to Rome under guard to stand trial in the imperial court. That’s the last we see of him in Acts, sitting in jail, ministering to his captors. As far as we know, he never met the folks in the Roman church, and it is very unlikely that his dream of going to Spain was ever fulfilled.

So was his ministry a failure? Hardly! One scholar wrote,

“Proverbs 19:21 says that human minds devise many plans, but it is God’s purpose that will be established. Paul would have heartily agreed ... But this should not lead to shoulder-shrugging fatalism. On the contrary, one of the most important lessons of Romans 15 might be put thus: God allowed Paul to dream of Spain in order that he might write Romans. No matter that Paul probably never reached Spain. What mattered was that he wrote this letter, which has been far more powerful and influential than any missionary visit, even by Paul himself, could ever have been. Perhaps ... half our great plans, the dreams we dream for our churches and our world, and even for ourselves, are dreams God allows us to dream in order that, on the way there, we may accomplish, almost without realizing it, the crucial thing God intends us to do.”[1]

Life has a way of taking place without regard to our arrangements. It is often said that life is what happens to us when we have made other plans. Henri Nouwen once said, “Interruptions don’t interrupt my work, interruptions are my work.”

Paul was interrupted. He was thrown off the course he had set for himself. Just the way our nation was cruising along before September 11, 2001, filled with plans for anything but war, but then the vagaries of life happened to us, the unexpected came our way, and all the tragedy and seeds of blessings that we have come to know in the years that have passed since – how can it have been ten years!?

Ann Ulanov, professor of psychiatry and religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, was interviewed on the Public Broadcasting program Frontline the winter following 9/11, and had some very helpful and useful things to say about the task that invaded our plans and preparations[2]:

“One of the hardest things about the Sept. 11 attacks is that people were just shoved into a place of spiritual crisis. They’re suddenly at the head of the line: Do you believe in anything? Do you care about anything? Where does meaning come from? Is the abyss of love stronger than the abyss of death? Is there any resurrection? How can I bear even to imagine being trapped in that building? I cannot go down. Will I be burned up? Will I be hurled out the window? Will I jump out the window? How can the person I love – who was incinerated, jumped out a window, thrown out a window, crashed in a plane – how can their last minutes be redeemed? How can I bear what they’ve suffered? Was God with them? Was God not with them?”

Professor Ulanov went on to say,

“...Christian tradition has an answer, and I’m sure other religions do too...

“Namely, in prayer time, it’s not the same as ordinary time, ego time, which has a past and a present and a future. Prayer time does not ... maintain that there is a past and a present and a future ... In prayer time, you can pray backwards. You can pray for Augustine. You can pray for Jesus on the cross. And you can pray for the man you loved or the woman you loved or the mother you loved in the office or in the plane.

You can pray that, at the moment of terror, blinding terror, that they had a sense that something was with them; that something was standing there ready to receive them; that at the same time they had terror and panic and regret and rage that their life was being stolen from them, they might also have felt a presence, something receiving them in the hour of their death, something comforting them in abysmal fear they must have suffered.”

Here is a thought that might get our Fall season started and interrupt our customary thoughts about what the church ought to be. It’s not an original thought with me, but it seems to me to be a large part of Paul’s motivation in his ministry in the first century: To a large degree, the church exists for those who are outside of it! How shocking! Perhaps our calling and our future is not to look to the church for ministry, but to look outside the church for the people in the world that need the ministering hand of Jesus Christ.

[1] New Interpreter’s Bible, Abingdon, Volume X, pp. 758-759.

[2] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/ulanov.html

The Name Game

2011-08-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

The Name Game

Exodus 3:1-15

Robert J. Elder

11th Sunday after Pentecost: August 28, 2011

When we read stories in Exodus like this account of Moses’ encounter at the burning bush, if we are like lots of other people, we may think of them as, well, stories about Moses. It may appear that one of the main reasons for the second book of the Bible is to recall the activities of Moses. We may think this story tells us about Moses’ religious experience in the desert, about his reluctance to follow God’s call to go free the people in Egypt. Seeing things from the human point of view, we think the story is about Moses.

Silly us.

That might explain the amount of ink spilled over the centuries in efforts to explain Moses’ state of mind when he came on the bush that burned and was not consumed. There have been tiresome modern attempts to describe Moses’ psychological condition at the time he encountered the burning bush. There have been some who have held forth at length on Moses’ repressed guilt for having murdered an Egyptian taskmaster, some who speculated on whether he had a speech impediment, others who believe they have found him to have been a mystic, and still a few more who have seen him as a crusading agent of political liberation for an enslaved people.

