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.

finally!

tomorrow i start my senior and final year of seminary.

it has been a long trip, including transferring schools when i realized that i had chosen the initial seminary out of fear (basically), and i needed to be somewhere else.

since i'm still more or less heading towards a ph.d. if i ever get focused enough, i'm doubling down on the biblical studies courses this year.  most requirements are out of the way, so i can take all the fun text-heavy courses.

also, i'm going to be a hebrew ta again!  despite the added time and stress, i really, really had a lot of fun last time, so i'm excited about this year.  i get to do way more teaching here than i did at the other seminary, so i'm excited about that too.

i keep getting told "not to count on" the way things were, that there is a "new normal," which basically means (as far as i can tell) that my parents' generation has decided that they don't really want to pass on all the advantages they had in terms of things like tenured, or even full-time professorships, or full-time pastoral appointments, and that i should plan to mostly support myself and be bi- or even tri-vocational.  so this year, besides classes, i'm a seminarian-intern again at a local church and a hebrew ta, which i hope will someday transfer to being a part-time member of a pastoral team and an adjunct professor, which, honestly, i'm not too upset about as a career prospect.

i do think it's important for academics to be involved in a local church, because i refuse to believe that the average person is nothing but a butt in a seat.  every christian academic is living proof that there are people in every church who are interested in feeding their mind.  i think it would be a shame and a waste to have spent years in seminary and getting a ph.d. and not make myself available to a local church.  but also, being crunched in a tire tread "where the rubber hits the road" can be such a valuable experience for an academic and an amazing resource for academic study.  it is in the day-to-day workings of a church where theory and theology and interpretation get worked out.

also, i'm not horribly terrified of only being a part-time pastor/priest.  i feel a primary call/gift to teach, and i would much rather work on a team of other pastors/priests than be solely responsible for a congregation.  i never conceived of myself as a full-time pastor, so the prospect of not having an appointment available doesn't deter me from seeking ordination at all.

so yeah.  one more year of seminary and then... who knows?  ordination?  another master's degree (th.m., m.a.?) to focus a little more?  we'll see what doors open.

what's the point?

while in japan last month for their wedding, we went to church with my brother and new sister-in-law. i am still processing that experience, but the trip also gave me some fodder for my sermon this morning.

What's the point of following Jesus?

Last month, my husband Chris and I were lucky enough to be able to go to Japan for my little brother’s wedding. One of the problems was that with the exception of my brother, no one in my family spoke much Japanese, and with the exception of his bride, no one in her family spoke much English. However, Chris and her brother became friends at the reception by mostly avoiding language and simply pouring each other sake. On the other hand, a few days later, it took Chris and me twenty minutes just to figure out how to buy train tickets. Twenty minutes just for train tickets. If I ever go back to Japan, I’m going to ask my brother for a crash course first.

The sheer power of words for humans is uncontested. It was the development of sophisticated language, scientists believe, that was one of the key skills that allowed homo sapiens to become the dominant species on this planet. Language allows for communication and cooperation far beyond what is achievable by any other method.

In one of the few moments of levity in Hamlet, there’s an exchange between Hamlet and Polonius while Hamlet is pretending to be insane. Polonius comes across the prince in the castle and asks him, “what do you read, my lord?” And Hamlet answers, “words, words, words.” Polonius then attempts to disentangle himself from this apparent misunderstanding, which allows Hamlet to mock him and wander off continuing in his apparent insanity.

Shakespeare’s plays, of course, are treasuries of words, containing some of the most carefully crafted English ever written, and, at least at one time, coming in only second to the bible itself in the sources of common quotations for English-speakers.

And yet, language isn’t all good. If I asked, probably everyone sitting here today could, within a few seconds, come up with an insult, a cutting word, a verbal takedown that someone said to us in our lives somewhere that still stick with us. Especially if said by a parent or a close friend, such words can be deeply wounding. And language can simply be a barrier as well, because there are thousands of languages spoken in the world.

Today we reach the end of this long, confusing dialogue between Jesus and the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. Just look at the confusion that can be caused even when people do speak the same language! Like many of Jesus’ conversations that the gospel of John gives us, this one has not only confused its hearers at the time, but continues to stump not only the church, but also people who don’t follow Jesus. John’s gospel seems to include this passage instead of recording Jesus’ words at the last supper, but Christian scholars have debated for centuries whether or how much of John 6 refers to the Eucharist.

Martin Luther mocked one of his Catholic interlocutors for appealing to this passage in their debate about the Eucharist, but the command to eat Jesus’ body and drink his blood seems unmissable. Also, it was this passage combined with the traditional “institution” passages in the other gospels that led people to charge the early church with cannibalism and to accuse them of murdering and eating babies in their worship rites. Even today, some anti-Christian writers have accused the church of trying to gloss over its own cannibalistic history by insisting this passage is Eucharistic, against its apparent plain meaning, and even the way the crowd in the text is recorded as having reacting.

Has Jesus purposely set out to confuse people?

I don’t think so. His answer here is different than, say, to Nicodemus in chapter 3. When Nicodemus can’t understand being “born again” or “born from above,” Jesus does not explain himself, but simply asks Nicodemus, “how come you’re not getting this?” Nicodemus is an educated man, a Pharisee, Jesus even calls him “Israel’s teacher.” But here, Jesus is talking to a crowd of people who have been following him, and probably also to those who have just come to the synagogue for services that evening. Jesus leaves the realm of the metaphorical and says, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

Jesus seems to have been using a rabbinic style of teaching here, with extended metaphor taken from the Exodus passage on manna. Since the people are thinking about manna and bread, Jesus uses that to launch his teaching. But people are obviously confused. If Jesus were a pastor, people would probably be complaining that his sermons are too unfocused. And, indeed, some of his disciples leave here. Even when he says, Ok, it’s not about flesh, it’s about my words, what I’m teaching you, people still can’t get over it and they bail.

Can we blame them? You think you’re following a miracle-worker, a healer, a teacher who has something new to say, and then he comes out with this crazy-sounding sermon in front of everyone at the synagogue. Who can accept this teaching?

It’s passages like that that make scholars think that the community to whom this gospel was written were asking the same question. Who can accept this teaching? Why are we bothering to follow this weird guy? People are kicking us out, accusing us of cannibalism!

What’s the point of following Jesus?

You can almost hear the sadness in Jesus’ voice when he says, “But among you are some who do not believe.” Even though maybe he knew people would not believe, he also says, again going back to chapter 3, that he has not come to condemn the world, but to save it. And then again, he turns to those closest to him, and he asks, “Do you also wish to go away?” The writer of the gospel is asking the same question of his readers. Some have already left us. Do you also wish to go away?

