Between Now and Then
Luke 15:1-10
I’ve never thrown a pot. Well, there was that one pot of chili that went horribly wrong, but I’ve never thrown a pot the way potters do—on a wheel. My work with clay began and ended with a couple of ash trays I made in seventh grade art class. Apparently my art teacher didn’t see much potential in my work, so I got to sing in the choir all year in eighth grade instead of dividing my time between art and music like most of my other classmates did. I do admire the work of potters who know what they’re doing, though. Whenever we visit the artisans’ shops in the mountains when we’re there, we’re always drawn to the beautiful and creative work they do with what appears to be just plain clay and water. On a few of those trips, we’ve been able to watch potters at the wheel.
What we’ve seen on those visits hasn’t changed much from the scene Jeremiah describes in his work written generations ago. The difference in what we were amazed at and what Jeremiah saw lies in the fact that Jeremiah was looking for a word about God’s involvement in our lives while we were looking for arts and crafts.
Work at the potter’s wheel continues much as it has since Jeremiah’s day. As nearly as I can figure it out, you start with a lump of clay, a pair of wet hands, and water. Then you begin to turn the wheel and to shape that clay into some form that already exists in your mind. The pottery pieces I have been most impressed with are not the ones that appear to be mass produced, all uniform in their appearance. Those may set a nice looking table, but the more interesting pieces are more distinctive, pieces that have a lot of the potter’s creative touch in them. Those pieces come from a process that involves both the potter and the clay. As the wheel turns and that blob of clay begins to take form and shape, the potter has some idea about what it is he’ll make and what function that creation will perform. But along the way that idea may change, depending on the quality of the clay, the turn of the wheel, and the skill of the potter. The end result will, most likely, still be a mug or a pitcher or some decorative piece, but as the potter works, specific qualities of that piece may change. Sometimes, of course, the process goes awry, and the whole project has to be scrapped and started again. Any number of things can cause that. Turning the wheel too fast, too slowly. Too much water. Not enough. Differing qualities of clay. Differing skill levels among potters. Whatever the cause, sometimes the only thing to do is to smash it all back into a lump, wet it down, take a deep breath, and start all over again.
These images mean one thing to us when we think of them in terms of clay that is trying to become mugs or pitchers or vases. But when we move beyond arts and crafts and look, as Jeremiah did, for signs of God’s involvement among us, they become a bit unsettling. For many of us, it’s nearly impossible to come to this text without hearing a familiar hymn tune in our heads and beginning to sing along---“Have thine own way, Lord. Have thine own way. Thou art the potter. I am the clay. Mold me and make me after thy will while I am waiting, yielded and still.” There’s nothing particularly wrong with that hymn, but it doesn’t do much to help us understand what Jeremiah wrote. Most of the time, we tend to personalize our relationship with God, to make it mostly about us—God and me---walking and talking through life together. That might be helpful if we were willing to live the kind of submissive life that hymn stanza talks about. But when we are honest, we must admit that we don’t put much stock in being molded and made and think even less about waiting, not to mention yielded and still. The hymn paints a wonderful picture of a life submitted to God’s will, but it’s not particularly descriptive of the life most of us are willing to live.
When Jeremiah began to interpret what he saw in the potter’s shop, he didn’t talk about his own life or the life of any other individual Christian. What he saw at the wheel caused him to think about God’s relationship to us as a community, as the community we form when we come together in God’s name to do and to be the things God calls and equips us to do and to be. What Jeremiah saw was not God sitting at the cosmic wheel cranking out cookie-cutter believers, people who are all the same, marching in lock step, doing exactly what God says, being exactly what God made them to be. What Jeremiah saw, and calls us to try to see, is God much more creatively involved in the process of faith and discipleship, God molding and shaping a community, and maybe even changing God’s mind as that process moves forward.
Changing God’s mind is not something most of us like to think about. When we think about the nature of God, most of our minds go to those classic, doctrinal words most of us learned somewhere along the way. God is omnipresent, somehow everywhere at once, omniscient, all knowing, omnipotent, all powerful. Immutable is another of those words we probably learned to associate with God along the way. Unchanging. The same always. Sort of like most of learned along the way that there were certain areas in which our parents were not going to budge, so we learned to stop asking for cake for breakfast or for a car just because we turned sixteen, and we learned to cope. Our understanding of the immutability of God goes beyond its intention, though. Instead of clinging to the truth that God has always been graciously inclined toward us, that God loves us and wants good for us, and that that, like other parts of God’s nature, does not change, we somehow twist our understanding to mean that God has this big, cosmic plan for each and all of us and that falling short of that plan seems to be what we do best, and, further, that God takes some kind of delight in catching us in those shortfalls and letting us know about them in unpleasant ways.
Jeremiah’s image from the potter offers us another option, but one that requires us to broaden our thinking about how God relates to us. We said earlier that God does not crank out believers who all look and respond the same. God is not the master of a cosmic assembly line cranking out Toyotas or Keebler crackers or CD recordings that need to all be exactly alike. Discipleship might be a lot easier if it worked that way, and many have tried to reduce it to that, but that’s just not the way it works.
God’s original intention in choosing a people was that we might worship and serve God, that we might serve as a model for all the rest of the world as to how those behaviors have changed our lives and how they will change the lives of others who do them, too. Worshiping and serving God has changed a lot through the centuries. None of us have ever done those things in a vacuum. Some of the most divisive issues in the Church today are issues we have not dealt with before. Sometimes because we didn’t want to deal with them. Others because the issues have come about as a result of developments in technology and the ways it has led us to understand ourselves and out condition. If God had laid down the rules all in one fell swoop years ago, as some believe God did, then being God’s people would appear to be a fairly easy thing. Following the old adage, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” would take care of most things. But what about all the things God didn’t say specific things about? Things like transplantation of organs or manipulation of genetic codes. What about some of the things God did, but we have decided to outgrow. Things like dietary restrictions that would do more harm to the coastal economy than either Katrina or BP bid or requirements for submission of one gender to the other. Some, of course, have chosen to live in a world in which those things don’t matter, in which God spoke once and for all and we deviate from what God said at our own peril.
But what about those of us who have ventured into other ways of understanding what God said and what it meant? Jeremiah’s visit to the potter’s shop is helpful to us here. If we think of God as potter, and if we agree that God is not interested in mass production of the same vessel, then think about this: Think about God molding a community of people who will serve as a sign of God’s caring, loving presence in the world. Let’s call that community the Church. If we look at our experience in the Church today as compared to the experience of our ancestors in faith from any period of history-Jeremiah’s time, first century Christians trying to follow Jesus, the church of the Reformers, the church we remember at whatever period of our own journey was the best or most helpful—when we look our experience in the Church today as compared to any of those other times, either we see a much different picture or we’re just not looking.
God is always at that wheel, molding and shaping a community in the context of all kinds of things. There is still God’s original purpose—to create a community which will be a sign of God’s intention for the world. But the world in which that intention gets communicated is much different today than ever before. And it will be different again when we are all gone and others take our place.
I’m not making a plea for change just for the sake of change or in order to be more relevant to the culture around us. God knows we’ve tried that and come up short enough already. But I am making a plea for us to consider that God is always at work among us, shaping us in new ways, molding us into new forms, based on what the world around us is becoming and how it will be able to hear what God communicates through us.
Look at the way we think about preaching, the proclamation of the Word. Most of us can remember a time when we decided the preacher wasn’t any good if we thought we understood what he was saying. Preaching was supposed to be a lofty, academic, theological enterprise, and if most of it went over our heads, then the preacher must be doing a good job. In those days, preachers rarely ever talked about themselves or any other real people, but delivered sermons that were polished and somewhat aloof. Somewhere along the way, though, we changed our thinking. Those of you who worship here on a regular basis probably know more about me and my sports allegiances and other preferences than you care to, but hopefully the more relaxed and inductive methods we have come to use have helped you to understand faith as more than an academic exercise. Somehow in the work of preachers like Fred Craddock and Tom Long and my own teacher, Paul Brown, God was at the wheel, reshaping how the church goes about being who it is.
And what about music? That ought to stir up some controversy. There was a time when a good Bach motet or a Mozart Mass or a Handel oratorio ought to be enough for anybody to display God’s wonder and majesty. Then there were the great old hymns of the church which everybody could sing and be faithful, if we could ever agree on which ones they were. Remember, I’m the one who doesn’t much like “Blessed Assurance.” Some in today’s Church have thrown all that out and replaced it with music that we’re not expected to participate in, but to be entertained by. I’m still working on how, but I believe that God is somewhere at that great musical wheel, humming a tune as God shapes and reshapes the ways we sing praise and thanksgiving together.
And mission and service? Some believe that if people have needs, they can come to us to have them met on our terms. Others believe that we must be out there where the need is, finding ways to meet it and to improve the quality of life for people whether they ever become part of the community of faith or not. It’s just what we do. It’s what some of us will do as we kick off the local Interfaith Dinner Network’s ministry off the
Thou art the potter. I am the clay. To believe that doesn’t mean we have to live in fear that God is going to smash us back into a formless lump and start over again. But I do think it means that we need to believe that God has a purpose, an intention for us. And that God is working that purpose out among us all the time. Some day, in the fullness of time, God’s purpose will come. Between now and then, we can decide how we will submit ourselves and the community we form when we come together to the will of the potter. As God continues to turn the wheel and to shape and reshape us, as the wheel spins beneath us and the water of life flows over us, what compliance or resistance to God’s purpose will be revealed? What signs are there among us that our goals and God’s are the same? It was in watching the potter at the wheel that Jeremiah heard God’s Word. It is in the same process that that Word comes to us. Thanks be to God. Amen.
It Was Supposed to Be Just Dinner….Or Was It?
Luke 14:1-24
The world of online dating is something about which I know nothing. I guess that's a good thing, since I've been married since before that world came into being. But we've all seen the growing number of ads for these services on TV and in other media. One that caught my attention recently was for a service called "It's Just Lunch." As nearly as I can tell, the idea behind this one is not to have the computer pick your life mate for you based on some set of questions you've both answered sort of the same way. This service seems to be just what it says, a place to find out about others in your area who might be interested in just lunch--and then see where things go. No long questionnaires. No matches based on supposed compatibility. Just lunch. No strings. If the conversation goes well, maybe you'll see each other again. If not, it was just lunch, hopefully Dutch treat.
I'm not sure how people really enter into those encounters. I'm sure that for some, it is what it says it is--just lunch. But I'm equally sure that some participants of both genders have been on the prowl long enough that they have other expectations. They may go along with the game and sign on for just lunch, but they probably have their own agenda when they get there.
Whether they hide behind the ferns and check out their potential meal mate or wait out in the open, just lunch could be the beginning of something they've been waiting for for a long time--or not.
No service had matched up Jesus and those with whom he had dinner in today's text from Luke. We really have to wonder whose idea this dinner party was and what they were thinking. If we know Jesus' story at all, we know that his encounters with the Pharisees usually don't go well. So it's reasonable to question why one of their leaders would have asked him to dinner at his house, and why Jesus would have gone.
Dinner parties are usually interesting gatherings. Most of us have grown pretty selective about those we invite into our homes. Used to be that we'd do that kind of thing pretty regularly, and some still do, but many of us have decided it's just too much trouble to clean up, set the table, and do all that cooking. We may go out with friends or associates, but when we do go to the trouble of having people in, we want to be sure it goes well.
We've all got stories of dinner gatherings that didn't. That may be one of the reasons we don't have them anymore. As hard as you work to plan the menu and to arrange the seating and to invite people who are compatible, we've all endured miserable evenings when one guest dominated the conversation and no one else could get a word in or when someone decided to use your home as the place to drop political or religious bombs that blew up more than just the place settings. There are some people we know better than to invite together, but sometimes even in spite of our best attempts to be gracious hosts, things just get out of hand.
We're well on our way to that kind of evening before Jesus ever even gets to the home of the leader of the Pharisees. We're told at the outset that there was more to this than just dinner. The line, "they were watching him" sounds an ominous tone before the evening ever gets started. If you were here last Sunday, you remember the stink about healing on the Sabbath. It must have been at least a week later than that other story, because when Jesus sees the man with dropsy, before he does or says anything, he asks those around him, "It is lawful to do something about this or not? Are you going to nail me again if I help this poor man?" They were silent. So Jesus healed him and sent him on his way. Apparently that guy hadn't been invited to the party. But Jesus had, so he went on.
Almost immediately upon his arrival, he begins what turns out to be more of a lecture than polite dinner conversation. I don't guess anyone likes pretentiousness, even though we are all guilty of it at one time or another. Dinners were big events in Jesus' day, just as they can be in ours. To be invited to the right place on the right date was to have arrived, and everyone knew it. It doesn't appear that they used place cards for this particular event, because what Jesus observes and comments on to begin with is the way people are jockeying around, trying to fit themselves into the right places at the table, maybe trying to sit next to the host or across from whoever the really important guest is. Jesus' first word is about all that foolishness, and it is pretty pointed. Be careful, he tells them, because if you work yourself up to some place you think you ought to be, you just might be upstaged by someone who turns out to be more important than you thought you were.
I've shared little bits of wisdom I learned from my poorly educated grandmother with you before. I don't know that you'd call any of the times we ate at her house a dinner party, but we gathered around her table many times. We all lived way out in the country, and a part of the morning ritual was to bring milk for the day from the barn every morning. If you've never drunk whole milk straight from the cow, you might not know that it's a good bit different from the skim or two percent we've grown accustomed to. She would pour off the gallon or two she thought we'd use in a day's time and allow it to sit so that the cream would rise to the top, as it naturally does. Whoever was close by was going to hear the same speech nearly every day. "Come over here and let me teach you something you'll need to know someday," she'd say as the cream began to separate from the milk so she could skim it off for uses other than drinking. "See how the cream naturally rises to the top of that jar?"
"Yes, ma'am," was the appropriate response.
"See how that happens? Well you'll rise to the top, too, if that's where you're supposed to be. Now, see all the rest of that milk that knows its place down here?
"Yes, ma'am."
"Just think how silly that milk would look if it tried to climb up there and call itself cream. You'll look silly, too, if you start putting on airs and trying to be something you're not."
I think my grandma must have been through this story about Jesus at the dinner a time or two. "All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted" has a much more poetic ring to it, but I learned what that meant while pouring up the milk in the morning.
If it weren't Jesus we were talking about, we might be about ready to decide we were sorry someone had invited him to dinner, but he's not through yet. Now he turns to his host and has something to say to him, too. None of the people who had been invited to that dinner were hungry or could not have managed to feed themselves if they had stayed at home. Some of them were already thinking about whether it must not be about their time to have a party since they had been here in this home several times. Jesus may have had the man he had healed before he got there on his mind when he told his hosts that it would have been better for him to have invited the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind than the social climbers gathered around the table. None of them would be able to return the favor, but that wasn't the point.
One time while we served a church in Tennessee , we had a well-known visiting preacher in for a special event one weekend. This preacher has served as a missionary, and was beloved by many. Lloyd and Anna Lois Kuykendall were a prominent couple in that little congregation, and they graciously invited our family and the visiting preacher to dinner after worship on Sunday. Our boys were about six and half and eighteen months then. The visiting preacher had been staying at the manse with us, so we were thankful not to have to feed him again. When we arrived at the Kuykendall home, we found everything you would expect from a family of their station entertaining an important visitor. Anna Lois was easily old enough to have been my grandmother, and she had set the table with china, silver, and crystal that had belonged to her grandmother. Deanna and I knew it would be impolite to ask if she had something plastic or paper for our boys to eat from, but we also knew that we couldn't replace what they broke, so we were already on edge. After the blessing, about half way through the salad, that visiting preacher/missionary/important guest looked across the table at Anna Lois and said, "I can tell you've worked hard to prepare and serve this meal, but it's really unnecessary. Why don't you sell all this fine stuff and give me the proceeds for the work of the Church in South America ?"
At least we weren't worried about our kids anymore. Whatever they did after that wouldn't have created as much of a stir. Anna Lois is dead now, and I am sure her daughter, Kathy, has all those dishes, silver, and crystal. The idea of selling family heirlooms was as foreign and offensive to her as inviting sick and unclean people into his home was for the Pharisee. I doubt that that preacher intended to be offensive, anymore than Jesus did. But two worlds were colliding, one so totally committed to seeing God's Kingdom come that it couldn't see much else, and another one with its own understanding and agenda.
Of course, as is the case so many times when Jesus speaks, he's talking about something other than just the dinner party going on around him when he speaks to his host and the other guests. That becomes more clear as the text continues. The next story he tells is about another bash someone threw, but everyone was too busy to come to, so the original guest list was scrapped, and even part of the one after that until eventually, people no one ever thought would be able to attend such an event were there, and all the people who should have been were left out.
The Parable of the Great Banquet, some Bibles call this story. It speaks to all of us about a day when God will finally have had enough of our excuses for not being the people God calls us to be and not doing the things God equips us to do and moves on to others who are grateful just to be able to eat.
