Forgiveness Higganum Congregational Church
April 19, 2009 – Second Sunday of Easter
Scripture: 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31
This past Wednesday, I tuned in my car radio to WNPR to listen to Tom Ashbrook's program, “On Point.” It was just another day. I had no idea what I was about to hear, what I was in for. After about ten minutes and long before I got to where I was going, I pulled over, turned off the engine and lsistened. I just sat in my car for the rest of that hour. Tom Ashbrook's guest was a Palestinian doctor named Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish. Dr. Abuelaish lives in Gaza, practices medicine in Israel, is an obstetrician who treated both Palestinians and Israeli, is fluent in Hebrew, is a deeply devoted peace activist, a Muslim of unwavering faith, someone who was welcomed by Israeli medical colleagues, one of whom called him a “magical, secret bridge between Israelis and Palestinians.”1
So far, just another remarkable man. On January 16 of this year, in the Israeli invasion of Gaza, an Israeli tank shell hit his home and killed three of his daughters and a niece. Three. And still he calls for peace. He saw their mutilated bodies, picked up the pieces with his own hands and took them to the hospital. By the strangest coincidence, Dr. Abuelaish was live on Israeli TV doing an interview by about medicine when the tragedy occurred, so all of Israel heard what had happened in real time, unfiltered and unedited. When he was at the hospital where his daughters were pronounced dead, he was calling for peace. Even then, with tears streaming down his face, his daughters' blood on his hands, he was calling for peace.
That hour, listening to this highly educated man who had lost the light of his life, listening to him cry over his enormous loss, listening to him expound his hope for the future, listening to him talk about the real work he is doing right now for peace, I knew I was hearing a man who lived the Resurrection. I cried. I couldn't breath. I was staggered by his word of hope.
I have no idea if I could do what he did and does. I have never been put the test, but I fear I would collapse. How could any of us get over the sudden, violent and senseless death of three young daughters and a niece? I think that I would be crushed, filled with hate towards the enemy who had done this thing, filled with loathing towards the politicians who had brought this catastrophe upon me, filled with anger towards my God who allowed this to happen, empty like a squeezed out sponge, empty of joy and empty of hope for a future any different than the present and past.
I am not going to go into a lot of details. If you want to hear what I heard, you can go on-line and listen to the program. I tried several times this week to tell Dr. Abuelish's story in my own words, but it seemed trivial from my mouth. What I can tell you is this: in hearing Dr. Abuelaish's words, as his story began to sink into my heart and mind, I knew I was hearing the voice of someone who was living our Gospel lesson for this morning.
The greatest and sometimes almost impossibly heart wrenching gift of God in Jesus Christ to us is the ministry of forgiveness. When Jesus comes to the disciples he offers them peace through forgiveness. The word Jesus used was “shalom,” which means “peace” but also and more importantly “wholeness.” How could Dr. Abuelaish ever be whole and therefore at peace again after having so much of his life broken and taken from him before his very eyes? If you are like me, you are flabbergasted. “Could I do what he has done? Could my faith give me the strength to be as he is?” I confess that I have never been able to convince myself that I could.
I cannot quote exactly what he said when Tom Ashbrook asked him this very question, but his answer went something like this, “I am a doctor who is committed to life. I am a believer who believes that God must have a purpose for me in this tragedy. My life is for the living. Once someone is dead, there is nothing more you can do for them. You can only help the living.” Amazing words of an amazing man.
Compared to Dr. Abuelaish, I am still taking baby steps with forgiveness because that is all I am probably up for and all that my life has given me the opportunity to take thus far. But even in these baby steps, I know the power of the Resurrection. I have lived the Resurrection, not as intensely as Dr. Abuelaish but according to the grace given me. I know that Jesus lives, that he was not and is not kidding, that life, peace, shalom, is only possible through forgiveness.