Is the journey getting too hard? Is the mocking getting too much? Do you just hate getting up early in the morning for some superstitious nonsense?

As in the other gospels, Peter gives a clear answer that rests on the identity of Jesus. “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” They get Jesus’ turn away from the confusing bread and flesh. Remember, Jesus said, “the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” But Peter says “eternal life.” Is that something special?

After the first and second Great Awakenings in this country and the revivalist Christianity that resulted, most of us would answer yes, it is! It’s about life after death, or something, right? It’s about “going to heaven when you die.” Jesus is a fire insurance salesman, right? That’s the whole point of following Jesus. You get to “go to heaven.”

Not really. In Jewish thought of this period, and especially in John’s writings in the New Testament, eternal life is about living now. It’s not some vision of playing harps and sitting on clouds after death. It’s about living now, following Jesus’ teachings, his words, living in this crazy new radically expanded community of God. Jesus brought God’s teaching about how things were supposed to be - life empowered by God’s Spirit as promised in John 3, all people united in worshipping God as promised in John 4, celebrating God’s creation and taking care of each other promised by Jesus’ miracles of wine and bread in John 2 and 6. When Jesus sets out to feed people, he doesn’t hold back! The best wine at a wedding, where people had already been drinking for days, and enough food for 5000 people. This is what eternal life looks like.

This is what Jesus promises. This, John says, is the point. This is the power of these words. Follow Jesus and live like this. Live life worshipping God with those who were your enemies, celebrating together with them and feeding and caring for each other.

The cost for those earliest Christians was high. The cost for some Christians today is still very high. Jesus never promised a life of material wealth or success, or a perfect family, and he definitely never promised that things would all make sense. The power of Jesus’ words is that when meditated on, eaten, absorbed into us, they give us a new way to live.

The second century church father Tertullian encouraged his home church, “We ought to devour him with the ear, and to ruminate on him with the mind and to digest him by faith.” Or as we say at the Eucharist, “feed on him in your heart with thanksgiving.” Words are powerful. May we take Jesus’ words into us as food to live the life he promises.

Amen.

we are all individuals.

i preached this morning at the request of my ordination committee.  unfortunately, this sermon suffers from a lack of tight organization; some of the transitions are rough, and in one case, nonexistent.  i tried to fix it on the fly when i was actually speaking, but now i can't remember what i said, so you just get the manuscript version.

i do preach from a full manuscript because i'm nervous enough that if i didn't, i'd be even more disorganized and would forget things.  it usually does change in the moment, but not a whole lot.

the text is Mark 6:1-13, with an allusion to the collect for the day.

Born into community

The image of the completely independent human individual has been a powerful one in western civilization since the eighteenth century. The person who stands alone, dependent on no one, completely determining their own fate - this image has guided art, literature, philosophy...most areas of human endeavor for the last three hundred years or so.

Unfortunately, that image, like so many others, is just that: an image. It does not reflect an accessible reality. We as people are dependent on our parents, first, for life, food, the beginnings of education. Even someone who moves “off the grid” as we say, was still at one point dependent on and shaped by their parents, or the people who kept them alive through the extraordinarily helpless early years as a human infant and toddler. Where a horse, for example, can walk shortly after birth, think of how little a human infant can do, and for how long. From our birth, not only do we need to depend on other people, but we learn to depend on them.

And when one reflects on this, the question might arise, is the image of the independent person a desirable one? Should we try to throw off as much dependence on each other as we can? Is dependence some kind of infantilism?

The answer from the Christian tradition has generally been... no. No, utter independence is not desirable. And it is not a symptom of an arrested childhood.

In today’s gospel passage, Jesus commands a radical dependence on his disciples. Do not make even the most basic preparations for your own comfort or survival, but rely on strangers who welcome you generously. This is how to be a disciple of Jesus.

That’s pretty... unrealistic, isn’t it? Does it really mean that we should never take thought to providing for ourselves? Well, we can say what it doesn’t mean. We know it doesn’t mean that Christians should be lazy and rely on everyone else for day to day needs. Paul has to remind the Thessalonian church of this: that someone who just leeches off the community is not living the way Jesus commands.

And in the second century, we have a document called “The Teachings of the Apostles” or it’s Greek name, the Didache. In there, it tells a church that they should be welcoming and generous to a visiting prophet, but a prophet who stays more than 3 days, and by implication, eats your food, drinks your wine, and borrows your clothing and spare room for more than three days, is a false prophet. True followers of Jesus don’t abuse the community’s interdependence or generosity.

And, logically, if everyone just relied on everyone else, nothing would ever get done and we’d all starve to death, wouldn’t we? This isn’t a command to sit around waiting for food and clothes to drop from heaven. The disciples cast out many demons and cured many who were sick in exchange for being taken care of physically. We even find out from this passage that Jesus was a carpenter, that he worked “for a living” so to speak, before he transitioned to being a rabbi, a teacher.

And by the way, just because I found this interesting, being a carpenter did not disqualify you from being a rabbi. One of the most famous rabbis in all of Judaism, a man named Shammai, started his life as a carpenter. The comment here by the crowd is an attempt to identify him as someone known and controlled, not necessarily to disqualify him from being someone who can teach. That’s just a freebie there.

But still, this kind of radical generosity and dependence is built into the Christian message. It’s not just about us as individuals going about the work of Jesus in the world, it’s about us forming a community, a radically generous and interdependent community that as more than the sum of its parts carries Jesus’ message and his presence into the world to change it.

You know, one of the things that really strikes me about this passage is Jesus’ own dependence on people. “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.” This statement is all the more striking because this passage comes right after about three chapters of miracle stories. Jesus has been healing people, casting out demons, even raising the dead, and suddenly he can do no deed of power in this town. Somehow, even Jesus is dependent on the faith of the people of that town to do his miracles. The saddest part of this story is that they crippled their own ability to experience the amazing things that Jesus offered.

And a realistic take on dependence and independence cannot ignore the fact that we are all separate people. Humans are not joined at the hip to each other, and dependence can be very unhealthy when a person loses their sense of self and identity. Dependence among the community of Jesus-followers should be life-giving, not taking selfishly or giving until the self is lost. Jesus knew who he was, and he stood by it. Loving your neighbor does not mean losing yourself to them.

Independence and dependence are alike that way. Some of each is needed, and too much of one or the other is unhealthy. Where Jesus’ instructions here in Mark prick us is that what Jesus defines as a healthy amount of dependence has been defined by our culture as unhealthy. This is the radical, world-changing side of Christianity that often gets pushed away the same way the crowd tried to domesticate Jesus, we as Christians often try to domesticate and control his message.