I’m not ready to deny that Moses could have been any or all of these things. He might well have been suffering from repressed guilt, he could easily have been a mystical revolutionary held back only by a halting ability at public speaking. He might have been these things and others besides, but I don’t find as much help in scripture for pursuing those biographical leads about Moses as others seem to do. When I turn to this story of his encounter with God at the bush on Mount Horeb, I am struck not so much by what it tells me about Moses, as what it tells me about God. It seems to me that for all our understandable curiosity about the figure of Moses, that is not the main purpose of scripture. This is a story in which we discover some of the most important things about God that can be found anywhere in the Bible. To miss that by dwelling too much on the quirks and foibles of Moses is to miss a great deal.

Would you like a clear description of the God we worship, the one Jesus confessed? Would it be helpful to know how God goes about working with people he calls as his servants, even those who answer reluctantly? Just what sort of God do we know through the testimony of scripture and the witness of the church? This passage supplies us with a pretty thorough profile on these questions if we will just pay attention.

This is the God who calls out, reaches out,

moves toward us, takes initiative (vs. 4).

In the story of Moses’ encounter with the burning bush, we discover a God who always takes the first step toward his people. For all the Hollywood attempts to make this Bible scene terrifying and dramatic, I believe we are meant to be struck more by the ordinariness of it, because that is the kind of time when God calls out to us, plain old ordinary time. Moses was simply the fugitive son-in-law of a fellow who owned some sheep, sheep which Moses took to the greener pastures around Mount Horeb. He was not on a spiritual quest, and he likely thought the day was going to go by like any shepherd’s other. If this was the mountain of God, it was going to come as news to Moses.

In the middle of ordinary time, while we were yet sinners, it is on a day that is just like any other day there ever was, that God moves toward us, reaches out to us, calls us. We don’t have to wait for some special place or time, some sacred site, some holy day. On a day like any other, God’s gesture is extended toward us, beckoning us. It is never the wrong time to find the call of God addressed to us. This is the God who calls us in the middle of the very sort of world we live in.

This is the God who was known by those who went before us,

by Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (vs. 6)

God was known by Grandma and Grandpa, by old Uncle Lou, by Pastor Perkins, and by our 7th grade Sunday School teacher. He comes to us through family, our network of relationships is one of God’s most effective vehicles for self-revelation. God has cared for those who went before. Now God will care for us. If we can believe that God was active in those past times both inside and beyond the accounts of scripture, then this declares that same God is the very one who steps up and is willingly self-revealed to us.

This is the same God that is known by that great cloud of witnesses, who, according to the letter to the Hebrews, have gone before us. We don’t have to step outside the faith that has been handed down to us from patriarchs and apostles and disciples. There is no need to reinvent God in our own image. This is the God who was known to those who came before us, and who wishes to know us just as he has known our fathers and mothers in the faith.

This is the God who has seen misery, heard cries of anguish,

knows what it is to suffer (vs. 7).

A close friend once shared with me the grief he went through when his father was dying.[1] His father had a rather long battle with cancer, and so he could see the end coming quite some time before it arrived. He said that one day someone who knew of his father’s condition brought him a copy of C.S. Lewis’ short book, A Grief Observed, saying, “I want to go through this with you.” Later, my friend picked up the phone and called, saying “Do you want to go through it now?” “Through what?” she asked. “Through the book you gave me.” But she said, “Oh, I didn’t mean the book. I meant the loss of your father.” That is what she wanted to “go through with him.”

So few people are open to that need to “go through” suffering with others. Often, our inclination is to run the other direction from suffering. But the ones who know grieving best, who are most intimately acquainted with it from their own lives’ experiences of loss, are frequently the ones who are able to help the most. They are the ones who in “going through it with us” go through their own grief as well and seek with us the transformation that “going through it” rather than going around or avoiding it can bring. God is like that friend. God sees, hears, knows suffering. And God says to Moses, as God says to us, “I have come...” I want to go through this with you. This is the God who sees, hears, knows who we are and knows what we suffer.

This is the God who acts not so much to erase suffering

as to transform it (vss. 8-10).