That is not to say that I and my life and perfect. I have lived unforgiven and unforgiving in the past. As part of my vocation as a disciple of Jesus, I have examined my experience living unforgiven and unforgiving. It is not pleasant. It feels fearful of the past coming storming back into the present. It feels as if possibilities have become impossibilities. Limited, constricted, guarded, threatened. Jesus and the Resurrection are not fantasy, but about real life, as real as it gets. If you are human being who is really living, you are going to hurt and be hurt, you are going to need forgiveness and you are going to need to forgive if you want to live abundantly. All of us do and say thoughtless or hurtful things to others. That's just what we human beings do. What I have experienced in my life is that from the moment of the pain, either given or received, until the moment of forgiveness, either given or received, given and accepted I am convinced by the grace of God who is ultimately the source of new life, I am stuck in the past, chained to that moment. I may still interact with the person I have hurt or been hurt by, but we both know that one of us has injured or broken the wholeness, the shalom we used to have, the shalom God hopes for us to have. Big parts of the present and future are no longer possible because the past is in the way. Until one of us puts our fingers in the holes in the other person's hands, puts our hands in the wounds in that other person's heart which were inflicted by the other, until one of us acknowledges what we have done and accepts that the wounds belong to both of us, there can be no shalom. The moment I take the bold step of Thomas and actually touch the wounds, the burden of the past begins to fall away. I am reborn. The present and future are possible again.
Not everyone accepts apologies or offers full forgiveness. Many of us say we do and secretly keep a card up our sleeves, put the memory away just in case. But at least one of us was able to unshackle the chain which held us to the past, unpack the burden from our shoulders and live lightly again. Ever since I learned and lived that, that person is me.
Jesus carries the wounds of the crucifixion with him. They did not go away. They are part of who he was and is. The same is certainly true for Dr. Abuelaish and for all the people who have suffered such astounding tragedies. For us too. Every person I have ever known carries their wounds and scars around with them, some visible, some hidden, some acknowledged, some ignored. Our wounded and wounding hands and hearts can become our wisdom if we allow them to. Most of us, however, push that stuff into the back of the closet and try not to see it, hoping it will just go away, but it doesn't. It's there. It lives on in our souls and causes us to be fearful, angry, hurtful, overly cautious, resentful, and so on. I am convinced, based upon my analysis of myself when I lived unforgiven and unforgiving, that most of our hurtful behavior in the present is triggered by things we have not forgiven or have not been forgiven for from the past. At least, that's how it is for me.
This is what the Resurrection has looked like in my life. As I said before, I am still taking baby steps with forgiveness, but I can offer you an analogy of what life lived unforgiven and unforgiving feels like. My analogy is one of a life consumed by worry, which I have noticed has the same effect on the soul as living unforgiven and unforgiving. Many years ago my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She is fine now, but from the moment of diagnosis until the successful end of surgery, we lived in dread and worry. Then, when the doctor said that she was fine, it was like we were reborn. That was not the end, however. As her yearly check-up approached to see if she was still in remission, the dread and worry would come back, intensifying to a fever pitch in the waiting room with other cancer survivors. “Has the cancer come back?” That's all we could think of. We were caught in the spiral of awfulization, imagining the worst which only gets worse and worse the more we imagine how awful it is and might become. And then the radiologist would take the x-ray and the doctor would do the check-up and she would be given a clean bill of health and we would breathe a deep sigh of relief. “Ah, I'm going to live.” “Thank God. She's going to live.” You may have lived similar things in your life, dreading the worst. After about ten years, I realized that all that time we had spent worrying, thinking about death and the way the past might become the future, rather than living in the present and allowing the future to unfold from right now, was anything but abundant life. It certainly was not peace, shalom, wholeness.
That is exactly what living unforgiven and unforgiving has felt like to me. A waste of life, living in the past, fearful in the present and dreading the future. Now I ask for forgiveness as soon as possible. Now I forgive as quickly as I can, whether the other person wants it or not. More importantly, I try to not let things stick in the first place. Just like you, I have been rejected, insulted, mistreated, cheated, lied to, stolen from, been done wrong by others – not all of which I have completely gotten over. But I pray to God to help me let go. I try to let things roll of my back and live shalom as many moments of every day as the grace of God gives me the power to live.