We can still cripple the power Jesus gives, both as the church, the community of people who follow Jesus, and individually in our own lives. We are given the power of the Holy Spirit, who gives life and who unites the church, but just as Jesus could do no deeds of power in his hometown, as individual Christians, we can cripple the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in our own lives.

And I think we all do this, at least a little. Jesus’ message hurts. It changes us. Change is always scary. How can we possibly live like this? The gospel of Mark is a great place to go for examples of this, because it seems every time you turn the page, the disciples are back-to-back getting it right and wrong. Here, in our passage today, they’re getting it right, healing people, casting out demons, calling for repentance. In a few chapters, they’re arguing selfishly about who gets the most honor in Jesus’ coming kingdom. Jesus’ call is a hard way to live.

And as the disciples’ bickering and miracle-working show, when we stop the change, when we domesticate and tame Jesus and his message, we don’t just hurt ourselves. We hurt the whole community we’ve been joined to through Jesus, and we hurt the rest of the world, because they don’t get to see us bring Jesus to them.

Jesus teaches a message of radical dependence and generosity, and not just in terms of spiritual gifts, but in intensely practical and physical ways as well. This is easier to do as a group; it’s easy to point at the ministries and community service and social justice acts of a local church than it is to either give or receive this in our own lives. But the radical, rugged independent individualist that we have come to see as a powerful guiding image is not the image that Jesus holds out for us. Jesus holds out the image of someone who knows who they are, but who also knows they are part of a community, that they are in a dramatic way dependent on that community. Jesus calls us to be a radically generous and interdependent community carries Jesus’ message and his presence into the world to change it. And instead of insisting we determine our own fate, we pray, Thy will be done. Even unto the cross.

Amen.

unity?

there's a lot of talk floating around about "christian unity."  people point out that Jesus and Paul both pray for the church to be in unity.  and there are many prayers for unity in many denomenations out there.  there are also accusations of division thrown back and forth in the calvinism vs. non-calvinism argument.

the problem i see with most of these is that "unity" usually means "like me."  for the christian church to be "unified" in most of these conversations and prayers is to mean that everyone believes the same thing, which is usually the set or sysem of beliefs of the person asking for unity.

two things bug me about this.  the first is a simple lack of "i might be wrong" humility.  very rarely is the person crying for "unity" willing to back down on some doctrinal disagreement, some secondary matter of the faith, whether it be women in leadership, a theory of atonement, transubstantiation, or a theory of authority.

the second thing is a little more nuanced.  i don't believe that Jesus or Paul were asking for a uniform, monoculture church.  Paul was the apostle to the gentiles and he recognizes Peter as the apostle to the Jews.  he insists that they do preach the same gospel, but it may look a little different.  contrary to popular belief, there is no record of Paul ever claiming that jews shouldn't continue to follow Torah.  it is only gentiles who do not have to.*

even in our new testament, we have various writers taking different views on things.  the author of the letter to the hebrews sounds very different than much of the rest of the new testament.  the differences between James and Paul and John and Paul have been commented on at length.  Paul leaves room for disagreement over non-primary matters of the gospel.

in the beginning, God created a hugely diverse creation, with all kinds of plants and shrubs and trees, and fish of the sea and birds of the air and beasts and creeping things on the ground.  and when God created humanity, he created a diverse humanity of male and female.  and it was very good.

uniformity isn't in God's plan.  part of the beauty of creation even before the fall is the beauty of diversity.

i can't see anywhere where denominations might be bad things in and of themselves.**  people are diverse, and it makes sense that we would create different traditions and have different patterns of worship and emphasize different nuances or angles of christian belief.  the roman catholic church, the eastern churches, the anglican churches, the presbyterians, the mennonites, the baptists, the pentacostals, the megachurches... as long as Christ crucified is being preached, we are in unity.   it is fair to call out a brother or sister when Jesus' life, death, and resurrection is not being preached.  that is when we must call for unity.  but there's no place for attacking fellow members of Jesus' body about secondary matters.

*it is clear that some of the food purity laws have to go out the window in favour of the unity of table fellowship.  however, even some of that is upheld in acts 15 when gentiles are counselled not to eat "meat with blood in it" or "meat of strangled animals."  i guess we should all be eating kosher meat! ;)

**i don't think the oft-cited passage from 1 corinthians 1:10-17 is a valid comparison when talking about denominations.  Paul is criticizing the corinthians for claiming to follow other people (including himself) instead of Christ.  even the roman catholic church, for all it reveres the pope, would not claim to be "of the pope" but "of Christ" as Paul demands.

where Wright goes wrong.

for the last year or so, i have sloooowly been making my way through N.T. Wright's massive trilogy (which, as i understand it, is about to become a tetrology and then hopefully his predicted pentology).

well, mostly i've been working my way through the first volume, when school and life have been giving me time off.  but now i'm on to the second! yay me.  and i've had some of his other books as textbooks for classes.  anyway.

he has a lot of good things to say.  in the late 20th century line of bringing in the jewish background to the new testament and taking it seriously, his scholarship is nearly unmatched and he brings a much-needed corrective to white, european, christian views of the bible and themselves.

but there are places where i disagree with him, and i think it's because... he's not jewish enough.  he is a white, european christian, and not only that, but a bishop in an established state church.  and as he points out himself, you can never remove a person or an author from their context.  and i think it's this context that leads him to make some mistakes in his biblical interpretation.  i am giving him the benefit of the doubt here and not speculating that he purposely interprets things to give his own situation the best standing :)

but here is an example.  in his book Jesus and the Victory of God, he takes the parable of the prodigal son and interprets it so that it will function as a paradigmatic narrative for his whole project in the book.  except the interpretation just doesn't work.

Wright insists that the parable would have been heard by its 1st century CE jewish audience, and especially the pharisees that Luke refers to, as the narrative of israel's exile and restoration, and an indictment of those who stayed in the land.  the prodigal son, Wright says, represents the exiled israel who strayed from faithfulness in contrast to the faithful remnant who remained in the land.  Wright sees this as supported by the narratives in Ezra and Nehemiah, as well as other 2nd temple jewish literature.