When I was in college, one guitarist we all knew, whose talent clearly placed him in a league beyond any run-of-the-mill top-40 player, was Eric Clapton. Clapton has had the sort of rugged life of big-time stardom and hard-time drug abuse that characterizes so many who emerged out of the 1970’s music scene. But then, by the 1990s, he seemed to have straightened his life around. Then one summer, his four year-old son, Conor, ran to an open window in his mother’s high-rise apartment in New York City and fell to his death.

Since that day, one news report said – rather snidely, I thought – that Clapton “has sought support through religion, therapy, and Alcoholics Anonymous.”[2] I don’t pretend to know what spiritual resources Clapton lays claim to, but I know pain when I hear it, and one of his subsequent songs – one of the most unlikely top-40 hits I have ever heard – was filled with it. Listen to some of the words he sang to his dead boy:

Would you know my name, if I saw you in heaven?

Would it be the same, if I saw you in heaven?

I must be strong, and carry on,

‘cause I know I don’t belong here in heaven.

Would you hold my hand, if I saw you in heaven?

Would you help me stand, if I saw you in heaven?

I’ll find my way, through night and day,

‘cause I know I just can’t stay here in heaven.

Time can bring you down, time can bend your knees.

Time can break your heart, have you beggin’ “Please,”

beggin’ “please.”

Beyond the door, there’s peace, I’m sure,

and I know there’ll be no more tears in heaven.

These are the sorts of questions and observations only grieving parents could bring themselves to ask. Someone once said to me, “When a loved one dies, it is a feeling like no other.” And it is true. Morning after morning, we awake to the knowledge that the one who once was here is now gone, irretrievably. Yet somehow, after time, an occasional morning will come and go, and we are startled with the realization that we haven’t given a thought to our loss. It may first strike us as if we were guilty of disloyalty. How could I forget? But we don’t ever forget, not really. I have seen tears over the loss of a spouse thirty years after the actual death, which struck me as fresh as the tears shed over yesterday’s grief. We never really forget, our suffering is never really erased.

But it can be transformed. Not invariably, but we have seen it happen. The knowledge of a certain pain can transform a person into one who is more sensitive to the pain of others. This is not to say that God sends pain to us. Nor is it to say that suffering inevitably builds character. Some people react terribly, become embittered. But I think there is the possibility that God can empower us, bit by bit, day by day, to live through the pain, and to appreciate, even grow because of the difference it has made in us. This is the God who can make all things new, even the old news of suffering and loss.

This is the God who takes our own limitations and fears seriously (vss. 11-14).

God met each of Moses objections to the call to go to Egypt by taking them seriously. As soon as it became clear that God had a job for Moses, Moses went from saying, “Here am I,” to “Who am I?” “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” God never says, “Never mind that now, just go and do what I tell you.” Throughout this story, God takes each of Moses’ objections with utter seriousness, and answers in kind. To Moses’ question “Who am I?” God answers, “I will be with you.” What you say, you say for me. So it doesn’t matter who Moses is so much as who God is. This is the God who takes us seriously, and makes our shortcomings irrelevant by the abundant availability of his power to bring to pass the new thing he has in mind for us and for our people.

This passage tells us so much about the nature of this God, that by the time God gets around to telling Moses the name by which he can be known, it is almost unnecessary. The literal translation of God’s name means, “I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.” And just what is that? Refer back to verses 6 through 14: I am the God who calls, the God who was worshipped by those who came before you, the God who knows fully what human misery is about and yet who acts to transform that misery into new life, the God who takes seriously the partnership God has entered with human beings. If you want to know the name of God, look for one who is revealed in those ways.

Look especially to Jesus on the cross, in the tomb, and raised from the dead, because this became God’s most powerful way of declaring solidarity with us in all our humanity, and transforming suffering into victory over death.

[1] George Chorba, “You Are...”, a sermon preached at 1st Presbyterian Church, New Vernon, NJ.

[2] Newsweek, March 23, 1992, p. 53..

Gone Wandering 5: The Best of All Is Yours

2011-08-14T17:36:00.000-07:00

Gone Wandering 5: The Best of All Is Yours

20th Sunday in Ordinary time: August 14, 2011

Genesis 45:4-20 (-28)

If we were going to make a modern film of the story of Joseph, we might be tempted to take the sort of liberties with the original narrative for which Hollywood has become famous. Remember, it is Hollywood that has turned such classics as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter from a tale of tortured 19th century guilt over sexual indiscretion into the sort of modern R-rated film that would have caused Hawthorne to blush and run from the room. It is Hollywood that transformed Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame from a dark and brooding story ending in tragic death into a cartoon tale of bright songs and happy endings.

