First Alton Sermons

Salt and Light

2011-02-07T07:10:00.000-08:00

Matthew 5:13-20
February 6, 2011 (5th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. “I can remember when this church was full!”

“I can remember when there were kids all over this place.”

“I sure wish more people came to church—there’s so much empty space.”

These sorts of statements of longing and desire are pretty common at mainline Protestant churches across the United States today. By mainline Protestant, I’m referring to the denominations of the old ruling class in this country: the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the Congregationalists, the Lutherans, and to a lesser extent, the Methodists and the Baptists.

As we both know, these denominations have been shedding members over the last few decades. Times have changed, and being a church member just doesn’t have the cache that it used to have in the business and civic world, and so we aren’t as full as we used to be. When we say we want more members, we sometimes mean that we want Protestant Christianity to have the same cultural and political force that it once did.

But, have you ever thought that the Protestant Church today is not that different from the very first church that formed after Jesus’ ascension to heaven? That church was not politically powerful. It had few members. It wondered where it’s place was in a world that often seemed at odds with the church.

When we hear Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, first recorded by Matthew to guide and comfort a struggling church, maybe we too can hear it as a word of comfort and guidance to us, also a church that is not powerful. How are Christians who are a minority of the culture supposed to live in the world? That is the very same question the first Christians were asking themselves—we might be asking ourselves the same thing.

2. Jesus tells them that they are to be salt and they are to be light. Put aside the modern medical wisdom that says too much salt is bad for you and remember that salt is what makes food taste good. Salt is the principal seasoning. It enhances other flavors. And it preserves food, keeping it from going bad. Preacher John Brokhoff reminds us that, “Without salt our hearts would not beat, blood would not flow, and muscles would not work properly. Before birth a baby develops in a saline solution. Accident victims may receive a salt solution intravenously. In Roman times salt was so precious that it was used, at least in part, to pay workers. The word "salary" comes from the Latin salarium, a word for salt. A person not worth his or her salt is one not worthy of wages.”

Another biblical commentator writes that salt “elicits goodness.” I really like that. Christians, who are to be salty people, are to be the kind of people who elicit goodness in the world. We are to bring out the best qualities of the people we meet, and we are to work for goodness in our societies. If something is good, we make it better. If something is bland, we give it flavor. If something is in danger of going bad, we preserve it for use.

3. And Jesus tells us to be light. When saltiness has done all it can, we need to shine light on the dark places. We can’t assume that we will always be able to improve what we find. We may also need to step in shine the light of God on places in this world that need to be illumined. This kind of light can both light up injustice and oppression so that redress can be made, or it can spotlight cases of remarkable mercy and kindness. Our Lord Jesus himself is often understood as light—he is the light in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. Likewise, we salty Christians are also to be light, the reflected light of God in a world that needs to see God’s glory.

4. Jesus preaches to his followers, then and now, that they should be salt and light. And Jesus makes specific mention of a group that is not getting this right—he singles out the Pharisees as ones who are not making the cut. Theologian Edwin van Driel points out that the Pharisees’ religious strategy was to withdraw into a religious enclave where they could live out their little formulas of faithfulness without having to interact with the Romans or any other challenging force in their world. As long as they could be left alone to practice their rituals and traditions in peace, they could claim to be holy and righteous before God. For Jesus, however, this was a failed approach to faithfulness. This was like salt that had lost its usefulness, or even worse, it was like a light that had been hidden under a bushel basket. It didn’t illumine anything. In response to this clubbishness, this clannishness, this refusal to interact in faith with the world as salt and light, Jesus preaches his sermon. He calls his followers to leave the confines of their little religious world and be flavor and shining goodness for a world in need.

5. And that brings us to the unavoidable question. Does the world need Christians? Life as we know it cannot exist without salt and light. Are we absolutely necessary in that way? Do we bring something intrinsically essential to the world? We sure do when we carry the flavor and light of Jesus Christ into a hurting and hungry and dark world.

To make it an even harder question: Does the world need First Presbyterian Church? Are we salt and light? I know for a fact that many of you have an important community of friends and loved ones in this church. And for that fact alone, you might find that the world does need this church. But as Archbishop William Temple famously said, “The church is the only organization on earth that exists for those who are not its members.” We are called by Christ to elicit goodness in the world and to shine God’s light. We do this, but there is always the opportunity to bring more light.

6. Older mainline congregations like this, those that can remember the glory days, are often content to recall light that used to shine. We wonder why we have declined, and in our heart of hearts, we may even wonder if we did something wrong to be in the state we are in today. Why are our pews so much emptier than they used to be? Psychologists teach us that it is very difficult to get your confidence back once it has been shaken by setbacks or even insults. We’ve heard so much that our church is shrinking and that it is graying. We have heard that we are irrelevant or washed up. We have heard that we are too set in our ways to meet the world with fresh flavor and bright beams of light. We’ve heard all that so much that we have started to believe it.

Professor David Lose writes, “Psychologists suggest that for every negative message elementary-aged children hear about themselves, they need to hear ten positive ones to restore their sense of self-esteem to where it had been previously.” Lose suspects, and I agree, that adults are not that different from children in this regard. If we hear that we are bad, we need to have it reinforced for us ten times over that no, we are not bad. We are salt and light. We are salt and light. We are salt and light.

7. I once brought a group of youth to a church camp weekend event for Middle School students. They keynote speaker, a young Presbyterian minister, stepped off the stage carrying a microphone. He walked up to a girl and had her stand up. He asked her name. “Stephanie” she said. Then he said, “Stephanie, you are God’s gift to this earth.” He walked to another kid. “What’s your name?” “Josh.” “Josh, you are God’s gift to this earth.” And in this way he approached several others, always saying that each one was God’s gift to this earth. Perhaps it’s not a bad message for us here today. We are God’s gift to this earth. God gave First Presbyterian Church to this earth, and each of you gathered here, to be salt and light. You’ve heard of the person who can light up a room. Let us be the church that can light up the world. Let your light shine! Let it shine now. The world still needs you. Amen.

Beatitudes--Not Platitudes

2011-01-31T07:01:00.000-08:00

Matthew 5:1-12
January 30, 2011 (4th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. A new semester has started for college students and for college instructors, and so I am back up at Lewis & Clark teaching World Religions. My practice is to begin the semester with a few classes on the ancient religion of India, Hinduism. If you push people to name what they know about Hinduism, they may be able to come up with many gods, some of them with many arms and legs, pilgrimages to the Ganges, the practice of yoga, reincarnation, and above all, karma. Karma is one of the driving concepts for Hindus, the idea that your good deeds as well as your misdeeds will be revisited upon you as rewards or punishments either in this life or the next.

2. Most people, Hindu or not, have at least a small belief in karma. Most people are prone to believe, and even to say, “what goes around, come around.” One of the ways I help students understand the concept of karma, for better or for worse, is to talk about a sitcom that aired on NBC a couple of years ago—it was called “My Name Is Earl.” The premise of the show was that a petty criminal, Earl, won a lot of money in the lottery. But minutes after winning, he is struck by a car and hospitalized in traction. During his recovery, he realizes that it was karma that made the car run him over. He had hurt so many people in his life of crime that karma could not allow him the good fortune of winning the lottery. So in his hospital bed, he makes a list of all the bad things he had done to other people and resolves to make things right with every last one of them. In this way, he hopes to appease karma so that he can keep the lottery money.

This kind of karma we can all sort of be on board with. We like to think that if we treat people well, we too will be treated well. And we like to think, even when the evidence is against it, that bad people who exploit others for their own benefit, will “get theirs in the end.”

3. With the prevalence of this idea in our culture, it is not hard to imagine that the passage we heard from Matthew this morning—the famous Beatitudes—is a religious justification of karma. So for example, try to make peace so that you can be a child of God. Or try to be meek, so that you can inherit the earth. Or, try to be the kind of person who wants righteousness so that you can be filled up with good things. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” In this way, the Beatitudes become a set of moralistic platitudes. Sort of a religious carrot-and-stick. If you are good person, you will win one of God’s lovely premiums. And if you are not good, well, let’s not even go there! Lest you be struck with the stick of bad karma, you better do the good that the platitude, oops I mean beatitude, mandates!

4. The thing is, of course, that the Beatitudes are not a karma system. They are not based on meting out rewards to the holy and punishments to the wicked. They are not “What goes around, comes around.” They are not pieces of advice for our behavior.

They are, instead, a clear description of God’s kingdom. In grammatical terms, they are not the future tense or the subjunctive mood. They are indicative. They describe how things are right now. They describe, they do not prescribe.

So, when Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” he is actually pointing out what is real in God’s reality. In the reality of God’s kingdom, the poor in spirit have the kingdom of heaven. Likewise, those who mourn ARE comforted. Those who are pure in heart DO SEE God.

We are likely to think of these beatitudes only in the future tense because we are so good at not seeing God’s reality. We are far more likely to see our own sin-drenched reality wherein the mourning are not comforted, where the meek get run over, where the poor in spirit are emotionally needy people that we would rather avoid, where those who make peace are accused of being unpatriotic, where those who show mercy are considered too soft or too lenient. We are ok with these beatitudes as long as they are limited to some future time. We are ok with them as long as we can say that they are holy ideals but hardly realistic descriptors of the here and now.

5. But the truth of the gospel is that God has preferences. God has made choices between us. And while God loves us all, God is quite clear over and over again that God chooses the meek, the poor, the merciful, the peacemaker. Theologian Marcia Riggs explains, “Those who receive God’s favor are not the privileged classes of the Roman Empire or the Jewish establishment. The Beatitudes are spoken to those groups whom God deems worthy, not by virtue of their own achievements or status in society, but because God chooses to be on the side of the weak, the forgotten, the despised, the justice seekers, the peace makers, and those persecuted because of their beliefs.”

Preacher Dylan Breuer further elaborates:

Jesus gathers in all of these people who are completely bereft and without honor in their culture's eyes, and he gives them two gifts which more than compensate for their very real losses.
Jesus gives them honor. In front of all the crowds, Jesus ascribes honor to them, declaring that these are the people whom the God of Israel honors. Their human fathers may have disowned them, but they are children of the God who created the universe, to whom all honor belongs.
And that brings up the second gift that Jesus gives them: He makes them family. They are children of one Father, and that makes them brothers and sisters. They will never be bereft in a community that sees themselves as family, and that cares for one another in ways that show that they take that family relationship with utmost seriousness.

6. So if the suggestion is that the Beatitudes are not Platitudes, which is to say that they are not simple sayings of cosmic cause and effect, then where do we find our selves in them? If the Beatitudes are instead a description of God’s preferences for the powerless, the suffering, the grieving, and the persecuted, where do we find the good news?

Well, first, the Beatitudes are recorded as the very first sayings in Jesus’ famous “Sermon on the Mount.” And notice that the sermon comes early in the gospel—it’s only in chapter 5. Jesus has barely begun his earthly ministry at this point. He’s been baptized, he’s gathered a few disciples, and he’s gained a following by performing some miraculous cures, but this is his first extended proclamation. He comes into his own by teaching that God blesses those who really need to be blessed. Before he gives any instruction, and directions as to how we ought to act, he first tells us that when we need it most, we are blessed by God. Before telling us to get our lives in order, before telling us to take up the cross and follow him, before commissioning us to be his hands and feet on earth, our Lord Jesus tells us that God’s reality is one where we are free to care for each other in meekness, in grief, with peace, and with spiritual simplicity. Jesus tells us that we are blessed.

We should take this as very good news. While none of us perhaps counts as the poor of the earth, every one of us has need of God’s blessing and care. Every one of us needs to find himself or herself not in the anxiety-system of the world but instead in the reality of blessing that is the kingdom of God. God blesses first. It is not karma. It is the gracious blessing of a God that surpasses all our expectations with steadfast love.

7. So know that, before all else, you are blessed. You are blessed, not because of the great things you do, not because of the great deeds you have accomplished, not because of the house and family and health and all those things we normally call “blessings.” You are blessed because God who loves you has chosen you as you are. Amen.

At Cross Purposes

2011-01-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

1 Corinthians 1:10-18
January 23, 2011 (3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. Jesus once said, “Wherever two or more are gathered, I am there with them.” This saying has led to a couple of pretty pointed jokes. My favorite is, Wherever two Presbyterians are gathered, there will be at least three opinions.” And it’s not just Presbyterians—Christians in general have a terrible time agreeing on things. Churches, ostensibly places of worship and service, are hotbeds of argument and disagreement. Lest we think that this is a modern-day phenomenon, we have Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth to show that congregations have been fighting with each other since the very dawn of our religion.

Paul writes his letter to the Corinthians because he has heard through the grapevine that they have been fighting with each other. While we can’t be 100% positive of the cause of their conflict, it seems that different factions have been forming in the church based on people’s commitments to especially gifted preachers. These Corinthian Greeks, who had long valued flowery rhetoric, have been sweet-talked by the honey-tongued early preachers. Then, to drive it home, some had the opportunity to be baptized by their preacher of choice. And so they would brag: I belong to Paul, I belong to Peter, I belong to Apollos, and so on. It reminds me of when I was in the fifth grade. A little boy in my class asked me where we went to church and I said the Presbyterian Church. He said, without guile, “You ought to go to the Baptist Church. We’re closer to God!”

2. I laugh at what my little friend said to me now. But the truth remains, and I know it all too well: different churches and factions in the greater Christian Church continue to fight and disagree and consider themselves more holy or more correct. And, within every congregation of Christians, of any denomination, there are conflicts and factions and ill will one towards the other. Some of the reasons for these conflicts are “religious” while others have to do with personalities, political disagreements, and sometimes the smallest petty things. As I was preparing this sermon, I realized that Paul was an outside observer of the church in Corinth. He could see their disagreements with some objectivity and thus give them some pretty straight advice. I wondered, then, if First Presbyterian Church of Alton were observed from the outside by someone like Paul, what would he or she say to us about divisions and disagreements in this congregation? What squabbles or differences of opinion or disagreements would be highlighted in his or her letter to us? Since I’ve been here, I personally feel that some conflicts in this church have healed to a great extent. But we must be on our guard. And the problem, as we see from 1 Corinthians, is not mere disagreement between people of good will. That kind of disagreement is part of the rich human experience. The problem, rather, is when these disagreements lead to factions in the church. When some people band together and compete against other people, we have to ask with Paul: “Has the cross been divided?” When I got here to this church, I read reports and comments from the mission study. Some comments, sadly, suggested that there were factions in this congregation that had stooped even to making threats to leave the church if certain decisions were made. Like I said, I think a lot of healing has occurred during the past two years, but this kind of competition divides the cross. When we are at cross purposes we ignore the purpose of the cross.

