milestone.

well, i have graduated.  Master of Divinity degree conferred.

now what?

doubting thomas.

so i just moved and don't have internet regularly except when i'm at school.  and i preached the second sunday after easter again this year.  as with me, this sermon goes all over the place, but people said afterwards they really appreciated it.  so here it is.

every year for the past few years, i have either taught or co-taught a class for "skeptics," people who are honestly interested in christianity, but have questions. very often, one of those questions is, "is it ok if i have questions?" this class always works my own faith pretty hard, but i really value the experience and would not give any of the past few years up. this sermon came out of some of that reflection.

Doubting Thomas

Have you ever had anyone ask you if you have “accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior”? If you haven’t, let me say that you are lucky. It seems to happen to me with uncomfortable regularity. I guess I just don’t look like someone who has. Once, I just had someone mutter, “There’s hope in Jesus” as they walked past me.

Every time this happens, I think to myself, is that what Christianity is? Accepting Jesus as personal Lord and Savior? Getting some kind of nebulous hope? Going to heaven when we die? This sounds so different from our gospel reading today, doesn’t it? “But these [signs] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing, you may have life in his name.”

Man! Someone call the Bible translation committees! John got it so wrong! We’re not supposed to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. We’re supposed to believe that he is our personal Savior, right? And “life in his name”? Where’s heaven? Where’s what happens after I die? That’s what Christianity is all about. Heaven or hell. Right? ...Right?

My point here is not to belittle street evangelists. They are obviously sincere enough about their faith in Jesus to go up to complete strangers and try to share that faith. They believe what they’re doing is the right thing, and I won’t say that street evangelism has never had any effect. God uses us all in different ways, and God can use anything to build the kingdom of heaven.

But what I am saying is that the “don’t you want to go to heaven when you die” gospel that the street evangelists share with people is only part of the gospel. It’s a compressed, simplified, and to some extent, a reduced gospel.

What does John’s gospel say today? Notice that there is no mention of heaven in the statement where the writer says why he’s written this book. John says only, “that through believing, you may have life in his name.” Heaven isn’t mentioned anywhere. And this statement comes right after the story of “doubting Thomas.” And before that story is the story of Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearance in John to the disciples where he says to them, “receive the Holy Spirit.” And then he gives them some instructions that seem strangely this-worldly, doesn’t he? Again, nothing about heaven or what’s going to happen after you die.

We are now in this period between Easter and Ascension Day, between Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension into heaven. In studying this text, I kind of noticed something for the first time: Jesus didn’t go to heaven after he died! He came back to the world for a while. He taught his disciples more, he ate with them, he had a body they could touch. And after he did go to heaven, he left them with a promise that he would come back to this world. So there’s something more to this than going to heaven when you die.

On the other hand, it’s easy to go the other way from the street evangelist and make the gospel all about this world. Jesus’ teaching certainly concentrates on how we should live for God in this world, in the here and now. But again, the gospel of John does not quite fit that either. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” Jesus says. There is a spiritual reality that also cannot be lost from believing in Jesus. And that spiritual reality contains a word we don’t like very much: sin. Now the church has disagreed over Jesus’ saying here for centuries, and to be honest it baffles me as well, because Jesus also says that only God can judge sin. But at least it must mean that there is a spiritual reality that we engage as Christians as well as a physical one rooted in this world. To lose either side is to shrink Jesus. It may be easier to get people to sign on to a shrunken Jesus, but then, who are they believing in?

And what does it mean to believe? I recently read an article that talked about Protestant problems with doubt. As you might know, one of the key pushes during the Protestant Reformation was to ground salvation in “faith alone.” “Sola fide” as it’s often quoted in Latin. There are a few of these grounding elements of the Reformation; some people call them the “solas.” But since the reformers put such an emphasis on faith, on belief, doubt became an enemy. We all know what a “doubting Thomas” is, right? And we all know that it’s not a compliment.

After the Reformation, the Enlightenment made certainty its holy grail. If you could just be certain about something, you had a place to stand. If you could just be certain about your faith, you are saved. It’s simple. It’s easy.

And it’s totally unrealistic.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” That sure makes it seem like doubt can’t be part of your life if you follow Jesus, doesn’t it? And yet what often gets missed in this story is Thomas’ shocking answer: “My Lord and my God!” Thomas may have doubted, but he came to such an amazing declaration of faith.

Many scholars see an echo of the Shema in Thomas’ answer. The Shema is the basic prayer of Judaism. It is one of the first things an observant Jew will say in the morning after waking up, and one of the last things said at night before going to bed. It is called the “Shema” because that is the first word of the prayer in Hebrew. We know it in English as “Hear O Israel: The LORD your God, the LORD is one.” In Hebrew, LORD stands in for the proper name of God, and the Greek Jewish writings carry that tradition over. When Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” he is making an extreme declaration of faith for any Jew.

And tradition tells us that Thomas went to India to spread belief in Jesus there. There are still churches in India today that trace their heritage back to Thomas. And of course, Thomas’ tradition was strong enough in the first two centuries of Christianity that we have a collection of Jesus’ sayings named after him: the gospel of Thomas. Regardless of its later reception by the church, you do not get a gospel named after you if you are considered the paramount example of someone who failed in your Christian journey.

If doubt is the enemy of faith, we would have to not only disqualify Thomas, but a huge number of the Psalms as well. Many, many Psalms express doubt about God and God’s purposes. They cry from the darkness of despair and depression. Just last week on Good Friday, we heard Jesus cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If that is not doubt, I don’t know what is. If even Jesus doubt, and not only Jesus, but the psalm-writer before him, how can we say doubt is the enemy of faith?