So, being possessed of such artistic license, we might take another look at the story of Joseph. What would be the motive running the narrative if Hollywood were to write the script? It would be revenge!

We could cast Matt Damon in the part of Joseph; Harrison Ford is old enough now to play Jacob; Justin Bieber could be the youngest brother, Benjamin; Keifer Sutherland as the waffling eldest brother Reuben; and maybe someone like John Malkovich as scheming Judah. We might then make the ending of the Joseph saga go more like this:

So, many years after they threw him into a ditch to leave for dead, years after they pulled him out of that terrifying pit only to sell him as a slave to a passing tribe of Bedouin traders, Joseph is only too happy to see the faces of his evil brothers again. They come to him in Egypt, hats in hands as it were, to beg for a bit of food to feed their starving people back home in Canaan. They do not know that the all-powerful representative of Pharaoh to whom they address their requests is none other than the very brother they had as good as left for dead so many years ago.

On that day, tied to that Bedouin trader’s camel, bound hand and foot, Joseph looked his brothers in the eye as they rode off and, quoting an older anti-hero, muttered, “I’ll be back!” But this was even better. He didn’t have to travel back home to make good on his threat. They had come to him. He had them right where he wanted them. The irony of it was too good to be true. His chance for sweet revenge stood right before him.

After toying with them for a time, forcing them to perform a handful of degrading tasks, then threatening their little brother with capture, Joseph finally revealed himself to them. He dropped his regal face down close to theirs and growled, “Don’t you know me? I’m your very own brother!”

After a brief gasp of recognition, swords were drawn instantly, once the ten realized the danger this one they had thought long dead now represented to them. Surely he would kill them like worms. Their lives weren’t much, yet they realized their only hope for such lives as they had would be to fight their way out of the Egyptian court. They would have to make plans on the run from there, if they managed to get out alive. Reuben – the cowardly eldest who on that fateful day so long ago had failed to stand up for his youngest brother, only lamely suggesting that they not kill Joseph – Reuben now lived to regret his long-forgotten moment of compassion. Joseph dispatched him first with a fierce swing of his broadsword. Then he turned on the others, all but young Benjamin, who wouldn’t have been much help in a Pillsbury bake-off, much less a sword fight. Benjamin spent the next half hour cowering in the corner, whimpering.

One by one they came at Joseph, and one-by-one, his excellent swordplay and superior weapon dispatched each maniacally bad brother to his well-deserved fate, until at last he was face-to-face with his real nemesis: Judah. Judah was the evil one who had not only come up with the idea of selling his own brother – he had personally dispatched his own sons when they displeased him, and killed one of his daughters-in-law. This was a bad man. After a furious fight, where the two combatants spun through the room, tearing at every drape and smashing every bit of crockery that was at hand, Joseph looked him in the eye and said only, “Hasta la vista, Baby!” before dispatching him.

Afterward, Joseph rescued his innocent brother, Benjamin, rounded up his wives, and went back to his father Jacob where they lived happily ever after.

Cue the music. Roll the credits.

That might be the way Hollywood would prefer to play on a story so ripe for the revenge motif, isn’t it? But that’s not how it went, was it? On one level, our passage celebrates something very unusual that happened in the life of this peculiar family. On another level, it celebrates something much bigger, standing as a sign of God’s loving grace that until that day had been only a dream in the mind of a slave boy in the Pharaoh’s employ.

After all the teasing and testing, most of which we did not get to read because it would take up too much time (you may want to go home and catch up on the rest of the story this afternoon), after all that the moment came when Joseph’s brothers, appearing before their former victim in a scene rich with irony and potential for revenge, Joseph’s brothers knew to their horror who it was that stood before them, clothed with the authority of the Pharaoh. This one they had believed was long dead by their own violence against him now stood before them with the power of life and death over them. And in that moment, Joseph did an unexpected thing, the sort of unpredictable thing that makes for the sort of story which could be remembered for 30 or 40 centuries. He did not pull out a sword, he did not call down the guards on his hapless former tormentors, he simply cried out to them instead, “Come closer to me!”