3. The Greek word for household is “oikoumene.” The Christian Church quickly adopted this word to refer to the larger Christian household around the world. Early Christians and Christians today have affirmed that we belong together. This word “oikoumene” is the root for at least two English words today. The first is “ecumenical,” which of course refers to interdenominational cooperation. The ecumenical movement seeks out ways for the world’s Christians to work together. But the other word from oikoumene, which is more provocative, is “economy.” The Greek oikoumene, or household, is the root for understanding economy, or how we function with the resources that we have at our disposal. Our economy is our system of assigning value. For example, in a monetary economy like ours, we have agreed together to give value to little green papers in our wallets and purses. But in God’s economy, what creates value? In God’s oikoumene, household, economy, on what do we agree that ties us together. Professor of New Testament Daniel Kirk writes, “We discover in 1 Corinthians that the cross creates its own economy. The cross transforms the value of our actions and status. Because of the cross we must learn to view the world differently.”

4. So what is the value of the cross? If we were to form our household, our economy, on the value of the cross, what would that value be? Partisanship in the church, as Paul says, “empties the cross of its power.” How so? Because the cross should be what unites all of us together. It should be our central focus. It should be our common currency. And the cross means:

Self-sacrificial love. The cross means putting aside your own need to be right or to have power or to be in the right group. And it means joining Christ in caring more about love for others than consolidating your own position. This goes for life in the church just as much as it goes for life in your family. The cross revalues how married people treat each other, how friends see each other, and even how political and religious opponents carry out their business.
Giving of yourself to others not out of a spirit of obligation or victimhood or self-serving martyrdom but out of joy and thanksgiving for the community of love that God has given us. No greater love is this than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Likewise, as in Corinth and in Alton, no greater love than to be united in the cross of Christ in the church, despite differences of opinion or emphasis.
An invitation to a whole new way of life. Saint Augustine famously wrote that there are two cities, the earthly city and the city of God. We must, by the power of the cross, find our citizenship in God’s city rather than the back-biting, coercive, anxiety-producing cities and economies of human life. We are called by Christ to rely fully on his cross.

5. And let’s not be mistaken. It’s ok for us to disagree with each other. We can be Democrats and Republicans. We can Cardinals and Cubbies. We can be in love with traditional worship and we can be attracted by other forms of praise. We can be conservative and we can be liberal. We can even have varying visions for the future of this congregation. But we can’t be partisan. We can’t say that those kinds of issues will decide whether we stay or go from the church. Again, Professor Kirk writes, “For Paul, the ramifications of party spirit are nothing less than a denial of the gospel itself. The story says that Christ is crucified, and when we act as though anything else (or anyone else) defines who we are then we deny the story of our salvation.” We are people of the cross. We are to be of one mind and one purpose, and that purpose is the cross of Jesus Christ.

Let us pray:

Holy God, help us to love each other with the same love that you have for us. Unite us in mission even as you bless us each with unique gifts and interests. Let all who witness us know that we are one in you. By the power of the name of Jesus. Amen.

Now Hiring, Will Train

2011-01-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

Matthew 3:13-17
January 9, 2011 (Baptism of the Lord)

1. When I was a little boy, like most little boys, I loved to watch my father shave his whiskers. I liked it so much that my folks bought me a little toy shaving set. It had a little fake can of shaving cream, a hand mirror, and a plastic razor (of course with no blade!). If he was in the mood and I was lucky, my dad would give me some actual shaving cream—not just the pretend stuff—and I would take my toy razor and wipe the shaving cream off just like an adult. Shaving was fun! Nowadays, if I could get away without ever shaving I would! Come to think of it, I also had a toy lawnmower, and believe you me, lawn-mowing is no longer a fun game! But you know, my kids have these kinds of toys too. They have a toy vacuum cleaner, and a toy kitchen, and other toys that are based on real, not so fun, adult work. And so kids play house or play school or play other kinds of adult work settings.

If you watch nature programs, you know that it’s the same with animal babies. When kittens pounce on each other, they are learning hunting skills for when they are older. And when fawns bounce around and play, they too are learning the agile movements of their mothers and fathers to escape predators.

As children, it would seem we play to become good versions of our elders. We practice skills when we pretend.

2. Baptism is a bit like this. When we splash in the water, when we play with a wash basin in the middle of a church, or go out to a river, or dunk ourselves in a tub as part of our worship, we are practicing for a very big and very serious job. In the Presbyterian Church, we believe that baptism:

initiates us into the church;
bestows the promise of God’s grace upon us;
assures us that God forgives our sins;
and calls us to a life of Christian service and fulfillment.

In other words, baptism both marks our entrance into the Christian community and helps form us for the work we will need to do once we are Christians. We could hang a sign on the baptismal font that read: “Now Hiring, Will Train.” The promises we make for ourselves and for the care of others in baptism are playful rehearsals of real commitments in the mature years of our faith.

3. So, since baptism is about neophytes getting ready for the big time, it is disconcerting to us—just as it was to John the Baptist—that Jesus shows up to get baptized in the Jordan River. John realizes as soon as he sees Jesus that he, John, is out of his depth. He stutters, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Compared to Jesus, John is the little boy with a can of fake shaving cream. He is still in training—why would he be called on to baptize the master?

This scenario of tension between the Lord and the follower is one that is utterly commonplace for the Christian. We all live in this tense place where we know that Jesus is Lord and King and at the same time we know that we are supposed to be like him. He sits on the right hand of God the Almighty and is himself part of the Trinitarian Godhead. Yet, he is also our brother and friend. This tension is why I have never been totally convinced by the slogan WWJD. You know, it stands for “What Would Jesus Do?” The idea is basically a good one: before you make decisions, or when you’re trying to figure out how to act, ask yourself, “what would Jesus do?” We all ought to do this—we all ought to strive to model our own lives on Jesus’ selfless compassion and love for neighbor. But at some point, as the John the Baptist knew, the question fails. As some point, when we ask, “what would Jesus do?” the answer is, “Come to earth as God Incarnate, perform hundreds of miracles, die on the cross for the sins of the world, and rise again from the dead to bring the promise of new life to all people.” Obviously, none of us is going to be doing that, and so like John the Baptist, we realize that we are playing at being something greater than us.

But then, our brother and our God Jesus comes to us in the midst of our play and blesses what we are doing by joining us in the game. He goes under the water. He begins. He shows us the way. And, glory be, our play-acting becomes holy and the very essence of the Christian life!

4. Given this good news that Jesus is with us and Jesus guides us, there’s pretty much only one thing left to us as we splash around in the baptismal waters: Get busy!

It is clear from Jesus’ own baptism that baptism is the beginning of something, not the end.

In our own experience in the church, this is not always the case. Too often, we treat baptism (and also confirmation, which is a similar rite) as a capstone event rather than a mere beginning. Too often, someone is baptized or confirmed, and we never see that person again.

This simply should not be the case, and we should all work to embrace all the baptized into the work and ministry of the church. Likewise, those of us who are here, we need to be ready to serve compassionately and reach out in love to a broken world. Like Jesus himself, we need to find our beginning, not our end, in the waters of baptism. We need to feel the clean feeling, we need to be refreshed, we need to hear the promises. Not so we can sit back and relax but so that we can continue to do the ministry of Jesus Christ. We need to keep playing, keep practicing, as we grow and mature and grow some more as children of God. The elders and deacons who were ordained and installed this morning set a good example for all of us with their willingness and joy in serving. All of us can listen for God’s call and, like Christ, be ready to “fulfill all righteousness,” that is, to carry out God’s will in our lives and in our world.

5. And the best news of all is that God is pleased already! Before we are even out of the gate, God is pleased. Before Jesus even begins his incredible ministry, God is pleased. How much more will be God pleased and glorified when we move ahead into ministry! How much happier a parent will God be when we bear fruit, when we love each other, when we serve the needy! When all of our playing and pretending leads to the real deal! With Jesus, then, let us come up out of the water, embraced by the Spirit, to do the good work of God. Amen.

Power to Become Children

2011-01-04T07:03:00.000-08:00

John 1:10-18
January 2, 2011 (2nd Sunday after Christmas Day)

1. An assignment that teachers sometimes give to their students is to produce a family tree. Lots of kids have to do this at some point in their education—I had to do it for an introduction to anthropology class. The idea, I guess, is that the student learns not only about his or her relatives but also about the different ways that we might think about kinship and family.

The easiest, Beaver Cleaver-type of family tree has a mom and a dad and kids. The mom and dad have their own moms and dads and brothers and sisters. So it’s a simple diagram of a few generations of immediate family as well as aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents.

But making your family tree is normally a lot trickier than this. There are all sorts of circumstances that can complicate a family tree. What if your parents get divorced? Does your step-parent’s extended family belong? What if you are adopted? What if there are people you call grandma or grandpa or auntie that are not biologically related to you? Do really close friends belong on your family tree if they treat you like family? Do blood relatives deserve a place on your family tree even if they don’t act like family ought to act? Sure, so and so is my biological father, but someone else actually treats me like his child. Or, I love Auntie So and So, but she’s not my mother’s actual sister, just an old friend. Who is in your family? Who has a place on your family tree? How do you imagine the web of relationships that surrounds you?

2. The incredibly beautiful passage we heard this morning from the gospel of John suggests that we are part of God’s family now because of Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh. Verses 12 and 13 read: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”

The gist of the passage from John’s gospel is that we become God’s family when we get to know God in Jesus Christ. What I was suggesting with the whole discussion of family trees was just that: human biological connection does not guarantee loving relationships. Instead, the people we know best and care most about as well as those who know us best and care most about us; those people are our family. So when God so loved the world to send God’s only begotten Son to us, we received indelible knowledge of God. A knowledge that opened up a relationship. And true and gracious relationship creates family.

The story of Christmas that we hear again in John is precisely this: When God came to us in the human flesh of Jesus Christ, we learned something radically new and more intimate about God.

3. The story of the Bible and the story of our faith is basically the story of God wanting us to know God better and better. As the gospel reading indicated, this goes back even to Moses. Moses went up onto Mt. Sinai into God’s very presence where he received God’s law. Of course, Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from that mountain, but he also brought back many other laws that guided the Israelites—and these laws still guide the Jewish and Christian communities. Knowing God’s law, that is, God’s requirements for our behavior, is certainly one way of knowing God. When we consider the Ten Commandments, which advise us to hold God above all else and to be good to our fellow human beings, we can know that our God is a God who wants to be worshiped and revered and is also a God who wants us to live as a mutually supportive and just community. Another way to think about this is that the Bible itself is a gateway onto knowledge of God. The words of the Bible are words of description and introduction to the person and character of God.

4. Besides the law and the Bible, we also know God by what God gives us. In our Old Testament reading from the prophet Jeremiah, God promises to give the people bounty and joyfulness. “They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.” God gives us life, God gives us strength and intelligence. God gives us the beautiful world to live in. And as John’s gospel reminds us, God gives us grace upon grace as well as truth. We know God then by the good gifts that God gives us even as we know God by the laws and stories that God places on our lives and society.

5. But above, all, and this is the gospel of Christmas, we know God because God came to us in human form in the person of Jesus Christ. A paraphrase of our gospel reading today says, “The Word was made flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.” That’s it right there. When God came to our neighborhood to live beside us, we became a family. We received the power to become children of the will of God. We can see God and know God so much more fully now that before when all we had was the Bible. In Christmas, we also have Jesus to be with us and show us what God is like—what God’s eternal love is like.

The great Dutch master Rembrandt painted a scene called the “Holy Family” in which Mary is seen with a well-read Bible in one hand and her other hand gently rocking a cradle in which the baby Jesus lies. She has evidently been reading the Bible but is now gazing lovingly into our Savior’s beatific little face. Professor Thomas Troeger, writing about this painting, says, “[Mary] does not ponder the page alone. She also ponders the infant beside her, ‘the Word made flesh,’ rather than the Word made paper and ink. The Word is a blood-warmed, breath-enlivened creature sleeping beside his mother. When Mary returns to her reading, she will understand what she reads at greater depth because she has encountered the Word through the Word made flesh. When she tends to the child, she will understand the child at greater depth because she has encountered the Word through the Words in the book.”

And, says the gospel writer John, when we know God, through Word in book and Word in flesh, we become part of God’s family.

6. To make it more explicitly clear, we can turn to the letter to the Ephesians. In that letter, which we heard earlier, we find this: “God destined us for adoption as God’s children through Jesus Christ.” We have been adopted into a family of faith and of care that will never falter. The exercise of writing out our family tree, on the one hand, becomes exponentially more difficult when we consider that all of us who know Jesus Christ are related in the bond of God’s love. On the other hand, the whole idea of family becomes easier, more pure, more profound when we embrace this adoption. Through God’s free gift of Jesus, we are brothers and sisters. Ethicist Gilbert Meilander writes, “Has it occurred to you that every Christian is adopted?...Because we have become God’s children by adoption, he has ‘sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”’ Each one of us has been rescued from our natural state; each has experienced the love of a new and better father; each has become part of a new and better family.”

