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.

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.

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.