"Israel went into exile because of her own folly and disobedience, and is now returning simply because of the fantastically generous, indeed prodigal, love of her god... Those who grumble at what is happening are cast in the role of the Jews who did not go into exile, and who opposed the returning people... There are, perhaps, other echoes, of quarrels between two brothers which left the younger vindicated and the elder angry and disinherited" (Jesus and the Victory of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1996) 127).

i am not sure that this works.  for one, the parable of the prodigal son is placed next to two other parables of losing, searching, and finding.  the three parables in luke 15 emphasize the search for anyone who is lost.  in telling these parables to the pharisees, Jesus seems to be reinforcing his statement from luke 5 that "it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick."  instead of creating a pure in-group, like the qumran community or the pharisees, instead Jesus is extending full citizenship in his new society to everyone, even those who are traitors to their own community.

but there's even a bigger problem.   Wright's project is to investigate the beginnings of the church, and establish "the church" as "the people of god."  he is softly and gently supersessionist.  in order to maintain his interpretation of the prodigal son that maintains the younger son as the favoured one of god, he has to ignore one clearly explicit line in the parable:

"‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”  

the older son is not disinherited, and quite explicitly not disinherited.  everything the father has is his, and his status as only heir is maintained.  there is no inheritance left for the younger son.  he has taken it and spent it.  he has only his father's ridiculous, generous, prodigal love and grace.  but he has no future outside of that, for the rest of the inheritance is explicitly given to the older son.

this parable is anything but supersessionist.  the older son is not replaced.  instead, against all law, custom, and normal human feeling, the family is expanded to include the one who cast them off and left.  i believe Wright is correct in seeing the parable as a story of exile and redemption, but i don't think it's israel's story.  or rather, it's only israel's story insofar as since the return from exile, israel has become obsessed with who is in and who is out, with observing boundaries and purity.  Jesus is casting all that aside and claiming that not only is it the impure and traitors who must be welcomed as siblings into the family, but also, as the younger son was forced to feed pigs, gentiles.  no one is cast aside in this parable.  those who stand outside, stiff and angry and insulted, stand outside of their own choice, and they miss the party.  but they are not cast aside.  this parable won't allow that reading.

the lectionary.

the church i am currently interning at uses the revised common lectionary. this is the first time i have been in a church which uses the lectionary, so i have been comparing my experiences.

some arguments for using the lectionary that i find persuasive are:

1. it allows people to hear lots and lots of scripture, especially the hebrew bible.

2.  because all of these less commonly used texts are in the lectionary, it gives preachers the opportunity to preach on texts they would otherwise not.

3.  it is so widely used.  in using the rcl, the local church joins in unity with thousands of other local churches globally, both within and outside its own denomenation.

4.  it keeps us on the rhythm of the church year.

5.  you don't have to worry about preaching series.  the lectionary gives you 4 passages of scripture to choose from every week, usually topical to the season of the church year.

i think these are all good reasons to use the lectionary.   but i also think there are several reasons not to use it:

1.  it distorts the bible by breaking it down into bite-sized pieces.  while this is necessary for any context, since you can't read the whole bible at every church gathering, the lectionary loses the overall sweep of the biblical story.  this can be dealt with by careful preaching, but in my experience, it isn't.  even though you go through most of a synoptic gospel in a year, the gospel itself is broken up into bits that follow the church year, not the gospel's own narrative context.  also except for the gospels, big chunks of the rest of the books get skipped, breaking their narrative structure.

2.  it distorts the interpretation of the hebrew bible by selecting pieces that sound as though they support or are supported by the new testament readings of the day.  not only does this again destroy the narrative structure of the hebrew bible, but it also disallows the hebrew bible from standing on its own and speaking with its own voice, which i think it has.  some people would not consider this a drawback.

3.  although almost every book in the bible shows up in the 3 year cycle of the lectionary, big bits of those books are skipped, usually anything having to do with violence or sex or really anything that sounds too bound to the context of the ancient world.  this gives people an erroneous idea of what the bible is and what it sounds like.

4.  it can be very restrictive if you want to spend time addressing a certain topic or part of scripture.  the church i used to attend spent one summer going through the entire book of ecclesiastes, a book mostly skipped by the lectionary because, frankly, it's weird, and seems to speak with a contrarian voice.   those 12 weeks opened people up to seeing new possibilities, both in the bible as well as in the christian faith.  also we spent several weeks going through the letters of John in an attempt to rebuild our community after a trauma.

so there are some arguments for and against using the lectionary.  in general, i don't mind using it.  at times it does feel restrictive, and i think it should not be followed slavishly year after year after year after year... but that space and flexibility should be given, both to address issues in the local community as well as to give people a more holistic view as to what the bible is and what the narrative arcs of the books of the bible are.

not a mother's day sermon.

this sermon was for two weeks ago, which i only realized was mother's day after i wrote it.

so one line got shoved in there real fast to acknowledge that fact.

one of the lectionary texts for the day was 1 John 5:1-6. i already happened to have a sermon written on 1 John 5:4-12, so that formed the jumping off point, and the "application" bit was taken pretty much straight from that one. but this was a different sermon. it was the one i would have liked to have written the first time (march 2011). but i wasn't a good enough preacher/sermon writer back then to have been able to pull it off, and i had only just fallen in love with Desiderius Erasmus then. the combination of trying to write (and giving up on) a paper on Erasmus and just getting better at more tightly organizing sermons, and having a very different audience let me pull it off this time around. this version of it actually should be longer, and could definitely have been a lot longer, but at an 8am service, they like the sermons short and sweet *grin*

Love and Faith Conquer All

Today’s reading from 1 John happened to intersect with two of my favorite topics, so I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to preach on it.

Despite possibly being the most bizarre book in the Bible after Revelation, 1 John is one of my favorites. I really love 1 John for its emphasis on how to live in Christian community. Even in the passage today, which is about the power of faith in Jesus Christ, 1 John can’t resist throwing in the comment that “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” If you love God, you will love the children of God, each other!

It manages to pack in a ton of theology, encouragement about how to follow Jesus, and confusing language all in such a short space. It’s also regularly given to New Testament Greek students, partly because the Greek is so strange, so you’re never sure if what you’re translating is correct or not because sometimes it just doesn’t make sense.

And speaking of the Greek, one of my favorite people in church history was Desiderius Erasmus. He was a monk who hated being a monk and ran away from his monastery to become a scholar and writer in the fifteenth century. One of my favorite quotes of his is also one of his most famous: “when I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food and clothing.” He was dedicated to his work as a scholar and dreamed that everyone would have a Bible of their own to read. Erasmus shocked the church by publishing a new translation of the Bible in Greek that disagreed with the Latin Vulgate, the official, approved Bible of the medieval church. His boldness in publishing and his vision of a Bible for the masses was a huge influence on Martin Luther and many of the other people who became the reformers.

Erasmus never joined the reformers, though. He knew the church needed reforming, but he was horrified when it became clear that Luther’s reforms would lead to a schism in the church. Although Luther wrote Erasmus asking for support, Erasmus refused and told Luther to back down in the face of Rome and work for less radical reform. In the words of my church history professor, “Erasmus died a Catholic, but a depressed Catholic.”

And this particular passage in 1 John became something of a real problem for him. The writers of the Vulgate saw three things: The water and the blood and the Spirit, and they couldn’t resist putting in an extra verse that supported Trinitarian theology. Erasmus looked at the Greek manuscripts available to him and realized it had been added. So he took it out.