We all know how hard life has become for all of us. None of us are quite where we thought we'd be when we set out on our journey however long ago we started. But most of us have spent a lot more energy on things other than our faith and the relationships it calls us to develop, with God and with one another, than we have spent on that very thing which will sustain us when all those other things have faded.
I don't much like the images of everlasting life that some seem to cling to--mansions and streets of gold and places of honor for some. Most of us have seen enough of those things, from inside or out, in this life. There is something about this Great Banquet image that intrigues me and gives me hope--a picture of people who were overlooked or looked over in this life who get to sit at the welcome table in the Kingdom of God .
Do you know that old song? The Welcome Table? I'm gonna sit at the welcome table. Yes. Yes. Yes. I'm gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days, hallelujah! I'm gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days. It goes on to say, I'm gonna drink and never get thirsty. I'm gonna eat and never get hungry. And then it comes back to the welcome table again. But it's the first and last verses that we sometimes forget to sing. They're the ones that tell us how all that welcoming and eating and drinking are going to happen. God's gonna set this world on fire, the song says. God's gonna set this world on fire one of these days, hallelujah! Then we can sit at the welcome table, drink and never get thirsty, and eat and never get hungry.
Jesus tried to help people move in that direction, but they were more concerned about places of honor. He tried to tell them in the story of the Great Banquet that is about something much more important than a menu and a guest list. People began to sing hopefully about the welcome table when they couldn't quite believe they would ever see it. So they sang and they hoped. And we still sing, and we still hope, and we still struggle to understand what any of this has to do with us.
God's gonna have to set this world on fire before we ever see. And God will. One of these days. Hallelujah. Amen.
Rules are Made to Be….
Luke 13:10-17
It had been one of those weeks that every pastor, and most everybody else, has once in a while. I was still in Seminary and serving as student pastor to a rural congregation that provided a manse for us to live in. That meant a hundred mile one way commute to attend classes four days a week, then home at night to study, do church and community and pastoral work, and try to find a little time to be husband and daddy. This particular week a woman in the church had been near death at home for some time, so that meant checking in with her and her family at some point every day. These were pre-cell phone days, so I arrived at the Seminary that Friday morning to find a note on the message board to say that I needed to call the Clerk of the Session, who was also our neighbor. The lady had died early that morning while I was on the road. “Go ahead and go to class,” the Clerk and I agreed. But the bad part was that since her death was not altogether unexpected and her family was small, they had decided to have her funeral on Saturday afternoon, visitation at the funeral home on Friday evening. You can figure how that weekend went without my running the schedule for you. It all wrapped up, of course, with Sunday services, morning and evening, at the Church. Sometime mid-afternoon that Sunday, between those two services, it dawned on me that I was way overdue for an oil change in the car I drove back and forth to school, and since I drove it a thousand miles a week, it wasn’t smart to miss an oil change. This was back in the day when real men, especially those who were students, did those sorts of things for ourselves, so I pulled it down to the sloping part of the driveway, got out my pan, wrench, and Valvoline, and proceeded to change the oil and filter.
When you live in the manse at the Presbyterian Church in a community of three hundred, you don’t do very many things that someone doesn’t see, even in your own driveway. That evening, all cleaned up from my afternoon chore, I got to church for vespers in time to greet people as they arrived. Gladys, the wife of the Clerk of the Session, and a few others had beaten me there. And Gladys had already told those assembled what she had seen with her own eyes out her window—the one you had to stand on a stool to be able to see what was going on in the back yard at the manse. As I walked by her pew, she asked me if I planned to drive my car to the Seminary the next morning. I did.
“Well,” she exclaimed. “I’m glad I don’t have to ride with you!” I was, too, but wondered what she was getting to. “I’d be afraid the Lord would throw me in a ditch somewhere if I had worked on my car on the Sabbath.” None of the other ladies on the pew rose to my defense. They had all been at the funeral home on Friday night, at the funeral on Saturday and the meal that followed it, and they had all been at worship that morning, as they were every week, so they knew where I had been all weekend, but no one had a word to say about their over-worked and under-appreciated pastor and the weekend we had all just endured.
I told them that I would leave out around six the next morning as I usually did, confident that the Lord knew where I had been all weekend and would let me slide on the oil change. Gladys was not impressed. My violation of the Sabbath was brought up at the next Session meeting, but I think it was mostly just so the Clerk could go home and tell Gladys he had brought it up.
If the Sabbath is serious business in rural
Today’s Gospel reading tells the story of Jesus healing a woman on the Sabbath. Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. There were all kind of people there for worship. One of them becomes the focus of the story. The woman didn’t ask Jesus to heal her. She must have been a regular and well-known member of the congregation because Luke includes in his telling of the story that she had been stooped and crippled for eighteen years, bent over, unable to stand upright. Eighteen years of looking at people’s feet instead of being able to look them in the eyes. Eighteen years of having to shift from one side to the other in awkward ways to be able to see the sky above her. And eighteen years of believing and knowing that everyone else believed that her condition had something to do with her spiritual life, that the devil was somehow involved in her being that way. Still, it had also been eighteen years of faithful participation in the life and worship of her synagogue. There probably had never been a special time of prayer for her during all those years. Conventional wisdom said that her condition was unfortunate, but that she must have done something to bring it on herself, so her best hope was to be faithful in worship and service and hope that God’s mercy might come her way.
By this time, it wasn’t unusual for Jesus to teach in the synagogues. The woman probably had heard him before, or had heard about him. She doesn’t appear to ask him for help. She knew the rules. She was there all the time. But Jesus saw her, had compassion on her, and healed her. When he laid his hands on her, she stood erect immediately, and began to praise God.
Wonderful story, right? The whole congregation joined in her celebration, right? Decided to set aside the liturgy for the day and rejoice at the power of God they had all seen with their own eyes. Sing some hymns and praise God together.
Well, it may have headed in that direction, but even though the leader of the synagogue wasn’t named Gladys, I think he might have been one of her ancestors. Indignant is the word Luke uses for that leader’s encounter with Jesus. I suspect it was that and then some. The issue is not that Jesus healed the woman. That had been the issue at other times, but the leaders of the synagogues were still undecided as to what to do about his healing. But this time he had healed this woman on the Sabbath. She had been crippled and bent for eighteen years. Would it have hurt her to wait one more day to be healed? Especially since waiting a day would have meant that fewer people would be around to see it or to hear about it. They seemed to overlook the fact that she hadn’t asked to be healed today or any other time. The initiative to heal had all been Jesus’. “Free from your ailment,” Jesus had said to her.
There were any numbers of things wrong with what Jesus had done from the standpoint of the rules everyone knew. He had touched an unclean person to begin with. And healing was work, work he had done on the Sabbath. It all added up to another opportunity for the leaders of the synagogue to discredit him before the people. It also provided an opportunity for him to display God’s power in ways that worship in the synagogue was not accustomed to seeing.
It is easy and predictable for us to criticize the people in charge. Most of us know that these guys don’t like Jesus very much. We know that the conflict between them will continue to escalate. We know where this story is going. But, like so many other stories in Scripture, we need to consider what the story says to our own situation before we take the easy way and say it’s all about those mean old people who gave Jesus so much grief. Those who insisted on adherence to the rules were being faithful to what they believed to be the way God called them to live and practice their faith.
We’re Presbyterians. We can understand these guys. We know about following rules. We’ve got a whole book of them. We’re engaged in a process of revising that book again. The Book of Order, the Form of Government. If there is a watchword for Presbyterian church life, a concept we can all try to agree on, it is Paul’s instruction that all things be done decently and in order. Dr. Will Willimon is a United Methodist Bishop and one of the best known preachers in the country. He was one of the preachers I heard preach and lecture in
We might try to take comfort in the assurance that we wouldn’t be as insensitive as the leader of the synagogue had been. We’ve done hospital visits on Sundays. We’ve seen healing take place, perhaps not as dramatically as what Jesus did, but healing just the same. Maybe even on the Sabbath, but probably not on the day Presbytery meets.
Jesus shamed the leader of the synagogue when he reminded him that there was a loophole in the Law about Sabbath that allowed people to tend to their livestock on that day even though that was work and that he thought that this woman, a daughter of Abraham, a woman of faith, ought surely to be at least as important as a cow.
For some reason, it always seems to take us longer and more pages to keep up with all the rules and instructions about how we’re going to live and work faithfully together than it does to say what we believe. There is something fundamentally questionable about that picture.
The current work we are doing as a denomination toward revising and reorienting our understanding of how we will govern ourselves in the church is ongoing. The General Assembly has commended a new Form of Government, a revision of the current Book of Order to the Presbyteries for ratification. Our own Presbyterial Executive has been on the committee (I told you it was a Presbyterian thing.) to bring the work to this point. Paul will chair the work as it goes forward. There will be several gatherings in our Presbytery during September to help us learn more about the new plan. There are plenty of rules in the proposed new document. If we are going to move forward in ministry amid the challenges of this culture, we must have some common understanding of how to go about it. The intention of this revision, however, is to help us focus on the mission of the church, the proclamation of the Gospel and being a part of the transformational work that proclamation brings. Following the rules has never been enough. When the rules equip us to focus on the needs of people that God loves and wants to make whole, people like us, then they are central to our identity and work. When they become ends in themselves, we find ourselves shamed, while some other crowd rejoices in all the wonderful things God is doing among them. In the name of the Father, who knows our need, the Son who came to meet that need, and the Holy Spirit, who guides us to healing and wholeness. Amen.
Looking at All the Pictures
Hebrews 11:19--12:2
Those of us who were here in worship a couple of weeks ago had a little fun at one another’s expense as we looked at pictures of one another way back before we were who we are now. All of that, as you may remember was a part of that morning’s reminder from Hosea that God loved us when we were children, and that God’s love stays with us all our lives. I don’t know if all that scrounging around looking for those pictures provided opportunity for some of you to take walks down memory lane you hadn’t planned, but I want us to think about all those albums and boxes of pictures that all of us have stashed away somewhere again this morning. I didn’t ask you to bring them with you today, but I know you all have them, so I want you to conjure up some of those images in your mind as we begin to think about the gallery of the faithful that the Letter to the Hebrews calls us to observe today.
We heard part of this list last week when Hebrews tried to help us think about what faith is and how it matters in our lives. We focused mostly on Abraham and Sarah, then. Today’s text presents us with a long list of names of individuals and reminders of occasions when God’s people have been faithful in response to God’s call. The writer of Hebrews looks back on people and their stories from generations before his own time and finds story after story that demonstrate how God’s people have answered God’s call. We get to look back on those stories from an even broader perspective. Many of the names and events we encounter here are things we remember from Sunday School and other Bible study experiences. Some of them are people we have forgotten, and some of them are some we think we’re probably supposed to remember but need some reminders about who they were and what they did. Looking over this list of the faithful is something akin to sitting with your grandmother and the family pictures, looking at people you never knew, hearing stories you’ve heard before, all in an effort to discover who you are and how you came to be.
Some of those pictures tell all the good and positive things that have made your family or other group who they are. Grandma may call you to remember that cross country car trip you all made when you were kids, back to some place she wanted to be sure everyone went together. “Wasn’t that a wonderful trip?” she asks, as she turns the pages on that part of the album. “Didn’t we have a wonderful time?”
Your memories of that trek may not be quite as positive as hers. Long family trips in the car haven’t always included video players and other forms of entertainment to pass the time. Sometimes they meant sharing the backseat with Grandma and her old-lady smelling hand lotion. Those trips haven’t always included stops at McDonald’s or Burger King. In those days, they probably meant stopping at a roadside park and eating Grandma’s pimiento cheese or cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches. But you do remember playing with the other cousins when you got there, so you decide not to remind her that the trip wasn’t quite the experience for you that it was for her.
A little later in that journey through the pictures, she probably came to pictures of graduations, weddings, and all kinds of other celebrations—some of them yours, some of them for other members of your family. “Look! Here’s when you graduated from college! Look how proud we all were of you. And look, here’s the day your sister got married. Look how happy everyone looked then!”
Those are some of the same kinds of images we see in the first part of our walk through the Hebrews gallery today, times when God was leading, God’s people were following, and it was difficult to imagine how things could be any better. Like when “the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land,” and the pursuing Egyptians got swallowed up by the water closing in on them. Or when Joshua fit the battle of
And, just like Grandma, the list goes on and on. Rahab. Maybe her morals were questionable, but God used her to provide shelter for people who were on God’s mission, and she became in instrument of God’s grace and mercy when others in her community perished. Gideon. Barak. Samson. Jephtah. We may have to scurry to the concordance or some other reference book to remember who they were, but when we do, we find story after story of glorious rewards for faithfully following God’s call. Conquering kingdoms, administering justice, obtaining promises, shutting the mouths of lions, quenching raging fires, escaping the edge of the sword, strong amid weakness, mighty in war, putting foreign armies to flight. Our best attempts at action movies or recruiting videos pale in comparison to all that. Wonderful story after wonderful story of people faithfully hearing God’s call to act and then acting.
Makes it a little difficult to comprehend the decline the Church has experienced in recent years. Looks as if we ought to be able to just tell these stories of how God leads and blesses, and people would line up to be a part of such a well-oiled, successful enterprise. If success is what people are looking for, then how could there be better examples of it than stories like these? You can almost see the smiles and happy expressions on people’s faces, just like in all those wedding and graduation and travel pictures we saw with Grandma. These are the things that make us who we are, and who we are is God’s people, people in the side of right, justice, and faith!
Even Grandma seems to get tired of looking at pictures sooner or later. Maybe even before we do sometimes. We’ve really gotten into hearing all about who all those people in the pictures are this time. Maybe we realize that Grandma won’t always be around to tell us these stories, so we decide not to shush her up like we usually do, to listen and hear the stories she seems to love to tell so much. But she appears to have gotten to a part of the old book that she’s not quite so fond of. “Enough of this,” she says as she quickly shoves some loose pictures back into the book and shuts it. Surely we can find something else to do. Let’s go see what’s on TV. Or maybe you can show me how to use that new phone you got me the other day.”
Like Grandma, all of us also have some pictures that are not quite so much fun to look at. Pictures of people who are gone and of events we’d just as soon forget. My mom had a terrible habit of making pictures of gatherings of people at funerals. “Might be the only time we’ll get them all together again,” she’d say. It usually was, but there is still something about a bunch of forlorn looking people standing in a cemetery that might not need to be preserved for all posterity. And then there are those pictures that came after those happy, happy ones made the day of your sister’s wedding when everyone was filled with joy. What are we supposed to do with all of those pictures that include the guy who became her husband that day now that he’s run off with the woman in his office and Grandma’s decided he is not who she thought he was? When we get past those pictures and begin to see others we’ve never seen before, we’re not sure whether it’s OK to ask, “Who’s that in that old military uniform and why haven’t I heard about him?” or “What are all those people doing, and why don’t I know that story?” Turns out that being part of the family means knowing about those pictures, too, understanding that not all the times that have gone into making us who we are have been happy ones.
If we go back to the gallery in the the Letter to the Hebrews, we discover that the same is true of God’s family. Being faithful to God has not always meant being victorious and celebrating. Although we don’t get a lot of names in this section, some of the images are pretty grisly: Some were tortured, but refused to accept release, choosing to die for what they believed. Some were mocked, flogged, chained in prison. We know the stories of Paul and Silas but there were others whose stories we have lost, some who didn’t experience a miraculous escape, some who died in dank, cold Roman prisons and worse places. Martyrdom isn’t a tool we’d think of using to call people to faith, but in the first century, being faithful meant all kinds of risk. Some were stoned to death. Some were sawn in two, some killed by the sword. Some of them may have longed for a home in heaven with God when their life ended, but some of those same ones didn’t have much of a place while they were here. Destitute, persecuted, tormented, they wandered in deserts and mountains, lived in caves and in holes in the ground.
Coming to terms with the call and promise of faith in God means looking at all the pictures in the family album. Those that are easy to see because they are so glorious. But also those that remind us that faith is sometimes its own reward and that the prize for following God is often something much different than we have expected or been told.
All of these we have seen as we have strolled through the Hebrews Gallery of Faith lived and died, some gloriously and heroically and others pitifully and without notice, but all of them lived and died and never saw what they believed come to pass. But still they were faithful. Still they believed and trusted in the goodness of God, whether they saw it or not.
Therefore. That’s always an important word when we come to it in Scripture. Because it makes us look back at all that has been said before it and lean ahead to what comes next, knowing that there is a connection between the two of them. All those good and glorious stories were not ends in themselves. All those pitiful stories are not the final word. Therefore. Because we have taken time to remember or to be told about all those who have gone before us. Because we have heard their stories of faithfulness. Because we can see their faces and know that they are a part of who we are becoming as people of God. Therefore.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. And we are. We have heard their stories again today. They have gone before us in faith and now live forever in the loving presence of God. And they are joined by countless others who have lived and died in faith as they have and who now live in God’s presence, waiting for the fulfillment of God’s plan for them and for all humanity. Whatever they have done while they lived, they now live to praise God and to encourage us to continue to be faithful in our own journey. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, what are we to do? Just sit back? Draw out their stories and tell them to each other when we have time? Maybe even tell them to others when we think they might sit still long enough to listen?