This is the Resurrection. It isn't pleasant at first, looking at and touching all those nail holes and wounded sides. Sometimes our fears get the better of us and we close ourselves off in locked rooms of our hearts and minds. But once you feel how good it feels, once you feel the new and abundant life flowing through you and out into the world around you, you know what Thomas knew in our lesson this morning. The really good news is that if that is what you want (and who would not want that?), if that is what you need (and this is what all of us need whether we want to admit it or not), Jesus will come to you wherever you have locked yourself away, through whatever doors you have bolted to keep the past out, and bring you new life. Can you imagine how beautiful life would be if we could just forgive others and seek forgiveness of others as the fallible yet precious creatures we are. God our Creator has already forgiven us. Wouldn't it be great if we could accept that and live as if that were true for us? It would be like, well, heaven, wouldn't it? Not in the future, but right now, on earth as it already is in heaven. That's what we pray for, isn't it? Thomas knew it, which is why he fell on his knees and exclaimed, “my Lord and my God.” You can too.
1www.onpointradio.org/shows/2009/04/a-gaza-doctors-case-for-peace
Monday, April 20, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Good friday - Where are you?
Were Are You ? Higganum Congregational Church
April 10, 2009 – Good Friday Scripture: Mark 14:1- 15:47
By now, most of you know that my preaching tends to stress what I think are the essentials of Christian faith. I do not spend a lot of time on peripheral issues. In fact, my wife tells me I only really have one sermon. “Love, love, love. That's all you talk about,” she says. And she's probably right. “There are worse things,” I respond. “Love is the fundamental premise of Christianity, that “God is love” and that we are called to live lives of love.”
The problem with only talking about love is that it fails to account for so much of what goes on in our world and in our lives, who we are a lot of the time. People want to feel good and be comforted in church, so we stay on topic and talk about love. But the truth which we visit occasionally, the truth which is inescapable on Good Friday, the truth which most modern, liberal Protestants like us try our best to ignore because we find it distasteful, is that there is a shadow side to God is love. That shadow side comes starkly into focus in the passion story, where we see people betraying and killing God in Jesus Christ. In the old days when churches like ours spent a lot of time talking about sin, what I am about to say would not be news to you. But today, when we stay on love, it is shocking and upsetting to hear the fundamental Christian insight into the shadow side of love, which is that we all betray God and try to kill God. Every one of us. It is the nature of being a human being, what theologians have called “original sin,” an idea that is badly misunderstood. We are incapable of pure love, of unwavering love, of truly self-less love.
Most modern, liberal Protestants like us would argue that there is a world of difference between being incapable, weak, or limited, which are shortcomings, and betrayal and murder, which are acts of the will and intent, to which I would respond, “the end result is the same.” We betray and try to kill God, each and every one of us, whether we mean to or not, every time we resist love and life, every time we turn our backs on love and life, every time we run away from love, every time we deny God, every time we ignore God's hope and intention for us and for creation, every time we get in other people's way into love, every time we deny love and life to others, every time we insist on our own way rather than allowing God to be God, every time we choose a life that is opposed to God, and so on. For all of us it is habitual. For some of us this only happens from time to time. For many of us, there have been times when it was intentional and with a vengeance.
All of this seems like a real bummer, doesn't it? I might seem like a throw back to our Puritan Calvinist ancestors, whose basic premise was that human beings are hopelessly sinful. I think that I am preaching great Good News, that seeing life, your life and all lives from this place is like standing on the threshold of freedom. When we accept the fact that all of us betray and try to kill God and when we are able to pinpoint the concrete ways in which we do this in our real lives, we are standing at the gateway to what God hopes for us. We know what we have to change and can begin praying for God's grace to make that change.