The uproar was fierce. How dared he change the words of the sacred scripture? When Erasmus pointed out that they had been changed to add the verse in the first place, no one was appeased. How dared he question the wisdom of the church? Erasmus’ reply to that was that he wasn’t questioning the wisdom of the church, he was simply being faithful to the manuscripts. If, he said, someone could prove to him that the verse was original, he would add it back in. And the leadership of the church was so desperate to put it back in the Bible that they had someone forge a manuscript and present it to Erasmus so that he was forced to add it back in. If you look up 1 John 5 in a King James Version of the Bible, you will find it there.

But today, Erasmus has won. And in one way, his story is a wonderful example of exactly what is being spoken about in this passage. Erasmus not only loved the parent, but he loved the children. Out of love for the church, he wanted the church to have the most accurate Bible it could have because that is where our faith comes from. When we read the Bible, we hear God’s Spirit speaking to us, telling us about God, and giving us the strength to have faith.

But out of love for his fellow Christians, Erasmus also wanted as many people as possible to have a Bible that they could read so that the Spirit could speak to everyone, not just the rich and powerful and educated. Before the reformation, the church leadership controlled who was allowed to read the Bible and who was not. Erasmus intended his Greek Bible to be the basis for translations into every language, and indeed, the King James Version is based in a large part on Erasmus’ Greek text.

And Erasmus had faith. He believed that God was guiding the church, especially in this newly discovered wave of manuscripts and the recovery of knowledge of Greek in Western Europe. He truly believed that our faith would conquer the world.

Of course, when a late medieval ex-monk thought of faith conquering the world, he thought of something quite different than what we think of today, or what the original readers of 1 John would have thought of at the end of the first century. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have the promise for today. In fact, today, we probably read it much more closely to the original audience, partly because of what we have learned from Erasmus and other scholars of his era: go back to the text. “Ad fontes” was their slogan: Back to the sources! Not only the biblical text, but as many other ancient sources as we can find.

The community that 1 John was written to, and probably the gospel of John as well, had undergone some kind of trauma. Just as Erasmus feared would happen to the medieval church, this ancient community of Christians had split, and they felt betrayed. So the writer reminds them of Jesus’ commandment: “love one another as I have loved you.” And when we obey this commandment, which is not burdensome, we love God, and our faith in Jesus Christ and our love for God and each other is what conquers the world.

This is not a victory through military might, or through rhetoric and manipulation, or even through a voting majority. This is a victory through love. It’s an amazing, upside-down, backwards idea. But this is the lesson of Jesus. And the Spirit of God who speaks to us and in us and through us testifies to this love and to Jesus because the Spirit is truth.

What does it look like to live like this, to live following the commandment to love each other as Jesus loved us?

How you act when you’re waiting in line at the grocery store or at the coffeeshop?

Or when someone else’s kid throws a tempter tantrum in the middle of the mall?

Or when a call goes out to volunteer here at All Saints’ or in one of the many ministries here that serves the community?

Or when the global NGO Save the Children comes out with its annual list of the worst places in the world to be a mother?

It shows in how we act towards people, yes, but it’s not just about people. In his book “Surprised by Hope,” N. T. Wright, a bishop in the Church of England and another of my favorite authors, says, “Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation…”

All of these things can be part of our faith which conquers the world. The activities themselves don’t conquer the world; it’s why we do it. We are inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation.

Living this way won’t automatically come naturally to us. It would be nice if they did, but we have to consciously listen for the Spirit in our lives. These are habits we have to build. For some of you, maybe writing things down is your way to go. Jotting notes during the day, or if you do daily devotions could help. I go through journaling phases in my own life; sometimes I write every day and then I stop for months. Something constant is what helps us build habits.

Put a sticky note on the dashboard of your car. “Love each other as I have loved you.” Make it your iPhone’s wallpaper :) Put a note on your cubicle wall at work. Make art or music or find an activity that speaks both to your heart and from your heart as it’s inspired by the love of God and the delight in the beauty of his creation. Maybe learn about a person in the history of the church who exemplifies this for you and then learn from them. There are some amazing people tucked away in our family over the course of two thousand years, and many of them are inspiring as well.

Maybe you’re already serving in a ministry and trying to love each other and listen for the Spirit. The problem is, if you’re still alive, God is still working on you. Keep listening, for the Spirit in your own heart and in the voices of those around you, and you can be sure eventually God will push you on to your next step.

But the promise is there for us. As we abide in the love of Jesus, we are children of God, and whatever is born of God conquers the world. Victory through love. Love God and love his children.

Amen.

fleeing to canterbury.

so. i am joining the episcopal church on sunday.

there are a number of reasons for doing this, but the primary one is ordination. the episcopal church ordains women, no questions asked. i don't have to justify myself. i don't have to defend my "call" (well, any more than anyone else seeking ordination). put simply, i don't have to fight. they will ordain me and let me teach and preach and not bat an eyelash.

i know there are many women who go back to the american evangelical church and fight. they push their way into meetings and committees and church leadership teams. they serve quietly, asking ever so often if the men up there have decided to take a look at the issue again. i could do that. but i'm not a very good politician, and i'd rather be in a place where i can actually use my talents rather than have to spend half my time convincing people to let me do so.

another key reason is that i'm currently plugged into an episcopal church for my internship, and they have been very supportive of sending me on for ordination. if i didn't do this, i would have to wait until next summer and find a new church and start all over again. am i rushing in too fast? probably. but that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.

and, in the end, i love the anglican tradition and liturgy. except the whole state church thing, but it's a disestablished church here, so that's ok. i like Thomas Cranmer and Elizabeth I and John Donne and C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers. and i even like Anselm. plus the anglican church can draw on celtic spirituality almost natively. and they're not a reformed tradition. there's a place for art and music and beauty and poetry. the episcopal church, and even the anglican church is centered on worship, not doctrine. they are the via media; they encompass a range of beliefs and are not fixated on doctrinal or idealogical purity. they even have a peace movement and support conscientious objection.

i guess i'll have to baptize babies if i even enter parish ministry, which i think is silly, but there's a good chance i'll only ever be an associate and hopefully spend more time getting a ph.d. and being a professor. but this is the thing: i've discovered that, generally in the church, in order to teach, you have to be ordained. i don't want to be anything but an associate pastor/priest and a professor; i don't think i would be a good primary pastor for any church. but if i want to teach, being able to say i am "an ordained episcopal priest" can only help.

low sunday sermon.

in doing research for this sermon, i discovered that liturgically, the sunday after easter is called "low sunday." but no one said why. the sermon is on Acts 4:32-35 and Psalm 133.