No, the call of Scripture is not to sit and revel in the stories of others. The call is to lay aside whatever it is that prevents our being people about whom someone might tell stories of faithfulness some day. Our call is probably not to wait for the
There is one picture in the gallery that we haven’t seen. If all those others don’t stir faith in us, maybe this one will. Look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, the writer says. “Look to Jesus, who could have found all kinds of reasons not to do what God called him to do, but who endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has now claimed his place—at the right hand of God.
Look to Jesus. Look at all those other pictures, too—the happy ones and the painful ones. But look to Jesus. And see what God calls and equips you to be. Amen.
Faith Is…
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Some of us who did our most serious dating in the sixties and seventies remember the little "Love is…" cartoons that ran in the paper. They're still around, I think, even though our local papers don't carry them. Some of us probably still have some of the old ones stashed away in a box somewhere with long faded wedding flowers or other such things. That cute little cherub-like couple helped us think about our relationships every day when we read the paper. Some of us scored extra points as we cut them out and included them in cards, flowers, or whatever else we were giving and getting in those days when we were beginning to think about beloved life partners and related issues. There was usually just one frame to the comic. They usually said thing like "Love is…all about communication" or "Love is…watching her favorite TV shows" or some other equally wise, pithy little thing that convinced us that we knew all about what love is and that we were going to be much better at it than anyone else had ever been. These little bits of wisdom started just about the same time as, and probably in response to, Eric Segal's Love Story movie which tried to convince a generation that love means never having to say you're sorry. That may have worked hard if one member of the couple was dying pretty soon, but most of the rest of us figured out a long time ago that it is not the truth in other cases.
And that turns out to be the problem with most of those short little attempts to define love. While there is a kernel of truth in each of them, no one of them alone covers all the bases. Love is all about communication. But sometimes the best communication we can do is to just shut up and give things time to settle a bit. Love does sometimes mean watching chick flicks, but hopefully not during the Final Four or the Super Bowl! It turns out that some concepts just can't be condensed into a sound byte. Understanding things like love or faith and other things we all depend on to sustain us requires us to think and talk more than a short little comic strip saying empowers us to do.
So what does it mean to be faithful? What is faith? I'm sure some church newsletter somewhere has had a "Faith is…" comic or two in an attempt to help people define it. The New Testament letter we call Hebrews offers the definition most of us learned in Sunday School; faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Somewhere along the way, in confirmation class or catechism or some other effort to engender faith in us, we learned to give back those words when someone asked us, "What is faith?" "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
Hebrews, of course, does not leave it at that and move on to some other concept. The author goes on to give a long list of examples of stories of people from Scripture who help us understand what faith is. Beginning with people who lived before Abraham and Sarah and then focusing on Abraham and Sarah themselves before traveling through the stories of Moses and the people who left Egypt with him and then countless other people whose stories show us what faith empowered them to do and what it required of them, the writer of Hebrews gives example after example of faithful responses to God’s call. We would do well not to leave our pondering about what faith is too quickly, either.
Trouble is that we have all been so conditioned by the sound byte media which shapes our thinking about most things that we're not quite sure what to do with ideas and concepts that take more time to unpack. As tempting as it is to recite "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," and be done with it, sooner or later, those few words just won't be enough.
So what does it mean for us to be faithful? Two images from Hebrews guide our thinking about faith. First, the assurance of things hoped for. What we hope for changes as we move through the various stages of life. When we were young and saving those Love is… cartoons, we hoped for all kinds of things—a car, someone to ride in it with us, that we’d be the one to score the winning points in our big rivalry game, that our face would clear up before the prom. Any one of those things was supposed to be it for us. Some of those things happened. As we moved into adulthood, the things for which we hoped, hopefully, changed. We hoped to find the person with whom we’d share life. The right job. Some of us hoped for kids, and then hoped we’d know what to do with them when they came. Some of those things happened, too. And we learned that no one of them was all there was to having faith. Our hoping continues to change as we live through all the other stages of life. Sooner or later our hopes extend beyond ourselves. We hope those kids we had will do better than we have. We hope that the communities in which we live will be all they can be. We hope for peace. We hope that a treatment plan will work, for us or for someone we love. We hope that in the end, what we have hoped for will sustain us. When it does, we discover what faith is. The assurance of things hoped for—the belief that even when we don’t know what to hope for, hope is a gift that sustains us.
Being faithful doesn’t mean that we’ll get everything we hope for. Garth Brooks used to sing a song giving thanks to God for unanswered prayers. Most of us can identify some of those things we hoped and hoped for and never got that helped us learn how to hope for better things. Even when we don’t get the things we hope for, faithful people know what it means to hope and to hope with the assurance that God has good things for us. Some of the most lasting lessons I have learned about being faithful didn’t come in Seminary or even in studying the Scripture. They have come as I have journeyed with people through their lives. Illness that could easily have broken spirits and provided justifiable reasons to abandon faith turned out to be an occasion for growth and renewal. Like the writer of Hebrews who used a long list of people to show us what faith is, I think of real people who have modeled faith for me. People like Roberta McCubbin, who could stretch a Social Security check as far as anybody I’ve ever known, whose adult children were mostly worthless and a drain on her both emotionally and financially, whose address was on the wrong side of town, but whose trust in God’s promises for her and for all of us never wavered. People like Nealie Gildon, who discovered the promises of faith late in life. Having lived and worked within the confines of family, work, and culture all her life, she finally mustered up the courage to participate in Bible study. That had always been for people who knew more than she did. She had plenty to do at home. But something stirred in Nealie, and she enrolled in a study group and discovered a whole level of living she had never known. She could ask questions, and she could provide answers for the questions others asked. When we left that community, a member of Nealie’s family who had benefitted much from the person she used to be asked me what they were supposed to do with the person she had become now that her faith was the center of her life. “Watch and learn,” I told him. I think of my dear friend and colleague, Jim Hunter. Jim and I were members of the same Presbytery, but we were on opposite sides of most issues. Jim had spent his career serving struggling, sometimes dying little churches, but he served them faithfully with a pastoral presence that I couldn’t have mustered for them. First when his son received a terminal diagnosis and then again when he got the same news for himself, Jim came to me and said that he had always been the pastor, but now he needed one and he had decided I’d be it. Over the course of several years that included the deaths of that son and Jim and another family member, I learned a lot more about being faithful than I taught. There were some things on which we never agreed, and we continued to talk about them right up until the end, but our faith was in the same God, the God who promised good and delivered it. Roberta and Nealie and Jim hoped in the same way that Abraham and Sarah did. They believed what God promised even when they couldn’t see it. And their faith was God’s gift to them and to many of us who shared life with them.
That conviction of things not seen is the other part of what faith means. We live in a world that wants us to believe that seeing is believing, even when we have learned that a lot of what we see is not believable. I’ve seen enough this season to figure out that the Cubs are not going to the Series again, so I’ll take comfort in the reminder that it’s less than a month until football season. Every so often, some new celebrity pops up as the person we’re all supposed to try to be like, to look like, to dress like. And just about the time we all line up for the class or the haircut or the procedure that’s supposed to make us look like that person, someone pops up on the web telling us that the pictures were airbrushed. Nobody really looks that good. The tabloids near the checkouts stay in business by showing people just enough to entice them, but the whole story on the inside is rarely as juicy as the headline and the grainy pictures promised on the cover. If we buy into the seeing is believing offers, most of what we see in our time doesn’t give us much to believe. There is little around us to muster up much encouragement. Division, discord, uncertainty, unbridled gain for some and unending need for others—these are the things we see. But we who have placed our faith and trust in God and not in the powers of this age are bold enough to believe in what we do not see.
Eternal hope is one dimension of our faith, but if all we hope for is that which will come when this life ends, then we are left with this life as either something to be endured or, even less, something that means nothing at all. If our faith is the conviction of things not seen, then we can be engaged in living in ways that bring God’s promises to bear in this life as well as in the life to come. When what we see around us and even within us is not what we see in God’s promise, then a part of believing beyond what we see involves working to change what we see. Working for justice and peace, as elusive as they are, is a dimension of faith that we ignore at our own peril and at the peril of all with whom we share life.
I don’t know exactly what eternal life with God will be for any of us. I do know that God has promised us life beyond this one, and that that promise is secure. With that promise in hand, then, our faith calls us to believe beyond what we see here and now, to trust that God is with us as we strive to make God’s vision for the world reality. We have all lived so long surrounded by hate and distrust that it is difficult for us to catch even a glimpse of what God intends for our life together to be. Faith calls us to look beyond what we see, to believe beyond what we see, and to begin to experience life as God intends it before we arrive on that other shore.
The Church has not always been the sign of faith that God calls us to be. Just this week some of you read, as I did, that Anne Rice, a popular author probably best known for vampire stories, whose public profession of faith was big news just a few years ago has now decided that she cannot be both faithful and Christian. I’m not much of a vampire fan, so I haven’t read her work. I did read some of the stories about her decision to leave the Church, but to keep her faith in Christ. I can understand some of her problem. We in the Church are not always the best examples Jesus has to work with. Too many of us have chosen to mirror the world around us in an effort not to be declared irrelevant and that has meant taking whatever stands the opinion polls say we should be taking at any particular time. Those stands almost always mean that we’ve alienated someone and elevated someone else. I don’t know if Anne Rice’s experience or that of any of the countless others who decide that they can be better people without the Church than they can with it would have been any different if they had been here among us or not. For my part, I’ll stay with the Church because it is, at its core, a community of faith, a gathering of people who may never agree any more than my friend, Jim, and I did, but who are connected by our common faith, our shared assurance of things hoped for, our mutual conviction of things not seen. I’ll continue to pray about the ways we hurt and harm one another. I’ll continue to depend on God’s mercy for all the ways we fall short of what we should or could be. That dependence itself, dependence on God’s mercy, stretches my capacity to believe in ways that continue to provide plenty of work for me to do in my own life and to challenge us to do in the life we share together.
What, then, is faith? The easy answer is where Hebrews begins—faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. The sustaining, satisfying answer takes us long to find. And it is worth the effort. In the name of our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Amen.
Try to Remember
Hosea 11:1-11
All of us have been subjected to them at least a time or two. Some of us have gotten far enough along that we've even become the ones who subject our kids to them. Let's sit down and look at old pictures. Thankfully, it's gotten to be way too much trouble to drag out the old slide projector and sort through all those boxes of Kodachromes in the front closet. But some of us have figured out how to get all those uploaded to the computer or one of those digital picture frames, so people, especially our kids, are a little edgy when they see us coming. We have them at our house, just like most everybody else does. I brought back a box full of some that Deanna and the boys had never seen when I came back from my mom's funeral earlier this month.
Those pictures are all pretty much the same, regardless of where and how we grew up. Most of them range from cute to humiliating. We have one of Blake and a female playmate when they were about two. They had played outside in dirt and heat about like what we're having this summer. Both of them had gotten so sweaty and filthy that their moms decided to just throw them in the bathtub together. They also decided it was just too cute an event not to record on film. We threatened to save that one and drag it out on prom night, but it's still in the box.
That's the way it is when we start looking through family pictures, regardless of what format they're in. Remember that trip? I never noticed how much she looked like your side of the family when she was little. Whatever happened to that boyfriend? Who was it who decided that cat-eyed glasses with rhinestones were stylish? Or Nehru jackets? How did those innocent looking little kids become these young adults with attitudes and opinions of their own? And when did their parents get their AARP cards? That's what happens when we start looking back over our life together. We dredge up some of the most intimate things we have experienced. We remember, sometimes accurately, sometimes not, things that have been pushed down in the memory bank for a long time.
The book of the prophet Hosea gives us one of the most intimate glimpses of God in all of the Scripture. Walter Brueggeman, esteemed Old Testament scholar at Columbia Seminary, calls Hosea one of the most remarkable oracles in all the prophetic literature. Another scholar goes even farther when he says that in Hosea we penetrate deeper into the heart and mind of the God than anywhere else in the Old Testament. After last week's raw and painful story of justifiable anger at unfaithfulness and dishonesty, the book wallows around in miserable family circumstances that would provide material for southern fiction writers for generations. Hosea's wife, Gomer, will not be redeemed from her former life, and Hosea, always the model of faithfulness, will not give up on trying to make it otherwise. By the time we arrive at the text for this morning, the frustration of everyone involved is thicker than the humidity that keeps us all indoors this summer.
It is almost as though we have crept up on a private moment God was trying to have, trying to figure out what to do with the wayward, willful people for whom Gomer serves as an all too accurate model. "What am I going to do with these people?" God ponders. "All I've ever tried to do was love them, but they seem to have ideas of their own about this relationship that I intended to be so good for all of us. Maybe it's just not going to work after all. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe I ought to just give up and let them do the best they can. I don’t need this!" But God's love for us is a parent's love, not the more objective or self-serving form of that emotion we’ve all experienced from others. Rejection is just not a part of that. Hope always is. Even when it appears that "live in hope; die in despair" is more truth than poetry.
Just as we’ve all had the experience of looking through old pictures, any of us who are parents or others who care for children have had another one. Where is that child? Where did he go? I just took my eyes off him for a second. Whether it’s in Wal-Mart or Publix or Disney World or some other public place, the emotions are the same. We run frantically from one end of the park to the other or we search up and down every aisle in the store, growing more angry and more frightened with every step. Where is that child? When I find him and get him home, I’m going to wear him out. Don’t dare do it in public, but you can be sure he’s going to get it when I get him home. I’ll never take him anywhere again. He’s pulled this stunt for the last time. You’d think he’d appreciate all I do for him. Taking him places. Buying him things. I don’t have to do that. Not all parents do. And this is the thanks I get. Can’t even stay in one place for two minutes. I’ve warned him and warned him about the kinds of people who are around these days. He knows he’s supposed to stay where I can see him. I may not wait until I get him home. I’ll just put a stop to this right here and now.
And then, right in the middle of our rant, that little tow head pops around the corner, wagging something he’s found along with him. And all of our justifiable anger, all of our intentions to help him grow up in a hurry, all of our frustration with a willful, disobedient child are gone. Let me get my hands on him is right. But we’re just so glad to see him that we just want to hold him close for a while.
Of course, that child doesn’t have a clue what all the fuss is about or why we’re laughing and crying all at the same time. So we decide to pull ourselves together as best we can and get out of there before we make a bigger scene than we already have. We’ll talk about all this when we can both pay more attention. For now, we’re just thankful to have found him.
We hear a lot of those same things when we continue to hide around the corner and listen in on God’s private moment. I have always loved this people. I have done things for them they could never have done for themselves. Hey, I even brought them out of slavery. You’d think they could be thankful that they’re not making bricks anymore. But it seems that the more I do for them, the less they acknowledge it. They’ve even gone to worshiping other gods. The same people whose worship always invited them to say, “The Lord our God is one.” The same people to whom I have said again and again, “I. I am the Lord, your God!” But they sacrifice to the Baals. They offer incense to idols.
I taught them to walk. I carried them in my own arms. They really are like children to me. Children I have led, fed, and bent down to lift them up.
Theologians have long tried to provide images to help us understand who God is and how much God loves us. Creator. Immortal, Invisible, God only Wise. Everlasting Father. Those are just some of the traditional images for God most of us have learned from someone. But what about the God we see in Hosea? This God who anguishes over us, God’s children. This God who dotes on us, goes to any lengths to show mercy to us. It was Calvin, not the foremost among theologians when it comes to warm and fuzzy images, who said that somehow God accommodates to us, speaks to us in ways we can understand. Of course there is more to God’s righteous nature than we can ever fully know, but God reveals enough of God’s self to us to bring us to faith, to keep us faithful. In another place, Calvin says that God is like a child’s nurse who speaks baby talk to us, speaks to us with a lisp, Calvin says, because that’s what we can hear and receive. Generations later, Robert Frost would ask God to speak Fahrenheit and Centigrade to us, use language we can comprehend. God always does. It is this accommodating, lisping, Fahrenheit and Centigrade God who ponders what in the world to do with us when we will not be thankful and obedient.
Much like us when we’re scared and frustrated parents in Wal-Mart, it shouldn’t surprise us that God’s initial response is the same as ours. Let them go back to Egypt if they can’t learn to be appreciative. Let the Assyrians have them. I don’t need this.”
And then one of those people, maybe a little towheaded one who has wandered off, comes into God’s mind. Back to the brickyards of Egypt with them?
How can I give you up? How can I hand you over. My heart recoils within me. My compassion grows warm. And tender. I will not execute my anger. I will not destroy.