7. Christmas, in this sense, is not only the birthday of Christ—it is also the anniversary of our adoption into this family. In our family tree, the strongest branches are between you and me in the bond of God’s love made known to us in Jesus. It is cause for a Merry Christmas! It is cause for song. In this family of faith, in this church given to us, grace upon grace, by Christ himself, we know that auld acquaintances will never be forgot. They will always be brought to mind. By our brother Christ, we are given the power to be family forever. Praise be to God! Amen

Finding Jesus

2010-12-06T07:13:00.000-08:00

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
December 5, 2010 (2nd Sunday of Advent)

1. It’s only been two Sundays now since our celebration of Christ the King, but the image of kingdom, of a just and timeless reign of God’s love, is pretty much a constant in the scriptural witness. We can’t just talk about kingship of Christ once a year and be done with it. In fact, Advent continues to be a great time to discuss the promise of Christ’s eternal reign since in Advent we wait for Christ to come again and usher in the justice, peace, and love of his kingdom. Of course, one of the other reasons we like to think about Christ as a leader—at any time of year—is because our own leaders, even the good ones, could really stand to improve drastically. In this vein, Rev. Tod Mundo writes:

George Washington's likeness appears on our dollar bills and our quarters, and he is revered as the Father of Our Country. George Washington owned slaves. Andrew Jackson was one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history. Andrew Jackson promised the Choctaw and Cherokee peoples, "they shall possess [their land] as long as Grass grows or water runs"; when gold was discovered on their lands, his forgot his promises and drove them from their lands so that the white people could prosper. Theodore Roosevelt was a man with a reputation larger than life, and his face is carved on Mt. Rushmore. Theodore Roosevelt pushed the notorious Platt Amendment into the Cuban constitution, thereby stealing a measure of Cuba's sovereignty under the pretense of caring about the Cuban people. Great leaders sometimes have great faults. Poor leaders sometimes have even greater faults. Jim Hightower quips, "If God had meant for people to vote, he would have given us candidates."

The leaders in the Bible, with the one obvious exception of Jesus, are not too hot either. King David is an adulterer and a murderer, his son Solomon has absolutely no self-control, the other kings of Israel and Judah mostly betray God and the religion of their ancestors. In the New Testament, we have King Herod and Pontius Pilate not to mention all the other Roman authorities who keep Paul in and out of jail.

Since the Bible, we Christians have long had a problematic relationship with our earthly leaders. Worship professor Christian Scharen suggests that, “The worst moments in the long history of God’s people across history come to pass when leaders throw their lot in with the politically powerful. Solomon and Herod are obvious examples, but so are church leaders in Germany during National Socialism or in Chile during the reign of Augusto Pinochet. Year after year, people watch their rulers again succumb to corruption, greed, and power—some more, some less.”

2. Psalm 72 must have been written by a poet that knew very well that earthly kings and leaders—and any collaboration between faithful people and those leaders—was usually marked by sinful missteps, faithlessness, and subjugation of the powerless. The psalm, however, takes a hopeful approach: instead of bemoaning how bad almost all kings have been, it focuses rather on a perfect future king who governs with justice for the poor and commitment to the well-being of all people. The psalm itself is wonderfully positive about the king, and the son of the king. Hearing this psalm with Christian ears, one immediately thinks of Jesus sitting on the throne of heaven. In the words of the psalm, this king judges the “people with righteousness and the poor with justice.” Under his rule, “the mountains yield prosperity for the people.” It’s an amazing vision. The king we await in these darkening days of December will finally be a good leader, the best leader. One commentator on Psalm 72 wondered wistfully, What would it be like if all of our leaders today had to pass this acid test to be considered good leaders? What if they had to bring justice to the poor and prosperity to the people? It’s all too easy in today’s world to forget that we can and ought to expect more from those who aspire to serve us as leaders. And continuing on a theme I started to discuss last week, wouldn’t it be amazing if we measured prosperity not in terms of gross accumulation of wealth but in terms of true and equitable well-being for all people? Way back in 1968, Bobby Kennedy made this appeal. He said:

Too much and too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product…--if we should judge America by that--…counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl….Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures…everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

3. Psalm 72, as well as the other scripture readings we heard this morning from Isaiah and from Matthew’s gospel describe a future leader, a Christ, who will not measure prosperity or justice in the corrupt and limited terms of wealth and greed. He will bring with him a peace and justice that far surpasses our meager expectations. He will be like the “rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth. In his days…righteousness will flourish and peace [will] abound, until the moon is no more.” The question of Advent is: How do we wait? How can we wait for Jesus to come and make the words of promise in Psalm 72 come true? First, we look at the gospel of a Lord who has already come. We pattern our lives after Jesus’ life and ministry while we wait, and we hope for a future where what God has started in Jesus comes to a final and beautiful fullness. Two great Methodist thinkers, Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon encourage us to do just this when they write, “The church is on the long haul, living in that difficult time between one advent and the next. In such times, we are all the more dependent on a community that tells us we live between the times, that it is all too easy to lose sight of the way the world is, now that God has come. Because we know something about the direction in which it is moving, we are encouraged by that picture and guided by the shape of its depiction of the way things are now that God has redeemed the world in Jesus.”

As John the Baptist teaches in our gospel reading from this morning, one greater than all of us is coming, one whose sandals we are not worthy to carry. But in the meantime, as we await this wonderful incarnation of God, John reminds us that is our job in the here and now to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” In other words, while we place our ultimate hope in the coming Christ, in the interim we do his work. We love as he loves, we ally ourselves with justice and mercy, we serve the needy, the oppressed and the poor, and we look to Jesus as our moral exemplar.

4. To do that, we need to go to where Christ is now. Jesus, from his birth, lived with the poor, the sick, and those in need. Psalm 72 asks that the king “defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.” We consider Jesus to be this king because he did and will do just that. South African pastor Peter Storey was once addressing a group of well-off American church people. He said something to them that I’m sure had to sting, but it is utterly true. He said, “Those…churches struggling in places of poverty and injustice are fortunate—they are already where Jesus is. Those who have become prosperous must find Him again.” In our prosperity and comfort, our challenge this Advent is to go to where Jesus is, among the poor and the downtrodden. What can you do in this season to find him? How can you move yourself to a place where you can encounter the king of justice among the poor? Can you give from your abundance to the needy? Can you write letters to our leaders to encourage them to enact legislation that protects Jesus’ beloved? Can you pray that the world will be transformed? Can you pray that Jesus come and really want it, for your own sake and for the sake of all those on this earth who desperately need deliverance? I’ve said it from this pulpit before but allow me to say it again: God doesn’t help those who help themselves. God helps those who can’t help themselves. And you have been called to minister in Jesus’ name. Find way to serve the poor, find a way to serve the lonely, find a way to share your prosperity, and you will find the king of peace. You will find Jesus. Amen.

Thrones of Judgment

2010-12-06T07:08:00.001-08:00

Psalm 122
November 28, 2010 (1st Sunday of Advent)

1. It is my intention to focus our attention during this season of Advent on the Psalms that occur in the lectionary readings. These ancient songs of temple, synagogue, and church—I hope—will provide us with just the right music for this time of expectation and preparation. So, to get started, let me share with you a song that has become a favorite around our house, and, if I may modestly admit it, I wrote it myself. I wrote the song as a response to my children’s frequent conviction that my decisions are not fair, or that their lives are too difficult, or that not all of their needs and wants are being met quickly enough. The song goes like this:

There is no justice on this earth!

There is no justice, there is no justice,

There is no justice on this earth!

My kids don’t really care for this song, but I like it a lot. For me, it revives ancient themes, ones that we often see in the Psalms themselves. When the people of Israel look around at their position among the nations, they see that they are small to the point of insignificance, and all too often they are conquered and hauled off into exile. Not surprisingly, perhaps, their songs lament the lack of justice on earth, but they also imagine a different world where there is justice. A world where God is in charge in the holy city of Jerusalem, and things are the way they ought to be.

2. In Psalm 122, which we sang this morning, the psalmist finds joy in going to the house of the Lord because in that house, it is possible to imagine a world where God’s justice is the norm rather than the exception. The words of the psalm asks us to pray for the peace and prosperity of Jerusalem.

Of course, for the ancient Israelites as well as for many today, Jerusalem is the centerpiece of God’s creation. It is the holy city where God is most pleased to dwell, the home of the ancient Hebrew temple, the home of Jesus passion and resurrection, and the home of the Dome of the Rock, one of the most revered places in Islam.

And members of all three of these religions have longed after peace for Jerusalem even as all of them have also been guilty of bringing strife and warfare to this same city. Jerusalem today is one of the most fraught places on the planet. Everyone seems to want the city for themselves to the exclusion of others, and perhaps this is how they feel about our God as well. We want God for ourselves in such a way that limits God’s potential affection for or relationship with other people.

Jerusalem, in this way, becomes much more than one particular geographical city. It rises to be the ideal place where all history comes together and God’s promises come true. It is the place where people from all over the earth metaphorically pin their hopes and dreams, and it is for this reason that the psalmist’s appeal to us to go up and be happy worshiping God in Jerusalem is such a timeless hymn. At the end of the seder meal at Passover, our Jewish brothers and sisters proclaim with hope: “Next year in Jerusalem!” Most have no sense that they will go to the earthly city called Jerusalem, the one that straddles the border between the modern political entities of Israel and West Bank. They instead refer to the Jerusalem of promise, the holy city where God lives, the mount of Zion where ancient hungers are satisfied, where justice flows down like a stream, where swords are beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks, where we will learn war no more.

3. What marks our longing for this heavenly Jerusalem is our shared conviction that this will be a place that will feature both justice and peace. We have a sense that justice and peace ought to be related somehow—after all, most of our towns have an elected position called “the justice of the peace” who is responsible for keeping order by settling disputes. We know, instinctively maybe, that if we have justice, we will also have peace. But there is plenty in our world to suggest the opposite. Plenty of judgments are made everyday in our modern world that disturb the peace. I refer to judgments which concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, judgments which choose knowingly to pollute the environment, judgments to make war instead of to seek peace, judgments that divide the powerful from the weak, the haves from the have-nots. These kinds of so-called justice drive a wedge between people and make peace seem like a far-away fantasy. But we know, as the psalmist knew, as the prophets knew, and as Jesus himself knew that true and godly justice will go hand in hand with peace. For this reason, we can understand where the psalmist was coming from when he imagined a city where “thrones of judgment” were set up. When the one doing the judging is the source of all creation and the author of justice, this is good news indeed. This judge creates a city so just that no more harm is done, no more alienation occurs, no more oppression is possible. In the purview of these thrones of justice, peace spreads. No wonder the psalmist seems to equate the practice of justice with the act of making peace as well as with the liturgical praise of the people. Justice-seeking equals peace-making equals praise-singing.

4. In front of these thrones of judgment, the sinful divisions we create unfairly between ourselves are done away with and we are all able to worship with freedom and human equality before our God. In this act of justice, we find peace, but Psalm 122 also suggests that in this justice we will also find prosperity. This prosperity is utterly unknown in our world, however. Sure, there are plenty of people who are well-off today, but unlike earthly wealth, the prosperity in the psalm is not won at anyone else’s expense. Biblical prosperity is not the accumulation of wealth in a system of scarcity. It is rather the fair and equitable sharing of God’s gifts to us. In this season of heightened consumerism and continuous demands that we buy more and spend more and live always at the edge if not beyond our means, it is instructive to remember that the prosperity and peace that are imagined in the Bible do not resign some people to poverty and dependence. The peace of the house of God, where God’s justice reigns, is the kind of peace that restores the dignity of all people, that brings low the mighty and raises up the lowly; it is the dignity that comes unexpectedly both in a manger and in glory.

5. So, the psalmist says, “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’

Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.

Jerusalem—built as a city that is bound firmly together.”

When these words are intoned, who is it that belongs within Jerusalem’s gates? Who is being invited to enter into this city of justice, where all is bound so firmly together? Is it for us pious Christians gathered here this morning? Is it for the holy? Who can come into this city chosen by God? In other words, who receives God’s promises? To whom do they apply? When Jesus says he came to seek out and restore the lost, to whom was he referring? I suppose the thrones of judgment are for all people, ready or not. For some, they will mean a reversal of fortune. But for all people, the promise stands: God’s justice will bring peace.

6. Well, you may be saying to yourself, “What does all this have to do with Jesus? What does any of this have to do with Advent?” Advent is a time when we affirm that the world can change. Not by our own labors, but as the psalmist suggests, by the arrival of a just judge to sit on the thrones of judgment. When Christ comes to reconcile the world for once and for all with God, the world will change. The injustices, the grief, the inequality, will be set right. Peace and true prosperity will reign. We Christians must live off of this Advent hope. It is like a song that has gotten stuck in our heads, and we can’t shake it. We believe Christ can and will change the world. This is our story, this is our song. Soon, little Avery Elizabeth will be baptized, and her own life will become part of this song of hope. In her, as in all of us baptized, ancient promises are being answered. As we await the coming of the Christ, let us see ourselves as we truly are. Let us prepare ourselves for praise, for justice, and for peace-making. I began with a cynical song about the lack of justice on this earth that I sing to my children. Let us end with the hope that all of us—even our little children—will realize a new song of gladness, justice, and peace. Amen.

King

2010-11-29T07:44:00.000-08:00

Colossians 1:11-20 and Luke 23:33-43
November 21, 2010 (Christ the King)

1. So did you hear the good news? If you didn’t, you may be living under a rock! Prince William is getting married to his long-time girlfriend, Kate Middleton! Barring some unforeseen circumstance, William and his new wife will eventually ascend the throne of the United Kingdom. William will be king, and his wife Kate will be Queen. Our perennial interest in the British monarchy is fascinating—it would seem that our American democratic character cannot help but be intrigued with the romance and tradition of royalty. We’ve all seen too many movies! Biblical kings were more likely to be exploitative autocrats than ultra-suave, polo-playing dandies. So what do we make of this strange Sunday at the end of the liturgical year? What are we supposed to think about this idea that Christ is King? Does he wear an ermine-lined cape and jeweled crown? Does he live in a palace? Does he rule with absolute authority, or does he leave most everything up to some celestial parliament? And, perhaps the hardest question of all, can you accept/believe that you are subject to a monarch, no matter that it is Jesus? Our scripture readings this morning can help us think some about what it means that Jesus Christ reigns as king.

2. In the letter to the Colossians, our Savior Christ is described in terms of cosmic power. The writer of this letter refers to Jesus as:

· the image of the invisible God;

· the firstborn of all creation;

· head of the body, the church;

· the beginning and the first born of the dead.