He laid aside the marks of his office, his royal authority, his golden robe, his magnificent turban, and in their place he reclaimed the office which he had craved ever since he last laid eyes on them, the role of son to his father, brother to his siblings: “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” Old Jacob, who got this whole story rolling. Was he still alive? It was a way of asking, “Is there still a family in which I may be a brother, a son again?”

When I was a young boy scout, I found myself on a long hike with some of my scouting friends. The talk turned to another scout who was not walking with us. Pete, the son of our pastor, was my friend. But because others I was with started bad-mouthing him, I joined right in. I found myself going on the way gossipers do when the person whose character they are assassinating isn’t within earshot, and had just said something like “He thinks he’s too good for us because his father is the minister,” when who should step out from behind a tree just ahead of us but Pete! I was mortified, but only for an instant.

Without missing a beat, Pete – a mature 13 year-old to my young 12 – said, “Aw Rob, you don’t mean any of that,” and put his arm around my shoulder as we walked on. It was a moment of grace I never forgot and never shall. As Joseph said to his brothers when his father, Jacob “was gathered to his people,” as the Old Testament described his death, “Do not be afraid! ... Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good...”[1] My comments must have been intended to do hurt and to harm, but my friend Pete absorbed them in his goodness. Probably part of my penance is that I would one day become a pastor and repeat this story on myself.

Joseph prefigures the work of Jesus in an important way, doesn’t he? In Jesus’ earthly ministry, God set aside his divinity and took up humanity. In Christ God set aside righteous vengeance toward those who have wronged him, and took up forgiveness and reconciliation instead. Faced with the pure goodness of God, we may be only too aware of our failures, our shortcomings, our inabilities to love fully, our submission to hatreds both petty and profound, we may fear evil at the hand of God and desire to run away, to separate ourselves from him. But in the person of Jesus, God turns to us instead and says, “Come closer to me.” Coming close enough to us really to know us, God fell upon us and wept with us in Jesus, and weeps with us still for all the distance we so stubbornly place between ourselves and God in every single day of our lives. God weeps, and yet God repeats, “It is I, Joshua ben Joseph, Jesus, son of Joseph, your brother. What you meant for evil, I turn to good. Come closer to me.”

[1] Genesis 49:33 and 50:19-20.

Gone Wandering 3: Wrestle Mania

2011-07-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

Gone Wandering[1] 3: Wrestle Mania

Genesis 32:22-31 Sunday, July 24, 2011

We have come some distance so far in our short series of readings from Genesis for the summer. We began with the birth of Isaac’s twin sons, Jacob and Esau, moved last week to Jacob’s dream at Bethel of the heavenly stairway with angels ascending and descending. This week we bypass stories of the bait and switch pulled by Jacob’s Uncle Laban when Jacob married first Leah, thinking she was Rachael, then finally married Rachel. As we re-enter the story today, Jacob is on his way to meet with his twin brother Esau. Because he snookered Esau out of his first-born birthright those years ago, Jacob was understandably anxious about the coming meeting. He sent presents on ahead in hopes to appease the long-simmering anger of his brother. He lay down next to the river for a fitful sleep before the next day’s meeting, and it was there, on the banks of the river, that he wrestled with God, who gave him a new name. He had, all his life, carried the name Jacob, which in Hebrew means “one who grabs by the heel,” as he had done, emerging from Rachel’s womb, contesting Esau’s right to be called firstborn. Now, following his struggle at the river Jabbok, he received a new name, “Israel,” which means “the one who strives with God.”

We wonder about all the struggle chronicled in the stories of Jacob. We wonder if, by the end, he will be different than he was at the beginning. Will he always be the same, grasping, conniving person, or will he finally become a person who can be real with others, whose life can be honest and forthright, and satisfied.

Israel: the one who strives with God. Probably that would be a good name for many of us. Few people in my experience come to faith as an easy, simple matter. For most of us there is some element of struggle, whether it is for understanding, or a sense of calling, or a desire to experience the presence of God more directly. We all struggle with God, seeking God’s blessing, some word from God about the purpose, the meaning of our lives.

I recall hearing a story about a pastor in his earliest ministry, when he served a very poor little church in rural Tennessee.[2] The church had been in existence about fifty years but had never had a called pastor. The lives of the people were filled with tales of the sort of hard-scrabble existence that once characterized a good portion of the population of the South, and still does in many places. When the pastor came to that poor little church and community they wanted to celebrate his arrival by decorating their small one-room frame church building. They had no beautiful art to hang above the pulpit behind the preacher, so they had a contest for something to hang on the wall as a centering point for their worship. One of the children won the contest. She had found, in a magazine, a close-up picture of the face of a bulldog. That picture won the contest, and it was put on the wall above the pulpit in the sanctuary, with the following words written underneath it:

Get a good grip on your faith and don’t turn loose!