Where in the world does that come from? Just when we thought we were going to see justice. Just when we thought we could stand by and say, “See, I told you. You’re finally getting what’s coming to you!” And God wimps out on us. Just when we thought it was all going to even up. Out of the clear blue or even somewhere beyond that, comes this warm and tender God who simply will not give them what they’ve got coming.
No. These words. This level of caring. This kind of love doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes from the very nature of God. “I am God and no mortal,” God says. “The Holy One in your midst. I will not come in wrath.”
You see, Calvin was onto something with that accommodation business. God is really just not much like us. There is justice and there is mercy, and they are both far more abundant than we can comprehend. There is grace, but it is not an excuse for our shortcomings. It is the very core of who God is and how God chooses to relate to us. We can set up our systems of insiders and outsiders, winners and losers, what we’ll tolerate and what we won’t, but we can’t impose them on God. We can exact justice or cut ourselves off from those who won’t comply with our expectations, but we can’t make God respond as we do.
I am God and no mortal. I will not come in wrath.
I don’t know why Katrina hit New Orleans instead of Tampa . Or why that earthquake hit Haiti when it was already one of the poorest places in the world. But Pat Robertson is dead wrong when he says it was because God sent it on them. God is God and no mortal. God doesn’t think like we do.
When Israel was a child, God loved him. When Ephraim was a toddler, God taught him to walk. When you were a child, God loved you. Some of you found expression of that love in a family and a church that brought you to baptism and nurtured that love in you all your life. Others of us came by it by a different route. Still others are still desperately trying to believe it.
When we were children, God loved us. When we grew beyond being cute and became willful, God still loved us. Wanted to smack us sometimes, for sure. My all too human mind still believes that needed killing ought to be a legal defense in some cases. But now that we’re wherever along the journey we are, be assured of this—God still loves us, and will go to whatever lengths it takes to help us know that and believe it.
I am God and no mortal. I will not come in wrath. God will roar like a lion, and we, God’s children, if we are wise, will come. Trembling? You bet. Because we know what we deserve. But we also know the One to whom we come. The One who is just not much like us. Thanks be to God! Amen.
Maybe Your Family Doesn't Look So Bad After All!
Hosea 1:2-10
We once had a friend who handled her son's entry into the dating years about as poorly as anybody we've ever known. She and her son had endured a lot of things together and were especially close, so it was difficult for her to send him out into the world where there were girls. We weren't around for his high school years, but the stories we heard seemed not to have left scars that wouldn't heal. By the time we knew them, he was a young adult, in college and just beyond, so the encounters with girls were becoming a bit more serious. Mom just couldn’t bear the thought of her son growing up (which he had already done) and living in a relationship with someone other than his mom (which he was well on his way toward doing). Every time we’d hear about a new relationship, or on those rare occasions when he’d bring his latest potential life partner to church with him, his mom never referred to them by name. It was always Tom and the harlot!
Ah, families! Aren’t they wonderful things? We moved away before Tom ever married, so I don’t know how his journey toward a sustaining relationship came out. But I suspect my guesses are not far off.
Even if you didn’t have a mom as nutty and controlling as Tom does, we are all products of families. And the thing about families is not so much whether they are dysfunctional or not, but the degree to which their dysfunction prepares us for life beyond them. I promise there’ll be no stories about my own family this morning—not that there aren’t plenty to tell, but since I’m still in the middle of sorting through our mom’s things and business, those stories are too close to be told. And besides, I think a family like the one we encounter in today’s Old Testament text, the family of Hosea the prophet, trumps even mine!
Telling family stories is something we all do to one degree or another. Embellishing those stories is usually not necessary. Some of the stories we tell are more entertaining than others. Some are too painful to tell. But most of us tell them. Trying to figure out what those stories mean and whether or not we will be defined by them is harder than just telling them. That’s probably why some of us never get to that point.
We don’t know a lot about Hosea except that he was a prophet. If we accept the definition of a prophet as one who speaks for God, then it stands to reason that Hosea was probably more attuned to looking for meaning in the things going on around him than the average person. I have told you many times that one of the primary things I believe and invite you to believe with me is that God is not distant and aloof from us but that God is alive and active, saying and doing things in the world. We do well when we pay attention to those things. Hosea certainly seemed to.
Whether Hosea actually heard a voice from God to go marry Gomer, a match that appears to have been made somewhere other than heaven, or whether he found himself in this strange and strained relationship and tried to figure out how he got there and what it might mean is not really the issue. The important thing about this story is that Hosea looks for what God might be trying to say to him through it.
Most of us who live in a relationship with someone else can hardly imagine a more hurtful or painful turn of events than discovering unfaithfulness and the rejection that that discovery would bring. For most of us, the intimacy that is a part of healthy relationship is so important to us because it is something we do not share with just everyone. That’s a part of what makes Hosea’s story so hard for us to hear. How could God call him to go marry a woman like Gomer, and then, even more difficult for us to ponder, how could God expect him to remain faithful to her when she kept going back to the way of life from which he had tried to rescue her. Most of us are probably sitting here smugly thinking, “I’d never put up with things like that! I don’t care if God did call me to it.” But Hosea was not a product of a self-actualized culture as we all are. There is a lot about marital relationships and human interaction in general that just doesn’t translate directly from his time to ours. So talking about what we’d do and what Hosea did just don’t make for valid or helpful comparisons.
And then we come to this business about naming children. Names were an altogether different kind of consideration in biblical times than in ours, but what we name our children has always been important. I know I said none of my family stories today, but this one seems apt: when Blake, our firstborn came along, we had agonized and labored for months about what to name him. Contrary to what both sides of the family wanted, we decided not to perpetuate family names. So he will forever be Justin Blake. Blake was born in the day of seim-private hospital rooms. We still remember the day someone from the records department came to get all the information for birth certificates for Blake and for the little boy who had been born the same day to the woman in the other bed in the room. We couldn’t wait to get all the forms filled out so that the world would know that our child had a name. The woman in the other bed had five other children at home. Her husband had not been there for this birth of this one. Someone had to be at work and at home with those other five. He was there, though, when that records person came in. They were about to go home, and they couldn’t go without naming the baby. The mom finally looked at her husband and asked, “Do we have a Joe?” “No,” he replied. And thus that child became Joe. Not Joseph Aloysious or Joseph Campbell or anything else with a ring to it. Just Joe.
The naming process for the children of Hosea and Gomer was intentional. The first, a boy was named Jezreel, to call attention to God’s displeasure about events that had happened there. Every time Hosea and his family would venture out, people would surely say, “There’s Hosea. You know about that woman he married, don’t you. It’s a shame, but he remains faithful. Boy, what a catch he’d be for someone who might appreciate him. But he stays with that slut even though everybody in town knows what she is. And now they’ve got that kid named after one of the worst events in
When the next children came along quickly enough to cause plenty of talk about whose they might really be, names were significant again. Can you imagine naming a child “No pity,” whatever the circumstances of her birth? Then you probably don’t think much of her younger brother’s name either. They called him, “not my people”
Surely by this point in the story we catch on that this is not just another sordid, warped family saga told for our entertainment or for shock value on which the movie version can capitalize. This story surely has some higher purpose, some benefit, or else why would anybody want to tell it about himself.
Remember our definition of a prophet—one who speaks a word for God. If, as we say we believe, God really is alive and active, saying and doing things in the world, then finding meaning and even a word from God in our daily lives is something we can all learn to do, and it’s hard to imagine a better teacher than Hosea.
It seems, then, that as miserable as Hosea’s family’s life must have been, that the purpose it serves is to be a metaphor for a much more important story: the story of God’s faithfulness in light of unfaithfulness that goes back generations and continues in our own time. Unfaithfulness to marriage vows may be something we can claim not to have been an issue for us. Jimmy Carter made a whole generation stop and think about what that faithfulness entailed in the ‘70’s, but we might still convince ourselves that it’s just not an issue for us. But if we stop to think about it long enough, we must surely all admit that there is considerable distance between what God has called and equipped us to be and what we are.
The people of Israel, divided into two kingdoms as they were when Hosea lived, instead of being the unified, united people God had called them to be, are the first example of unfaithfulness Hosea’s story calls us to encounter and acknowledge. From the beginning, God called us into a covenant relationship. Covenants, as we experience them, work when both parties keep their end of the bargain. Citibank and we jointly own a house. So long as I send them the required amount of money on the first of every month, we get to live there. Let me ignore my end of the bargain for long enough, and we become another statistic on the daily economic news report. We certainly wouldn’t be the only one of those in
That kind of tit for tat understanding of covenant keeps most of us respectable in our neighborhoods, in our jobs, and in our personal relationships. We choose to violate the covenants in which we live at some degree of peril. The degree to which we put ourselves at risk tells us a lot about the importance of those covenants to us. We live so much in that way of understanding that, at some point in our spiritual formation, we decide that God must be pretty much like we are. We are, after all made in God’s image, so we assume that that means that God is some kind of bigger and better version of us---hopefully more kind, more hopefully more dependable, but still pretty much like us.
This first part of Hosea’s story seems to confirm our suspicions---poor old Hosea living with that wretched woman who doesn’t realize what a prize she has. Remember when Kenny Rogers used to beg Ruby not to take her love to town? I suspect Hosea had his own version of that song in Hebrew meter. And then God tells him to name those kids those strange things—one named after a bloody field of battle that God wasn’t happy about, another named no pity, and the other one not my people. Thank God there were only three. God knows what the next one’s name might have been. That last one stings the most: Name him not my people because you are not my people, and I am not your God.
Who could blame God for getting to that point? What we call the Old Testament is one tale after another of God’s people failing to be who God called them to be, not doing what God called them to do. From the journey out of slavery in
Many of us live our whole lives fearful that God will say the same thing to us. I’ve had it. That’s enough. Even though we comfort ourselves with some assurance that God seems to have changed God’s mind and maybe even God’s nature with the whole Jesus thing—we still live in fear that God will get fed up again. And there always seem to be plenty of people around to confirm our thinking. Let any natural disaster hit, and some preacher is always ready to tell us who’s God mad at this time. The Gulf Oil Spill is supposed to be a sign that the end is near—and for people other than shrimpers. BP is the new anti-Christ for some. There will, of course, be another one when this one’s someday forgotten.
That’s why it is so important for us to read all of Hosea’s story, which I commend to you this week because we’ll be working through the end of it next Sunday. This is a sordid tale to speak politely. If we probe that unfaithful partner metaphor at all, we find ourselves siding with God, even urging God on—Yes, you have every right to reject such miserable, disobedient, unfaithful people.
And then we realize that this story is not just about Gomer or about Hosea, or even just about a bunch of people thousands of years ago. It is a story about all of us, all of us who know we have not followed God’s intention for our lives as we could have, not to mention should have. Just as God called the Hebrews, God calls us, the Christian community to be people of love and welcome, people of mercy and forgiveness, people who forgive as we have been forgiven, people who welcome as we have been welcomed, people who affirm as we have been affirmed.
We need only glimpse at the division we create and sustain in the name of the Gospel, the attitudes we defend and nurture because we like the part about being chosen, but, like our Hebrew ancestors, are not so sure about the reason for which we were chosen: to show people what God can do with us and our lives when we commit them to God’s way.
Somehow in the midst of God’s anger, justifiable though it is, somehow God is not able to reject even the most unfaithful of God’s people. As we say most times we gather at God’s Table, God is faithful to the covenant even when we are not. So the final word from God is not “You are not my people.” It is, “You are children of God.”
Wayward. Willful. Disobedient. The same kinds of children most of us were at one time or another. But children of God. Children of a Parent for whom rejection is not an option.
I don’t know if some families will ever be the nurturing environments they can be. I don’t some relationships will ever be stable and sustaining, as relationships can be. But I do know that the love of God trumps the anger of God every time. Every time.
And I know that God calls us to be more like that with one another than we are. Amen.
Anything or Everything?
Galatians 6:1-16
Anything and everything has become a pretty good way to describe both the amount and the quality of information available to us on most any topic. Along with more information has come the opportunity for most of us to hear almost exclusively what we want to hear about most things. Most of us have figured which news outlet to listen to to hear people who think like we do. The giving over of the broadcast media to an entertainment mindset has left little room for real news, but what there is comes through filters that are not very hard to identify. The print media has always made it a little easier to identify who’s who and from what perspective they’re coming. So whether you’re a U. S. News and World Reports kind of guy or you tend toward Newsweek or The Nation, it’s pretty easy to validate what you’ve already decided to be the truth instead of being bothered with hearing an opposing viewpoint. Of course the Internet, that most reliable of all sources of information, gives us the opportunity to bookmark the sources we want to read or even to have them send us automatic updates every time somebody we trust has something else to tell us. We’ve come a long way from the days when we had a lot fewer options.
One of the prices we have paid for all this access to information has been losing our ability to listen and read carefully enough to see when we’re being led down a particular path. Thinking for ourselves seems to be a dying art. Hearing and recognizing when we’re being fed a line has gotten harder and harder to do. Another price we’ve paid is the civil give and take that comes from talking and listening with those with whom we do not agree. These days it is far too often, “I’m right. That means you have to be wrong. So there’s no need for us to talk with each other.”
Families get divided along those lines. Workplace drama becomes more difficult to manage when people choose up sides. Neighbors stop speaking to each other when they can’t or won’t agree. And, of course, the church is not immune to any of this either.
Some of us remember when the mainline churches all pretty much respected one another, even when there were some issues of doctrine and practice on which we couldn’t agree. Everybody knew that the Baptists and the Catholics wouldn’t serve the rest of us communion, and we’ve always known that the Episcopalians thought they were closer to God than the rest of us, but we Presbyterians have always known that we’re the chosen people of the New Covenant, so we all just agree to disagree and get along. There have always been a group of independent or free churches outside the polite conversations of the mainline folks, and in recent years, we have seen many others pop up and, in many cases, become the most visible expressions of faith in many communities. All in all, we have become much less tolerant of one another. Worship styles. Positions of doctrine and social policy. Christians who once united in ministry to the poor and other forms of common witness now stay pretty much to ourselves, practicing our own brand of religion. Even within denominations, there are those on this side of a hot button issue and those on the other. Across denominational lines the divisions are often even deeper. Our lifetime has brought us to the point that inter-faith considerations bring a whole new dimension to our public life. We weren’t doing very well as a Christian community, and now we brush up against Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and people who claim no religious identity almost daily. Depending on those to whom you choose to listen, you can hear anything and everything about what other people believe and how they practice their faith.
Spending time with one another is probably the best way to overcome some of these divisions. But you know how it is in the Church. We’re all so busy promoting our own programs and agendas that we just don’t have time or inclination to learn or experience much about other people and their faith. I’ve told some of you about the times I taught an Introduction to Christian Worship course on the college level. One of the requirements of the course was to attend three different worship services in a tradition other than your own and to write up a brief reaction paper to what you experienced. Simple enough. But every time I taught that course, I had at least two or three students drop the course after the first meeting because they didn’t see how it could be helpful for them to attend worship anywhere other than in their own church. And there were always at least three or four others who stayed and wrote scathing papers about the doctrinal heresy they encountered when they worshiped in new places. Spending time with those we’ve already decided to be wrong just doesn’t appeal to some folks.
As Paul concludes his letter to the Galatians, in which we have spent the past several Sundays, he has two primary things to say. One of them is the same thing we’ve heard him say all summer—that doing what someone else tells you to do, in his case following the Law of Moses, it not a guarantee of being right or spiritual or whatever else it is that you’re trying to be. Then and now, there have been and will continue to be people who are always ready to tell us how to live and what to do. Sometimes those people are not members in competing groups, but people in our own community, as the Galatians experienced. These were people who all claimed to be followers of Jesus Christ, people who had all come to faith under the leadership and teaching of Paul. But when Paul moved on to other work, other teachers came and introduced different ideas. Faith in Jesus was a good thing, but surely there had to be some standards and expectations to define who was in and who was out of good standing within the community. Of course Paul had taught them, and correctly, that faith in the redeeming work of Jesus was the way to experience the new life that God promised. But surely that didn’t have to mean not doing what everyone since Moses knew that God expected.
Funny things happen, though, when churches start practicing their faith, especially when they start sharing what they believe with others and inviting them to become part of their community. Not all of those newcomers bring the same history that people in the community share. But they do all bring the gifts that God has planted in them. That’s what happened in churches in
So Paul’s first word as he closes out his sometimes angry conversation with the Galatians is that there are not different paths to God for people of different backgrounds. It is by grace and by grace alone that we come to know God, and that grace has been fully revealed in the life and witness of Jesus Christ. That grace is freely available to all who will receive it. Not just to those who follow the Law. Neither just to those who see nothing to be gained by following the rules. Paul’s words are “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything!” In other words, the two opposing factions in
New creation, always Paul’s image for the change that God works in our lives, is the most important thing Paul has to say to the Galatians and to us. After arguing with them for chapters, Paul calls them back to the reminder that being new people is what it means to follow Jesus, being something different than we were before.