God's diverse yachad

Do you know, this short little passage from Acts has actually become fairly controversial? Maybe it’s not so surprising to see why... it seems as though the early church followed quite a communal economic model, doesn’t it? “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”

There is a lot of argument over whether this description of the earliest church is to be “normative” for the whole church. That is, we ask is this really to be the way the church should live? Isn’t it impossible when there are billions of Christians? Isn’t it impossible when we live in a world of credit and capital, an industrialized economy where money is more often numbers in a computer somewhere? The model of an ancient, agricultural society can hardly apply to us today, right? And really, do we have to talk about money in church again? Many scholars question whether the picture of the early community depicted here is even accurate; maybe it’s being remembered with “rose-tinted spectacles.” Or maybe the people who never really believed but came for free handouts is being carefully edited out.

I once had a professor who quoted a paraphrased version of this passage, and then she asked, “who said that?” And I answered, without raising my hand, “Karl Marx.” Most of the class laughed, but the professor said she would pray for me :)

But we like our stuff, don’t we?

Luke, who wrote the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, has some hard things to say about money. The most famous is probably the story he tells is the one we call “the rich young ruler,” where Jesus tells a young man to sell everything he has and give the money to the poor, and then come follow Jesus. One scholar notes, “Wealth is not, for Luke a sign of divine approval. It is a danger.”

I don’t really know if there are economic lessons we can draw from this passage. I don’t think Luke recorded it to give us a model for organizing the financial situations of our churches. Because of where it is situated in the narrative of Acts, though, I think Luke put it there to explain to his audience how we should live as followers of the resurrected Jesus. If there is anything perfectly clear from Luke’s stories and parables about wealth it is that the follower of Jesus should not be caught up in gathering wealth for their own sake. Wealth is good, but only if it’s used to build up the kingdom of God.

Luke follows this general sketch of the new community of Jesus-followers with two stories: one is of a man who sells a field and gives all the money to the apostles. The other is of a couple who also sell a field, but who keep back some of the money and then lie and say they are giving all of their profits to the community. Peter confronts both of them about the lie and they die suddenly, which Luke attributes to supernatural causes.

The point in their story isn’t that they kept some of the money back. It was their property, they could do such a thing. No, what they are accused of is lying to God. They wanted to make themselves look good by saying they were giving everything to the people of God. Their lie proved they cared more about themselves than and how they appeared than God or the poor. So we need to be really careful about insisting we can draw economic or financial models from this passage.

What is absolutely certain is that God wants his people to look beyond themselves and especially to the poor. You can barely open the Bible without being confronted on every page, Old and New Testaments, with the injunction to care for the community, to be generous and free with your money for the good of God’s people. And this isn’t just unique to Christians. Tacitus, a Roman historian who wrote in the second century complained that Jews are wealthy because “among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion.”

I also think the psalm selected for this morning picks up on another theme Luke is hitting on here. “How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity!” Psalm 133 is a very famous psalm in the Hebrew Bible; when I was growing up, we sang a song of that verse in Hebrew. Unity is also desperately desired by God’s people. The word in Hebrew is “yachad;” it’s one of the words the community which created the Dead Sea Scrolls used to describe themselves. They were not just an assembly, or a community, they were a unity.

But we have to be careful with that too. The yachad, the Dead Sea Scrolls community are known for their very strict discipline practices. It took at least three years to be admitted into their community, and it was very, very easy to be cast back out again for some infraction of the rules. As far as we know, women were not allowed at all. They clung to their charismatic leader, whom they called “the teacher of righteousness” and seem to have had a tightly controlled and administrated community purse, which is unlike Luke’s depiction of the early Jerusalem church in this passage.

It seems to me that the unity that God’s people are called to is not uniformity. God created a wonderfully diverse world full of all different kinds of people. I can’t imagine that all that diversity was a mistake. I don’t think God wants people to be identical, cookie-cutter clones. For one thing, people are given different spiritual gifts! Why in the world would God make people different if he wanted everyone to be the same? In a few more chapters, the apostles are going to create the first deacons to head up what we might call the social justice side of the community, because they see their primary role in the community as teachers and witnesses to the risen Christ, not as administrators.

And thank God for administrators and people who are good with money! The church needs them as much as it needs people to teach. I mean, I love reading and researching and teaching (you may have noticed :) but I’m just as happy to hand off details and logistics and finances to those who love it as much as I love my books.

This, I think, is the final lesson of Luke’s little snapshot here. Although it is the apostles who “gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus...great grace was upon them all.” The line about giving testimony to the resurrection is sandwiched in the middle there among Luke’s description of the community’s practical day-to-day living. What that tells me is that God is as concerned, if not more concerned, with how we live as a community than our public witness to the gospel. The resurrection is absolutely of central importance to the Christian witness, don’t get me wrong. But being a missionary or a pastor or someone in what they call “full-time ministry” is not the only way to worship God and it’s certainly not the best way to be a Christian. Being concerned with social justice and the poor, being concerned with how the church handles money is just as “full-time ministry” as the clergy roles.

By the way, I hate that phrase “full-time ministry.” For one, it uses “ministry,” which is a silly word only Christians use to begin with, but it implies that somehow living your life with those other gifts from God isn’t as full-time as anything else. As people of God, we’re all doing it full time!

So you know what? Live with the gifts God has given you. If you are rich, if God has given you wealth, remember why you’re given it and remember the radical generosity in the scriptures. If you love social justice, pursue it! If you serve behind the scenes, serve! If you’re artistic, make art! If God has given you something, you make us all poorer by not using it. As we brothers and sisters live in unity, supporting each other in our diversity, then we are living as God’s people.

So isn’t it funny that this short little passage is so divisive? It divides us into those who think Christians should live in communes and those who think capitalism is God’s chosen economic model. It divides those in “full-time ministry” from those who merely give money. It divides rich and poor. And instead Luke wanted to show us that “those who believed we of one heart and soul.” Luke doesn’t erase the differences between rich and poor or between the apostles and the rest of the community. But he insists that they don’t matter. The people who sell their property and give their money just as much serving God as the apostles are when they witness the resurrection. Rich and poor alike are part of the community. The priest is as much a member of his church as the accountant, the business owner, and the person who comes to the food pantry. We are called to a beautiful yachad, a unity with all the diversity of God’s creation.

Amen.

an easter prayer.

i wrote this last year for everyone who was part of the easter service. it's a mix of my own thoughts and some others' that i found said it better than i could, including the bible, Gregory of Nazianzus, historic liturgical prayers, and a prayer written specifically for those "working" on easter.

Today is the feast of feasts. Today Christ is risen from the dead.

God, who is our father and gives life by the death of your son and the power of your spirit, we praise you for the miracle of Easter. We praise you for the resurrection from the dead.