It might shock you to hear me say it, but none of the characters in the passion story are pure evil or just plain bad. Not even Pontius Pilate who was just doing his job. The truth of the matter, if we dare to admit it to ourselves, is that we work, live and are related to every one of these characters. Each of us and all of us, at one time or another, is one of these characters. As I said before, this is not an exercise in self-blame or morbid guilt, but the beginning of freedom. In the passion of Jesus we can actually discover, uncover, and begin to let go of, root out even, whatever it is that is getting between you and life and love, what you might want to die to so that you might live in Christ. This is not for atheists or agnostics, but for people of faith who really want to go all the way with God.
Let's listen to the story and see if we can see ourselves.
The chief priests and scribes masterminded the whole thing. Why? Weer they evil and bad? They did a terrible thing, but they did it out of love, love for the religious institution to which they had given their lives. Jesus and his new way of seeing God and a faithful life was messing up their life's work. When faced with the choice between being open to Jesus' new interpretation and perhaps changing, or getting rid of Jesus, they chose the easier path. Let's get rid of him. Isn't this the shadow side of the history of the church? A history of violent repression and intolerance of difference? But how about you? Where are you? How stuck are you in your beliefs and practices? Are you really open to what God in jesus Christ might do in and through you? Or would you rather do what you do and know what you know?
Then there is Judas. Why did Judas do what he did? No one will ever know, but Mark seems to imply that money was behind it all. I think Judas was really passionate about helping the poor, which is why he got angry at Jesus praise of the wasteful extravagance of the anonymous woman. That money could have been used for helping the poor and so he goes out and offers his services for a price. Perhaps Judas just thought Jesus was missing the mark. Maybe I'm wrong about Judas, but a lot of people do a lot of bad things in the name of doing good. We all have our own agendas of the way things ought to be and what is really important. We all know best. But at what cost? Where are you?
The there are Peter, James and John who fall asleep in the garden. That's hardly a betrayal, but it is an accurate assessment of how most of us are with God. We get bored. We don't want to wait. We fall asleep. We nap our ways through our relationship with God. Are you sleeping your way through life? Missing somehow the important things right in front of you? Where are you?
Then there is Judas again, betraying Jesus with a kiss. A kiss. This one really hits home, doesn't it? How much of what we call love for others in our lives is really self-interest? I love you if you do what I want? I love you if you are a certain way? I love you if you make me feel good about myself? Who and what do any of us love selflessly and unconditionally? Where are you?
I think we can lump all the soldiers, the people who helped arrest Jesus, and the executioners together in a group. These people were all just following orders, doing their jobs, helping the system function. Do you follow orders, do your job, go with the flow, rather than question how what you do stifles life and love around you? Do you prefer to rationalize what you do in life and how you do it as a necessity rather than open yourself to what God might have in store for you? Do you view life and everything in it as first and foremost either an asset or a debit, as a commodity to be used? Where are you?
There are the disciples, all of whom run away except for Peter. All of us have run away from difficult situations in our lives when we are fearful. We regret it and wish we could have done differently, but we still run. Where are you? Running away is a booming business in our society. It's what makes TV, entertainment in general, the internet, and big alcohol such profitable and accepted businesses.
There's Peter again, denying Jesus in the courtyard. Let's not sugar coat the situation. Peter knows that if he admits he is a disciple he may well end up on the cross right next to Jesus. What would you do if you were in Peter's shoes? Where do you draw the line with God?
Pontius Pilate. There's no denying it. He was a cruel man who crucified a lot of Jews like Jesus in his day. He is ultimately responsible for the crucifixion. He gave the order. But notice how he tried to shirk his responsibility? Tries to put the burden on the chief priests and scribes and then on the crowd? He could have stopped the whole thing with two words, “you're free,” but he doesn't. Where are you? Do you take responsibility in your life? Or do you live life pointing the finger at others? He's the reason I am do this. My childhood made me this way. I don't have any real option. I'm unhappy, frustrated, unfulfilled, violent, whatever, because of this person, that situation, or anything at all except me. Where are you?