The people of that poor little country church were saying to God what Jacob said to the angel. “We will not turn you loose until you bless us.”

Sometimes faith has to be like that: tenacious, unyielding. Sometimes faith has to be gripped so as not to let it slip from our grasp, leaving us without faith, without hope, without purpose. Do not turn loose of God until you are blessed, be insistent about it, like the psalmist who cried, “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord?... Rise up, come to our help.”[3]

One thing is sure. No one comes away untouched from grasping after God. Jacob found that he had a limp in his gait from that day on, a persistent, step-by-step reminder in his hip socket that once upon a time he had grasped after God and perhaps had found more than he bargained for.

What led to his grasping for God?

Remember that twenty years before, Jacob had cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright as the eldest son of Isaac. He had run away to Haran from the anger of his brother, where he arrived with only his walking stick and his life. While he was there he worked for Laban, his uncle. He earned two wives from this sharp dealing relative (perhaps it takes one to know one!), as well as amassing an Old Testament version of a sizable fortune in oxen, donkeys, flocks, slaves, wives and children. Now he prepared to return home to encounter his brother. Word was out that Esau had put together a small welcoming party of 400 soldiers. What would you do? How would you feel?

After sending all his entourage and his goods across the Jabbok River, Jacob remained behind, where he spent that famously restless night which turned into a wrestling match.

Have you ever had a sleepless night? Of course you have. You toss and turn, items from the troubles of the day rolling through your mind. The problem isn’t that you are sleeping. The problem is that you are very much awake when you should be sleeping. You worry, you fret. Small problems loom large. What am I going to do about the mortgage payment when there’s nothing in the bank? Where did I leave that memo that was supposed to be on my boss’s desk by this morning? How can I possibly clean the house in time for company when I have to work until 5:30? In the quiet of the night when our defenses are down, thoughts return to us, unbidden, until we find we cannot sleep. We are wrestling with our anxieties, if not with angels.

Consider Jacob’s guilty reflections. I can imagine Jacob thrashing back and forth until he bid God to help him in his worried sleeplessness. And God came, not as a host of angels or a menacing thundercloud on the mountain, but in a form unbidden, as a man who would wrestle with him until together they had made peace for Jacob. One writer asked, “How could Jacob even stay in the ring with God?”[4] But this was not God in all God’s glory. Here God took human form to encounter Jacob at his own level. The man who wrestled with Jacob – whom Jacob was entirely convinced was God – could not defeat Jacob any more than Jesus sets out to defeat us when we encounter him. It is not his purpose. God’s purpose is transformation, which is why God could transform Jacob’s name into “Israel,” while Jacob could not fathom the name of God. Staying perfectly in character, Jacob demanded a blessing from those he engaged. As he demanded a blessing from his brother, his father, his father-in-law, so here he demanded a blessing from God.

But a blessing from God never leaves us unchanged. God’s blessings are the very stuff of change, and Jacob discovered as dawn broke that the stiffness in his leg wasn’t his arthritis acting up. He was going to be sporting a limp in his walk from that day forward. Each step of the rest of his life would serve as a reminder of the One who, in blessing him, also transformed him into someone more human than he had been before.

Jacob went to Esau, limped up to him as it turns out, and did not make demands of him but simply invited him to share in the bounty which he now recognized had been showered on him, not by his own craftiness, but by the undeserved grace of God.

What Jacob learned at last – and maybe the limp he had to carry through his life was to serve as his daily refresher course – was that it is never by our strength alone that we do what we do and become what we become. The miracle in this story is not that Jacob finally came to terms with the fact that he was a sly deceiver – which he likely knew already. The miracle is that God recognized that quality in him too but loved him anyway.

What was true for Jacob can be true for us. As we limp along through our lives, finding daily reminders of our own shortcomings, we may rest in the assurance that God loves us enough to transform us, enough to save us, enough to wrestle with us through all the failures we throw in our own way, and his, contending with us through the man Jesus, who – like a mysterious wrestler in the night – came to us so that we might come home to God.

[1] Third in a series of five sermons on the Jacob/Esau cycle in Genesis.