Which brings up the second thing Paul uses to conclude this letter: bearing one another’s burdens.
I once served on what we call an administrative commission in the Church. It was not a happy experience. Often when churches become deeply divided, this one over loyalty and hatred for their pastor, sometimes the division is so deep that it cannot be resolved internally. In our system Presbytery can send in a commission to run the business of the church and to try to bring about healing. For two years, several other folks and I would meet with the Session and the membership of that congregation at least once a month. When we first began to meet, we’d come in to find the pro pastor people on one side of the room and the anti pastor people on the other, usually leering across the room at one another. We’d give them assignments to work on between meetings, things that should have required them to work together while we were away. And every month we’d come back and there they’d be, each group on its regular side of the room and no discernable progress toward any of the work we had assigned them.
Finally, at one of those meetings, the old school teacher in me came out. I made a seating chart, and forced them to interact with one another. It was not pretty, and it never accomplished all that I hoped it would, but at least they stopped leering at one another from across the room.
Paul calls the Galatians to bear one another’s burdens and in that way to fulfill the expectations that Christ has of them, to fulfill the law of Christ. These who have been trading barbs back and forth at each other’s heritage and future in faith, Paul seats boy-girl-boy-girl and says, “Learn to care for and about one another, and in this way, you will begin to understand what Christian community is. Your group is not altogether right. Your group is not altogether wrong. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything. A new creation is everything!”
Our General Assembly has just adjourned for another session, and the Church is still sorting out what happened there. I’ve already heard anything and everything about what the Presbyterians have done this year. There will be lots of opportunities over the next several months for us to talk and pray and worship together and to agree and disagree and then to finally vote to ratify or not ratify the decisions of the Assembly. And yes, there are issues for us to discuss in addition to who can and who cannot be ordained.
Many have been hurt by rulings of the Church in the past. Some will likely be hurt by these. When we learn that tending to that hurt is as much a part of our call and ministry as insuring that the right side wins, then we, like the Galatians, will have opportunities to take steps toward becoming an authentic Christian community. God help us as we strive to become something God makes new. Amen.
Freedom
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Freedom. More ink and sound and video have probably been spent on that concept in the past week than anything except maybe where Lebron James would play basketball. Freedom is one of those things that we in this country talk a lot about, but rarely take time to understand. Children are taught from early on that they live in a country that guarantees them freedom. They grow up thinking that means that some day they can do exactly what they want to do—no parents or teachers or meddlesome neighbors to make them follow the rules. Those children grow to be teenagers who decide to try out as much of that freedom as they can get away with. Most of us can remember those growing years when, “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” was our response to every time we got nailed for doing or not doing something we should or should not have done. Most of us can also identify with a comment our older son, Blake, made to his brother several years ago when Kyle was asserting his independence about something in the midst of some adult dilemma, probably a bill of some sort, that Blake was dealing with. Just about the time Kyle said something about being grown enough to make his own decisions, Blake chimed in, “Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up, brother. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be!”
And that’s the big problem with freedom. Somewhere along the line, we decided that freedom means doing as we please. Not doing what we don’t want to. I suppose there are some few who arrive at that goal. But for most of the rest of us, every age brings with it something other than the freedom we thought we were going to find.
Preachers and theologians are usually numbered among those people who talk a lot, but seem to have difficulty saying something clearly and succinctly. Since Paul is both a preacher and theologian, it won’t surprise you, then, that when he begins today’s conversation by saying, “For freedom Christ has set us free,” he has more to say than just those few words. For several weeks this summer, we have listened in on Paul’s serious conversations with early Christians in Galatia . The primary issue causing dissension there seems to be one involving freedom. Does faith in Christ set us free from the responsibility for keeping the Law, which has always been the way that faithful people thought we found favor with God? That question and all of its corollaries have always caused problems for Christians. If God has promised to forgive us, then why not just do what we want to? If God is in the forgiving business, wouldn’t it be a terrible thing to let God go out of business?
That kind of thinking, of course, trivializes what it means to live faithfully as disciples of Jesus. But we can all admit that we’ve wondered about it. Old Covenant; new covenant. Grace and works. Law and grace. Whatever system it is that we believe describes God’s covenant with us, it is generally stacked in our favor. The ones causing the ruckus in Galatia thought pretty much like we do: grace is a wonderful concept, but we’d better keep some of the rules around to keep people in line, or else we’ll have people doing as they please, all in the name of Christian freedom.
Paul launches off into one of those theological discourses that have provided fodder for Bible study and preaching ever since. “You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.” There he goes again—you were called to freedom, but now I want you to become slaves. Why can’t he make up his mind? And why can’t we get a straight answer when we ask him what we’re supposed to do?
Both the Galatians and we wind up getting a lot more than we probably want to hear.
In Paul’s mind, the whole issue boils down to something really simple—will you be controlled by the flesh or by the Spirit? In a culture like ours, where sex appeal is a tool for selling everything from cars to golf clubs, we think we know about that flesh-spirit dichotomy. Whether it was Mick Jagger in the ‘60’s or Lady Gaga in the 10’s, we’ve seen so much flesh in our lifetime that we aren’t shocked by much anymore. If the only choice we have to offer people is the one between being led by the flesh or by the Spirit, we’re probably not going to do very well. That’s why it’s important for us to follow a basic principle of biblical interpretation: to try to hear a text in the way that its original readers or hearers heard it. As those of us who have engaged in Bible study have discovered, that’s an altogether different task than picking up the Bible and assuming it speaks directly to us across all the years between when people like Paul wrote and our own day.
When we hear about a choice between flesh and the Spirit, even those of us who remember when Lucy and Ricky had to sleep in twin beds on TV (and make us wonder where Little Ricky came from), even we have lost our innocence. We know what flesh is, and we know what being led by the flesh does to us and to our relationships.
But Paul was not a twenty-first century media consumer who had seen it all. He was a product of a first century, middle-Eastern, Hebrew culture. We’ve heard him brag about his piety before. We know he was a Pharisee, a strict interpreter of the Law, one who was always ready to tell people what they needed to do to please God. Until his life-changing encounter with the Risen Christ on the way to Damascus , the carnal side of human nature was for Gentiles, for people who did not know the joy of serving God. But when Jesus called him, he began to look at everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, in a different way. Just last Sunday we heard him say that in the Christian community, there can be no distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, even male and female.
So when Paul talks about choosing between the flesh and the Spirit, he is not being a prude. The word he uses for flesh means more about being a human that it does about watching porn or ogling at the beach. To say that the flesh and the Spirit are opposed to one another is about something much bigger than just trying to restrain our libido.
For Paul, the flesh is everything involved in being a human. Not just the carnal part of our nature, but all of us: that stubborn insistence on having our own way, that dogged assertion that no one is going to tell us what to do. The self-centered mindset that resides in all of us is what Paul calls the flesh—our need to have things the way we want them, even if it hurts or demeans someone else. The insistence that I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
Yes, I know that’s British poetry and not Scripture. And I also know how attractive that kind of thinking is. In this country, we’ve all been reared on it. Be strong. Be decisive. You know what’s right, so just do it. Did your family not rear you to know the difference between right and wrong? Whole generations have been reared in the church to believe that spiritual growth is a simple matter: learn the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong and choose right.
Trouble is, it’s just not as simple as we’ve been led to believe. As offensive a concept as it is to us, we really are bound up in our human nature, slaves to the flesh, people who, by our own power, cannot do the very things we know and believe we should, will not do the things that we know lead to life. Instead we continue in destructive patterns of behavior, unwilling and unable to change our nature. The list of behaviors that Paul identifies with the human condition, not just the condition of a subset of inferior humans, but behaviors that are all too common to all of us—that list is a pretty scary one: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissentions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. All of us were warned about some of those things when our folks first trusted us with the family car and the neighbor’s daughter on Friday night. When we grow up a bit, we know how prone to some of those practices we all are when we’re honest. And that’s Paul’s point. They are simply things that come with being human—things we’d all do if we thought we could get by with them. I know how hard this part of Paul’s instruction is to hear. We don’t like to think of ourselves or of those we love this way. But to believe that we are any other way would mean that we haven’t been to a family gathering or a committee meeting or anywhere else where real people gather in a while. To be sure, hopefully all those practices don’t break out at once, but if they do not add up to a pretty apt description of what people are and do when left to ourselves, then Paul and lots of other people have completely missed the boat.
This wrangling over keeping the Law in Galatia is what prompts Paul to launch off into this diatribe. These are people, Galatian Christians, some of whom had been faithful Hebrews before, some of whom had heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ and changed their lives from Gentile worship of other gods or no god at all. But the bottom line is that these Galatians are people who have committed themselves to follow Jesus Christ, to be led by the very Spirit of God, which Jesus promised would come to guide them into all the truth. That commitment, to follow Jesus Christ, means that they need no longer be bound by that human nature which is hostile to all that God is trying to do in and among and through them.
To be led by the Spirit, which Christians can be, is real freedom—not free do to as they please—that’s what we’ve been set free from. Just as Paul lists behaviors of those who refuse to be led by God’s Spirit and who choose to follow their own leadership, so he sets out a list of fruits of the Spirit, results of living God’s way instead of ours: It is a much more pleasant list: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And then, as if to put an exclamation point at the end of the list, Paul says, “There is no law against such things!” There is, of course, against most of that other list, or at least against some of the things to which it leads.
Our Kyle was a big talker in first grade. I lost count of how many report cards and other notes we got that year from his teacher citing a need for him to practice greater self-control. Can you imagine being a first grade teacher and sending a note home saying, “Kyle really needs to lighten up on the self-control a bit. He is becoming repressed.” I don’t think so. Can you imagine getting a letter from the Stewardship Team saying, “You’re being too generous in your support of the ministry of the Church? We need you to ease up a bit?” Don’t hold your breath. The mid-year financial report will be out soon. I don’t think we’ll be citing too much generosity.
All those good things that Paul calls the Galatians and us to practice are simply not natural to us. Even the best people we know need the power of God at work within them to be loving and faithful and patient and kind.
The Good News is that that power is freely available to us in Jesus Christ. Living faithfully, being an effective witness to the presence of Christ within us is not and never has been just a matter of straightening up and doing right. It is a question of being controlled by God, being a slave to God, instead of being a slave to human nature.
The Galatians struggled with the human and spiritual condition. And so do we. But we need not. For in Jesus Christ, God has come to us to show us what human life can be, as opposed to what it always has been. Where the Law served as a guide and a source of hope, in Christ, and in the abiding presence of his Spirit, we find strength and courage to live not as we must but as we can. By God’s grace and by God’s grace alone, we discover the limits of human existence and the unlimited possibilities of life in the Spirit.
John Newton, who gave us the hymn “Amazing Grace” said, “I know I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I want to be. I am not what I hope to be. But, by the grace of God, I am not what I used to be.” Amen.
Our Prolonged Adolescence
Galatians 3:23-29
One of the most prominent blemishes on my professional record comes from the couple of years that I served as advisor to the Student Government group at the high school where I taught years ago. Nothing criminal or negligent happened, but I was not very good at the job, and the group accomplished little under my leadership. A little background: I taught high school, and I was only a few years older than my students. In fact, the first year I taught, I had students who were all of a year and a half younger than I was, but those kids and their stories are for another time. Suffice it to say, they were never elected to the Student Council. The Student Council at that school did most of the things that Student Councils do anywhere else. They planned activities. They sponsored dances. They raised money. All those things were supposed to provide opportunities for the kids to learn how to become leaders, or at least responsible people.
My problem was that I expected them to be those things already. When they told me they were going to do something, I expected them to do it, or, at least, to give it their best effort.
Remember these were high school kids. Unfortunately, their best efforts sometimes fall a little short of what’s required. The biggest disaster I remember was the year we had to call off the Christmas Dance. Horrors! Or so you would have thought when I finally had to make that call. School policy dictated that we could not proceed with events that were in the red. If we didn’t have the money, we couldn’t do the event. We had met and gone over all the various responsibilities for pulling that event off, just as we had for homecoming and the other things we did. I had told them what they were supposed to be doing in the way of fund raising, ticket selling, and arrangement making. We had entered into agreements with the DJ. We had planned for decorations and all the other things. Somewhere along the way, we had established a deadline by which all the money had to be in. It wasn’t. So on that day, I got to be the one to tell the student body that there would be no Christmas Dance that year.
I’m sure my name is still mud among some of those kids and their families. I had parents calling offering to make up the difference because their little darlings had already bought dresses. I had kids asking for just one more week to get the work done. I had colleagues telling me that if I’d stayed on top of the process and the kids more, we might not have been in that mess.
My big mistake, of course, was in expecting those kids to behave like adults, to assume the responsibilities that they thought they could. They were, even the best among them, still teenagers, still in need of direction, whether they liked it or not. Although I did the typical adult thing and assured them that the fault for canceling the Christmas Dance was all on them and their irresponsibility, I knew then and I know now that a good bit of that responsibility was mine. I was supposed to be the adult, in all of my twenty-five year old wisdom.
Years and years later when the responsibility for traveling with fifty some high school kids from north Alabama to central Florida for a Summer Mission Trip fell to me, my leadership style was quite a bit different. There were still some negotiables. There were still plenty of opportunities for the kids to participate in the decision making process. But there were also decisions that were not theirs to make, deadlines that could not be extended, and responsibilities aplenty for everyone involved. Those trips have been enough years ago now that many of the kids who participated in them are now at least as grown as I thought I was when I was Student Council sponsor. Most of them have turned out pretty well, and most of them will tell you that the boundaries in which they lived and worked during those summer trips and other events in which we participated together, as much as they may have bristled against them at the time, are a big part of the reason they have turned out as they have.
Apparently I’m not the only one who has had experiences like these. Some of you know that Deanna and I are just back from a week in
Nobody, whatever our age, likes to admit that we need direction. Especially in a week like this one, when we’re celebrating our hard-fought and much loved liberty, you’d think we could find something to talk about besides our need for direction.
We have been listening in on this ongoing conversation between Paul and the Galatians for several Sundays now. It has not all been happy chatter. Some there want to impose strict rules on others. Others insist that they’re free from the restraint of the Law, that their faith in Christ has changed the rules for them.
The word that we read as disciplinarian in today’s text, when Paul says that “the Law was our disciplinarian until Christ came so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, is the key to understanding Paul’s teaching.
I well remember the summer that my sister and I declared that we no longer needed a baby sitter. Both our parents worked, and that meant that we had various relatives and others who cared for us in the summer months when we were out of school. The last summer we had a sitter, she was a woman down the street named Inky Matthews. Inky had several children of her own, so our folks thought it would be an ideal situation. We could all play together, and Inky could watch us like we were her own. It took us until half way through the summer to convince our folks that we were basically indentured servants at the Matthews household. Her kids had all the fun. We did all the chores. Her kids got to take swimming lessons at
The disciplinarian Paul talks about was a much better baby sitter than Inky. The word in Greek was paidigogos. It was a type of servant that parents hired to supervise their children, to get them back and forth to school, and to generally supervise them until they were old enough not to need quite as much watching. A little Mary Poppins, a little Mr. Belvidere. Generally, a kind and watchful person, but also one capable of teaching, guiding, helping children learn to be responsible, to care for themselves. Those of us who have taught, and others, too, have heard the word pedagogy, the study of teaching. And, of course, we hear the same root in paidagogos, that the primary function of that baby sitter figure was to teach, to form, to mold, to prepare children and young people for the next stages of life.
That’s what Paul says the Law, our understanding of keeping all the rules of faith, was designed to do for us. God knew that we couldn’t handle freedom all at once, so the Law was God’s gift, not God’s punishment or curse, a gift that was designed to set boundaries and limits for our behavior and our understanding. But that gift was not designed to last forever. God’s intention was that following the rules would govern and guide us until we knew what we should and should not do without being told.
Think of all the boundaries and limits we go through in our various relationships. It’s a long way from, “Don’t touch that! It’s hot!” to “It’s time for you to learn to fix your own grilled cheese sandwich.” It’s even longer from, “Any who call themselves faithful do this and would never do that,” to “Commit your heart to God, and then follow your heart instead of someone else’s idea of what’s right and what’s wrong.”
The idea behind all those growing things is that God expects us to grow, too, to grow in our understanding of God’s love for us and the liberating freedom that it makes possible.
Like most parents who wonder if those adolescent years will ever end, I suspect that God gets a bit exasperated with our extended adolescence, our need for rules long after we should be able to go beyond them, our need to impose rules on others that we know we can’t keep ourselves.
The world that Paul envisions, a world with no distinction between Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, a world in which all are one in Christ Jesus, was not one that he ever saw, except in his own mind and heart.
It is not one we have yet fully realized, either. But it is the world toward which we strive, one in which the way of Christ nurtures and leads us out of our adolescent rebellion and hesitance, out of our need for direction and certainty. A way to live that depends more on being attuned to the continuing call of Christ to follow him than on a set of rules designed to keep us in line.