Notice Jesus’ response to Thomas: “Stop doubting and believe.” Doubt is normal. A faith that never doubts, that never wrestles with questions like the possibility or impossibility of resurrection is not much of a belief. But a faith that never stops doubting is not much of a belief either. Chronic, constant doubt kills our belief. On one side, we have to lose our affection for certainty and realize that we will never have it. Faith, belief, trust - these are not certainty. They are instead the voice that says, “My LORD and my God!” even in the dark times. But on the other hand, if we can never say that either because we are too concerned with getting something right, with missing something, with something being impossible, we do not have faith either.

Remember where Jesus appears: in the middle of the disciples. They are all in a group, relying on each other to get them through this dark time. And it is the group that bears witness to Thomas. One of the promises of Jesus is that he formed a community to carry on his work and his teaching. Everyone receives the Holy Spirit. In the dark, in the doubting times, we never have to go it alone. Thomas might doubt, but he sticks with his fellow disciples anyway. When our own faith is falling to pieces, the church picks us up and carries us until we can see Jesus again in our lives.

Jesus isn’t my personal savior. He is all our savior! And he is not just “my Lord” but all our Lord. And sometimes we might get something wrong, but there is always someone else to offer another viewpoint. Jesus is not just spiritual and not just of this world. We question and we doubt, but we gather with Christians every week or month or year to fall on our knees and say, “my LORD and my God!”

Amen.

radical hospitality.

i know i just preached, but since i didn't preach at all january and february, i guess i have some making up to do :) what actually happened was the rector was coordinating a diocesan retreat yesterday and they had a drama at the later, more popular service, so i volunteered to write a sermon for the small early service, which is where i've been preaching about once a month for the past year.

and the passage was John 12:1-8 which is one of my favourite gospel passages out of all of them.

Radical Hospitality

Did everyone see the media frenzy back in the fall about the whole “Jesus’ wife” thing? A scholar at Harvard discovered an ancient papyrus fragment from Egypt that had the words “Jesus said, ‘my wife...’” written on it. The whole thing was hard to miss... It was on CNN, ABC, NBC, all the news stations. People were speculating and commenting. Even the Vatican came out with a strong statement accusing it of being a modern forgery.

The whole thing got me thinking, you know, why is this such a frenzy? Why are the mass media, companies with budgets in the millions of dollars, spending so much time and energy on a little fragment of papyrus, a couple inches square, and an obscure researcher at Harvard working in the incredibly obscure field known as “papyrology”? You know, the down-to-brass-tacks practical question of what makes them think they’re going to get their money back from this story?

Let’s face it: Christianity is big news. And not only things that appear to question orthodox Christian belief like this papyrus. The media frenzy and circus around the election of the new Pope is pretty much identical. Pope Francis gave an audience just yesterday to 6900 reporters and media staff. Almost seven thousand men and women came to hear the Pope, not to receive spiritual guidance or wisdom, but because it’s their job, and they are getting paid to send news of this man all over the world.

But what struck me as almost funny about the coverage of that little papyrus was the superficiality of it. As I said, papyrology is a pretty obscure field, and you really can’t expect journalists to dig into the nuances and details of this field that they report on maybe once or twice in five years. But it wasn’t only papyrology that got a superficial coverage, it was Christianity itself. No one, at least that I saw, bothered to talk about early Coptic Christianity in Egypt, the community that probably created the papyrus. Is it because this is also an obscure branch of Christianity, or is it because this community is currently being threatened by the new Islamist government in Egypt, and contemporary politics are too much of a hot potato to be in a story about Jesus and his wife?

And no one, again, at least that I saw, ever commented about one of the names for the church in the Bible itself. Do you know what the church is called in the New Testament? Yeah, it’s called Christ’s bride. The author of Ephesians compares the relationship of a husband and wife with Jesus and the church. In fact, he gets so enraptured with his metaphor that he actually has to stop halfway through this exalted rhetoric to comment “oh wait, but I am talking about Christ and the church.” At the end of the visions in the book of Revelation, “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’” They invite everyone to “take the water of life as a gift.” This image seems to parallel the visions in Isaiah of Israel welcoming the nations to Jerusalem to worship the one God of Israel, with the church as the inviting bride.

Is it so surprising, then, that we might find an ancient writing from a tradition that scholars know was heavily mystical, where Jesus refers to his wife? A professor last semester, who has his Ph.D. in papyrology suggested just that: that this fragment might not be written about a human wife for Jesus, but it might have been written to encourage the church as the bride of Christ. Especially considering that the rest of the sentence has been torn off the papyrus fragment, we really have no idea. Even the Harvard researcher who made the discovery was cautious, commenting that this proves nothing one way or the other about the historical, human Jesus. Her voice did tend to be downed out, however, by the excitement!

But the other thing that struck me in the coverage is that whenever anyone goes searching the gospels fro a wife for Jesus, the inevitably latch on to Mary Magdalene. And it makes me wonder, why not this Mary in our gospel passage today? She is not Mary Magdalene, but Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

Imagine the scene. There is a banquet. People are reclining on couches. They are probably all getting ready for the Passover which will start in a few days. Maybe they are talking about the trip to Jerusalem, tensions with the Roman military occupiers, gossiping about the priests in Jerusalem. Maybe Martha is encouraging them to eat up all the bread, because you cannot have anything with yeast in the house during Passover. Lazarus and his family may have been giving the banquet to thank Jesus for raising him from the dead. And in the middle of the dinner, Mary, the sister of the host, in fact probably one of the hosts herself, comes in, breaks a stone jar of perfume over Jesus’ feet, and then unveils her hair and wipes his feet with it.