We pray for the gift of hospitality today as many join us to worship you. May we welcome them with open arms.

We pray for joy and strength for ourselves and for everyone who comes to celebrate with us today. Your resurrection heals and gives hope to everyone.

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good
His love endures forever.
We will not die but live
and proclaim what the LORD has done.

We pray that those who are hurting, who are sad, who have suffered loss will find joy and hope and healing as the Good News is proclaimed.

In the name of Jesus,
amen.

lenten sermons, part 2.

here is the sermon i delivered this past sunday. it is not as good as the one below. if i had been thinking more clearly, i would have added the challenge to think about who doesn't seem to fit, who doesn't seem to have done things "right" and the possibility that they may be the new way God is working in and through his church. but i was stressed and a little depressed. and i'm not very good at "application."


Children of God

You know, sometimes Jesus doesn’t make any sense to me. On the other hand, he’s hardly alone in that. The passage today from the gospel of John actually happens after Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but of course, we won’t celebrate that until next week. So the people who arranged the lectionary are at least as confusing (or maybe confused? :) as anyone else.

But I think Jesus is especially confusing. Here he is in Jerusalem. He is getting ready to celebrate the Passover with his disciples. And he seems to be getting ready for his death, having been predicting it for a while. He has just been welcomed rather flamboyantly into Jerusalem by people waving palm branches as one would cheer a king returning victorious from battle. And in all this excitement - about Jesus, about the festival coming up - some Greeks want to meet him.

It’s not entirely clear who these people were. They may have been Hellenistic diaspora Jews who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. That is to say, Jews who spoke Greek as their first language and read the Bible in Greek. Or they may have been gentile worshipers of the God of Israel, but one who had not officially and formally converted by the rite of circumcision. My guess is that they’re non-Jews who worship the Jewish God. Either way, it’s clear they lived neither in Jerusalem or Palestine at all and had traveled at some length and some expense to come to the festival.

It’s similar today to how Christians travel to Jerusalem to celebrate Holy Week there. You may know that every year, thousands of Christians from around the world descend on Jerusalem around Easter to follow Jesus’ own path through the city and celebrate with parades, ceremonies and church services precisely the things we are reading in the gospels. Of course, today, we can fly there, whereas in the first century, the journey had to be made much more slowly and painfully by foot, horseback, and/or ship. And whether it was the first century or the twenty-first, it’s not a cheap trip either way.

So these Greeks seek out Philip, one of Jesus’ disciples who probably spoke Greek - he has a Greek name - and told him they wanted to meet Jesus. Philip goes and tells his friend Andrew, and together, they go to tell Jesus, possibly offering to act as translators between the Aramaic-speaking Jesus and the Greeks.

And what does Jesus do? Does he say, “Great! Bring them over!”? No. Does he say, “No, at this really important festival, I need to concentrate on my fellow Jews”? No. He goes off on this bizarre monologue about the Son of Man being glorified, grains of wheat, and his Father in heaven.

What the heck is going on here?

Well, part of what I think is going on here - and this is just me - but I think the author of the gospel narrative has gotten a little distracted. Ok, distracted isn’t quite the right word. I don’t mean to imply that the author here has ADD or something. But what I do mean is that he is trying to make a point, and he’s using the Greeks to make it. We’re the ones who get distracted by this narrative of the Greeks who have come to Jerusalem for the festival and get a little off track from the gospel’s larger point. So the Greeks and Philip and Andrew are really just a setup to be able to give Jesus a chance to speak.

This is all standard in the ancient art of writing biography, which is another reason I feel like saying the author got distracted is a bad way to put it. In the ancient world, people expected the story of someone’s life to be given a point, that the narrative would be constructed to communicate a morally edifying lesson by the author. If the author didn’t do this, he would be held to have not done his duty. It was part of the convention of the genre. It would be like today, picking up a newspaper and reading an article about a court case, say, where the journalist had written up the article so that it was embellished and sounded like an excerpt from a novel. It would, in fact, still depict what happened in the courtroom, but it wouldn’t fit our expectations about how the journalist should write her story. She would have defied the conventions of her genre.

So when I say that the author of the gospel is using the request of the Greeks as a setup for Jesus, I don’t mean he invented it. It probably did happen, because we also know from other writers that inventing things was frowned on. But then in proper ancient style, he uses the episode to allow Jesus to deliver an important speech which reinforces the message being given to this account of his life.

But what is the point?

One way we can get to that question is to ask what is it about the fact that people described as Greeks wish to see Jesus. We’ve already seen that Jesus doesn’t seem to answer their request. But what if his strange monologue here is, in fact, an answer?

People have found that among others, some of the major themes in the gospel of John are Jesus’ identity with respect to the Father, and the identity of God’s people. And when you look through that lense, this episode starts to make a little more sense. First, Jesus’ monologue about the glorification of the Son of Man and of the Father’s name fit very nicely within the theme of the relationship between Jesus and the Father.

Throughout the gospel of John, Jesus is put into a very close relationship with his Father. And in this little passage, Jesus’ own glorification is linked to the glorification of the Father’s name. So this very carefully reinforces again that close link between Jesus and his Father. As we’ll discover on Easter, Jesus’ death glorifies both him and the Father’s name.

The other theme that gets pushed here is this gospel’s new definition of the people of God. Jesus spends his time in this gospel talking to just about everyone: his friends and family, Pharisees, fellow Jews, and at least one Samaritan woman. In all of these exchanges, John’s gospel has Jesus pushing on the definition of God’s people, arguing and disagreeing with his fellow Jews about that definition. And here, Greeks come to see him and this prompts him to begin talking about the glory of the Father, which even prompts a response from heaven.

Jesus is pushing a new definition of the people of God. Here it’s being made clear: the new people of God are Jews and Gentiles together, united not by circumcision, but by Jesus’ death. There was always a way for Gentiles to join the people of God: circumcision for men, and eventually baptism for both. The Hebrew Bible is filled with stories of Gentiles coming to believe in and worship the God of Israel.

Jesus' radically new way of including Gentiles in God’s family is one of the things that we celebrate on Easter, and indeed every time we take communion. We always pray and thank God that we are made one body when we eat the bread and drink the wine, the bread and wine that were first part of a Passover meal where Jesus made another radical announcement that they were to be the body and blood of Jesus himself. In his death and resurrection, all people are made the children of God.

Amen.

lenten sermons, part 1.

so either seminary is kicking my butt, or i'm just not cut out to blog about the things i'm most interested in. i think part of my problem is that i'm not used to expressing myself in less than a few thousand words.

so on that note, i am taking my husband's advice and posting my sermons here.

this is the sermon i preached 3 weeks ago for the second sunday in lent. the scriptures are Psalm 22 and Mark 8:31-38.