The passage declares that all things were created through Jesus Christ, meaning that you and I, the natural world around us, the air we breath, and the infinite expanse of the cosmos were all created in some mystical way through the person of Jesus. Moreover, in this Jesus our King, the entire fullness of God has been pleased to dwell, and all of us can find reconciliation with God and with each other through him.

This vision of Christ is amazing, astounding, astonishing. He is so far from the humble babe in the manger, far from the scruffy carpenter, far from the executed teacher and healer. In my imagination, after reading this passage from Colossians, I imagine Jesus getting bigger and bigger until he fills my entire field of vision, until he fills the entire universe. Even for a dyed-in-the-wool anti-authoritarian, it is not that difficult to feel like a subject of this larger-than-life Lord of Life. It reminds me of another of my favorite New Testament passages: the hymn about Christ in the 2^nd chapter of Philippians:

“Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is the Lord”!

3. But you may find yourself squirming with all this talk of an Almighty King. Your relationship with Jesus isn’t like that maybe. You don’t like the idea of bowing and scraping. Jesus is your friend, your brother, your confidant. Or, even if that’s not completely how you feel about him, he’s not some cosmic overlord! If you feel this way, you are not alone. Theologian Sallie McFague has been one of the most trenchant critics of this way of thinking of Christ, or even God the Creator, as some Almighty Royal Figure. She writes, “My criticism of [this monarchical model] focuses on its inability to serve as the imaginative framework for all of creation….

“The relationship of king to subject is necessarily a distant one: royalty is ‘untouchable.’ It is the distance, the difference, the otherness of God that is underscored in this imagery. God as king in his kingdom—which is not of this earth—and we remain in another place, far from his dwelling. In this picture God is wordless and the world is Godless: the world is empty of God’s presence, because it is too lowly to be the royal abode.”

Some of you have said something more or less like this to me, if not with McFague’s exact words. You don’t like a king Jesus. Thinking of Jesus as king makes him distant, out there, un-relatable.

These criticisms suggest that Christ the King seems, at best, old-fashioned. At worst, it takes away our own God-given human dignity and expects us to genuflect mindlessly as a way to keep us in our place. As a lifelong Protestant, I remember how shocked I was the first time I saw news footage of the ordination service for a Catholic priest. At one point in the service, he doesn’t merely kneel but rather complete prostrates himself face down on the floor before the altar at the front of the church. I mean, in our churches, we don’t even have kneelers in the pews! Our understanding of Christ simply does not call for this kind of self-abasement. How can good democrats (lower-case “D”!) ever find any sort of comfort in a God who treats us like subjects of a king?

4. The thing is, as our Gospel reading makes abundantly clear, Jesus is no ordinary king. He is not far away and up above. He is Jesus. He died with criminals on the cross. But even in his most agonizing moment, he was reaching out to them and inviting them into his kingdom, into his community. This king is someone who, when confronted with earthly kings and powers, receives nothing but mocking. They make fun of him! “If you are the king of the Jews, then do something! Save yourself!”

When the author of the letter to the Colossians describes our Lord Christ as a Cosmic Lord, he must hold that vision of Jesus in tension with the King Jesus who rules from the throne of the cross with a crown of thorns. We must also hold these two visions of king in tension. One is the Lord to whom every knee must bow. The other is the king who offers grace even to the criminal at the hour of his death. If we bow to our King Jesus, we do so because he is with us and loves us. He is not in some distant royal abode, but nor is he someone we can tuck away in our back pocket. He is mighty, and he is kind. He is merciful, and he is just. All things were created through him, and he wants to know you personally.

5. Perhaps the best wisdom I have heard concerning our celebration of Christ the King is from preaching professor David Lose. Lose emphatically explains that when we make Christ our King, this is not just regime change. We are not just replacing our worldly presidents and bosses and lords with Jesus. Lose writes, “But the kingdom – or, maybe better, realm – of God that Jesus proclaims represents a whole new reality where nothing is the same – not our relationships or rules, not our view of self or others, not our priorities or principles – nothing. Everything we thought we knew about kings and kingdoms, in fact, gets turned right on its head.” Lose continues, “If we believe that Christian faith isn't just allegiance to a different sovereign but rather is entrance into an entirely new realm, then who knows what God will expect from us. No longer can we keep our faith a private affair and ignore the need of our neighbor. No longer can we sing robust and rousing hymns about God's glory and majesty and ignore the plight of God's good earth. No longer can we pray that God's kingdom come and yet manage our wealth as if it actually belonged – rather than was entrusted – to us. And no longer can we relegate the realm of God to a comfortably distant – or for that matter frighteningly near – future. The realm and rule of God is all around us, beckoning us to live by its vision and values even now.”

6. So, in this last week before we must absolutely get caught up in Advent and in Christmas, remember again that we exist in this church because Christ is our Head. He defines who we are and how we are to act. He welcomes us and sends us out. He feeds us at this table, and calls us to feed others.

I will conclude with words of praise from the book of Revelation:

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,

to receive power and wealth

and wisdom and might

and honor and glory and blessing! Amen.

Signs of the New Creation

2010-11-16T12:21:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 65:17-25
November 14, 2005 (33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. Hear again these words from the prophet Isaiah: “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” Isaiah was writing to a people recently returned from their exile in Babylon. Jerusalem was a shambles, families and farms and trades were all in disarray, and the world crowded all around as a constant threat. The people needed to hear God’s promise again that a new creation is on its way. Last week, we talked about heaven, and that’s part of this new creation. But today we need to remember, like the ancient Israelites, that God is with us now. God is creating something new and something better in our world in our lives right now. We believe in a God who is doing a new thing, a God who puts a new heart within us, a God who rules over a place called the New Jerusalem. We believe in a God who makes all things new.

2. One of the remarkable features of this passage from Isaiah is how specific are God’s promises concerning the new creation. To be honest, it’s probably so specific because the prophet Isaiah was responding to specific injustices, real cases of public nastiness, particular instances of mean and sorry limitation. In other words, the vision of the new in this passage points to some very concrete problems with the old. And if you are a realist, what some might call a pessimist, you might not be too shy about pointing out that the old and awful world of the ancient Israelites that emerges from this passage is all too similar to our own world. You might wonder: if God is bringing newness, if new creation is on its way, it seems to have been delayed. Just like the experience of the Israelites, the world still crowds around us, our lives are all too often a total mess.

But don’t take my word for it. There is proof that our world still cries out for something new.

Isaiah promises that the new creation will not have infants who live but a few days. While rates of infant mortality have decreased radically in the modern world, especially in developed nations, in the third world, infant mortality remains tragically high. The CIA World Factbook puts infant mortality in the United States at the relatively low rate of 0.6%, but this still means that the U.S. is in 46^th place in the world in terms of infant mortality. Sadly, many nations in Africa still have infant mortality rates higher than 10%.

Isaiah promises that all old people will live out a long life. Again, in the industrialized world, this is basically true, with the exceptions we all can name resulting from accidents, murder, and disease. But in other parts of the world, the average life expectancy is appallingly low, generally due to the AIDS epidemic. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have a life expectancy hovering around 40 years.

In the new creation in Isaiah, no one builds houses and then doesn’t live in them. Nor does anyone plant crops and then not eat of them. Of course, many today do not live in the houses they built. National Geographic magazine says that in 2010 there are 35 million refugees in this world who have been forced from their homes by war and unrest. Some agencies put that number much higher.

And of course, in today’s global agricultural economy, few people eat the food that they plant in their fields. Presbyterian mission co-worker Jed Koball explains that one of the key causes of hunger in the country of Peru today is the fact that many fields once used to provide food for the local population are now used to grow a cash crop, asparagus, for the North American market. Examples like this one are unfortunately common.

Finally, and perhaps most provocatively, in God’s new creation says Isaiah, no parents will “bear children for calamity.” This is every parent’s most fervent hope for their children today, that they will never encounter calamity despite a world full of perils and traps. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if none of our children ever experienced calamity?

No wonder that Isaiah’s prophecy for an ancient people still sounds fresh and attractive to us today! So many conditions of the old world still plague our contemporary time. We still need a new creation. We still need a new heaven and a new earth.

3. Noted Christian speaker and preacher Tony Campolo makes the bold claim that when Jesus came into the world, God’s promises came to pass. Despite all that I’ve just said about the world still being in dire need of a new creation, Campolo argues that in Jesus, we have been given new life. Jesus, in all the gospels, proclaims that, in him, the kingdom of God is coming near to us, and this is the beginning of the new creation. Campolo writes, “[Jesus] wants to change this world into the kind of world that it ought to be. That’s why Jesus came, to create transformed people who in turn will live in a transformed world.” This is why Jesus teaches his disciples—and us—to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

In other words, Jesus among us is the turning point in history between the old world and the new, between the old life and the new life. Ancient promises, like the one made in Isaiah to the Israelites, are answered in Jesus Christ. And so now, even though the world can still feel awfully broken, it is on the mend. Christ is with us, Emmanuel, in a whole new way, even in the trials and problems of modern life.

Campolo suggests that Hurricane Katrina was a good example of a new thing emerging even in the destruction of that storm. Campolo writes, “When Katrina took place, [Jesus] was the first one who wept. He was the first one who cried. He was the one who was outraged because we didn’t build levees strong enough to hold back a hurricane force wind. He was the one who was outraged by the fact that there was so much poverty in New Orleans. To be Christian isn’t just to believe in Jesus, it’s to allow Jesus to invade you, to change your emotions, your feelings, your thinking.”

4. And when this transformation begins to take place, we start to be able to see signs of the new creation. Life emerges where before there was none. As Christians we need to remember that Jesus came to bring in the kingdom of God. In him, the old world is being made new. When you see new life emerge, you can be sure that is Christ at work. When you see signs of the new creation, you are seeing the promises of God being fulfilled even now. After the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington in 1980, scientists and other observers were astonished by how quickly the landscape regenerated. A 1987 article from Time magazine reported that, “What they observe is nothing less than a landscape being reborn. Nature is laboring mightily to transform the scoured flanks of the mountain, its debris- filled river systems and chemically polluted ponds and lakes into a facsimile of the sylvan setting that existed before the eruption. To the untutored eye, the evidence of devastation still seems overwhelming. Scientists, however, see a glass filling itself up slowly but surely. Says James MacMahon, head of the biology department at Utah State University: ‘It's not a forest yet, but the rate of progress is amazing.’” Maybe all of us can think of areas in our own lives where we have been surprised by the rate of growth. Where has Jesus been making new life in you?

And sometimes, this work of new life, this constant move toward wholeness, comes in even less expected and more sudden ways. I recently heard a radio interview with musician Sxip Shirey. Shirey grew up in rural Ohio on 54 acres of woods. He loved it in the country. But to make it as a musician, he realized it was going to be necessary to move to New York City, a place he initially detested. It was ugly and crowded and unfriendly. But then one night, he found himself on the roof of a friend’s 36-storey apartment building overlooking downtown Manhattan. It was a deeply foggy night, and as he looked out, he saw the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Their bases were covered in fog such that it looked like two enormous buildings floating in the clouds. In the harbor, he could hear the foghorns of the boats, and to his right he could see the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges lit and floating above the mist. To his left, he could see the Statue of Liberty, and he at once felt connected to his Albanian grandmother who had emigrated through Ellis Island. Then and there, Shirey discovered the life and the beauty of the city. He said, “I felt connected on a spiritual level to the city for the first time.” What was ugly was beautiful. What had hurt and felt like a strange land had become home.

5. For us too, a new world is on its way. Even when we feel alienated and when this world feels old indeed, our God is at work. When we see the world through the redemptive lens of Christ, we note new life springing up. When forgiveness is extended, when beauty shines forth, when relationships flourish, it is then that “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” Open yourselves to Jesus and to what he is doing in you and in us to usher in a new creation. Open yourselves to these promises and trust that our God is faithful.

Let us pray: Almighty God, attune us to see your work in your world. Open our hearts and minds to the many ways that you are bringing us new life. May your kingdom so inspire us that we share your love and life with all. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Heaven

2010-11-08T07:30:00.000-08:00

Luke 20:27-38
November 7, 2010 (32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. The genius American folk singer Woody Guthrie once wrote some extremely moving lyrics for a song called “Heaven.” Here are a few stanzas from that song:

It’s after my work tired and weary, I lay down to rest my eyes,
I see this world change in a whirlwind and heaven flies down from the skies;
I see rising up from the wreckage cities and mansions so bright
I see my friends’ eyes and their faces lit up with a bright shining light.
Every hand works in hand with the other and not for power nor greed;
Every hand works to its fullest ability and is paid in its deepest of need;
No cancer, no tuberculosis, no paralysis or asylums are here
No bowery nor skid row of homeless, no eye that is blinded by tears.
I know as you hear such a dream, friend, you will not pass it along;
I do not expect you to sing it as I do, nor to sing such a curious song;
I wrote down this song for my own self, and sing it now to my own soul.
But if you’ll sing songs of your dreamings, then you will reap treasures untold.

Guthrie captured a vision of heaven that was meaningful to him. It was a sort of workers’ paradise without disease or madness. But Guthrie realized that his vision may not be the best for everyone—his heaven may not be your heaven—but he encourages us all to reap the benefits of dreaming of a better future.
Is that what heaven is for us in the Christian Church? Is it just an imagined perfect place to comfort us through the misfortunes and sadness of this life? Is it somewhere that we actually go? Is it real? Do we fly around on angels’ wings strumming little harps?

2. These have been questions for Jews and Christians for thousands of years. Our gospel reading this morning shows Jesus in a tricky discussion with a group of economically powerful Jews known as the Sadducees. By Jesus’ day, most Jews believed in some sort of resurrection of the body and reunion with God in something like heaven after death, but the Sadducees stubbornly maintained a more ancient skepticism in Judaism about the reality of the resurrection. So they try to trip up Jesus, who had become famous for his preaching about the coming kingdom of God where all would be resurrected for eternal life. They try to trick him with a question about Jewish marriage customs in which a widow could marry her deceased husband’s brothers to try to conceive a child to carry on the deceased’s name. In the resurrection (that is to say, in heaven), to whom would the widow be married: the original husband or one of the later husbands? It’s a disingenuous questions since the Sadducees do not believe in the resurrection at all, and Jesus customarily reframes the question and reminds us all that God is the God of the living and that the resurrection is about living in God rather than about our human relationships in this life. But, the passage in some ways raises more questions about heaven than it answers.