Everything didn’t go exactly as we planned it the remainder of that first summer my sister and I declared ourselves grown up enough not to need a baby sitter anymore. But if we hadn’t been allowed to take those first steps toward discovering who we were, we might never have found out.
If we never step outside of the box that someone has decided sets the boundaries for faithful living for us, there is a dimension of God’s providence and love we will never know. Sooner or later comes the time for all of us to grow up, to decide that God’s boundaries for our lives are not confining, but freeing. And to discover more freedom in being bound to God than we ever knew could be possible. As joyful and as miserable as those adolescent years can be, we look pretty silly when we’re still living them many years after we should have outgrown them. Let all with ears to hear hear what God says to the Church this day. Amen.
Christ Living in Me, and in….
Galatians 2:15-21
I once served in a small Presbytery where everyone knew everyone. We had a retired minister there who never quite caught on to the purpose of retirement--to stop working and go home. This guy continued to participate in the work of the Presbytery long after his contributions were useful. Whenever he couldn't have things his way, he played a little game that some of us began to call, "Let's you and him fight!" He would never take a position on an issue himself, but he was a master at stirring up an argument between other people who did as a means to get things to come out his way. That strategy worked pretty well for him for years, until we finally got tired of playing his game.
Apparently my colleague was not the originator of that "Let's you and him fight" game. We've been listening in on the debate between Paul and the Galatian Christians, or at least hearing Paul's side of it, for a couple of weeks now. Apparently sometime after Paul had left that region where he had helped churches get started, other teachers had come and disturbed the believers there by adding requirements for faithful living to the fundamental, grace-centered theology Paul had preached and taught. The debate seemed to center around whether Gentile Christians, those who did not have Hebrew ancestry, had to follow all the rules of the Jewish religion if they were going to become members of the Christian community. Paul said no, that faith in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ was the only requirement for being a Christian. Peter, another important preacher of that day, had started out with the same kind of message, but had apparently changed his opinion and his behavior when the more conservative Hebrew leadership of the Church in
Paul's categories of people, either Jews or Gentile sinners, sounds a bit harsh to our ears that have become accustomed to some attempt at inclusiveness, whether our hearts are in it or not. But those categories were the two options Paul and others in his day had for understanding their relationships with people. Whether some early Christians ever had any intention of seeing their faith in Christ lead them to create anything other than some kind of messianic worshiping community within the Jewish faith is debatable. But when the Gentiles, people like us, began to hear the Gospel and respond to it, Christians were faced with a dilemma: Is this for them? Can they become part of our community? If so, how? And what does their admission mean about the nature of the community we're forming? Is uniformity the goal? Or is all this about something else?
Having everyone think alike, behave alike, and in general be alike is a pretty easy way to run an organization. Any of you who have spent careers in corporate arenas know how that's supposed to work. Any of you who have lived in families know how it sometimes doesn't. All of us who have lived in the church for any length of time know how dangerous it is to assume that we are all singing off the same page on most any issue. Making sweeping generalizations about denominations or groups within them is neither helpful nor useful. I lived in a dry county in
After Paul gets his lashing out at Peter over with, he settles into the basic theological question that he sees driving the conflict: does our relationship with God depend on our doing the right thing (or not doing the wrong thing)? Or is salvation really a gift of God's grace that we accept by faith, something we cannot earn by even our best effort?
It's that faith business that gets us every time.
Christian faith begins with the impossible assertion that Jesus could be dead and then be alive again. All of the spit and venom that have been expended to try to prove how this can be true have been in vain, of course, but that hasn't and doesn't keep people from continuing to try. Dead. In the words of the Apostles' Creed, "crucified, dead, and buried." That's what we say we believe Jesus was at the end of Good Friday afternoon. Alive again. Risen from the dead. Those are the central assertions of Easter morning, and of Christian faith. We know, intellectually, that alive doesn't follow dead. That's what makes death such a painful reality. When that EKG monitor changes from beep, beep, beep, to a flat, steady hum, we know that life is over. When we walk away from a committal service, we know why we weep. Yet, the unifying tenet of Christian faith, the thing that unites us from one end of the spectrum of Christian practice to the other, is our common belief that this thing we know cannot be true is. "Crucified, dead, and buried." "The third day he rose again from the dead." Somehow, by the mystery of God's power and grace, we believe that both these are true.
That's the simple part. It gets a lot more complicated from that point on. We don't believe that Jesus just lives. Paul contends that he lives in us. Somehow, by another of God's great mysteries, Christ is alive not only in some other-worldly, pneumatic, mystical sense, but as a real presence in our lives, guiding, encouraging, teaching, forgiving, and renewing us, every minute.
Every time I'm not altogether sure I believe that, I think about the times when I get really angry or frustrated with someone, like Paul did with Peter, but I don't lash out and say all the things I'm convinced they'd be much better off if they knew. Call it conscience. Call it good manners. I prefer to think of it as the presence of the Risen Christ, who died and rose again to make me a new person, alive and at work in me!
Paul thought of his own experience that way. He has spent many words several times outlining his spiritual history, how he was advanced beyond most in his practice of Judaism. But it was not his strict interpretation of or his adherence to the Law that brought him to peace with God. That came to him just as it comes to us, through his encounter with Jesus Christ--by his faith and trust in him and by his efforts to conform his life to Christ's, not as some substitute for the Law, but as a sign of how the presence of the Living Christ transforms our existence from what it is into what it can be. Paul's phrase, "crucified with Christ" is not so much a reenactment of Christ's death on the cross, not even something we do once symbolically in our baptism and then live a life of bliss--it is not so much that kind of thing as it is a new way to experience life every day. Who we once were--willful, self-concerned--that person has died and is no more. The new life that Christ brings by his presence in us is someone different, someone who sees what Christ sees, who does what Christ does. What Christ does, first and foremost, is to love with God's love. And so does the new person we become when Christ lives in us.
That new person that Paul became and that we are becoming, then, does not have to cling to our limited understanding of how things are supposed to be. I'm not sure what it would have looked life if Paul had tried to add a little Jesus to his lifelong understanding that keeping the Law was the only way serve God. I know what it looks like when Christians try it. It's not a pretty sight. It usually pretty quickly becomes a system of rules and practices, and we either conform to them in the same way, or there is conflict and division. The churches in
Holding to the way we've always understood faith and practice is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. But worshiping and serving traditions instead of the God they call us to know, is.
What Paul and other early Christians discovered is that if Christ lives in me, then I must also allow Christ to live in you. And that your response to that presence may not look exactly like mine. Protestant and Catholic. Presbyterian and Anglican. Traditional and Contemporary: the broad divisions that have come from our differing understandings of what it means to have Christ live in us are readily apparent in most every place. But even within traditions and congregations of the same stripe, diversity has become the rule instead of the exception. Some find meaning and purpose in a life of scholarship and reflection, teaching and writing. Others contend that such ivory tower practices do little but muddy the water and insist that we must be doers of the Word and not just hearers. So while some live out their lives as disciples in academic and reflective places, others organize work trips and food pantries and strive for justice in overt and obvious ways. In the place where I grew up, there is a cloistered convent of Passionist nuns who never leave their community. Those women have pledged themselves to a life of prayer and contemplation. They do not go to the Cathedral for
We've all had other issues that have defined what it means to be Christian for us--only to have them challenged when we encountered someone whose experience was different than ours. Women who are anything but silent and submissive. Married, married again, and single people who have gifts of leadership to share with the Church. People who spend their lives studying the Scripture. Other people who just want to know how to do what it tells us to do--and to get on with it without going to a meeting! The truth with which we struggle is that Christ lives in all of them, and in all the other responses to his presence that come together to form communities of faith.
Our eavesdropping on the conversation between Paul and the Galatians will continue for a few more weeks this summer. We'll hear more of what Paul had to say to them. And we’ll decide what we have to say in return.
Our own experience of Christ living in us and in each other will go on much longer. Figuring out what it means for Christ to live in all of us, yet for us to remain a diverse community under his Lordship will take us much longer than this series of sermons. It is a road worth walking, a journey worth taking. Thanks be to God for the privilege of being on it. Amen.
I’ve Got Good News and Bad News
Galatians 1:11-24
I think I’ve told some of you before about a young adult couple who came into a church I once served. They moved into our town from a place not far away. They enrolled their daughter in our preschool, and pretty shortly after that, that started attending worship and then Sunday School and other activities at the church. It seemed to be a pretty smooth and easy transition for them. The Sunday School group they joined met in the room next to the one I taught, so we’d talk some going and coming. I’d often see one or the other of them when they came to pick up their daughter at school. We had Inquirers’ Day events there similar to the ones we do here to help newcomers find out the things they want to know about the church and its ministry. They came to one of those, but they seemed hesitant to make a commitment to the church. They continued to attend and to widen their participation in church events, so nobody pressured them to join.
Finally after about six months, we were together at some event at the church, and they asked me, “I guess you’re wondering when we’re ever going to join the church.” “Well, in a word, yes, but I figured we’d talk about it when you were ready.” “Well,” one of them said, “we think we’re about ready, but there’s one question we still haven’t figured out.” “Fire away,” I told them. “We can talk about whatever seems to be holding you back.”
They didn’t hold back at all when they asked their question. “We’re still trying to figure out who it is that you all are against.”
Now, when you do what I do for a living, you work really hard at trying to maintain a flat affect when you’re talking to people. You try not to let your face react to whatever it is that you hear. You really don’t want to appear shocked, even when the things you hear are shocking, or disappointed when you hear the same old things over and over again. I’m not sure I was very successful holding my face when they asked who our church was against. They said, “What? Are we not supposed to ask that?”
“No, of course you can ask whatever you want to. It’s just that I’m not sure I’ve ever been asked that question before, and I’m not altogether sure what you mean.”
“Well, in our old church, a
I’m not sure what my face was doing by this point in the conversation. They went on.
“We’ve been coming here for several months now. We like it here. We like the preschool. We like worship. We like the music. We like our Sunday School group. We even like your preaching. But we’re still waiting for you to cut loose and tell us who we’re against here. Most of what we hear you talk about is grace. That’s good, but when are you going to get around to who doesn’t believe like we do so we know whether we want to be part of this church or not.”
We had several more conversations before they finally did decide to join us and become Presbyterians. But it wasn’t because we were against the right people. It was because they learned a whole new way to be part of a church.
The Good News in today’s reading from Galatians is that Paul was helping people in his time to discover a new way to be church. The bad news is that it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
We began our journey through Galatians last Sunday and established the fact that Paul was pretty ticked off because people had come into the churches there after his departure and had begun to teach things contrary to the foundation of faith he had laid there when he lived and worked among them. Apparently, these new teachers threw a jab or two at Paul himself while they were trying to point out the errors in his theology and practice. His background in Judaism made him suspect to some. The fact that he was not one of the twelve who had been with Jesus caused problems for some others. His insistence on including Gentiles in the community of faith was a big issue for almost everybody. So it was easy to put Paul on the defensive, to back him into a corner and make him defend himself.
You probably know what usually happens when you back somebody in a corner. It is usually not pretty. It isn’t with Paul, either.
Credentials are usually pretty important to most professional groups. Get a bunch of preachers together and before long, the conversation will turn to where they went to school and with whom they studied. In Presbyterian circles, the
Paul had some problems in the credential department. We’ve already seen that some doubted his credibility because he was not one of the Twelve. Paul goes to great lengths to try to convince people that his conversion and call experiences are every bit as valid as those of the disciples, if not more so. The Gospel he proclaims, and his commission to proclaim it, come straight from God, he claims. He is not dependent on those in authority in
This all sounds well and good to us because we know this is Paul. Even if we’re not students of the Bible, we’ve been in church enough to know that Paul is one of the good guys, unless, of course you’re a woman or a Pharisee or some other group that he’s particularly hard on in some places.
If we didn’t know Paul, though, I hope we’d have some pretty serious concerns about his defense of his position and practice.
My young couple new to the church would probably have had an easier time with Paul than they did with me. In his earlier life, there was little question about who he was against. He railed against the young Christian church. Threw believers in jail. No question about who was right and who was wrong. But then came that experience along the road to
In his fervor to defend himself and to establish his authority, Paul comes dangerously close to the kind of power play the church has seen all too often between Paul’s day and ours. Wendy Farley, who teaches at Emory in
The Good News part of this story, however, is that there always seem to be people like Paul around in the Church to push for renewal and change and openness to what God is saying and doing among us now as opposed to assuming that God has said all there is to say long ago.
The Church continues to go through a time of expansion of thought and practice that has caused the same kinds of divisions among us in this century and the one just ended as those that divided the Galatians. Contemporary and traditional have come to some kind of peaceful co-existence in many places, reflected by the indications of several different kinds of services on signs and ads. In other places, the wars continue to rage. None of those praise choruses in here. No stodgy old hymns here. Our pastor has degrees from all the right places. Ours doesn’t have any, but experienced a call just the same. If you were baptized right, you’re OK. If it wasn’t done our way, you’ll have to do it again. Everyone is welcome in some places. Other places are only for those who meet particular doctrinal or theological criteria. Our church is the biggest one in town, so we must be right. Yours isn’t growing, so that ought to show you you’re not doing something right. None of us knows where all these debates and conflicts are headed. They’ve been going on for years.
Authority is not the answer, because authority that is imposed eventually becomes something to resent and overthrow. Popularity can’t be the test, because we all know how quickly that can change.
Any time we find ourselves drawing boundaries around God’s grace and the freedom of God’s Spirit to share it, we need to be very careful, because God has a way of breaking through whatever boundaries and limits we draw around God and God’s determination to love the world. It really is one of those Good News, Bad News kind of things: The Good News is that God is God. The Bad News is that we are not. Thanks be to God for both. Amen.
Strong Words About Important Things
Galatians 1:1-12
Any of us who spend time with Garrison Keillor on NPR on the weekends know what's coming when we hear him say, "It's been a quiet week in
Back in the long ago times when people actually wrote letters to other people and mailed them-with a stamp--we used to get a letter from my grandmother every week. My grandparents lived about seventy-five miles from us, but seventy-five miles must have been a lot farther then than now because we almost never saw them, but we got a letter every week, usually on Thursdays. Those letters always began exactly the same way: "Dear family. This leaves us all well and hope you all are the same." Then she would launch off into the details of what was ripe in the garden in the summer or how cold it was in the winter, usually with side stories and details that would make Garrison Keillor proud. The opening sentence of her letters was almost always the same, "This leaves us all well, and hope you all are the same." That meant what it said: that there wasn't really any news to report. She was just writing to stay in touch. Any of you who remember communication in the days before instant e-mail, text messages, and tweets, and can remember when long distance phone calls were only for emergencies, and then preferably after nine pm, can probably remember getting letters like those, too. The few times we got a letter that started out any other way were times when we knew something was up. Like the time the letter opened, "Your daddy fell the other day." That was code for "my granddad is in the hospital and we'd better get down there quickly." He died a few days after that letter arrived. Sometimes, just the way a message starts out tells us a lot about what it has to say.
Sometimes we call expected patterns of communication like that conventions--conventions of letter writing, conventions of communication in general. There were conventions at work when Paul's wrote letters that became part of the New Testament, ways that people expected to be addressed, ways they expected to hear the news that was coming. New Testament letter conventions sound a bit awkward, even to the few of us who still write letters today. Normally, if we want to know who sent us a letter, we look at either the return address on the envelope or turn to the very end of the letter, right after, "Yours truly" to see who wrote it. In Paul's day, it was just the opposite of that. Letters began with the name of the sender. When Paul wrote to his friends, the Philippians, he began, "Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints who are in
The Galatian letter, with which we will spend most of the summer in worship, is not conventional in its form. From the very beginning, sort of like that letter from my grandmother that said, "Your daddy fell last week," it seems pretty clear that this is not going to be a newsy little note from home with sweet words of blessing and encouragement. "Paul, an apostle," not Paul, called to be an apostle." Not even an apostle by the will of God. "Paul, an apostle--sent neither by human commission nor from human authority, but through Jesus Christ and God the father who raised him from the dead…to the churches in
From the very beginning, there is the sense that this is not going to be happy correspondence. Paul seems to be more than a little concerned about establishing his credibility. I'm an apostle, he contends, not because any human hierarchy said so, but because God called me to be one. I guess there are several scenarios that could put someone in such a defensive posture. I doubt that there had been a scam alert published in the local papers telling people to watch out for fake preachers who would try to exert their authority over them. But surely someone had come into the Galatian Churches and created controversy over Paul's authority, challenged some of the things he had taught about what it meant to be faithful to God by following Jesus Christ. The Church was not yet well enough established to have things like Presbyterial Committees on the Ministry to be sure that former pastors stay out of the business of their previous calls. Paul didn't seem to mind meddling at all. Of course, we wouldn't have half of the New Testament if he hadn't found it necessary to write letters back to places he had preached and taught to keep people in line. To the churches in Galatia Paul has some strong words to say, and we all know how people get when the preacher starts using strong language! But the strong words Paul has to say are about important things, things that the young Christians in
Paul chides them for turning from what they learned and experienced as the grace of God in Jesus Christ to some other understanding of the Gospel. It is not then, as is so often the case, that the church has fallen into some petty argument about what color the carpeting ought to be or whether we're going to inscribe names on the stained glass windows or even if there will be stained glass windows. The issue that has divided Paul from the Galatians is of much greater import than those things. The issue appears to be one of how to understand the very nature of our relationship with God and the difference that relationship can make in our lives. We'll spend the next several Sundays in this letter, so we'll be more and more familiar with the things Paul wants to be sure they understand.