Do you know how intimate an act that is? She is touching, caressing him. She has unveiled her hair in the presence of all the guests, especially all the unrelated men in her house, and she is wiping the feet of her rabbi with it. A woman’s hair in the Middle East is a symbol of her sexuality. It is no coincidence that, even at its most minimal, the Islamic hijab covers a woman’s hair, or that observant orthodox Jewish women cover their hair so that after they are married, no man sees their hair but their husband.

And what is the objection to her act? It is not, as it is in a slightly different version in Luke, that the woman is sexually impure. There is no comment on her sexuality at all. And it is not the objection about status which Peter gives in the very next chapter when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. Much has been made in commentaries about Jesus washing feet that it was a slave’s job. But that is not the objection here. Instead what Judas objects to is the financial impropriety of her act. Not even Mary’s brother comments at the way she is opening herself and her family up for accusations of dishonor. No, all anyone seems to care about is the waste of money.

The financial equivalent is actually quite hard to work out in this case. A denarius was a silver coin of the Roman Empire, and it was what a daily laborer would get paid. These are like the people who are hired to work in the vineyards, in Jesus’ parables. There was no middle class as we think of it in the Roman Empire, so to call something like this “minimum wage” would be misleading. It would be enough to keep a family on. So something more like a construction contractor’s yearly income, maybe. According to the U.S. government, that would be something around $35,000. Mary pours $35,000 worth of perfume on Jesus’ feet.

So when I think about the intimacy and the extravagance of this event, not just the financial extravagance but also the personal risk involved, do I think this Mary was Jesus’ wife?

No, not really. For one, this is the only hint of any kind of relationship between these two. For another, we don’t know if her brother and sister berated her in private afterwards. For a third reason, I think this extravagance can be explained by the fact that just in the previous chapter, Jesus raised her brother from the dead. This does not seem an unrealistic response of gratitude to me. Her family is already giving a dinner for Jesus and all his disciples. We can surmise both from the apparent size of the party to the fact that the family owned a jar of perfume worth that much money that they were very wealthy. It is even possible that the nard had been meant for Lazarus, and when Jesus raised him from the dead, the siblings decided to anoint Jesus with it out of gratitude. I think, though, that we can rule out that they expected Mary to wipe Jesus’ feet with her hair. That was her own offering, her own sacrifice of her dignity and honor for Jesus’ sake.

And what is Jesus’ response? Does he protect her sexual honor? No again. He simply accepts her sacrifice and protects her from criticism of her financial decision. “Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’”

Many scholars see an echo of Deuteronomy 15:11 in Jesus’ reply here, so like a good seminary student, like a good preacher, I went and looked it up. And indeed, the two comments are remarkably similar. But what was even more interesting was the context of Deuteronomy 15. Deuteronomy 15:11 comments that there will always be poor in the land, but the chapter is not about the poor, but it is about the Sabbath year. Every seventh year, ancient Israel was supposed to cancel everyone’s debts. Deuteronomy chapter 15 is mostly concerned with laying down the procedure for loans to be cancelled from repayment. 15:11 comes at the end of an instruction not to take the proximity of the Sabbath year into account when making a loan. “Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, 'The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,' and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing.”

God turns our economic practices on their heads. The Israelites are instructed to give loans, not only without consideration of interest income, but even without consideration of ever being paid back! Mary’s personal risk in this story takes it even further. Not only does she give extravagantly financially, but she also gives extravagantly of her own dignity, personal status, and sexual reputation.

Every week, when the gospel passage is read here, we affirm that it is the gospel of the Lord. And we praise Christ for giving us his gospel. This is a gospel that calls us to an uncomfortable, a radically uncomfortable re-ordering of the way things work. The gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to extravagant hospitality and extravagant personal and financial risk without any consideration of what we might “get back,” or even, in some cases, what consequences we might suffer. Mary could not know that Jesus would defend her, although she surely knew that someone would object to her actions. And she did it anyway.

May our own risks and gifts be made, not with the risk-reward, “how am I going to make my money back” calculations, but with obedience to the gospel and such love of our rabbi and our Lord.

Amen.

Here I am.

yeah, i haven't blogged in a while.  mostly because i haven't preached in a while.  life has been crazy and hectic and also i was sick and today was the first preaching date that made sense in my calendar.

this sermon on Exodus 3 is based on one i preached for Encounter back in July 2011.  i like this version better.  i always felt fake shoehorning in down-to-earth, practical advice into my sermons.  and partly i had to do that to make the sermon at least 30 minutes, which was what they expected.  i much prefer preaching shorter, 1-point teaching sermons.  this one was about 15 minutes instead of the original 30-plus.  it also avoids the transcendent/immanent theophany bit that i tried to include in the original version and then gutted because someone who read it before i preached it didn't like it.

what i did also add to this one instead of a reference to John 8 is some of the language of this morning's gospel passage from Luke 13.

Here I am

Do you ever feel like Moses in this passage?. When he appears here in Exodus 3, he has murdered a man and run away from being an Egyptian prince, but you know, here he’s doing pretty well for himself. He has a wife, a kid, a job, even a rich father-in-law... maybe it’s not as exciting or luxurious as it used to be in Egypt’s royal court, but hey, no one’s trying to kill him.