[3] Psalm 44:23.

[4] Terrence Fretheim , New Interpreters’ Bible, Volume I, Abingdon, 1995, p. 568.

Rung by Rung

2011-07-17T19:31:00.000-07:00

Rung by Rung

July 17, 2011

Genesis 28:10-17

Romans 5:12-19

Perhaps you have heard this old story by Matt Suhey, running back for the Chicago Bears. If you have not heard of Matt Suhey, it is probably because you are much more likely to have heard of his more famous, and faster, teammate, Walter Payton, a superstar running back in the 1970s and 80s. Anyway, Matt Suhey and Walter Payton were once on a camping trip together in Alaska. Matt Suhey awoke to find Walter Payton lacing up his running shoes. “What are you doing?” asked Suhey. “There’s a bear right outside our tent, and I’m getting ready to run.” “You can’t outrun a bear!” said Suhey. Payton replied, “I don’t have to. All I have to do is outrun you!”

So much for team solidarity. The story has a point, though, that ties in with our reading about Jacob. As you know, Jacob made his early life’s work a continuing effort to cheat his older brother out of the family inheritance. Once he was finally successful, Esau was understandably perturbed. So while the cover story for Jacob in our morning reading was that he was sent out of the country by his mother to search for a suitable wife, we know that in reality, he was also fleeing the wrath – and probably the superior aim – of his brother. Jacob was on the move. It might be less poetically stated by saying he was on the lam. He didn’t have to outrun a bear, all he had to do was outrun his brother, Esau. But he couldn’t outrun his fear of being in a strange place, his loneliness as he left behind all the familiar people and places of his life, or his guilt for what he had done to his brother.

Jacob thought that being on the move was a thoroughly horizontal proposition. We all suffer from the same delusion. Get out a road map and plan a route, say, from South Dakota to Indiana, and we’ll probably think of the whole drive as a long itineration along a surface that is mostly as flat as the pages in the atlas, more or less. Only a meddlesome person would take the trouble to remind us that we would be traversing the surface of the earth, which is a sphere, a globe, so that there is no truly direct way from South Dakota to Indiana, unless we were prepared to bore a hole in the ground and travel through the earth in order to maintain that straight line.

On a more spiritual level, though Jacob thought of his trip as a pretty straightforward journey, he was soon to discover that God had in mind another dimension for all his moving to and fro. Probably Jacob’s dream is the most graphic reminder there ever was that our journeying in this life is more than moving on the horizontal. God has in mind a vertical dimension for our lives. He made that abundantly clear to Jacob while the young fugitive lay near a rock and dreamed of the angels of God running up and down a heavenly escalator to be about God’s bidding in the world.

This is a truly revolutionary dream, because for all our suspicions that heaven and earth have little to do with each other, Jacob’s dream declared to him and to us that God has continuing association with earth, that earth and heaven are not separated by some great divide, but joined by the unfathomable purposes of God.

All of us harbor our own stories of the road. A light-hearted decision made, a mate chosen, a career almost accidentally embarked upon, a friendship casually engaged, so many events in our lives – which we would have thought existed in a more or less horizontal dimension – have developed into deep experiences which reverberate profoundly throughout our lifetimes and have influenced every action since. We are spiritual creatures, no matter how seldom we pause to think of ourselves in that way, and anything we do is riven with spiritual implications, touched by the purposes of God.

I remember once receiving a little Sears Roebuck guitar for Christmas. I didn’t much play it after I got it because in a few short days I discovered that it wouldn’t play itself, that I would have to go through the digit numbing pain of learning where to place my fingers and when to strum in order to make anything resembling music come out. All in all, it seemed like too much trouble. The little guitar sat in a corner for a few weeks, until my older brother got it in his head that he could teach himself to play, and before you knew it he was doing just that. But after all, it was my guitar. I couldn’t let that happen. So I began the arduous process of teaching reluctant muscles to work together to make music. As things stand, I would appreciate it if you would help maintain the secret that my brother remains my superior in guitar playing to this day, but my initial and hardly commendable motivation to stay even with him, forced me to learn, and kept me from missing the opportunity to expand myself in those learning-filled adolescent days, learning how to play a guitar so that my singing could be accompanied by my own playing. But, having learned that, what became of that ability?