3. If you even believe in heaven as a place, or a state of being, or whatever, what do you think it will be like? Through most of Christian history, Christians stuck pretty closely to Jesus’ words in this passage. They did not imagine heaven to be a place where human families or relationships really mattered all that much. They did not expect a reunion with deceased loved ones to be a highlight of the afterlife. Scholars refer to this view of heaven as “theocentric,” meaning that it was centered in every regard on God. The author of a book on heaven, Lisa Miller, has explained that this kind of heaven can be imagined like a giant crowded stadium or arena where everyone is facing the center. In the center sits God on God’s throne and all present praise God continuously having no desire to look either to the right or the left at those around them. God is their one focus. St. Augustine, writing in the early 5th century, said, “The praise of God should be the object of our meditation in this life, because in the life to come it will be for ever the object of our rejoicing.” Almost a thousand years later, St. Thomas Aquinas said that even if heaven had only one person living in it, this sole inhabitant “would be happy, though having no neighbor to love.” The idea, I gather, is that if you are focused on praising God eternally in heaven, you have no need of other people.

4. I won’t lie to you—I don’t find this classical Christian idea of heaven to be all that appealing. I affirm that praising God is our highest calling, but if I praise God better with my friends and loved ones now, why would that change in heaven? And moreover, we want to be consoled by the idea of heaven. We want it to be a place where our grief and loss is done away with because we are reunited with those we love. But, in the last few hundred years, Christians have embroidered more and more into our visions of heaven. As a result, our heaven can sometimes come to feel more like a perfect earth rather than a whole new experience of life. What would your perfect heaven be like? According to some passages in the book of Revelation, its streets will be made of gold and all things will be bedecked with jewels. And popular jokes have St. Peter at the pearly gates acting as heavenly bouncer. One thing I sometimes imagine is a great banquet, a feast, where the conversation is lovely, the food is delicious, the wine is fine, and it just goes on and on. Or I imagine a heaven of mountain meadows with cool breezes, snow-capped mountains, completely fresh air, and I am with my family. And when I am missing her, my mother is there with me. Perhaps your visions of heaven are similar. You are reunited with your dead, you are doing things you enjoy in places that are supernaturally beautiful. How radically different are these visions of heaven from those of the early and medieval Christians! In our modern heaven, where is God? Where is Jesus? Speaking for myself, I sometimes imagine Jesus as the host at the feast, or he is with me in the mountain meadow, or my mother introduces me to him. And God is little more than light or a feeling of well-being that permeates this heaven of mine. Despite this, I still like my heaven because it is so comforting to me now. Our modern visions of heaven encourage us, and console us in grief, and they remind us that things will get better when we are feeling down or scared or lonely or overwhelmed.

5. Of course, despite their ability to console, these visions of heaven, these modern visions that foreground reunions with loved ones and pleasant activities, run the danger of trivializing eternal life with God. They can problematically lessen our focus on resurrection to new life with Christ. Perhaps we have gone too far from Jesus’ own words about heaven wherein we will not be worried about to whom we are married but rather will be like angels and children of God. Perhaps we have lost our focus when, as author Lucy Bregman worries, our heaven resembles “a Florida retirement community, minus ill health and mortality.”
And then, of course, is the very real issue that in this modern scientific world, it has become utterly possible to be a faithful Christian who yet wonders if there even is a place called heaven. It can be hard to believe that Jesus will descend on a cloud and resurrect all the dead, bodies and all, from their resting places to move them to some kind of paradise in the sky. Never mind family reunions or beautiful sunsets over the ocean, can we really believe in the resurrection of the dead at all? Does it even help us to live with this kind of comforting vision of the afterlife, or does it just distract us from our real problems in the here and now? Are we merely drugging ourselves with “pie in the sky when we die by and by”?

6. A famous Baptist minister and preacher named Carlyle Marney once made some candid and self-revelatory remarks about heaven. “In some lectures at Southern Methodist University, Marney confessed there were days he didn’t know if he believed in the resurrection or not. Afterward his friend Albert Outler stopped him in the hall and said, ‘Marney, whoever told you that you had to believe in the resurrection every day?’ ‘Well, Albert,’ Marney responded, ‘if you know so much, when do I have to believe in the resurrection?’ Outler said, ‘On they day you die and the day you help someone else die; that’s when you believe in the resurrection.’” (Quote from The Christian Century, Nov. 2, 2010, Kyle Childress) I’m inclined to agree with Outler. We’ve heard Jesus speak on heaven, we’ve heard Augustine and Aquinas, and we’ve heard our own fantasies of heaven. But what we really need is an abiding belief in the resurrection that is there for us in our most delicate and important moments.

7. Ultimately, as Jesus teaches us, “Now [God] is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive.” You get that? For God, you will never be dead—you will always be alive. That is what counts. When this earthly life is over for you and me, we will know the resurrection made possible for us in Christ. Golden streets, harps, reunions with loved ones—these things are all wonderful consolations, but the resurrection is ultimately an act of God on behalf of life, our life. Let us conclude with another teaching of Jesus. He was talking to his friend Martha after Martha’s brother Lazarus died. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” [Martha replied,] “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” Brothers and sisters here today gathered, Do you believe this? Believe it. Because of Jesus the Christ, you will never die. Amen.

It's a Trap!

2010-10-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

Luke 18:9-14
October 24, 2010 (30th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. In 1980, singer Mac Davis came out with a hit song. Here’s the chorus from that song:

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way

I can't wait to look in the mirror 'cause I get better lookin' each day

To know me is to love me, I must be a h(eck) of a man

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble, but I'm doin' the best that I can

One of the reasons I like this song is because I know there are a lot of humble people in church! Let’s have a show of hands here. Who out there is humble? Ok. Well, who out there is the most humble? Raise your hand! Don’t be shy!

Of course, there’s the rub. We knew we were in trouble when the gospel reading starts with the clear statement that the following parable is for people “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” The last time I checked, most of us think our opinions and beliefs are right, if not righteous. And people who don’t see things our way, if not contemptible, are at least sadly mistaken.

It’s an especially tricky problem for those of you who may have enjoyed some power or authority in your life. A good one that Susie Delano shared with me this week comes from the inimitable Mohammed Ali: Prior to take-off on a plane, Mohammed Ali, was told to fasten his seat belt. He boastfully replied, "Superman don't need no seatbelt," to which the flight attendant responded, "Superman don't need no airplane either."

Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble!

2. The parable from Luke seems simple. Two men go up to pray in the temple. The Pharisee gets up in a good public place and crows on and on about how great he is. He is religiously perfect—fasting and tithing on a regular basis. He thanks God for his ability to be faithful like this, and he is especially thankful that he is not some villainous piece of garbage like the traitorous and thieving tax collector he sees across the way. The trouble with the Pharisee, unfortunately, is that biblical scholars tell us that Pharisees were hardly the self-righteous blowhards we often imagine them to have been. The Pharisees were a movement in Judaism to make the keeping of the law more of a daily practice accessible to all the Jewish people rather than just to the priests in the temple. They believed that Jews would be better off in religious terms if all would keep God’s law more carefully and in everyday ways. Most scholars admit that Jesus himself shared many of these Pharisaical tendencies. And, except for the part where this Pharisee specifically thanks God for not being some lesser person, it’s not that terrible of thing to thank God for helping you be good!

What about the tax collector? It’s not easy to imagine a modern-day equivalent to the tax collector—he was not much like an IRS agent. Tax collectors were entrepreneurs who collected taxes for the Roman Empire—as such they were considered traitors, and it was common knowledge that they used extortion, graft, and all kinds of thievery to shake down the populace. Any money they collected above what was owed to the Romans went right in their pockets. The closest analogue in our society might be a loan shark or a Mafioso who also oozed the opposite of patriotism. This particular tax collector, the one in the parable, has apparently come to some sort of crisis point in his life. From the description given, he seems to be honestly convicted of his sinfulness as he prays, “God, be merciful on me, a sinner!”

It’s easy, even given what I’ve told you about how the Pharisees weren’t all that bad and how the tax collectors were that bad and worse, to be attracted to the humble and contrite tax collector and be repulsed by the bragging and pious Pharisee. Even Jesus seems to point us this way, saying that the tax collector went home justified, meaning that he went home set right by God. Obviously, our sympathies should go with the tax collector even as our condemnation should be against the proud Pharisee.

3. But watch out! This parable is a trap! You see, as soon as we feel superior to the Pharisee, we become the Pharisee. Preaching professor David Lose says, “For as soon as we fall prey to the temptation to divide humanity into any kind of groups, we have aligned ourselves squarely with the Pharisee. Whether our division is between righteous and sinners, as with the Pharisee, or even between the self-righteous and the humble, as with Luke, we are doomed. Anytime you draw a line between who's "in" and who's "out," this parable asserts, you will find God on the other side.” Lutheran pastor John Petty agrees. He writes, “The twist is that even when we're at our best, such as the pharisee, we're actually worse off than we were before we shaped up. Now, we're under the illusion that we're "special" and "better." [This is a special kind of irony.] It means that even when we think we're close to God--especially then--our self-righteousness in thinking so means we're actually farther from God than we were to begin with.”

This is why trying to be humble is a losing proposition. In fact, it might not even be possible to try to be holy! When we try, we inevitably fail, or we succeed, but in succeeding, we alienate others with our pride at managing to be so holy. No wonder so many people outside of the church (and even inside it) think that we Christians are hypocrites. If you’re like me, you have at least one family member and probably several friends who are to willing to tell you that they don’t go to church because it’s full of a bunch of over-pious hypocrites. They don’t want to be part of that!

4. As much as we would like for these people to come to church and see that church is so much more than their negative perceptions, we have to admit that Pharisees and good church people can be hard to take.

Regarding this passage, theologian Albert Nolan has said that, “One of the basic causes of oppression, discrimination and suffering in that society was its religion….And nothing is more impervious to change than religious zeal. The piety and good works of the dutiful religious man made him feel that God was on his side. He did not need God’s mercy and forgiveness; that was what others needed. The sinner, on the other hand, was well aware of his desperate need for mercy and forgiveness and of his need to change his life….Jesus soon discovered that it was the dutiful religious man, rather than the sinner or pagan Roman, who was an obstacle to the coming of the kingdom of total liberation.”

The same goes for us in these days. How many times have you seen a poor person on the side of the road or some other suffering person in this world and uttered something to yourself like, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Or, when you are totally honest with yourself, how many times have you thought, “I am so grateful that I’m not like someone else.”? I’m not proud of it, but my parents taught me when I was young that it was better to be an American than to be anything else. So, by being an American, am I better? Am I luckier? Am I more justified by God? Please remember that the tax collector went home justified.

5. So what’s it going to take? How can we reset this whole situation so that it is not a trap? How can we live in such a way that we can live as God would have us live (like the Pharisee) and avoid the prideful comparisons (also like the Pharisee)? How can we be justified, saved, redeemed, set right, and set free by God alone?

Well, it’s useless to try to be humble. So why don’t we try to love like Jesus? Why don’t we try to love the sin-soaked tax collector amongst us? Why don’t we love the criminals, the sex offenders, the terrorists, the illegals, the repulsive? And while we’re at, why don’t we love the Pharisee, the boor, the braggart, the self-righteous, the overly confident? Author Jayne Hoose points out that, “To act towards others out of love often requires us to look beyond the obvious. What is it that compels the Pharisee to compare himself favorably to the tax collector before God? [Why did he need to do that?] A more loving response to this parable might be to try to understand the underlying needs and hurt of both the Pharisee and the tax collector. It is only when we regard others out of love that true humility follows. Love and humility are essential partners.”

6. Jesus has a way of doing this to us. He tells a story that seems obvious: the Pharisee is a schmuck and the tax collector is justified. But as the story pulls us in, and we go farther and farther into it, we end up where we so often end up: standing with all the rest in need of love. We need to be loved and we need to give love. Love your neighbor as yourself, even if he is a Pharisee, even if she is a tax collector. And, neighbor, we will love you.

Let us pray:

Holy God, our righteous judge, daily your mercy surprises us with everlasting forgiveness. Strengthen our hope in you, and grant that all peoples of the earth may find their glory in you, through Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord. Amen.

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Our Greatest Joy

2010-10-11T11:38:00.000-07:00

Luke 17:11-19
October 10, 2010 (28th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. For many of us, there was a childhood ritual that occurred the day after Christmas or after your birthday when you were kids. Your mom marched you to the dining room table, sat you down, and made you write thank you notes. You had to say thanks, to discuss more or less how much you liked the lumpy sweater or the toy you received from Grandma. You had to describe how you would use it, and how much it meant to you. In my family, and maybe in yours, though, the content of the thank you note did not matter quite so much as the basic existence of said note. You could be ecstatic with gratitude in your heart, but if you didn’t write a note, and actually say “thank you,” that was a BIG problem.

2. In today’s gospel reading, we get to see what it was like for Jesus to do something for someone else and not get the equivalent of a thank you note. As in much of Luke, Jesus is on the road from his home in Galilee toward Jerusalem. On this road, in a border region between Jewish Palestine and Samaria, Jesus comes across a small leper colony. In the ancient world, communicable skin diseases were a terrible scourge, and people who had these diseases were forced to live in quarantine away from healthy people. And the quarantine was especially serious for Jewish lepers since the Jewish law exacted strict standards of physical and ritual purity. Even if a leper recovered from his illness, he could not re-enter Jewish society without first checking with a priest and getting his stamp of approval. So these lepers were doubly excluded from life: from day to day interaction with healthy people and any interaction with the ritual life of their religion. By this time in Jesus’ ministry, it was well known throughout the region that he was a miracle worker—he had healed hundreds if not thousands of sick people, and even these quarantined lepers knew that he was probably their only chance to be cured. So, when he comes within earshot, they call out for his mercy.

So, being Jesus, Jesus cures them. He sends them to be checked out by religious authorities in the temple, and as they turn to go, they discover that they are all better. And you know how it ends. Only one comes back to say thank you. To accentuate how unique, how special, it is that this one is giving thanks, Luke tells that of the ten lepers, only the Samaritan, the foreigner, came back.