He’s a shepherd for his father-in-law. And then... God shows up.

It’s funny, we usually think that when things are going pretty well, that’s evidence that God has shown up in our lives. But sometimes in the bible, it’s the opposite. Things are going well and then God shows up and your life takes a left turn.

When I first learned about seminary, I thought, “I’m a Classics major. I don’t need another useless degree!” But here I am. In the past month, my husband Chris got offered a job in Manhattan. Talk about life taking a left turn! We’re now getting ready to move again, in the middle of the semester as I finish out at Princeton and at All Saints’. The next few months are going to be crazy and busy and full of work, but faith says God is involved in this somehow.

And our story is not nearly as dramatic as Moses’. In this case, Moses is out with his sheep, and “the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, 'I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.'”

So, something out of the ordinary is happening. The bush was on fire, but it did not burn up. Bushes usually burn up. I remember once driving through California, the hillsides were black with the remains of bushes and trees that had been completely consumed by wildfire. So Moses, quite logically, goes over to check this out.

And then God calls to Moses: When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”

And Moses said, “Here I am.”

I don’t know about you, but if a burning bush called my name, I’m not sure “Here I am” would be my response.

But Moses’ response - “Here I am” - is a very important one in the Bible. It’s used several times throughout the whole Bible. In Hebrew, it’s just one word. The rabbis traditionally interpret this word not just to mean, “Here I am,” but, “Here I am, ready to do whatever you command me.”

Abraham says it in Genesis 22, and God tells him to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Samuel answers with the word in 1 Samuel 3, when god is calling him to be his prophet.

Isaiah says it in Isaiah 6, when God asks, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

In Acts 9, God calls a Christian named Ananias in a vision and he answers with the Greek version of this same word. And then God tells him to go meet a young Pharisee who has been killing Christians, but who had a mystical experience on the road to Damascus and is struck blind. Ananias’ job will be to restore this man’s sight.

And I love Ananias’ response. Ananias’ response to God’s command is, well, he’s not so sure. He kind of says, “God, are you sure you know what you’re doing?” ‘“Lord,” Ananias answered, “I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name."“

In the gospel of Luke, Mary asks her questions to the angel first, but she gives the same answer as well. “Here I am, the servant of the Lord.”

You see, this is kind of the pattern. Life is going along, and the -rrrt! God calls your name. Abraham finally has his promised son. Samuel has a pretty good thing going serving in the temple. So does Isaiah, he’s an honored priest. Ananias is living comfortably far away from the persecution going on in Jerusalem. Mary is all ready to get married. And God shows up in all these lives and says, I’m going to pull you out of your comfort zone.

Even Moses is afraid isn’t so sure God has the right person.

And very often the people who have just responded to God in faith take this opportunity to push back, to ask questions, to engage in real dialogue with God.

After telling Moses who he is, God gives him this divine plan. He says, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and now I am going to keep my promises to them. Their descendants are already a nation; now I am going to give them the land I promised.” And then he says to Moses, “So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

And what does Moses say? Does he say, “Wow, I’m so honored”? No.

Does he say, “I’m ready to serve wherever you need me”? No.

First, he is afraid and he hides his face. When God finally tells Moses what he is to do, Moses says, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

Ananias comes by his doubts of God honestly. Even Moses wasn’t sure God was getting it right. But, spoiler alert! All these people end up doing what God asked them to do. Moses and Ananias argue about it for a while, and it takes three times before Samuel’s teacher Eli finally figures out what’s going on, God wins.

And I take great comfort in God’s reply to Moses. When Moses asks, “who am I?” God doesn’t say, “You’re Moses! You got saved from the massacre of infant boys! You were raised as an Egyptian prince!” No, God says, “I will be with you.”

God will be with me. God will be with us. God did not leave Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Mary, Ananias, or any other person he’s ever called. And, did you know, we’re all called?

We are call by a God who appears as a burning bush in the middle of the desert.

We are called by a God who will always be with us.

We are called by a God who became a human like us, who walked and taught, ate and died, like we do.

But Moses, Abraham, Ananias, Mary, you and me … we argue with him, we question him, and we’ve run away from him. God looks on the Israelites as they groan in slavery. He is concerned. He remembers his promise to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob. He wants to bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey. He talks with Moses and promises to be with him.

His name is an entry point into knowing him. If God wanted to stay majestic and all-powerful and incomprehensible, he would not have given a name at all.

But this God wants to be known!

When God first introduces himself, even before God’s name is revealed, God is simply “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” And Moses is afraid and hides his face. What is Moses afraid of?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of the United Kingdom says that his teacher told him what Moses was afraid of was seeing the suffering of the innocent from God’s perspective, and that Moses was rewarded for it. He writes, “If he could ‘look at the face of God,’ if he could understand history from the perspective of heaven, he would have to make his peace with the suffering of human beings… He would understand the ultimate justice of history. That is what Moses refused to do, because the price of such knowledge was simply too high… He preferred to fight injustice as he saw it, than to accept it by seeing its role in the script of eternity…” That refusal, which Rabbi Sacks describes as, “born not out of a lack of faith but precisely the opposite, the conviction that God wants us to be in active in the pursuit of justice” that drives everyone who answers God’s call with, “Here I am.”