Deconstructing Peter, Deconstructing Death

I have a confession to make: I don’t know how to die.

I suppose that’s not surprising, though. I don’t think many of us do. Some people never learn. They fight to the end, angry, denying, desperate. But some people do learn how to die. Jesus did.

We read the last few verses of Psalm 22 a little bit ago. It’s usually the beginning of Psalm 22 that we read, because that first verse is probably one of the most quoted verses: it became Jesus’ cry of desolation on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In fact, the whole psalm is read on Good Friday.

But Jesus was learning how to die before Good Friday. In Mark chapter 8, which we also read today, he is teaching his disciples and other followers how to die.

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”

The impact of this statement from Jesus is often lost, because “to take up their cross” has sort of entered out everyday language. It’s not too common any more, but haven’t we all heard somewhere, “oh, that’s my cross to bear”? It usually means something frustrating or irritating, something long-term that dogs us.

But that’s not what Jesus was talking about. “To take up their cross” does not mean “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” (Hamlet Act III, scene I). The cross was a piece of equipment used in execution, and to carry your cross is to take an active role in your own death. This is why the Romans forced prisoners to carry their crosses. It was an act of psychological torture before the physical execution, which could probably be described as torture itself. Highways in the Roman empire would be lined with crosses hung with dead or dying men as warning to those who would rebel against imperial power, and the Jewish people rebelled often. So this image would have had quite an impact on Jesus’ first hearers. For us today, it’s like being asked to wire up the electric chair or fill the lethal injection needle ourselves.

But what’s interesting here is why Jesus launches into teaching the crowd and his disciples about how to follow him, which is to learn how to die. This passage could be called “Peter’s great reversal.” Only a few verses earlier, Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah. Now, Jesus rebukes him and calls him Satan! Wow! What happened there?

After Peter’s confession that Jesus was the messiah, Jesus started teaching that he must “undergo great suffering...and be killed.” And Peter can’t handle this. So he starts to rebuke Jesus. We don’t know what he said, but it’s plain that he disagreed with Jesus’ insistence on suffering and dying.

So Jesus calls everyone together and begins to teach that not only will he suffer and die, but that in order to be his follower, everyone else has to be prepared to go through the same: suffering, rejection, torture and a shameful execution.

The middle of Psalm 22 gives a poetic picture of this in verses 14 and 15:

I am poured out like water;
all my bones are out of joint;
my heart within my breast is melting wax.

My mouth is dried out like a pot-sherd;
my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
and you have laid me in the dust of the grave.

That’s hard to say. I don’t know how to get there.

In 1999, the film, The Green Mile came out, and it was nominated for the Oscar for best picture. When I was in college, my friends and I used to throw an Oscar party every year, where we’d watch the Oscars and complain about who should have one and who had picked which disastrous outfit to wear. I hadn’t seen The Green Mile, but when they announce the nominees for any award, they also show a clip or series of clips from the film. I don’t remember what the whole clip from The Green Mile was, but I do remember part of it was that famous scene where the cell door clangs shut, and from somewhere a voice calls out “Dead man walkin’ on the green mile!”

At the time, I thought it was an impressively dramatic scene. But later, after I’d had time to reflect, I realized that is what Jesus is calling us to as his followers. We are to be dead men and women walking.

The gospel of Mark is widely held to have its basis in the teaching and sermons that Peter gave while in Rome. Some of the writers of the early church recorded that Mark wrote down Peter’s teaching so that it could be passed on after Peter was executed at Rome. This explains many of the accounts in Mark that include Peter, and often James and John, but not the other disciples. In this light, though, it’s remarkable that it contains this story of Peter’s private rebuke of Jesus and Jesus’ response of calling him “Satan.”

Not only could Peter not handle Jesus’ own teaching that he would have to suffer and die, he didn’t know how to die himself. Jesus realized that Peter’s own misunderstanding was probably a microcosm of what everyone who was following him was thinking. So he called together not only his disciples, but also the whole crowd who was following them and delivered this graphic teaching on what following him really meant.

This was important enough that Peter kept Jesus’ teaching alive and Mark wrote it down to be passed on to the church as a whole. Another story about Mark is that after Peter was executed in Rome, Mark went to north Africa and founded what would become the church in Alexandria. The whole gospel of Mark seems to be meant for people who are undergoing some kind of persecution, to encourage them to stay fast in their faith and in their commitment to follow Jesus. So this description of what it means to be a follower of Jesus would have probably made sense. It’s not all healings and answered prayer.

And Peter finally had learned how to die. He doesn’t protect his reputation here. He doesn’t put himself out as the insightful, spiritual disciple who was the first person to identify Jesus as the Messiah. Yes, that’s there, but he turns right around and tells of this huge mistake he made, a mistake that caused his teacher to call him Satan.

Peter learned how to die.

And when he learned how to die, he also learned what it meant to live. His teachings ended up encouraging generations of Christians who also had to suffer and die, and we still read them today to teach us what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Because, included in following Jesus, included in the teaching that we learn how to die, is the promise of a new kind of life. Again, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Somehow, learning to die leads to gaining life.

This is the same promise contained in the portion of Psalm 22 that we read today.

My praise is of him in the great assembly;
I will perform my vows in the presence of those who worship him.

My soul shall live for him;
my descendants shall serve him;
they shall be known as the LORD'S for ever.

They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn
the saving deeds that he has done.

After the psalmist has recorded the suffering he is going through, he ends on the promise of life.

Now, as Christians in the United States, the chance that we’ll ever suffer the kind of persecution that Peter and the church in Rome did under Nero is pretty small. But we have other things crowding out the call of Jesus on our lives. Certainly, we have our egos to protect. We might never be party to our own physical execution, but we can learn from Peter how to die anyway.

Lent is often called “the great penitential season of the church.” It is a time when Christians try to learn how to die to prepare themselve for the celebration of Jesus’ own death and resurrection. I just learned this: the word “Lent” comes from the same word as “lengthen.” We call it these 40 days in English “Lent” because now the days are getting longer. Spring is coming! Included in this very season is the promise of life. Easter follows Good Friday. Resurrection and life follow death, and in fact are made possible by death.

During Lent, some people deny themselves a special food or physical comfort. Some people take up a spiritual discipline or a special Lenten devotion. Some still practice the ancient discipline of fasting, as our Jewish and Muslim neighbors also do today. Whatever you choose to do this Lent, including following Peter’s example of learning true humility so that by your mistake someone else might learn something, I would encourage you to join the ancient church in learning how to follow Jesus into death so that we might find life.

And the resurrection promises, in the words of poet and Anglican priest John Donne, “Death, thou shalt die.” (Holy Sonnet X)

Amen.