There's the crowd, who love Jesus one day and call for his execution the next. Anyone who follows politics will not be surprised by this, how one year we love one president and approve of whatever he does and the next year we hate and despise him. The pressure to conform is stronger than most of us can withstand. Where are you?
There are all the on-lookers. Do you know who I think of when I think of these folks? I think of the time I visited the Nazi concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, in the city of Berlin. Right at the end of a residential neighborhood. These good, law abiding Germans watched 90,000 Jews, communists, homosexuals, POWs, and political dissidents being marched through their neighborhood and through the front gates of the camp. They never saw anyone come out, and asked no questions. They saw the smoke from the fires. They smelled it. The ash fell on their houses. “We didn't know what was happening,” they all said in 1945. Where are we? We see similar things on our TVs, in the newspapers, on the internet. Wars, genocides, torture, we see it all. But what do we do? Where are you?
I sincerely believe that no one person can change another person or group of people unless they want to be changed. What that one person can do is disturb the other or the group enough so that they change to adjust to the disturbance. Good Friday, the passion story of Jesus, is God's disturbing gift to us, our opportunity to look honestly at our selves, the way we are in the world, the ways we betray and try to kill God. If we can bear the truth, we are on the threshold of the new and abundant life God promises us in Jesus. As Jesus himself said, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” Amen and Amen.
April 10, 2009 – Good Friday Scripture: Mark 14:1- 15:47
By now, most of you know that my preaching tends to stress what I think are the essentials of Christian faith. I do not spend a lot of time on peripheral issues. In fact, my wife tells me I only really have one sermon. “Love, love, love. That's all you talk about,” she says. And she's probably right. “There are worse things,” I respond. “Love is the fundamental premise of Christianity, that “God is love” and that we are called to live lives of love.”
The problem with only talking about love is that it fails to account for so much of what goes on in our world and in our lives, who we are a lot of the time. People want to feel good and be comforted in church, so we stay on topic and talk about love. But the truth which we visit occasionally, the truth which is inescapable on Good Friday, the truth which most modern, liberal Protestants like us try our best to ignore because we find it distasteful, is that there is a shadow side to God is love. That shadow side comes starkly into focus in the passion story, where we see people betraying and killing God in Jesus Christ. In the old days when churches like ours spent a lot of time talking about sin, what I am about to say would not be news to you. But today, when we stay on love, it is shocking and upsetting to hear the fundamental Christian insight into the shadow side of love, which is that we all betray God and try to kill God. Every one of us. It is the nature of being a human being, what theologians have called “original sin,” an idea that is badly misunderstood. We are incapable of pure love, of unwavering love, of truly self-less love.
Most modern, liberal Protestants like us would argue that there is a world of difference between being incapable, weak, or limited, which are shortcomings, and betrayal and murder, which are acts of the will and intent, to which I would respond, “the end result is the same.” We betray and try to kill God, each and every one of us, whether we mean to or not, every time we resist love and life, every time we turn our backs on love and life, every time we run away from love, every time we deny God, every time we ignore God's hope and intention for us and for creation, every time we get in other people's way into love, every time we deny love and life to others, every time we insist on our own way rather than allowing God to be God, every time we choose a life that is opposed to God, and so on. For all of us it is habitual. For some of us this only happens from time to time. For many of us, there have been times when it was intentional and with a vengeance.
All of this seems like a real bummer, doesn't it? I might seem like a throw back to our Puritan Calvinist ancestors, whose basic premise was that human beings are hopelessly sinful. I think that I am preaching great Good News, that seeing life, your life and all lives from this place is like standing on the threshold of freedom. When we accept the fact that all of us betray and try to kill God and when we are able to pinpoint the concrete ways in which we do this in our real lives, we are standing at the gateway to what God hopes for us. We know what we have to change and can begin praying for God's grace to make that change.