When God shows up in our lives and calls us, God calls us to live in a new way for God’s creation. Moses is taken out of his comfortable life and sent back to his own people, his former home, to fight for freedom and liberation, to fight against the oppressor and for the oppressed.

It’s so easy to think that wealth and smooth sailing in life are signs of God’s divine favor and hard times are signs of God’s punishment. But Scripture is not sure that is true. Are those who suffer oppression and injustice, violence and death, worse sinners than everyone else?

God’s call to us contains a warning: we only have a little time. God enters a dialogue with us; we question and push back and bargain, but by our very human nature, we only have a little time. Lent may be when the days are getting longer, but it begins with Ash Wednesday, which reminds us that “you will all perish just as they did.”

When God calls us to fight injustice, to struggle with and for the oppressed, to carry his message of liberation to the world, we have a choice. We can answer, “Here I am,” or we can run away. “Here I am” does not mean unquestioning, silent, unthinking obedience. Abraham and Isaiah answered with that, but Moses, and Mary, and Ananias did not. And they stand for us as examples in the faith. Even Jesus, praying in the garden before his own death, struggles with God. Without Jesus’ death, there would be no resurrection, the resurrection that began to bring God’s new creation, that inspires and drives and fertilizes our lives to bear fruit for God.

God calls us to go out into the world, outside of our comfort zones, to leave behind the things we thought were signs of his blessing, and to change the world, to get rid of injustice, racism, sexism, violence, and all kinds of discrimination and oppression.

And God will be with us.

Amen.



Quote taken from: Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation: Exodus: The Book of Redemption (New Milford, CT: Maggid Books, 2010), 38-40.

before they're gone...

very sadly, my former church was forced this year by the load of an unpayable mortgage to merge with another one.  and the new church doesn't have much use for women in a teaching ministry.

from 2005 to 2011, my husband and i were part of the emergent community that existed there.  they were our friends, our family, our congregation.  and eventually, as i learned and matured in seminary, i was given the wonderful priviledge of being one of their preachers.

i discovered a few days ago that some of the last sermons i preached there are still available on the website. this website will go away sometime this month, probably, in favour of the one from the new church, so this will only be relevant for a few more weeks.

the church i am currently attending does not have recording capabilities, and of course this blog is mostly my sermon manuscripts, but if any readers here would like to actually hear me preach, go ahead and click the link.

the sermons are much longer than the ones i have posted here; that community was used to 30-45 minute sermons.  i find i much prefer writing and preaching shorter sermons, but most of these hit the 30 minute mark. 

i'm not actually very proud of these.  they have significant flaws, and they represent a growing stage for me as a preacher and, really, pastor.  i disagree with some of the theology i preached in these, but they reflect the dominant theology of the community and the founding pastor (who always reviewed my sermons with me after i preached them).  in my humble opinion, the earliest one available there, from April 14, is the best, although today if i preached it, it would be less supersessionist.  the latest one, from September 4, is the same as this post.

with the change to a new year, sometimes it's good to look back and see where we've been.  this is where i've been.  it's an unalterable part of my story.

Advent light

i volunteered to preach this morning because originally it was going to be an elderly british priest who needs a magnifying glass to read his own sermons. but without telling me, the rector decided to preach all 4 sundays in advent as a series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. when i said i didn't have to preach, he said he thought i ought to have the learning experience, so i did anyway. and i even managed to keep with the Bonhoeffer theme.

at first i had no idea what i was going to preach on, because all the lectionary passages this morning seemed so freaking short, and the gospel bit is first just a list of names and then a quote from Isaiah. and i couldn't extend the selection (it's only part of the pericope) because next week takes up the text right where this week's leaves off.

and then in one of those weird things that happens when you're writing a sermon, i realized exactly how much Luke was cramming into these short verses and i ended up with this incredibly dense sermon. it really wants to be about double this length with some lighter bits to break it up. but they like their sermons short and sweet at the 8am service.

Advent Light

Happy Hanukkah!

Today is the second Sunday of Advent, but it is also the first day of Hanukkah. We lit the first candles last night. Like Christmas, Hanukkah is a winter holiday celebrated with light. It commemorates the restoration of the Jerusalem Temple after Antiochus Epiphanes put up statues of Zeus, Apollo, and Hermes and sacrificed a pig on the altar in order to force the Jews to stop worshipping their God.

It may not be surprising, then, that the books that record this story, the books of Maccabees which are found in the Apocrypha of our Bibles, are books that look forward intensely to the coming of God into the world. This is a viewpoint we often call “apocalyptic.” The books of Maccabees also record some of the clearest references to the hope of resurrection and the life of the world to come in any of the literature we have. We even know that Jesus observed Hanukkah, because John’s gospel tells us in chapter 10, “At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon.” It’s not surprising that Jesus would be associated in the gospel with a holiday about God’s intervention in the world and resurrection, is it?

Hanukkah is very like Advent, that way. They are both times of looking both forward and backwards. Hanukkah looks backwards to the miracle of the restoration of the Temple, and forwards to God’s ultimate restoration of the world, resurrection. In Advent, we look back to Jesus’ birth, his first coming, and forward… To God’s ultimate restoration of the world, resurrection.

It is the desire for this restoration, this ultimate point of God’s contact with the world, that seems to be motivating John the Baptist in Luke’s gospel today. Luke begins by listing all the human rulers of the world, beginning with Tiberias, the emperor in far-off Rome, and going through governors and “tetrarchs,” which is the word simply translated as “ruler” here, all the way down to the high priest in Jerusalem. Luke’s inclusion of the high priest in this list of other rulers tells us that they ought to be lumped in the same category with them, oppressors and corrupt. The corruption of the world extends all the way to Jerusalem, to God’s own Temple.

