Sunday, August 26, 2012
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.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
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.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
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.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, May 18, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, April 16, 2012
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.
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.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
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.
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.
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