It might shock you to hear me say it, but none of the characters in the passion story are pure evil or just plain bad. Not even Pontius Pilate who was just doing his job. The truth of the matter, if we dare to admit it to ourselves, is that we work, live and are related to every one of these characters. Each of us and all of us, at one time or another, is one of these characters. As I said before, this is not an exercise in self-blame or morbid guilt, but the beginning of freedom. In the passion of Jesus we can actually discover, uncover, and begin to let go of, root out even, whatever it is that is getting between you and life and love, what you might want to die to so that you might live in Christ. This is not for atheists or agnostics, but for people of faith who really want to go all the way with God.
Let's listen to the story and see if we can see ourselves.
The chief priests and scribes masterminded the whole thing. Why? Weer they evil and bad? They did a terrible thing, but they did it out of love, love for the religious institution to which they had given their lives. Jesus and his new way of seeing God and a faithful life was messing up their life's work. When faced with the choice between being open to Jesus' new interpretation and perhaps changing, or getting rid of Jesus, they chose the easier path. Let's get rid of him. Isn't this the shadow side of the history of the church? A history of violent repression and intolerance of difference? But how about you? Where are you? How stuck are you in your beliefs and practices? Are you really open to what God in jesus Christ might do in and through you? Or would you rather do what you do and know what you know?
Then there is Judas. Why did Judas do what he did? No one will ever know, but Mark seems to imply that money was behind it all. I think Judas was really passionate about helping the poor, which is why he got angry at Jesus praise of the wasteful extravagance of the anonymous woman. That money could have been used for helping the poor and so he goes out and offers his services for a price. Perhaps Judas just thought Jesus was missing the mark. Maybe I'm wrong about Judas, but a lot of people do a lot of bad things in the name of doing good. We all have our own agendas of the way things ought to be and what is really important. We all know best. But at what cost? Where are you?
The there are Peter, James and John who fall asleep in the garden. That's hardly a betrayal, but it is an accurate assessment of how most of us are with God. We get bored. We don't want to wait. We fall asleep. We nap our ways through our relationship with God. Are you sleeping your way through life? Missing somehow the important things right in front of you? Where are you?
Then there is Judas again, betraying Jesus with a kiss. A kiss. This one really hits home, doesn't it? How much of what we call love for others in our lives is really self-interest? I love you if you do what I want? I love you if you are a certain way? I love you if you make me feel good about myself? Who and what do any of us love selflessly and unconditionally? Where are you?
I think we can lump all the soldiers, the people who helped arrest Jesus, and the executioners together in a group. These people were all just following orders, doing their jobs, helping the system function. Do you follow orders, do your job, go with the flow, rather than question how what you do stifles life and love around you? Do you prefer to rationalize what you do in life and how you do it as a necessity rather than open yourself to what God might have in store for you? Do you view life and everything in it as first and foremost either an asset or a debit, as a commodity to be used? Where are you?
There are the disciples, all of whom run away except for Peter. All of us have run away from difficult situations in our lives when we are fearful. We regret it and wish we could have done differently, but we still run. Where are you? Running away is a booming business in our society. It's what makes TV, entertainment in general, the internet, and big alcohol such profitable and accepted businesses.
There's Peter again, denying Jesus in the courtyard. Let's not sugar coat the situation. Peter knows that if he admits he is a disciple he may well end up on the cross right next to Jesus. What would you do if you were in Peter's shoes? Where do you draw the line with God?
Pontius Pilate. There's no denying it. He was a cruel man who crucified a lot of Jews like Jesus in his day. He is ultimately responsible for the crucifixion. He gave the order. But notice how he tried to shirk his responsibility? Tries to put the burden on the chief priests and scribes and then on the crowd? He could have stopped the whole thing with two words, “you're free,” but he doesn't. Where are you? Do you take responsibility in your life? Or do you live life pointing the finger at others? He's the reason I am do this. My childhood made me this way. I don't have any real option. I'm unhappy, frustrated, unfulfilled, violent, whatever, because of this person, that situation, or anything at all except me. Where are you?