Now, make whatever you like of that small illustration, but that simple journey toward musicianship, begun almost as much in competitive spite or sibling rivalry as with any more admirable motivation, has over the years resulted in uncountable hundreds of opportunities before wonderfully diverse gatherings of people in varying states of appreciation for my musicianship; fellowship, in my growing up years, with dozens of other fellow-travelers who like to play guitar together; zillions of campfire sing-alongs with the faces of young people and old folks smiling and singing, people who – even though some of their voices have now gone silent – remain more real to me at this very moment than many of the folks who populate our more run-of-the-mill dreams; and many evenings in which the only audience for my playing was myself and the angels who must have needed some musical accompaniment while they made their way on that heavenly escalator back and forth into my growing-up world.

All of us have similar stories. Things we thought we did for only the most pedestrian of reasons, we later may have discovered were experiences that have enriched our lives, breathed into us the very breath of life. Perhaps a casual conversation started at a dining table in school was transformed into courtship and a life-long conversation over breakfasts and dinners; or a childhood choice one day to read instead of play baseball was transformed into a decision to major in English and teach others to love reading; or a fascination with toy trains became a first step toward a lifetime of engineering or public works; or any of a hundred other decisions, once made and for whatever reasons, have turned into life-transforming journeys.

Jacob’s dream was granted to him to tell him what we all know in our bones if only we stop to think about it long enough. It is that the God who created us loves us still and will make of our own common experiences something holy, something truly redeemed. It is perhaps summed up in the phrase which typifies God’s dealings with Jacob and everyone of us ever since. “Behold, I am with you, and will keep you wherever you go.”

It was a promise that God would have to repeat several times through the years before humanity would begin to really believe it, if we ever really have.[1] That is why it is one of the names for Jesus that we hear most often at Christmas: Emmanuel. God with us. Jeremiah reports that God gave the assurance of his presence to his troubled people in just these words that Jacob heard no less than 6 times as they were being assailed by armies they could neither defeat nor understand.

“I am with you.” It is the heart of the story – the heart of any story worth anything more than a good cry, when you get right down to it. All good love stories have that element. Juliet promised to be with Romeo, even unto death. And, as it turns out, that plot wasn’t invented by William Shakespeare. The very same promise was God’s promise to his people, and Jesus lived and died that very promise for us. Says Paul in his letter to the people in the tiny church in Rome, “For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift of that one man Jesus abounded for many.”

New Testament scholar, Paul Achtemeier says, “thus does grace triumph over evil, by burying evil in an avalanche of grace.”[2] I really respond to that image! Think of the little things we have entered into, the small decision to take up the guitar, the tiny misstep from which we have learned immeasurable lessons. To shift metaphors, the tiny specks of our little life’s choices are bobbing on the ocean of human existence, until God picks us up on a mountainous wave and we find ourselves cascading atop the foaming water on our way toward the shore of his purpose.

Perhaps Paul was able to see it more clearly than anyone before him. From the time of Adam we have been on the move, yet the one evil we have never outrun is our sinful selves. But one day, Jesus appeared on the road of our aimless wanderings and things took on such a direction that the world has never since been the same.

Since I began with a story about two friends, perhaps I can end with one. There is an old Asian story[3] that one day a man found his neighbor on his knees, searching for something. “What are you looking for?” came the obvious question. “My key. I’ve lost it.” Both men proceeded to take to their knees and continue the fruitless search. After a while the neighbor said, “Where did you loose it” “At home.” “Then why are you searching for it here?” exclaimed the exasperated neighbor. “Because there is more light here.”

If we have found ourselves – like Jacob – tempted to wander far afield, leaving home looking for something to fill the emptiness of our lives, we can be sure that as earnestly as we may search, God is as near at hand as our next heartbeat, as present to us as our restless dreams, as ready to define our lives into purpose and meaning as he is to suffer and die on the cross for us.

Dear friends, as we scurry about the level places of our lives, we may be reminded that there is a ladder, extending to heaven, and that earth and heaven have met in Jesus Christ. We need never be alone and lost again, no matter where we are.

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[1] Genesis 26:3, 26:4, Isaiah 41:10, 43:5, Jeremiah 1:8, 1:19, 15:20, 30:11, 42:11, 46:28, Haggai 2:4, Matthew 28:20, John 13:33.

[2] Romans, by Paul Achtemeier, John Knox Press, 1985, p.102.

[3] The Song of the Bird, Anthony de Mello, S.J., Gujarat Sahitya Parakash, Avand, India, 1982.