And then…. What? ”the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” The word of God doesn’t come to Rome. It doesn’t come to the Jewish rulers in Galilee, Ituraea, or Abilene. It doesn’t come to the high priest in Jerusalem. It comes to a man in the wilderness. This is a further indictment of the power structures and hierarchies of this world, both secular and religious. Although, that’s not a division ancient people would have recognized. One of the titles the emperor in Rome held was “pontifex maximus,” high priest. And the high priests in Jerusalem were as much political powers and leaders as they were religious leaders. God passes over both pagan and Jewish powers by human structures, and he sends his word to a man in the wilderness.

This is a powerful statement about how God works. God doesn’t care about human power, about the people humans think are important. Keep in mind that the situation here is the Pax Romana. Augustus, Tiberius’ step-father had welded together an empire that stretched from Spain and Morocco, encompassing all the lands around the Mediterranean Sea, on past Turkey, Syria, and Palestine all the way to what today we call Iraq. And not only had he merged this huge amount of land and disparate peoples, each with their own religion, language, and culture, but he had, in the end, established peace. The wars that had convulsed the Mediterranean world were over. Roads stretched from Barcelona to Rome, from Alexandria to Jerusalem and on north to Byzantium. Jerusalem sat at a crossroads of the ancient east-west road from Baghdad and the north-south road from Alexandria. In this peace, made possible by the Roman emperor and the Roman armies, wealth was being created and cultural exchange was happening on a scale that not even Alexander the Great, 300 years earlier, had ever accomplished.

And God said, you know what? I don’t care. It’s all wrong. The Roman peace came at the cost of thousands of lives, oppression, taxation, and religious compromise. The Jewish people had rioted against Pontius Pilate when he came to Jerusalem because he put Roman eagles inside the Jewish Temple there. We know from Josephus, himself a Jerusalem aristocrat, that the Jewish high priesthood at the time were more politicians than priests, more concerned with power and Roman politics than serving God.

Do we know anything about corruption today? Do we know about peace, wealth, and good living bought at the cost of lives? Do you know how hard it is these days to find a product not built, assembled, or manufactured in a factory in China somewhere? Or many of the other countries with minimal labour and environmental protection laws? Do we know about trying to change these things through human power?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer recognized the incompatibility of God’s coming into the world with human power structures. As someone who took the step of defying the human authorities of the Nazi government and the official church they had authorized, he knew the risks. He was eventually executed for taking part in a failed plan to assassinate Hitler himself.

Bonhoeffer believed with all his life that sometimes human power is so corrupt, God will stand against it. In one of his Advent sermons, he said this:

“We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God's coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God's coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.

"Only when we have felt the terror of the matter, can we recognize the incomparable kindness. God comes into the very midst of evil and of death, and judges the evil in us and in the world. And by judging us, God cleanses and sanctifies us, comes to us with grace and love. God makes us happy as only children can be happy.”

God lays claim to the world, he says, and that should frighten us! It is this same sense that causes John to begin proclaiming “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” God is coming! John says. We ought to feel terror because the evil in us is going to be judged. In this way, John fills the role of the prophet of God, the “voice crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’”

That, of course, is the famous quote from the prophet Isaiah. What is a prophet? Is it just someone who tells the future? Isaiah is a prophet because he “predicted” there would be a voice calling in the wilderness and now John the Baptist is doing it?

Well… partly. The prophets in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, do often predict things in the future. But their primary function is to remind people of their relationship with their God, and to call them out of living in the world’s corruption to living the way God has told them to live. This is why John the Baptist fits the prophet profile, not because he is predicting something, but because he is preaching “a baptism of repentance.” This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “the serious aspect” of Advent. God is coming to judge the corruption and evil of the world, not just “out there” in Rome and Galilee and Abilene, but also right here, in Jerusalem, in his holy Temple itself. The corruption and evil in us.

And then the terror turns around into hope, peace, joy, and love. God comes to us as a child, a crying, helpless infant who will grow up to judge the evil of the world and its powers, the evil that all humanity is capable of, by suffering that evil himself. From prison awaiting his execution, Bonhoeffer himself wrote, “only the suffering God can help.”

The suffering God who came to us as one of us, who was born a human infant and died a man at the hands of humans themselves teaches us a different way. Not a way of power, of armies, of roads and wealth, but a way of repentance, love, peace. In this dark season of the year, the Advent candles remind us of many things, but especially they remind me of when Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” And he knows how hard life in this world can be because he did it! He lived it. He died. In this Advent season, as we look forward to the coming of Jesus the baby, may we not forget the light that we are, the light of his death and resurrection, the light of hope, peace, joy, and love, the light of reconciling and restoring the world the way he taught us.

Amen.

Happy Reformation Day.

i wish i had something fun to offer, but with the exception of his "table talk," Martin Luther didn't really leave many fun things, including his own reputation. also, i only got power and heat back last night, so my googling has mostly been limited to essentials and stuff for homework.

so instead, i offer my favourite of the 95 theses that were (supposedly) tacked to the door of the Wittenberg cathedral 497 years ago:

Thesis 50: Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence preachers, he would rather the basilica of St. Peter were burned to ashes than built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep.

why in the world that thesis? because for me it shows the best of what Luther intended: the unity of the church (in his respect for and benefit of the doubt offered to the pope), the reform of excesses, and his care for the everyday person.

is the prophet still speaking?

one of my deep and abiding convictions is that there is no such thing as a "God of wrath in the Old Testament" and a "God of love in the New Testament." the God of the bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus is the same God and his character does not change.

another conviction is that Jesus did not preach a different ethical message than one already embodied in the jewish religion, although certainly that message had been corrupted in some quarters, just as it has in both judaism and christianity today.

when given the lectionary passages for this week, i thought both of these things were worth pointing out.