There's the crowd, who love Jesus one day and call for his execution the next. Anyone who follows politics will not be surprised by this, how one year we love one president and approve of whatever he does and the next year we hate and despise him. The pressure to conform is stronger than most of us can withstand. Where are you?
There are all the on-lookers. Do you know who I think of when I think of these folks? I think of the time I visited the Nazi concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, in the city of Berlin. Right at the end of a residential neighborhood. These good, law abiding Germans watched 90,000 Jews, communists, homosexuals, POWs, and political dissidents being marched through their neighborhood and through the front gates of the camp. They never saw anyone come out, and asked no questions. They saw the smoke from the fires. They smelled it. The ash fell on their houses. “We didn't know what was happening,” they all said in 1945. Where are we? We see similar things on our TVs, in the newspapers, on the internet. Wars, genocides, torture, we see it all. But what do we do? Where are you?
I sincerely believe that no one person can change another person or group of people unless they want to be changed. What that one person can do is disturb the other or the group enough so that they change to adjust to the disturbance. Good Friday, the passion story of Jesus, is God's disturbing gift to us, our opportunity to look honestly at our selves, the way we are in the world, the ways we betray and try to kill God. If we can bear the truth, we are on the threshold of the new and abundant life God promises us in Jesus. As Jesus himself said, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” Amen and Amen.
I Woke Up this Morning
I Woke Up this Morning Higganum Congregational Church
April 12, 2009 – Easter Sunday Scripture: Mark 16: 1-8
Here we are again on Easter, the most important Holy Day in our lives as Christians. Easter defines us as God's people, as resurrection people who live rejoicing in the power of the risen Christ. People love Christmas and there obviously could not be Easter without Christmas, but Easter is what makes us Christians.
I particularly love Mark's telling of the Easter story because it rings so true for me. Most people prefer the Easter story in John as it is so neat and tidy, so warm and fuzzy: Mary Magdalene in the garden alone, Jesus calling her by name, her great joy. But Mark's telling has always been more true for me; not true as in factually more accurate, but true as in what it means and how it resonates with my experience of the risen Christ.
There are four truths in Mark's Easter story which I would like to lift up for you this morning. First, the story opens with Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome “walking around with their eyes down.” Isn't that the truth? It certainly is for me. I have spent way to many days walking with my eyes cast down, days when I woke up wishing I could sleep some more; days I woke up and sort of took it for granted that I woke up, like that very fact was not reason enough for great joy and celebration. Like I woke up, got out of bed, put on my bathrobe and slippers, went to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, got the kids up, helped make breakfast for myself and the family which we then ate together, got showered, shaved and dressed, helped get the kids dressed, took the kids to daycare and the dog for a walk, went to work, and nothing much impressed me with any of that. Like people to love and be loved by, having a home, food to eat, and the physical ability to do everything I had done between the moment my eyes first opened in the morning until they closed at night was not reason enough for great joy and celebration. No. Sadly enough, I miss most of it on far too many days because my eyes are cast down. You see, that's real truth for me. How about you? Do you spend a lot of days walking around with your eyes cast down?
Then comes the second big truth in the question the women asked themselves on their way to the tomb: “who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb for us?” Oh, if that isn't me! Who is going to make things right in my life? Who is going to finally step up and take responsibility for all the ways they are messing up my world? Which one of the people in my life who have offended me or done me wrong is going to be man or woman enough to ask me for forgiveness? Who is going to finally realize what a great person I am and give me the break I deserve and have deserved for a long time now? How about you? Do you spend a lot of your life asking yourself who is going to roll away the stone from the tombs of your life?