3. We don’t often think of how Jesus felt. We are more likely to think of him as all-powerful, or as a perfect example, or as a teacher, or as a character in an ancient story. But he was a person. He had feelings. He could be happy, he could be sorrowful. And I have no doubt that he could have his feeling hurt. It had to sting that he had healed ten and only one said thank you. Now, it was not necessary for the other nine to say thanks—it wasn’t like Jesus took their healing away from them because of their lack of good grace. But you know and I know that it is nice to hear “thank you.”

4. It takes a while to learn to express gratitude. I’m sure this is why our mothers made us sit down and write thank you notes. We are so oriented to receive and to take that it is all too easy to forgo gratitude altogether. We can be a lot like the nine lepers. They’re not all bad. They had faith in Jesus and his power and his mercy. And they were good at following directions. When Jesus tells them to go to the temple and show themselves, they get right to it. But Jesus is not their drill sergeant. When he says “frog,” he doesn’t expect people to jump. The great preacher Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way: “I know how to be obedient but I do not know how to be in love.” Oh yeah. To be grateful is to acknowledge a relationship. It is to acknowledge the tie between you and God, or you and someone else.

Author David Steindl-Rast suggests that when we say thank you to God, we are implicitly saying that we are close to God. He writes, “One who says, ‘Thank you’ to another really says, ‘We belong together.’” In this sense, expressing gratitude is one way of expressing love.

5. Of course, the first step in being thankful is to notice the blessings you have received. Presbyterian minister Lynne Baab says, “It is truly amazing how many blessings we can notice if we take the time to pay attention. It changes our heart over time if we try to notice all the ways God is already working, rather than focusing on the ways we want God to act.” If we spend all our prayer time asking God to do more we can forget to spend time thanking God for what God has already done.

6. Perhaps this is why our own worship is based so much on giving thanks. When we come together to pray, we like to celebrate what God has done and is doing. Sure, we also try to be obedient to God and God’s desires for our lives. And we also ask God to intercede on our behalf. But when we come to worship, we come with thanksgiving and praise on our lips. We praise God for being who God is, and we thank God for doing the things God does.

One of the central features of our worship is the sacrament of communion, also known as the Lord’s Supper or the “Eucharist.” The word “eucharist” means “thanksgiving” in Greek. And the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving is what we call the prayer that ties the Lord’s Supper together. In one way, it is a prayer of gratitude before a meal.

It begins this way:

The Lord be with you. And also with you.

Lift up your hearts. We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks and praise. It is truly right and our greatest joy to give our thanks and praise.

Now, I bet a lot of things give you joy in this world. The sunshine, the blue sky, spending time with loved ones, meaningful work, etc. But in this prayer, we say together that OUR GREATEST JOY is to give thanks and praise to God. It is our greatest joy because in so doing, we recognize and remember that we love God and God loves us. We remember all the great and merciful acts that God has done for us in history, culminating in the gift of Jesus Christ. And we are grateful. We are grateful not because we are such great people with such exquisite manners. We are grateful because of who God is. Because God is who God is, it is truly right and our greatest joy to give God our thanks and praise.

7. We all need to remember this sacrament, this Great Thanksgiving, and build up personal and community habits of gratitude. Our Wednesday morning study group recently spent some time considering gratitude as a spiritual discipline. We discussed what a good idea it would be in our prayer lives to spend more intentional time counting our blessings and saying thanks to God. There are so many motives for gratitude: in the creation, in our families, among our friends, in our work—you name it, there are lots of ways God is caring for us and building us up. Like the Samaritan leper, we ought to turn around and say thanks. And saying thanks, building up those habits of gratitude, will lead to an even better appreciation of God’s never-ending love. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “Only they who give thanks for little things receive the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts he has in store for us because we do not give thanks for daily gifts.”

So, we thank you God for the little things you do for us. We thank you for this church. We thank you for our homes. We thank you for our friends. We thank you for being with us. We thank you for Jesus and his love for us. We thank you and we acknowledge that we depend on you for everything, big and small.

I would like to close with a prayer that was written by Rev. John Thomas, the president and general minister of the United Church of Christ denomination.

“Let us pray: Teach us to practice gratitude in our lives that we may honor the graciousness at the center of your creation. Forgive every form of self-centeredness that assumes we are entitled to what we have and make us mindful of every good gift and of every good gift-giver. Thus, may we return again and again to you as those redeemed and renewed by your love rather than our deserving and so experience the joy of your presence that makes us well. Amen.”

Faith to Move

2010-10-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

Luke 17:5-10
October 3, 2010 (27th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

1. Do you remember the story from the book of Exodus about the Israelites wandering around in the desert for 40 years? It was tough going through those forty years, just one of the many tough times they went through. If you’ve been listening closely to our Old Testament readings for the last few weeks, you’ve been hearing the sad stories of exile and punishment from the biblical prophets. Well, anyway, getting back to the Exodus—do you remember that the Israelites were hungry out in the middle of nowhere? God hears their complaints and gives them manna, which is this sort of flaky sweetbread that settled with the morning dew. God commanded that each family gather only as much manna as they would need for one day, anything extra would go bad. And, in fact, those greedy families who hoarded the manna would find that it would not last more than one day—the leftovers would quickly fill with worms and become inedible.

Naturally, this whole experience with manna has become a powerful metaphor for both Jews and Christians who are trying to remember that God will meet our daily needs. In the wilderness, the Israelites didn’t need barrels full of manna; they just needed enough to sustain them each day.

2. The disciples in this morning’s gospel reading want more than what is sufficient for one day. They say to Jesus, “Increase our faith!” Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had so much faith you could store it away for those times in your life when you know you could use an extra boost? It’s not completely possible to be sure about the tone of Jesus’ response, but I like to think that he laughs at the disciples a little. He seems to say, “You need more faith like the ancient Israelites needed more manna! What are you going to do with all this surplus faith? Do you honestly have a need to plant mulberry trees in the ocean? Do you honestly have a need to move mountains with the power of your faith? The last time I checked, the faith that you have was getting you through the day!”

3. Like manna, it seems you can’t store up faith. In fact, the gospel passage seems to suggest that the question is not “How much faith can I have?” but rather is “What is my faith for?” Professor Kim Long writes, “In this economy, faith is not stockpiled in a storehouse for the working of spiritual wonders, but is lived out as obedience to a just and loving God….[F]aith cannot be measured, only enacted.”

4. Back in the late 1800s, there was a famous Methodist revival preacher named Samuel P. Jones. He did a lot of preaching in Ryman Auditorium, which nowadays is the home of the Grand Ole Opry. I want to share with you a piece of one of Rev. Jones’s sermons.

[An old church member] says, “I am waiting for faith.” Yes, you have been waiting forty years for faith. How much have you saved up? Like the fellow who had ten bushels of wheat, and was waiting till more grew before he could sow what he had. Sow it, and you will have a hundredfold. By keeping it, you will not get any more, but the rats will eat up what you have.

… “I want to be a blacksmith as soon as I get muscle.” Why don’t you go at it? There he stands until at last he has got muscle enough to lift the hammer. He is “getting it” with a vengeance. How did you get faith? By using what you had. I tell you what tickles me—to hear fellows down praying for faith. “Lord, give me faith.” The next time you get any in that way, bring it over and let me see it. That ain’t scriptural, that talk you are doing now. Christ rebuked those who prayed for faith. The trouble with you is not that you need more faith. You use the faith you have, and then you will get more. I would as soon pray for sweet potatoes as faith.”

I love that last line! “I would as soon pray for sweet potatoes as faith”!

5. Rev. Jones is surely right. Use your faith if you want more of it. This is the gist of the story Jesus tells the disciples when he asks if the master should invite the slaves in for dinner after a hard day’s work. The answer, at least in Jesus’ day and age, was “no, I would have them continue serving me since they are meant to serve.” Jesus concludes, “So you also, when you have done all you were ordered to do, say… ‘we have done only what we have ought to have done.’” In other words, we must not forget that God is our God, and we are here to serve. We don’t need more faith, or an increase, because we have what we need from God to serve right now. Faith, if we can talk about it increasing at all, increases in service.

6. And how do we know this? German theologian Margit Ernst-Habib says that we need to “understand the faith talked about [in this passage] as Christian, not in the sense of the faith of the Christians, but in the sense of the faith in Christ that mirrors the faith of Christ.” You see, when Jesus tells us we need to serve if we want to have faith, he is not just telling us what to do. He himself models this. Jesus Christ is the Lord who serves. He serves the poor, he serves the sick, he serves the downcast, he serves the lonely, he serves the stranger, he serves you, and he serves me. This is the faith to move. Faith, in a very real sense, can hardly be thought of as a noun, but would better be considered a verb tied very closely to serving our God and neighbor.

7. There is a very famous line in a poem by Spanish poet Antonio Machado. It is: “Caminante, no hay camino; se hace camino al andar.” Or, “Traveler, there is no road... it's made by your own footsteps.” So we move in faith. We reach out and serve. We make the road ahead of us by walking and serving. And that’s what actually constitutes our faith! We can’t stockpile God’s gifts. They are for sharing right now.

On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus served the Last Supper to his disciples. Because of that night, we continue to come together around this table to be with him and be strengthened by his own body and blood. As part of that evening, Jesus stripped down to his undergarments, got down on his hands and knees, and like a slave washed the disciples’ feet. If you want an increase in faith, this story is a great place to start. We believe that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in the man Jesus. And this Jesus behaved as a slave to his followers. And so, this meal, this bread and wine, remind us that we are to serve. We are to reach out and care for others, to remember their dignity, and to remember that they, too, are beloved by God.

So on this World Communion Sunday, we give thanks to God that our servant Lord taught us that faith is to give your life. May we be strengthened at this table to move, to serve, and so to have faith.

Let us pray:

By your will, O God,

we go out into the world

with the good news of your undying love,

and minister in the midst of human need

to show wonders of your grace.

We pray for men and women

who minister for you around the world.

May all Christians be strengthened by our mutual concern,

and supported by the sharing of our gifts.

Let us not be discouraged by doubts or other barriers

but make us brave and glad and hopeful in your word;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Invisible Man

2010-09-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

Luke 16:19-31
September 26, 2010 (26th Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson

1. Some of Jesus’ parables are so familiar: the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan. Some not so much. Here we’ve got one of the less popular, but it’s a goody! There is so much detail and humor in these verses from the gospel reading, and the characters—though a bit caricatured—are true enough to life. Of course, there’s the rich man. He’s not a bad guy, he’s just privileged. He was born that way, with a silver spoon in his mouth. Then there’s Lazarus, the only person in a parable to have a particular name. He’s the opposite of the rich guy. Instead of fine clothing, he wears nothing but his own worn out skin, which itself is full of sores. Instead of eating sumptuous feasts, he eats nothing but what he can beg. Instead of being greeted by the beautiful people, stray dogs disgustingly lick him while he’s down. Then in the story, we have the patriarch Abraham, who seems to be in charge of something like heaven. He’s more or less to this paradise as is St. Peter at the pearly gates in our jokes about heaven. Across an impassable chasm from heaven, there is a place called Hades, which is full of fire and torment. And, strangely, both the suffering ones in Hades and the comfortable ones in the bosom of Abraham can see each other.

2. Remarkably, and of key importance for the parable, the rich man never sees Lazarus when Lazarus is a fetid beggar outside the gates of his compound. He never sees him when he is coming and going from his dates with the rich and famous or from his jaunts to the finest shops. The rich man doesn’t see Lazarus until his backside is being warmed by the fires of Hades. Then he sees Lazarus living the comfortable life up in paradise, and he somehow conjures up his name. But he still doesn’t speak to him directly. Instead, the rich man, who is used to giving orders, tells Abraham to send the poor Lazarus to come and refresh him in Hades. And when that is refused, he asks that poor Lazarus be removed from the paradise that he so richly deserves after his miserable life, and be sent back to earth to haunt the rich man’s brothers and scare them straight. This request is also refused.

3. The natural sense of the parable is that both Lazarus and the rich man get what’s coming to them, and so perhaps it is also natural that we are likely to feel sympathetic with Lazarus and even laugh a little bit about the rich man’s hubris and comeuppance. But, I think that if we are honest, we need to swallow our laughter and remember that it is far more reasonable in this day and age in this rich country to remember that we are more like the rich man. There’s a website on the internet called Global Rich List. On this site, you can enter what your income is, and it tells you where you stand financially in the whole world. I entered mine and my wife’s income into the site and found out that together, we are the 49,322,169^th richest people in the world! So, pretty far down the list?! Not so. It turns out, even at 49 millionth place, we are in the top 0.82% richest people in the world! In other words, in a group of 100 random people around the world, I would be the richest. I imagine those 100 people in a line behind me, and I know that I can see the 98^th and 97^th richest people right behind me. If I really try, I can even see down to probably the 90^th richest person. But I can’t even see the really poor people at the end of the line. They are like Lazarus to me. They are completely outside of my vision and my experience.

4. That’s the problem right there. Too many people live in this world completely outside of our sight. Because of poverty and other sinful barriers, we cannot see them. The terrible truth of this situation is what inspired Ralph Ellison’s famous novel The Invisible Man. The protagonist of the book is a nameless African American man who has been made metaphorically invisible by the society he lives in. The narrator says, “I am an invisible man.  No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe:  Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.” It’s the gospel story all over again. The rich man in Jesus’ parable could have seen the poor, sore-covered Lazarus outside his gate, but he had no reason to do so, and so he simply was blind to the suffering, downtrodden man before his gate.

5. What is perhaps worse is when the rich like us go out of our way to not see the poor and the suffering. I live in west Belleville not far at all as the crow flies from the slums of East Saint Louis. The quickest way for people in our part of town to get to downtown St. Louis is to take Illinois 15 west and then navigate through the blighted and burnt out neighborhoods of East St. Louis to the Poplar Street Bridge. But if you take this route, there is almost no traffic. All of us, myself included, find it better, safer, easier, less terrible, to take the longer way around on the 255 up to I64 thus completely skirting the devastation of our neighboring city. I would say we Bellevillians must be a pretty rotten bunch to act this way, but all over the country, cities like Belleville, and like Alton, have found ways to route better off people away from poor people. In this awful circumstance, we are willfully blind. We don’t see because we do not want to see.