Is the Prophet Still Speaking?

When I met with Pastor Hugh earlier this week, I joked to him that I bet these are the Scripture readings he would have liked to have had last week for Stewardship Sunday. And he laughed and said yes.

But as we talked, we realized that these passages are certainly not any easier to read or preach on than Jesus’ teaching on divorce from last week. Jesus is not any less radical about wealth than he is about divorce. “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” Ok, wow! I don’t want to preach on that! Even the rich young man did not want to hear it. Ok, let’s check the other readings.

Whoops. Amos is not any better. The ancient prophet is certainly not any easier to preach, with his excoriation against the wealthy. Speaking of preaching! Can’t you just imagine the prophet declaiming, delivering this harsh criticism to the wealthy nobles in Bethel?

The situation Amos was preaching to was actually kind of similar to the one we faced here a few years ago. Other biblical sources as well as archaeology confirm that Israel was enjoying a time of peace and prosperity. The international situation had calmed down, and the economy had picked up. People were taking advantage of this, apparently, financially manipulating things to line their pockets.

And when Amos says, “They hate the one who reproves in the gate/ and they abhor the one who speaks the truth” he is referring to judicial corruption. In ancient times, court cases were heard at the city gate. This is why this verse hangs on to the one that talks about justice. The people Amos is preaching to were not interested in fair claims or real justice, he’s saying, but they were more interested in protecting their wealth. Shouldn’t money and standing in the community have some influence? Let’s pass some laws that make it easier to increase our wealth!

Is this ancient preacher saying something to us that we can hear today?

You know, I really struggled with these passages. For one, no one likes it when the church talks about money. I have to say, I am really impressed with how All Saints’ is carrying out its capital campaign and annual fund drive because I have seen those kinds of things handled very badly in other contexts. But between Amos and Mark’s story of Jesus and the rich young man, it does not sound like the Bible speaks in a voice that is all that admiring of wealth. And, let’s face it, just by living in the United States, we are wealthy.

Even minimum wage in this country is a fortune by the standards of African subsistence farmers that make maybe a dollar or a dollar-fifty a day. Seven twenty five an hour doesn’t sound too bad against that. Yes, we can take into account relative living expenses, but this whole country is cris-crossed with pipes that allow running water, cables that allow electricity, and now increasingly towers that allow cellphone access even to the poorest. The only thing an African farmer might share with us is the cellphone access, and she certainly won’t have an iPhone!

Is this just about our wealth on an international level? I do think both Amos and Jesus are speaking to systems here, and they are both certianly delivering messages about handling wealth in a local context. Amos is obviously speaking to the general culture in Israel at the time, but when Jesus says, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” he is certainly speaking of more than just that rich young man. You know, one of the ways that is very popular to get around Jesus’ radical statement there is to say, oh, well, Jesus only meant that selling all he had was what that young man needed, it’s not a command for Christians of all time. But Jesus immediately follows it up with a statement about “those who have wealth.” Jesus’ call to radical sacrifice and care for our fellow humans is to everyone, not to one specific person in a story from thousands of years ago.

Both Amos and Jesus agree: concentrating on money makes it hard to find God. Our passasge starts today with Amos saying, “Seek the LORD and live.” Right before it, he has told his audience, “Do not seek Bethel, nor go to Gilgal, nor cross over to Beersheba.” Those three cities were alternative worship sites in ancient Israel. Bethel especially became famous in the Bible as a place where the kings erected idols to other gods and a place where worship to the God of Israel was mixed with worship of these other gods. It was a deeply ironic development, because Bethel was where Jacob had his famous dream of the ladder going up to heaven. He was the one who named the place “Bethel,” which means “house of God.” Amos is drawing a clear tie here between the practices of the wealthy corrupt and their desertion of the pure worship of their God.

The warning seems obvious, though, doesn’t it? When you worship other gods and their idols, you are breaking the first and second of the Ten Commandments. When you use your wealth for your own gain, when you are grasping and selfish, you are not following God. I mean, duh, right? But Amos keeps bringing it back to legal structures. When you get laws passed to make it easier to take from people, maybe some risky financial ventures because some things got deregulated, he is saying there is no difference. Legality does not necessarily equal justice.

Ouch. That hurts. Ok, so I did not happen to get involved with any of the crazy trading stuff that happened in the mortgage crisis. I don’t even understand most of what is going on. Am I innocent? I have an IRA. It does not have a lot of money in it, but I have one. So somewhere, I have money in the stock market. A few weeks ago, I saw a news report about the damaging environmental practices of a company that I know is held by my IRA. Did I call up someone at Vanguard and ask them to sell those shares and not put them in the account again? No. It’s too intimidating. Who am I, this impractical, academic liberal arts major and seminary student to tell my investment person what to do? Is it even possible to sell one group of shares in a fund like that? I have no idea. So I did nothing.

Maybe I should try.

Is wealth bad?