The crux of the matter for Paul, and ultimately for all of us, is that salvation, that lifelong process by which we find peace with God and with ourselves, comes to us at God's initiative and not our own. God does not love us because we are descendants of the right tradition or because we have submitted to the required rituals or because of any other thing that we have decided to do or not to do. God loves us because God has graciously chosen to do so. And the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ show us the great lengths to which God will go to enable us to experience that life-changing love. Paul had preached that kind of Gospel, one grounded in the unconditional, unmerited grace of God, made known to us in Jesus Christ, when he lived and worked among the Galatians. It is by faith that we come to the saving relationship God offers us. So in
You know how it is, though, when the preacher leaves. After Paul had established the Church in
Paul was not the author of the Gospel, but its power had transformed his life, and he spoke boldly about how it could be effective in the lives of all who would respond to it. He committed his transformed life to proclaiming the Gospel and enabling people to experience its transforming power in their lives. We’ll see as we live with this letter this summer just how important a right understanding of what it means to follow Jesus was for him.
I suppose it would be a little similar to working and learning and singing a piece of music the way we understand it might be—maybe even getting pretty good at it. And then having the guy who wrote the piece show up to spend the weekend with you and discovering that he has his own ideas about how that piece is supposed to be understood and sung. And that his ideas are pretty important to him, so much so that he wants you to do it his way.
The Church has struggled with the same issue that divides Paul from the Galatians for generations. Can it really be that we can let just anybody in here? Isn’t there any standard by which we’re called to evaluate and monitor one another and the effect that our witness has on the witness of the community of faith? We Presbyterians have written and amended about as many books and guidelines about that kind of thing as anybody I know. The Westminster Confession stood until we decided we were tired of arguing about parts of it, so we adopted some other statements to stand alongside it. We continue to try to formulate statements about what it means to be faithful to God by following Jesus, and sometimes the give and take involved in that process involves some strong, harsh words. The General Assembly will convene again in a few weeks and pick up some of those conversations where they left them off two years ago, and, I suspect start up some new ones. Presbyteries and local congregations and individual believers will struggle with whatever decisions get made there, and the conversations at those levels can involve some strong and even harsh language, too. We speak and feel so strongly about these things because they are so vital to our understanding of what it means to be faithful.
Whatever else it means, and we will likely continue to wrangle about that, our faith begins with God’s unmerited favor—with grace freely given to all the world in the redeeming life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. What our journey of discipleship looks like beyond that point is another whole conversation, but our journey begins with grace, is sustained by grace while we are on it, and will offer us grace when it come to an end. At the risk of sounding as defensive as Paul, this is not my position, nor is it Paul’s. This is the Gospel, the Good News: that in Jesus Christ, God has called us to new life. And that by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can respond to that call and become new people. Thanks be to God! AmenFeeling a Triple Punch? I've Got Good News For You!
Romans 5:1-5
I'm thankful I haven't had to make any commencement speeches this year. Graduations have been happening everywhere from preschools to graduate schools recently, and they will continue for another couple of weeks before the season comes to an end. Some of you have graduated as many times as I have, and most of us have sat through enough ceremonies with family and friends to know that the commencement speech is not usually the most important part of the celebration. Most everyone is there to see their child our spouse or neighbor's kid walk across that stage and receive a diploma. Before that can happen, though, everyone has to sit through the speech.
Graduation speeches are usually full of hope and optimism. I remember when I was a senior sponsor back in my teaching days. One of the responsibilities of the English teachers who were senior sponsors was to review the speeches students were planning to give at graduation, not necessarily for grammar and punctuation, but to make sure they weren't going to do or say something stupid! (Remember, I taught in the '70's!) Usually, in our school at least, stupid wasn't usually a problem, but sappy almost always was. There and most other places where I've sat through graduations, the hope and optimism is thicker than sweet tea in
Some of you may have read about the commencement address Ann Curry, an NBC news personality, gave a week or so ago. She was invited to give the address at
Adversity is a word with which most of us have become all too familiar in the past couple of years. This year’s graduates will pretty quickly be more familiar with it than they want to be. That’s a part of what Ann Curry told the folks at
I don’t know anything about Ann Curry’s spiritual life. I don’t know if she’s ever read Paul’s letter to the Romans. I don’t want to accuse her of plagiarism. God knows she’s taken enough lumps for that speech already. But her comments about adversity and determination in the face of it sound an awful lot like what Paul wrote to
Few of you are hearing those words for the first time. In fact, most of us have heard them so many times that we pay about as much attention to them as we do to commencement speeches. “That’s all well and good,” we say, “but you don’t really know what I’m up against here. It’s easy for you to say that suffering is a way we experience God’s presence, but I’d just as soon experience it some other way.” And we dismiss Paul’s words just like some in that college crowd dismissed Ann Curry’s—easy for her to say, she’s got a six figure job, and, besides, she didn’t even know which class she was speaking to!”
As a culture, we don’t put stock in suffering. Dr. T. R Bailey was our dentist when I was a kid. Pediatric dentistry, the no pain variety, hadn’t made its way to
I’m certainly no student of medical history, but the whole field of pain management came into being somewhere between my appendectomy in a Catholic hospital on my tenth birthday, when it did little good to ring for a nun or a nurse to tell them I was in pain—they always came in and said, “Of course you’re in pain. You had surgery!”-- and Deanna’s C-sections with an anesthesiologist crouched near her ear gently whispering, “If you have pain, I have drugs.”
We have learned that suffering is not a good thing. Will Willimon, a United Methodist bishop and excellent preacher, won an Associated Church Press award for an article he wrote for the Christian Century about what he learned as a result of an encounter he had with a chain saw last winter. The article is a hoot. Once he decided he was going to live, he figured at least he’d earn points in the nursing home since, in his words, “a chainsaw gash surely trumps a broken hip.” But the injury he suffered must have hurt. I doubt he was thinking about the award-winning article he would write as he waited in the Emergency Room in a small town mountain hospital in
No, we don’t put much stock in suffering these days, even though we’ve all done more of it in recent months than we ever planned to.
The suffering Paul meant didn’t have much to do with economic uncertainty or with less than desirable opportunities awaiting us. He wasn’t talking about misfortune brought on by poor choices or misfortune over which we have no control. The suffering he meant was of a variety most of us know even less about. Paul was talking about suffering that comes to us because of our faith in Christ and our insistence that it is the foundation of our lives.
Peace with God, that elusive goal for which too many of us strive all our lives—peace with God is already ours, Paul contends. That peace comes to us because we are justified by faith and not by our own efforts. And that is exactly why so few of us ever fully experience it-because we cannot/will not accept the fact that salvation is God’s to give and ours to receive, not ours to earn by impressing God with our goodness and good works.
Regardless of what many of us believe, God has always been graciously inclined toward us. Sending Jesus into the world was not a second best plan that God had to come up with when we fouled up the original so badly. The same God who loved us in the Old Testament is the God who decided to come among us in the person of Jesus Christ, to experience life as we do, to redeem the life he shared with us, regardless of how far we had allowed it to stray from God’s intention. As painful and hard to hear as the story of Jesus’ redemptive death is for us to hear, it shows us the length to which God is willing to go so that we can live at peace with God, with ourselves, and (the hardest of all) with one another.
But even then God wasn’t through. The Holy Spirit, which we celebrated last week, and on which we depend every day of our lives, comes and stays with us so that we are not alone as we face adversity or whatever else life throws at us.
We can, I hope, muster come compassion for all those who graduate and move forward into the next phase of their lives in the midst of the most confusing times any of us have seen in a while. They’re facing enough adversity and uncertainty of their own. They don’t need to know about our 401K’s and our shrinking pensions. They just need to find jobs and keep funding Social Security for the rest of our lives.
And all of us need to remember that this world we insist on making such a mess of really does belong to God, and that we do, too. Adversity can be an opportunity for us. Suffering really does produce endurance and character and hope. And hope that is grounded in God does not disappoint because God has gone to great lengths to assure us that we are loved and that we will be cared for, even in the midst of suffering.
Getting past what we think we know because we’ve heard it so many times and hearing God’s Good News spoken into the lives we really live is a goal all of us need to set. When we listen for the Word of the God who made us in love, redeemed us in love, and sustains and guides us in love, that word will come, and it will transform our understanding of who God is, who we are, and who God calls us to be. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God who loves us in ways we have not yet begun to imagine. Amen.
One of Those Special Birthdays
Acts 2:1-21
Birthdays. I’ve had fifty-seven of them. Some of you have had more. Others think my fifty-seven put me over the hill. However many of them you’ve had, most of us look forward to some kind of celebration on our birthday. Oh, I know, you have to tell them not to make a fuss this year. No point in celebrating after a point. Some of us have been thirty-nine and holding for too long to fool anybody much. But, for most of us, even though we tell them to just let it pass, we know they’re not going to, and they know we’re looking forward to some kind of celebration.
Most of us can look back over our years and point to several birthday celebrations that stand out. We probably don’t remember it ourselves, but somebody somewhere has pictures of most of us on our first birthday with cake smeared all over us. Maybe we had on a special outfit for the day, or maybe Mom was smart and put us in a highchair with just a diaper because she knew what a mess we’d make. (And because she knew she could use that picture against us when we were older!)
Jump forward a few candles on the cake. Maybe it was the birthday when you got your first bike. Or that special doll. Maybe you got to go to Disney World. One or more of those childhood celebrations probably sticks out in your mind. Then a few years later, you hit the big sixteen. Whether there was a Camaro or a Mustang in the driveway or you got your own key to the family station wagon, that sixteenth one is usually one we remember. Then there was eighteen. And twenty-one. You don’t have to tell your pastor how you celebrated your twenty-first, but I’ll tell you that Kyle went out for a legal drink—with his Sunday School teacher! I don’t think any of us will forget that one.
Our celebrations start slowing down some after the big milestone birthdays. Thirty hits some hard. Forty hits some even harder. Then come the ones that qualify you for senior discounts. And by the time they come, you’re past being offended by them, and you look forward to the dollar off!
The thing about most of those early milestone birthdays is that they tend to be pretty much all about us. Whether you were sweet sixteen and never been kissed, or turned sixteen and hoped your folks didn’t find out what you’d already done, turning sixteen, or eighteen, or most of the other milestones is all about us. We want the right people there to celebrate with us, and we want them to know what a special day it is, and what a special person we are!
Somewhere along the way, though, our perspective changes. After the bikes and the cars and the drinks, eventually we arrive at a birthday when we grow a little more reflective (and, hopefully, a lot more mature). We still like to be remembered. We still like to celebrate with the people we can. But somewhere along the way, birthdays become a time to think beyond ourselves, to be thankful for the joy we know, and to think about how fortunate we are to share that joy with the people we do. Maybe even to think about how to broaden the circle of people with whom we share our life instead of keeping our celebration confined to just a few or to think about ways we can help others know some of the joys that have made our celebrations so important to us.
It’s a shame that we have to get to a certain age before we figure out the really important things in life. But when we figure them out, they change the whole character of our life.
The Day of Pentecost is the day that many celebrate as the birthday of the Church. Christmas is a lot of people’s favorite holiday, whether their celebration involves the Church or not. Easter is probably the biggest festival day for worshiping communities. But fifty days after Easter, after Jesus had lived among the disciples again, after he had told them about the mission they would continue after he was gone—fifty days after Easter, the disciples gathered in
You heard Luke’s story of how one particular Pentecost celebration forever changed the meaning and significance of that day for those who follow Jesus. The rush of a mighty wind. The Holy Spirit coming and equipping people to do things they never knew they could do. On that particular day, the gifts of the Spirit involved speech and the use of languages that no one could explain, but which enabled people to hear the Good News of Jesus and the salvation he had achieved in ways they could never have heard if they waited for the Church to organize and to set up a Board of the Evangelization of the World and committees and sub-committees to train people in all the languages they would need to know if they were going to go into all the world as Jesus had commanded them to do. But the Holy Spirit didn’t wait for the Church to organize and to agree about how to proceed with the work before it. The Holy Spirit blew through God’s people and empowered them with gifts they did not understand, but with gifts that were immediately effective in sharing Good News people needed to hear.
What a first birthday celebration it was! No cake. No pictures. But bold proclamation that God was up to something new, something that people needed to hear. And that God had provided the gifts people needed to tell the world.
Luke says that everyone there was amazed and perplexed. Some asked, “What does all this mean?” And others blew it all off, saying they must have gotten into the new wine too early that day.
That’s when Peter stepped up and quieted the scoffers and amazed the faithful by explaining what a special day this was. “We’re not drunk!” he told them. “It’s just nine in the morning, too early for even a bunch of people who had been called drunks before to be lit up.” No. We’re not drunk. This is that day God has promised, a day when God’s own Spirit will come upon us. When the young will see visions and the old will dream dreams. When our sons and our daughters will speak God’s Word. When all will hear God’s Word and know that it is for them. A day when everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
Peter’s sermon goes on from those familiar and reassuring words. He tells them the whole story of how Jesus had come from God and how his life, death, and resurrection had made possible a whole new life for those who would believe. He told them in one sermon the same thing I try to tell you every time we gather for worship: that God’s love is the foundation for a new way to live, and that God’s love is for all who will receive it.
We don’t always see visible results of the opportunities we have to experience God’s love together. On the day of Pentecost, after Peter preached, three thousand people believed, were baptized, and began to live a new and faithful life. The gift of God’s Spirit on this day gave birth to the Church. And the Church began with a spectacular display of God’s power and generous gift-giving.
I don’t know how the Church remembered that day in its earliest years. I’m sure people who were there talked about it and told and retold the story the way people tend to do when things are important to them. I can imagine the little children as this time of year began to roll around and people began to tell that story again and to plan celebrations to commemorate it. You can almost hear them as they walked along to those last few days of school. One might ask another, “You want to go fishing this weekend?”
“Can’t!” his friend replied. You can’t go either. Not this weekend. It’s Pentecost. My mom’s already been telling me that story again—about the wind and all those languages and Peter’s preaching and all those people getting baptized. We’ll have to go to church this weekend and hear it all again.” And so the Church began to tell its birthday story year after year.
Trouble is, too many of our Church birthdays have been like those milestone ones we’ve all celebrated. They’re all about us. We tell this story and all the other stories that are so important to us. But we mostly tell them to ourselves. Two thousand and some birthdays we’ve had now. I wonder how many more we’ll have before we reach that point when we realize that it’s not about us, that it’s time for us to change our celebration from one we share with ourselves into one that shares our faith and our joy with people who don’t know them.
Pentecost. Holy Spirit. Those are unsettling terms for a lot of people in the Church. Some are glad when this day comes and goes. A little talk about the Holy Spirit is OK, but let’s don’t get carried away here. Remember, we are Presbyterians after all, not Pentecostals.
I beg to differ. Without the Holy Spirit, there would be no Presbyterians or any other kind of Christian. Had God decided to receive Jesus back into the joys of Heaven and ignored his promises to send a Comforter, a Guide, an Advocate to show us the way and to keep us faithful to follow it, we’d have been left to fend for ourselves. And both the Scripture and our own experience have plenty to say about how that’s worked out before. But Jesus did promise to send the Spirit. And God made good on that promise.
While we good, moderate, decent-and-in-order Presbyterians may understand the presence of the Spirit among us differently than some, and while our celebrations of this day may be a bit tamer than some, it is not some exclusive, toned down Presbyterian brand of the Spirit which we celebrate today. It is the same Spirit which blew through that crowd in
Those of you who are still celebrating those birthdays that are all about you—go ahead and enjoy them as long as they last. And I hope they last a long time. But know that one of those birthdays is coming when it really won’t matter if there are gifts and cake or a big crowd to share them with. A day when you’ll be thankful to be there to celebrate, and thankful for opportunities to share what you’ve discovered with people who still think it’s all about them. By then you’ll know that that day is coming for them someday, too, and you’ll want to help them have something to sustain them when it comes.