6. The upshot of Jesus’ parable, sadly, for the rich man is that there’s not really anything new to say. The rich man desperately wants Lazarus to be sent back to his family, with the notion that a specter from beyond the grave would at last open their eyes. That an apparition would do the trick to remind them of their religious obligations to care for the poor. But Abraham says no. He says there is no new word to give on this. It’s all been said before. The law, the prophets. It’s all in there: take care of the poor, comfort the afflicted, tend to the suffering. And if you didn’t hear the old, old, story, not even the ghost of Lazarus will turn you around. I guess I don’t really have a new word either. We all know that we Christians cannot bumble through life with blinders on. We all know that the poor, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the foreigner are all our specific responsibility. What more is there to say? If we haven’t listened to all that, and we persist in our willful blindness, not even seeing a resurrected man will turn us around once it’s too late.

But, it’s not too late. That’s why Jesus tells the parable in the first place. He wants those who hear him to do something now. We are still able to open our eyes and clean out our ears. We are still able to repent and start seeing.

7. And this need to see the poor, and to serve the poor, and to be one in Christ is urgent. An old saying attributed to the British stateman William Gladstone is “justice delayed is justice denied.” There is no time to wait. The urgency of poverty in this world is extreme. Jesus’ parable about the rich man and Lazarus suggests that it is not our certitude about God and the afterlife that will ultimate motivate a change in our behavior. Instead, we will be motivated by the certitude that suffering people exist in this world, and we need to see them and care for them and help them find justice now, before it is too late for us and too late for them.

8. It’s like the campaign that you see around Illinois with the big signs that say “Start Seeing Motorcyles!” We need to start seeing the poor. Let me give you some suggestions on how to do this.

Pray. Pray that God open your eyes to the suffering of your fellow human beings. Pray that God give you a compassionate spirit and the energy to serve.
Talk. Talk to your friends and neighbors. What are they doing to help others? Can you help them? Find out from them why they got interested in the work they do to help others.
Reflect. Think about what God has given you. What are you good at? What are your interests? Is there some way that you can both help the Lazaruses in this world AND use your God-given gifts and interests. Do you like to read? Read to the blind. Do you like to garden? Find a way to beautify blighted areas. Do you like children? Become a mentor.
Finally, make a commitment. When it comes to helping the poor, to providing justice now rather than later when it is too late, the important word is this: something is better than nothing. You don’t need to be the next Martin Luther King. You need to do something. Do it here at the church, or do it with another group. It is not possible to be a rich Christian, and we are all rich in some way, without serving the poor. Let me conclude with words from the passage in 1 Timothy that we heard this morning: “As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. ¹⁸They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, ¹⁹thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.”

Brothers and sisters, Amen.

Pray for Everyone

2010-09-20T06:55:00.000-07:00

1 Timothy 2:1-7
September 19, 2010 (25th Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson

1. You may have noticed in the past few years, even the past few decades, that politics and religion in this country have gotten mixed up. Presidents, congresspeople, governors, even Supreme Court justices, call upon God for help and ask for God’s blessing. Something called “family values” has become shorthand for a conservative Christian social agenda. Cases come to trial about removing “In God We Trust” from our money. And in the last three years, Illinois has required a daily “moment of silence” in classrooms across the state and then repealed that requirement as being covertly religious. Everyone knows that we enjoy “separation between Church and State” in this country, but we aren’t sure what that means, and most of us only want that separation when it is convenient for us. Sometimes people say that they just wish politics and religion could remain separate. They especially say to me, as a pastor, that the church should not get involved in specific political issues—that we should just preach the Golden Rule and stay out of particular debates.

Even if we thought that course of action were preferable, the Bible again and again shows that all of human life, including political leaders and political structures, must be met through the person of Jesus Christ.

It’s no surprise really. Both politics and religion are focused, at least in part, in how we ought to live together. Naturally, we Christians must find ways to live in the world. It’s an old concern. The advice we heard from 1 Timothy this morning admonishes us to pray for “kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.” That kind of advice made especial sense for early Christians who were trying to live peaceably in an empire that was openly persecuting them. But perhaps it makes sense for us now as well. How must we live to be Christians in the world? And to make the question a little more focused for this morning’s sermon: how must we pray to live as Christians in a world that is ruled by powerful people and political systems?

2. Fortunately we Presbyterians have a leg up on this question. Our Presbyterian form of government with representative bodies of elders, presbyters, and delegates to General Assembly is not dissimilar to many western democracies. You can’t be a Presbyterian for too long before being introduced to the Book of Order, the governmental part of our church’s constitution, which is full of theology as well as rules and regulations about how we are to work together as a church. One of our favorite catchphrases, which comes from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, is that we like to do things “decently and in order.” Indeed, part of my seminary education was to become familiar with Robert’s Rules of Order! The reading we heard this morning from 1 Timothy is a bit like an ancient Book of Order. The writer of the letter, ostensibly Paul, is instructing Timothy on how to run a church and be a good Christian leader. The passage we read this morning focuses on how important it is to pray for everyone. Special emphasis is placed, as I mentioned, on praying for muckety-mucks, head honchos, grand poohbas, and other politicians and rulers. It seems that it has long been our responsibility to make intercessions with God for our earthly leaders. In other words, our religion is supposed to play a role in politics.

3. So for whom should we be praying? Well, there’s President Barack Obama. Then of course, there’s the congress. Our senators are Dick Durbin and Roland Burris—we should certainly pray for them. And depending on where you live, your congressperson is either Jerry Costello or John Shimkus—both need our prayers. The mayor of Alton is Tom Hoescht and the mayor of Godfrey is Michael McCormick. But we need not limit ourselves to the United States. We can pray for the leaders of other nations: for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq. We should pray for our military generals and for Ban-ki Moon, secretary general of the United Nations. We should pray for the leaders of our enemies: for Mahmoud Admadinejad of Iran, Kim Jong Il of North Korea, the leaders of Al-Qaeda, and for the leaders of Mexican drug gangs. The letter to Timothy makes it clear that we Christians must pray for all these leaders—the good, the bad, and the ugly—because Jesus Christ gave himself as a ransom for all people, everywhere. It is not our job to distinguish who deserves our prayer. We are to pray for peace, for godliness, for dignity and leave the rest to our Lord.

4. Naturally, we must not pray only for leaders and rulers. We must pray for all people. We don’t believe that prayer is some sort of vending machine, where we put in the prayer and God must dispense the result. Instead, we believe that we have been taught to pray by Jesus’ own example. We believe that prayer reorients our lives and reminds us that we all rely on God. We believe that prayer brings healing to individuals and to communities. So we are called to pray for everyone. One incredible website I found while preparing this sermon is http://www.prayer4every1.com/. Anyone can go to this website and enter a prayer request and it is immediately posted so that all visitors to the site can lift up other people in prayer. A few recent entries included a little girl who has been having seizures, for a woman named Janice, for the ministries of a church in Florida, and for all married people.

We pray for all these people because we believe with the writer of 1 Timothy that: “there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself as a ransom for all.” This good news is not meant to exclude those who don’t believe in Jesus but rather to include all in the merciful salvation won for us in Christ.

5. But more than the good news of this universal salvation given to all people, there is also the good news that when we pray in the name of Jesus Christ, we reorient ourselves and our society. I was recently reading through some instructions for prayer in the introduction to a Lutheran daily devotional book. The writer suggested that each of us, upon waking in the morning, sit up in bed, cross ourselves and say, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Likewise, when we go to bed at night, we should say our prayers, making intercessions for all people, and asking for a godly rest through the night. In this way, you live your whole day with prayer bookends around your actions, your thoughts, and your encounters.

And when those prayers are made in the name of Jesus Christ, the one who perfectly reveals God’s love and goodness to us, we begin to see the world, see other people, see our leaders, and see ourselves in a new way.

In the Wednesday morning study group, we have been studying the apostle Paul. Do you remember what happened to him on the road to Damascus? In the experience of conversion, he was blinded by the light of Christ. Later, when he joined fellow Christians, who prayed for him, something like scales fell from his eyes and his vision was restored. Something similar happens to us when we approach the world in prayer through the mediation of Jesus Christ. We see new things. Indeed, we see basic human dignity where before we saw strangers and enemies. We see the need for justice and peace where before we saw the seduction of national or economic interests. We see brothers and sisters who live by the same mercy and grace that we live by when before we saw no one at all. This is the power, the gift, and the necessity of prayer for all people.

Let us pray:

Great God of the whole world, we pray for our rulers and leaders, that they may guide the nations of your world with compassion and justice that all people may live in all godliness and dignity. Send your Spirit to continue to teach us to pray so that, in you O Christ, all human beings may find the truth of your love. In your holy name we pray. Amen.

Celebration!

2010-09-13T07:04:00.001-07:00

Luke 15:1-10
September 12, 2010 (24th Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson

1. Did you know that just about every day is a good day for a party? If you have trouble cutting loose and letting down your hair, if you need a pretty darn good reason to have any fun at all, then, boy, do I have some good news for you! If you do even a little bit of searching around, you can find a reason to celebrate every single day. For example, today, September 12, besides being both Commissioning Sunday and Grandparents’ Day, is also Chocolate Milkshake Day, National Video Games Day, and on the perhaps lest festive side of things, National Pet Memorial Day. If these days don’t satisfy, we can probably get by with celebrating tomorrow, which is also Fortune Cookie Day, Uncle Sam Day, Positive Thinking Day and National Peanut Day!
Of course, I remember with the rest of the nation the anniversary of September 11 and the tragedies of that day, but today I would rather get us back on track to celebrate. Every Sunday morning is a great day to celebrate what God does for us.

2. The last few Sundays here at church have not been completely celebratory. The scripture texts have been pretty tough on us. Lately, in our lectionary readings Jesus has been hanging out with Pharisees, who totally get him down with their nit-picky legalism. And then he’s with a crowd of followers, whom he normally has good words for, but last week he gave them some hard words. He challenged the Pharisees’ social customs and unjust pecking order and he challenged the crowd of followers to commit themselves fully to his gospel. But in the very next verse, in Luke chapter 15 verse 1, Jesus is back in his comfort zone: he’s with tax collectors and sinners.

Jesus knows who he’s with when he’s with tax collectors, prostitutes, moral reprobates, ne’er-do-wells, and the like. These are the kind of people who know what a sin looks like. They are intimately related with that place in human experience that today’s 12-step movement calls “rock bottom.”

In today’s theologically-sophisticated Christian church, we are quick to point out that we are all sinners. And so maybe we should imagine ourselves in this group close to Jesus. Lord knows we’ve all had our own scrapes with sin, with bad mistakes, with regret. That’s precisely why we start our worship services with a prayer of confession. We acknowledge who we are and what we’ve done so that we can receive forgiveness and move on with our worship and thanksgiving.

But on the other hand, these sorts of New Testament sinners might be out of our league. In fact, Jesus makes clear that, not only have these people done some bad things, they are also on the edges of society. They have been ostracized. They are not welcome with the good people—the Pharisees, the regular folk—you and me.

But on yet another hand, maybe we do belong with them, with these legendary New Testament outcasts—the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the ne’er-do-wells. I say this because as Christians, we have made a commitment with Jesus Christ to welcome the stranger, to live with the outcast, to embrace a social reality that defies prejudice and division.

In any case, whether we should be comforted by seeing ourselves in the group with which Jesus felt most comfortable—or whether we should be challenged by seeing ourselves amongst the holier-than-thou Pharisees, we all can recognize how awful it feels to be alone and lost.

3. In Jesus’ parables, there’s a little lost sheep and there is a little lost coin. The way the stories are set up, it is clear that Jesus wants us to see ourselves in the sheep and in the coin. We may not even know we are lost, though we probably do—what’s really at issue is that God, respectively the shepherd and the sweeping woman in the story, has lost us and wants to get us back.

The main mover and shaker in these parables is God. God moves to find and restore the lost one. God leaves the other 99 sheep to find the one. And God turns the house upside down to find the what was lost. God is always coming to bring us back when we lose our way.

Methodist bishop Will Willimon remembers a story from Annie Dillard.

Annie Dillard, the great American writer, tells in her book about her life growing up in Pittsburgh. She was a smart young woman. By the age of fifteen she’d read through all the books in the Carnegie Branch of the Pittsburgh Library near her home. And reading those books she decided that all this religion stuff is bunk and God doesn’t really exist. So she took it upon herself at age fifteen to show up at Shadyside Presbyterian Church and she said to her aging pastor, “I want my name off the roll. I don’t believe in God anymore.”

The pastor said, “Okay.”

Annie Dillard said, “You’re not going to try to argue me out of it?”

And he said, “No, no, no. You’re too smart for me. There’s no way I could argue you back in.”

So she said, “I want my name off the roll.”

He said, “It’s off the roll.”

She said, “Okay.” She walked out of the minister’s office and on her way down the hall she heard him mutter to himself out loud, “She’ll be back!” She wheeled around, went back into the office and she said, “What did I hear you say?”

He said, “Oh, I said I presumed that you’ll probably be back.”

And she said, “Look, this is my life. I live my life like I want to live my life. I’m not coming back!”

Well, Annie Dillard wrote in her life story, “As I write this I’m 48 years old and I’m back.”

The amazing truth of the gospel is just that. God wants us back and will come get us no matter what. No matter how far away you get, no matter how lost you become, no matter how turned around you are, God will stop everything to come and get you. One person has said it this way, “To lose faith is to wander into that place where one can be found.”

4. And once the wanderer has been found, then God does the unexpected. When the lost one is found, all the people, the sinners and the Pharisees, the insiders and the outsiders, are called out to party. God doesn’t need any other reason to celebrate. Nothing is more worthy of celebration than when one of God’s beloved is restored. To the consternation of the holy and to the comfort of the sinner, God parties like there is no tomorrow when God finds us and brings us to safety.