No. Neither Jesus nor Amos are preaching against wealth here. We even know that wealthy women supported Jesus’ ministry through Palestine. Wealth is necessary to get God’s work done! Joseph of Aramathea, who buried Jesus, was apparently incredibly wealthy because the gospel of John records Jesus being buried like a prince. Without his wealth, Solomon would never have been able to build the Temple in Jerusalem, the very Temple where Amos wants people to go worship God instead of with their idols at Bethel. Wealth can be used for God’s work, and there is certainly nothing about wealth itself that makes it incompatible with following Jesus.

Where wealth gets us into trouble is when we stop worshiping God because our wealth is more important. When we push aside justice because it would decrease our returns. When we cannot care for the poor because that would lower our bank balance. When we cannot give to God’s work in the world, our community, and our local church because we want the newest gadget, that really nice car, that pretty sparkly thing, that night out at that really expensive restaurant we love. When we cannot spend on God because we just feel more comfortable with that cash cushion, we are not trusting God.

Following Jesus is not easy, and it costs. It costs money, and as Peter starts to point out, and Jesus finishes for him, it might cost family, career, and a sense of stability. Above all, it costs our self-reliance. When we say “yes” to Jesus, in a very radical way, we are really saying “no” to a lot of other things, including the world’s call to get all you can, keep all you get, and always look out for number one. That is not, and has never been, the way of the God that we worship. Jesus says, “come, follow me.” Don’t follow your wallet. Don’t follow the power it gives you.

It’s not easy to hear. It’s not easy to say. Jesus makes a radical claim on our treasure here on earth, and it’s not a claim that anyone has ever liked to hear. But it is God’s claim. “Hate evil and love good and establish justice.”

Amen.

languages.

as much fun as hebrew is, and as much as i love teaching it as a TA, it's doing my greek homework that raises my mood.

yom kippur

today was yom kippur, and it was also the day i (accidentally) volunteered to preach my senior sermon at the seminary's daily chapel.

so, given the choices of leviticus 16, or the book of jonah, i chose jonah.

the text was Jonah 3:10, 4:5-11.  Or here's the whole passage in context.

Jonah’s story ends so unresolved that can we even speak of it ending? Thousands of years later, are we still waiting for Jonah’s answer? He has been arguing with God, and God gets the last word here, but the question lingers, waiting for an answer? “Should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

Jonah knows from personal experience that God is loving, forgiving, righteous, merciful, filled with loving-kindness. We sang his song a bit ago. “In my trouble I cried out to the Lord my God... from the depths you heard my cry.” He’s glad when God’s saving grace and mercy are offered to him. But not so much when the same God treats Nineveh the same way.

Today is the Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In synagogues all over the world this afternoon, the Book of Jonah will be read. Why Jonah’s story?

I will tell you a secret: it’s not because of the fish. Sometimes, I think we do our kids a disservice by telling them the story of “Jonah and the whale” and leaving out the rest of it. Although, really, the rest of it doesn’t make a really good story, does it?

Jonah goes to Nineveh, and he preaches destruction, the people repent, and Jonah gets cranky and argues with God. “No! NO! I didn’t want you to be righteous and loving towards them! They’re my enemies!” He goes out from the city, and made a booth so he could see what would become of the city. He’s prepared to camp out for as long as it takes until God does what Jonah wants God to do, not what God does by God’s very nature. And then there’s the weird part with the plant, and the worm, and God’s question. No resolution, no denouement, just the question echoing in our minds. “Should I not care?”

You know, when I first read through Jonah quickly, I thought, oh, he’s forgotten what God did for him when he was rescued from the storm on the sea. He forgot his prayer of despair that turned into thanksgiving. But then I realized, he absolutely did not forget. Jonah knew exactly what kind of God the Lord is. He doesn’t forget and he doesn’t need to be reminded. In fact, he doesn’t want to be reminded, because that would mean seeing God’s grace and kindness and compassion extended to Jonah’s enemies.

That’s a big reason the book of Jonah is read on the Day of Atonement. It reminds us, because sometimes we forget, or we don’t want to see, that God’s nature is to forgive, to be gracious in the face of repentance. God is creator of everything, and all people are made in God’s image, even them.

Who are they? Are they the people who have the wrong view of the Bible? The people who have bad theology? The people who vote for the wrong person? ... The people who fly planes into buildings?

Jonah’s story reminds us that God’s atonement is for everyone. And it reminds us how like Jonah we are. There is always someone on whom we want to see God’s wrath come down, not God’s love. And God’s question echoes in our ears. Is it right for you to be angry? Should I not care?

As followers of Jesus we are reminded of God’s gracious love and forgiveness, not only by the story of Jonah and Nineveh, but also by the letter of 1 John, which reminds its readers, “If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

As followers of Jesus we can say with Jonah, “You heard me!” We have our atonement. We rest in God’s amazing love and grace. We are baptized into death and resurrection, as Jonah journeyed into the sea, the fish, and then back onto land, as Jesus died and rose. This is who we are: forgiven, atoned for, resurrected people. And we are confronted with that question: “Should I not care?”

Maybe we don’t need to be reminded of who God is, maybe we need to be reminded of who we are. We are forgiven, atoned for, resurrected, loved as God’s own children. Isn’t that too good to keep to ourselves? Even Jonah, overwhelmed with his salvation from the depths, went and preached to Nineveh, knowing the probable outcome. May we be as overwhelmed with the joy of our own forgiveness!

May we learn the lesson of Jonah, not about a big fish, but about how loving and gracious God is to all of God’s good creation.

Amen.