The time for the Church to tell its stories to itself should have passed a long time ago. In too many places, it hasn’t. It’s time for us to make our birthday celebration a different kind of party—to create worship and other things to do that are not about us, but about all those other people who don’t have a clue what our celebration is all about. They probably won’t just show up to eat cake with us. Too many of them already think they don’t belong. So we’re going to have to celebrate in a different way, learn a new language, find a way to carry what we find here out there where there are people who don’t know that it’s for them, too.
Once in a while we hear a story about someone who decides to go parachuting on his eightieth birthday or to go scuba diving on her seventy-fifth. Good for them. Two thousand ten is a ripe old age to begin doing something new and different, something risky and dangerous. But maybe this is the year when we in the Church will begin to do our celebrating among those who need what we say we’ve found. Happy Birthday to us. We’ve had more than our share of cake an ice cream. Let’s go give it to some who haven’t had nearly enough. Amen.
What Must I Do? What Can I Do?
Acts 16:16-34
Like most of you, I suspect, I’ve never been to jail—except to visit someone else. There was a woman in one of the churches I’ve served who never quite caught on to the idea that when her bank account ran out of money, she was supposed to stop writing checks. She wound up in the local jail several times before she finally figured it out. For a couple of years, I worked with some friends to coordinate a youth leadership program similar to the one that happens here in
On the day we toured the jail with the kids, we prepared them as best we could for what they were about to see. The jailer had prepared the inmates as best he could, so there wasn’t anything particularly shocking going on. There was one notorious local murderer in jail then, awaiting trial for a series of gruesome murders, but even he behaved himself while we were there. The other person of note was the woman from my church serving time for bad checks. As we rounded the corner toward the women’s cells, she saw me coming and said, “Hey, Bob, how’re you doing?” Those kids were four plus impressed that I actually knew a prisoner. They were a bit confused when I told them she went to my church.
Paul’s time in jail is probably not the most admirable thing on his resume, either. Let’s see: served as organizing pastor for several new congregations; wrote a good portion of the New Testament; together with Peter, is responsible for the inclusion of Gentiles in the Christian community; served as a missionary on several fields. Any Pastor Nominating Committee would have to take a second look at his paperwork. But then there are these jail sentences. Not just this one we read about today, but several times Paul found himself in jail. That’d be hard to sell to the Session, don’t you think? I know Jeb Magruder served as pastor of a church in
Although a jail sentence may be legitimate reason not to let your son or daughter date someone, to dismiss Paul because he did time would be to miss some things most of us need to know.
The story of the way this particular jail term ended is as dramatic as most of the things that make for movie plots. On this particular occasion Paul and Silas are in jail for interfering with the free market economy that characterized
Now, that’s a wonderful thing for the girl, in one way. Now she can live some kind of normal life. But she is still the property of the people who are not nearly as happy with her now that her primary marketable skill is gone. Those people realize that it’s not going to do them a lot of good to punish her, so they go after Paul and Silas. They hauled them before the local magistrates and had them thrown into jail for disrupting their business. After being stripped and beaten, most likely in public, they were locked up in the most secure part of the local jail, probably not a place that students and their Chamber of Commerce leaders got to tour very often. That’s when the story gets even more interesting.
I’ve been a visitor on a couple of Kairos Prison Ministry teams, and I have a friend who does that at least once a year, so I can attest that some people really do sing hymns in jail. But it’s probably not the first pastime that most of us think about for prisoners. Preaching and teaching were more than a job for Paul. They were a calling, something he could not not do. So, apparently, even though facing uncertainty that would send most of us to some resource other than a hymn book, Paul and Silas began to talk with the people there with them: thieves, people with politics someone didn’t like, perverts (And perverts in Rome would have been something even for our jaded sensibilities!). But Paul and Silas didn’t just run their tin cup up and down the bars, demanding to be released. They talked with the people chained to the wall with them about their faith in Christ, how it had changed their lives, and how it would change the lives of those people, too, if they would believe.
Their talk went on into the night. The jailer probably checked on them at the appointed times, but after a while, he must have thought it was safe to go catch a nap. How much trouble could they cause singing hymns? I tried to get Art to help me lead the first part of today’s worship chained to the wall to give us all an idea about what Paul and Silas were up against, but he balked when I told him it would involve singing.
You’ve probably seen video of some operatic soprano shattering glass with a high A. It can happen. The Scripture doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of Paul and Silas’ singing, but something caused an earthquake in that jail that night. I’m not certain that it was their singing, but I’m just saying….
I’m not sure what magnitude of earthquake it takes to break the chains that held the prisoners to the wall, but that’s what happened, according to Luke. Now you’d think any self respecting thief or pervert would be gone. Whether it was fear of the aftershock that might be coming or something Paul and Silas had said about changing their lives, something caused all those prisoners to stay right where they were. Paul and Silas, too.
That’s when we meet the jailer, who becomes the real focus of this whole story. He comes running in with his sword drawn, not to lop off the heads of any prisoners he could catch, but to fall on and take his own life. The job of Roman jailer was not a union position. There were no three strike provisions before strict discipline was administered. If the jailbirds escaped, the jailer might as well fall on that sword because that would be a more merciful death than the one he would face at the hands of the people who employed him.
But before he could do himself in, Paul shouted that they were all there. Remember, when the jailer had left them they were singing Amazing Grace. Now this. What the heck kind of dopey bunch did he have this weekend? Was this some kind of a trick? But when he got there, there they were, all of them.
Something about the spirit in that room took hold of that jailer just as it had taken hold of those prisoners who could have gone free. What in the world could cause a bunch of men to give up their freedom to stay with these two big mouthed preachers?
Whatever it was, that jailer wanted some of it. So he asked Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” “How do I get in on whatever this is that has obviously changed all your lives?”
Paul said what Paul always says when asked that question. “Believe on the Lord, Jesus Christ, and you will be saved. And that salvation will come through you to your whole household. But it begins not with doing, but with believing.”
Sooner or later, all of us come to that same question. Our arrival at that point in our lives may not be nearly as dramatic as that jailer’s or those other prisoners. Sometimes that’s a problem for some. We keep waiting for something dramatic, earth shattering to happen, and it doesn’t. We just keep living our life, probably the same way we’ve always been living it, even though we’ve got plenty of evidence that the way we’re living isn’t quite working out as we had hoped. We may not think of ourselves as enslaved or possessed, but anyone who has suggested that we might try something different hasn’t gotten very far. So we go on measuring ourselves and those we value by our possessions, our achievements, our standing in this group or that one. I’d like to tell you that you could come here, to the Church, and be free of all that, but you know better. The Church is another notch on the belt for some, another gold star on a resume. I’ve had more than one person, not here, not yet, ask me how you run for the job of elder. When I told them that most people run from it instead of for it, they laughed and said, “No, really, how do I get to be one?” Telling them that the office would seek them didn’t help their understanding much, either. I don’t know any of them, but I read the other day that there are five, count them, five people being nominated to serve as Moderator of the General Assembly which meets this summer. I can’t imagine one person wanting that job, but there will likely be six or more by July. I would assume that all those people already have a sustaining relationship with Jesus Christ, but there is still something that motivates some to think that by holding this office or doing that task, they can gain something along the way.
So in the Church and in the rest of the world, we still haven’t learned that it isn’t by doing or not doing that we find favor with God. Sooner or later, we all come to the Philippian jailer’s question; What must I do to be saved?
The answer, when it comes from someone who has our best spiritual interest at heart, is just as frustrating and unnerving now as it was then. The bottom line is that there is nothing you can do to achieve salvation. In fact, salvation is not an achievement at all. It is a gift. And only when we realize that the doing that was necessary to set things right between God and us—Jesus did long ago. Our call is to believe—to believe that somehow God accepted the faithfulness of Jesus to serve as an antidote of sorts for all the unfaithfulness that separates us from God’s intention for us. To believe that God loves us, just because God has chosen to, and not because we have finally figured out how to make God happy. To believe that God loves us and to experience the lengths to which God will go to enable us to experience that love in a way that changes our lives is the beginning of faith.
That’s right. I said it’s the beginning. We can choose to stay there at the beginning and bask in the radiance of God’s love and never take another step until the trip to eternity sets out. But we would miss most of the joys of this new life our belief has opened for us. It’s not that we’ll never do anything for God. It’s that we finally come to understand that we do, we give, we tell, we share—whatever it is that we do is not to earn God’s attention or favor; it is to attempt to be thankful for it.
What must we do to find salvation? What can we do? Believe. Believe on the Lord, Jesus Christ, and we, too, will be saved. Thanks be to God! Amen.
Spirited Travel
Acts 16:9-15
When the Presbytery of
The other truth of the matter is, of course, that all of those eighty some people rarely show up at the same time. I know that the whole membership of the larger, longer established congregations of our Presbytery or our community don’t show up on any given Sunday either. But in a growing church like ours, absences are a lot more noticeable.
No, this is not a sermon on absenteeism. I’ve never understood those—the very people who need to hear them are, by definition, not there. This is a sermon about people being led by the Spirit of God to be where they need to be at any given time. By now you know that I’m one of those crazy people who believe that the vast majority of the population needs to be in a Presbyterian Church somewhere on Sunday mornings, and that significant numbers of people in this community need to be in this one. But this is not really a sermon about the surpassing virtues of this congregation as a sign of God’s presence in the world, either.
This morning is a pretty typical Sunday for us. Of those eighty some for whom we look before we start counting visitors, we can usually count on between fifteen and twenty being somewhere else. The Rothrocks, for example, are not here this morning. They’re in
I doubt that any of those folks thought much about the Spirit of God calling and leading them to be where they are this morning. Especially not Kyle who’s doing his food service thing on Mother’s Day. Some of us who are here in worship this morning probably didn’t think much about the Spirit calling us to be here, either. We are here because this is what we do on Sunday morning. Hopefully, the Spirit is in it all somewhere, but we can be honest enough with one another to admit that that’s probably not the first thing we thought about when we decided we’d come to church this morning.
We are, after all, Presbyterians. There are other people who talk a lot more Holy Spirit language than we do. But there are not a lot of believers who depend more on the leadership and nurture of the Holy Spirit than us stalwart old Presbyterians do. So maybe we all need to be more open to the presence of the Spirit in our lives and in the life we share in common when we worship and serve and learn together in the Church. Don’t be alarmed now. We’re not headed in any radical direction this morning. Pentecost is still two Sundays away, and even then, our celebration of the Holy Spirit will be a lot more orderly than some we could find.
The story we read from Acts this morning is full of the leadership of the Holy Spirit, sometimes named, and sometimes assumed. It’s Paul we encounter this morning after spending the last two Sundays with Peter. And from the very beginning, there are things going on that assume some power beyond even Paul at work in the events we experience. First, there is that sense within Paul that he and those traveling and preaching and teaching with him are being called to go to
One of the problems we encounter when we read Acts is that there is a lot of traveling going on, most of it to places we’ve never heard about. It is tempting to skip over whole sections of the story of the early spread of the Gospel the same way that some of us can remember coming up with good excuses not to go to our friends’ or neighbors’ for a cookout the week after they came home from the Grand Canyon. As good as the burgers and cole slaw may have been, in the old days, we knew that we were not getting out of there with out watching the slides of their trip.
Paul’s travels can be like that sometimes. If you’re interested in geography or history, then knowing that he went by way of Samothrace and Neapolis to get to
But if we think about why Paul is going to those places, then the trip becomes something other than a travelogue. If ever there has been a person who understood what it means to be open to the call of God’s Spirit, it was Paul. When that vision of a man in
Little did he know that, somewhere about the same time, a woman named
So outside the city of
Just as the Spirit had called Paul there, so that same Spirit bright
Paul was not supported by a General Assembly Mission budget. As he traveled around the world in response to God’s call, he depended on ways he could support himself and people who could provide for him and his work.
Just a few days earlier, Paul was busy where he was. And
When we learn to be as open to the leadership of the Spirit in our lives as Paul and
But remember, when Paul arrived in
I don’t know. But I know that circumstances aligned to bring them all together to hear God’s Word and to be transformed by it.
And I know that the same Spirit that worked all that out is still at work here among us after all these years, calling us together week after week to hear God’s Word together. Challenging you and me to share what we find here with people we know who need the same assurance of God’s love and care that we need and find in worship, in study, and in service in this congregation.
In our neighborhoods and in our interactions with people throughout the week ahead, there are people who would ask us for help if they knew how or if they knew what they needed. Perhaps the best gift we can offer them is to be open to the possibility that they need the same thing we do—to know that God loves them and that there is a place where they can find assurance of that truth. Sometimes they ask. Sometimes we invite. Always the Spirit is at work among us, placing opportunities to share our faith before us. Thanks be to God! Amen.
In the Way or On It?
Acts 11:1-18
If the people in
The thinking of those good folks in
The transition of that family from strangers to part of our family was, for us, as joyful a process as the one Peter experienced when he saw Cornelius and his family and others like him come to faith in Christ. Well, it was for most of us.
There were two women in that congregation, sisters who had married brothers, and had been there all their lives, who came by to see me one afternoon a few weeks after
I wasn’t sure what to say. Turns out I didn’t have to say anything because they weren’t through talking. These were the same people who had not been happy, they reminded me, that the friend our Blake had brought to a lock in earlier that year turned out to be a Black child. We had told all the kids they could invite a friend, and our Blake didn’t know that meant only certain friends. These were the same people who had not been at all happy, they reminded me, when another family’s son came home when he didn’t have anywhere else to go because he was dying of AIDS, and I went in and out of their house just like I did anybody else’s. I had buried him that summer, and they weren’t pleased about that, either. The conversation that ensued is not really important. I never got around to it, but I wanted to so some snooping around on Ancestry.com to see if that family didn’t descend from some of those people who hauled Peter on the carpet in
Peter told them the story you heard me read from the Book of Acts a few minutes ago. It’s the same story that book tells in the chapter just ahead of the one from which we read. Outside the Gospels, there aren’t a lot of stories in the New Testament that get told more than once. So this one seems to be one to which we ought to pay special attention. Shortly after we left Peter after he had raised Tabitha from the dead last week, he had this strange encounter with Cornelius, a Roman who seems to be a believer, but his pedigree doesn’t run through
For some, that was enough—that Peter, a Jew, and not just any Jew, but a leader in the movement to establish the Church, would enter the house of a Gentile, sit down and eat, was unthinkable. When the good people back in
A couple of interesting things about that story. Peter was Hebrew, and old habits don’t die easily for any of us. So when he first had that strange encounter with that sheet full of all kinds of animals, clean and unclean, when that voice told him to kill and eat, even he said, “Now, wait a minute. Let’s be clear here. We all know there are things there I’m not supposed to eat. Unclean things that I have never tasted.” And we all know that Peter wasn’t just talking about things that couldn’t pass the health inspector’s visits to Sandy Bottoms or the Surf. But the voice Peter heard was relentless: “I’ll decide what’s fit and what’s not. Kill and eat.”
Three times that happened to Peter. Whether you believe in symbolic numbers or not, three times ought to be enough to get our attention. It did Peter’s. And right after that experience, those guys showed up and took him to the home of Cornelius. He must have figured out that there wouldn’t be much sense in asking about going to a Gentile’s home. Kill and eat. Go where I send you. Something imperative about those verbs.
We’ve chided poor old Peter for not being enough of a thinker several times. He’s beginning to think about what’s going on around and within him. He wonders if there’s not some connection between what Jesus had told him and the others about God’s love being for all people and the opportunities that seem to be thrust upon him. The first telling of this story tells us that when he got to Cornelius’ place, the people there were so receptive to his teaching about Jesus that he baptized them. In his mind, the Spirit had led him there, and the Spirit had opened their hearts, so who was he to stand in the way of what God was most obviously doing.
And that’s the gist of his testimony before the leaders in
The response of those who questioned Peter seems to come a bit too early and too easily. I’m sure there was discussion not unlike that I had in my study that afternoon in
It still hasn’t reached some places. And so every church, every believer, every denomination sooner or later has to come to terms with what it means to welcome all the people God calls to be among us. The Commission Jesus gave the disciples and all who come after them was not to go out and tell all the people you like, or all the people who are like you, about God’s grace and mercy. The Commission we have received is to go and to make disciples of all the nations, and to remember that Christ is with us as we go.
So the real question we come to, just as Peter did, is whether we are in the way of God’s will when we insist that God and the Gospel need our protection from this kind of people or that kind. Or whether we are willing to be on the way to discovering what God has been trying to show us all along—that the Gospel has the power to transform lives--not to meet our expectations, but God’s.
It is providential that we come to God’s Table today after being confronted with this story again. The most joyous part of this celebration for me as the one presides over it in Jesus’ place is that I get to be the gatekeeper for this celebration. And the best part of that office is that the gate is open to all. “This is the joyful feast of the people of God,” I will say to you in a bit. Not just our branch. Not just those who understand it as we do. Not those who are sure and can demonstrate they are worthy to be here. This is the joyful feast of the people of God. Peter discovered that God shows no partiality. Someday maybe God’s Church will discover that truth, too. Amen.