Way back in 1980 (that’s 30 years ago, believe it or not!) the band Kool and the Gang had a huge hit in their song, “Celebration.” You have most certainly heard this song—the lyrics of the first verse go like this:

There's a party goin' on right here
A celebration to last throughout the years
So bring your good times, and your laughter too
We gonna celebrate your party with you.

Yes, we should celebrate! At the end of it all, today’s gospel does not invite the sinner to repent. Instead, it invites the righteous to join the party when the community is restored. We once were lost, but now we’re found. Once, we were gone, but now we’re here. So all together: let us bring our good times, and our laughter too. We gonna celebrate this party with you. Amen.

The Calculus of Discipleship

2010-09-05T05:41:00.000-07:00

Luke 14:25-35
September 5, 2010 (23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson

1. If these were the only words we had from Jesus, we would have a very different idea of who he is. Most of us think of Jesus as merciful. He’s a healer and a miracle worker. He’s the Son of God who gives of himself to save and redeem us. He’s the King of Heaven sitting on God’s right hand welcoming us to the eternal banquet at the end of our earthly life. But then, in passages like the one we hear from Luke’s gospel this morning, Jesus suddenly is speaking words to his followers that are as hard as nails. He seems almost unreasonable in his stridency. He says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” These are incredibly hard words! What are we to make of them? How in heaven’s name can the Lord of love and mercy, the one who is always trying to draw us together into a community of faith, say these hard, divisive things? Well, I’ll say up front that most Bible scholars and commentators try to lessen the impact of these words in some way. They either say that the Aramaic word for “hate” had a more benign meaning than the English word. Or, and this is more common, they say that Jesus was exercising poetic hyperbole to make a very serious point. These kinds of interpretations help us get our heads around Jesus’ words, but we must not forget that Jesus said something very demanding—very serious.

2. I don’t want to bury the lead too much—I think the point of Jesus’ words, and the point of this sermon is that being Jesus’ followers—his disciples—demands everything we’ve got. Rev. Alyce McKenzie remembers a story from her childhood that sounds awfully familiar—perhaps you had a similar upbringing: “When I was growing up, my dad was big on perseverance proverbs. ‘Winners never quit and quitters never win.’ ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ He even had a picture over his desk in his study of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s battle flag that flew over the USS Niagra during the Battle of Lake Eerie in 1812. It read ‘Don’t Give Up the Ship.’ …Growing up we were never allowed to quit anything. That’s enough to make you think twice before you join the marching band.” It’s a good lesson for children, and maybe for adults too: If you sign up to do something, see it through, do not give up. Of course, there are times in our lives when quitting is appropriate—sometimes we start things that become too harmful or just don’t make sense to continue with. But the basic point stands—don’t sign up for something unless you are ready to commit to it.

3. Jesus is looking around at the crowds that are following him around. He sees people that are in the crowd for a lot of different reasons, and one senses that he feels distinctly suspicious that many of these people are fair-weather friends. One has to wonder if he may also look around the Christian churches today, gathered this morning, and wonder the same thing. So he decides, with hard words, to make clear to all of us following him that there are serious ramifications of being his disciple. One commentator has said that this passage is “the fine print” of being a Christian, and that once you’ve heard it, you can’t say that you haven’t. The fine print of Christianity is that being Jesus’ follower must be your number one commitment in your life.

4. Once you know the fine print, that being a Christian can be nothing less than all-consuming, then Jesus invites you to get out your calculator and make some prudent calculations. He gives a couple of examples that, unfortunately, continue to be relevant in our modern world. First, he mentions a contractor. The wise contractor does not start a building project until he first calculates whether or not he will be able to complete the job. Otherwise, he’ll be stuck with a half-finished eyesore and be the laughingstock of all. To drive the point home, he makes another example in the area of warfare. What military leader would lead his troops into a war without first being next-to-positive that he could win the conflict? Even if you’re not a contractor or a military general, you get the gist of what Jesus is trying to say. When you say, “Jesus, I will follow you,” when you agree to be a member of Jesus’ church, when you make promises at your own baptism and at the baptism of others, you commit yourself to something that hopefully you have made provision to carry through.

5. So, how would we make this tally? When we were examining this incredibly demanding fine print, how would we calculate what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the “cost of discipleship”? Well, what do you think it requires to be a Christian? Let’s start with the baseline. You need to come to church to worship with your fellow Christians pretty regularly. You need to serve others in some way. You need to give of your time and talent. You need to pray. You need to study. Ok, that already can seem like a whole lot in busy lives. But after Jesus’ words that we need to forsake everyone, even ourselves, to follow him, that we need to take up the cross, even these tall orders do not seem quite tall enough. There are more difficult tasks. We must turn the other cheek. We must forgive those who harm us. We must give the coat off our own backs. We must go the extra mile. We must love our enemies. Perhaps there’s even more. Perhaps we cannot move through our lives keeping our religion separate from politics, or from our family life, or from our work, or from our school. Jesus suggests that we need to give up all our possessions. More hyperbole?

Have you ever done those little thought experiments where, with friends, you say: “If you had to give up one of these for the rest of your life, what would it be? Would it be chocolate or red wine? Would it be french fries or pancakes? Would it be movies or books? If you had to choose just one of the pair, which would it be? In the context of Jesus’ terribly hard words, in the context of the fine print, which would it be: following Jesus or anything else?

6. By now, if you’re like me, you are realizing that you are not going to be able to do this thing. If I have to give up all my possessions and put my family in 2^nd place and live out my faith in every arena of my life without fail, then, no, I can sincerely say that I am going to be found wanting.

But the good news (and there is always good news!) is that all these commitments are not the price of a ticket into Jesus’ company. Jesus is inviting all of us now. We don’t need to be perfect disciples to join in. That’s right. Total commitment is not the price to follow Jesus, it is the inevitable consequence. If you stay with him on the way to the cross, if you never leave him, if you make him first in all, the consequences could be hard indeed.

7. But you will not be alone. Thanks be to God, when we follow Christ and take up the cross with him, we are given the Church. I’m talking about the Church with a capital C. This is the congregation of the faithful that goes beyond the congregation of First Alton. It’s the Church of all those who have read the fine print and signed up anyway, those who know full well that their priorities will never line up with the priorities of the world. You know, the priorities that say it is fine to go to church on Sunday and not think of it again until next week. Or that say that it is fine to spend all kinds of money on clubs and property and luxuries and give some spare change to the church. Or that say that some people are better than other people on this earth because of their citizenship or class or race or gender. Or that actually think that poor people deserve to be poor because they lack what it takes to be well-off like us. Maybe we’d like to be members of a Church where everyone was like us and had the same sophistication or money or background or family that we had. But that’s a Church that is ignoring the hard words from today’s gospel. That is not the Church that Jesus is giving us. Jesus is giving us a Church made up of all those other disciples who have agreed to give their all. Jesus is giving us a Church that is ruled by the priorities of his cross. It’s not an easy place to be, but it is the only place to be.

Let us pray: God of all people, give us the courage and strength to follow where you lead us. Help us to find our value, our identity, and our purpose in you and in no other. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Who Is Missing?

2010-08-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

Luke 14:1, 7-14
August 29, 2010 (22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson

1. Some of you know that I started teaching at Lewis & Clark Community College this past week—I’m teaching a few sections of World Religions and really enjoying myself.

Being back in the classroom has got me thinking about some of the academic theories and methods that I have studied over the years. A lot of what I do as a scholar of religion is to document, evaluate, and think about people’s culture.

The thing about culture is that it is often more easy to recognize someone else’s culture than your own. Anthropologists, those scholars who spend most of their time studying culture, have noticed that it is all too easy to forget that you have your own assumptions and peculiar ways of doing things when you are examining someone else. Or, as Jesus would perhaps say: it is easier to point out the dust in another person’s eye while ignoring the log in your own.

2. In a kind of humorous demonstration of this principal, an anthropologist named Horace Miner wrote a description of a foreign culture way back in 1956. He said the name of this North American tribe was the “Nacirema.” He said the people in this tribe all had little shrines in their dwelling places. In these shrines, they had a charm-box full of magical packets that treat real or imagined maladies. Underneath this charm box, the Nacirema always locate, “a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution.[5] The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure…The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious [6] about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical [paste], and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.”

Of course, the surprise ending of this account of the strange Nacirema people is that Nacirema is just “American” spelled backwards, the shrine is the bathroom, the charm box is the medicine cabinet, below which is the sink where we wash our faces and brush our teeth. Sometimes, our own cultural practices and daily habits and ways of interacting with the world are so close to us that we can’t even see them!

3. This is precisely what’s happening in this morning’s gospel reading. Jesus is at a dinner party at the home of a leader of the Pharisees. He probably feels pretty comfortable. Many scholars have argued recently that Jesus’ own interest in holiness and the law suggest that he himself, if not officially a Pharisee, was sympathetic with their basic program. However, as the gospels abundantly show, Jesus was also quite critical of the Pharisees and their legalistic excesses. The Pharisees and their gathered guests cannot see their own culture because it is too familiar. They cannot see the way meals in their society were theaters of social class and importance. They cannot see that a dinner party was an opportunity for the guests to cement their rank in the community based on where they sat. And they cannot see that it was also an opportunity for the host to induce debt in his guests so that they would have to pay him back with invitations to lavish parties at their own homes.

Jesus, with the acumen of a brilliant anthropologist, does see what’s happening at the dinner party. Moreover, he tells the two-part parable about the imaginary wedding banquet where guests strive to sit in the low place so that they might be invited to the place of honor and where the host does not invite his muckety-muck friends but rather the poor, the halt, and the lame knowing full well that they cannot pay back his kindness.

4. Food and eating are mentioned in the gospel of Luke more than in any other gospel. And so when a banquet scene appears in Luke, we should perk up and pay attention—something important is about to happen! Over and over, Luke and Jesus use the parable of the wedding banquet to point to the Realm of God.

And in the Realm of God, we find that God’s culture, God’s social structure and intent for human relationships is radically different from the one that Jesus finds in the Pharisee’s home.

5. But what about our culture, the rules and assumptions that surround us so tightly that we can barely recognize them? Well, you don’t need me to tell you that—while our culture is not identical to that of ancient Palestine—we still have a culture that separates the powerful from the lowly, the strong from the weak, the rich from the poor, the white from the black.

The great Reformed theologian of the 20^th century, Karl Barth, insists that the Christian community and our hospitality within this community may not under any circumstances make divisions based on:

national, ethnic, or linguistic barriers in our world;
racial differences;
cultural differences;
or class distinctions between rich and poor.

Barth also said that when preachers sit down to prepare their sermons, they should have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. So, let me share with you a cover story in the Post-Dispatch jus this last Tuesday. The story pointed to the terrible fact that African American unemployment in the St. Louis area is much worse than for white residents. The reporter writes, “An African-American living in the St. Louis region in 2009 was twice as likely to be unemployed as a white resident of the area.” The jobless rate for black men in 2009 was 22.1%, compared with 10.5 % for the whole workforce.

James Buford, president of the St. Louis Urban League for the past 25 years, blamed the discrepancy on several factors. First, he mentioned the disintegration of the black nuclear family. Then he points out that many black people do not finish high school (47% in 2008). Finally, he pointed to black-on-black crime and high incarceration rates for contributing to unemployment. While Buford refuses to blame racism for the unemployment, he is forced to agree with other observers that race is definitely part of the problem. He and others insist that the answer to this problem lies in fixing a broken public education system, that is so frequently broken along lines of race and class.

6. Let’s hold that thought for a minute and go back to Jesus. Prof. David Lose argues that Jesus’ parable in this passage is precisely the kind of thing that gets Jesus killed.

Lose writes, “he dares not only to stand outside the social order of his day; he dares not only to call that social order – and all social orders – into question; but he also says these things are not of God. Jesus proclaims here and throughout the gospel that in the kingdom of God there are no pecking orders. None. Zero. Zilch.
And while that sounds at first blush like it ought to be good news, it throws us into radical dependence on God's grace and God's grace alone. We can't stand, that is, on our accomplishments, or our wealth, or positive attributes, or good looks, or strengths, or IQ, or our movement up or down the reigning pecking order. There is, suddenly, nothing we can do to establish ourselves before God and the world except rely upon God's desire to be in relationship with us and with all people. Which means that we have no claim on God; rather, we have been claimed by God and invited to love others as we've been loved.”

7. So is there something we can say, for example, about public education in St. Louis that would so threaten the powers that be that we would be putting our life at risk? Is there something we can do to so challenge our culture, the status quo, on questions of race, and sexuality, and class, and other wicked divisions that we sound like we are citizens of some odd country that does not share our culture? Some odd country like, say, the Kingdom of God?

There’s a lot to say and a lot to do. But let me give one humble place to start. We must be radical and kingdom-based in our hospitality, in our welcome of people into this community of the church. We must live and act as if everyone who is not here is someone whom we desperately need to have with us. Who is missing? Who do we need here that our culture is keeping out? What social rules and assumptions are making it uncomfortable for people to be here with us, praising God? If our congregation is to approach the openness of the heavenly banquet, then we must include all people here.

I’d like to close this sermon with a wonderful story that UCC pastor Kate Huey tells, a story from her childhood:

“When I was growing up in a family of eleven, meals were a big deal. My mother sat at one end of the table, and my father at the other. My four big brothers sat along one side of the table, and the five youngest, beginning with me, faced them on the other side. We always ate together, no matter how late my father had to work. Often, my parents would talk about the family business, but my father always asked each one of us “how our day went.” And occasionally, out of the blue, he would do a rather wonderful thing, as I look back on it now. Each of us could get lost in a sea of so many faces. But my dad would say, in a very serious tone, “How many people are happy we have John [or Libby, or Chuck, etc.], raise your hand.” And we would all raise our hands. (You made sure you always raised your hand, because you wanted everyone else to do the same when it was your turn – a great equalizer!) I can’t describe the effect it had on each of us to see ten hands go up in the air (some days people would put BOTH hands up – that was really something!)" Well, I think in that heavenly banquet in the eternal city, God will be like the dad in this story. God will say, “How many people are glad we have Jeff and Ruth and Betty June and Steve and Bob and Emily Dawn…raise your hand.” And we will. Amen