The third big truth comes when we see the women poking their heads into the tomb. That's me too. I have spent way too many days poking around in the tombs of my life, digging at and rehashing the same old disappointments, the same tired frustrations, and the same unchanged angers I have rehashed a thousand times before, like a cow chewing her cud. Like all the days I wake up and for one reason or another I start thinking about my resentment towards someone who is blowing up my world, all the days I wake up and start rehashing in my mind a disagreement I have had with someone and in the process of replaying it for myself I become even more convinced of how right I was then and still am and how pigheaded and difficult the other person was then and still is. Like all the days when my mind nags me about how things are not the way they ought to be, how I am not who I might have been or should be, how there are so many things I have to do, how there are so many things others have not done for me, and so on. That no one in my life seems to be quite who they ought to be. THANK GOD FOR THE DOG! At least she is just right! You see, the women poking their heads into the tomb is real truth for me. How about you? Do you spend a lot of days poking around in the tombs of your life?
Those are three big truths that accurately describe way too much of how I have spent my life. It's not just me though. Isn't the truth that all of us have these interior conversations going on in our heads? We human beings spend most of our lives walking around with our eyes cast down, wondering who is going to roll away the stones which are keeping us closed off or closed in from the life we want and the people we want to be, and poking around in the tombs of our lives
My friends, let me be the young man in a white robe for you this morning, the man you find at the tomb this Easter, as Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome found that other young man in white robes sitting inside Jesus' tomb all those years ago. I am not an angel, but let me tell you this: “Do not be alarmed: you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Go, he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”
Jesus is not dead. He has been raised and he goes before us right now into our lives as he told us he would. Easter is not some historical puzzle about what happened at that tomb nearly two thousand years ago. Don't waste your time trying to figure that one out. That's just more tomb gazing and questions about stone rolling. No, Easter is about living in the recognition of the power of the risen Christ in our lives, the power to bring life out of death, the power to bring us out of our tombs into new life, the power to live from a clean slate with other people whose slates are equally clean, the power to help us see possibility where we see finality, the power to strengthen us to live abundantly when we see limitation and scarcity, the power to help us to be love when hiding in fear is much easier. It's about opening yourself to that presence and power and allowing it to change you.
Many of you know exactly what I am talking about, the times in your lives when it was suddenly a new day, when you had been released from whatever had kept you entombed, when life just seemed possible again. Most of usually notice these sorts of things in retrospect and then we connect the dots, saying to ourselves, because we are Yankee Congregationalists after all for whom professions of faith are kept to ourselves, “Wow. So that's what Jesus was talking about?!? It happened to me! Wow, you know I think God saved me.”
I think we all of us have had this experience or we wouldn't be here. Most of us, however, either take it for granted, or chalk it up to luck or the cyclical nature of things. To those of you who have not called this new life by it's Christian name, the resurrection, the power of the risen Christ in both your life and in the world, get excited. This is what it's all about. The risen Christ is going ahead of you into your lives to make all things new.
I am not talking about false optimism or shallow buoyancy, the power of positive thinking or the comfort of delusional living. It's not even wishful thinking. I am talking about opening ourselves to the power of the risen Christ, about living the resurrection. So many Christians like us think that being Christian is all about learning what Jesus said and did, that he lived a great life, died a bad death, and then something else happened, and then trying our best to live our lives that way, but that is missing the main point. Being a Christian is about living the resurrection, about feeling the power of the risen Christ, knowing somehow that Jesus really is alive because you feel it and experience it, and then, out of that experience, living as Jesus taught us to.
Which brings me to fourth and biggest truth in Mark's Easter story. Did any of you find it strange when that other young man in white robes said to Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome all those years ago, “Do not be alarmed.” Why would they be alarmed? Why? Because all of us who spend our days walking around with our eyes cast down, all of us who spend our days poking around in the tombs of our lives, all of us who spend our days wondering who is going to roll away the stones from the tombs of our lives, all of us panic when we first come face to face with the reality of the Resurrection. We hear the Good News of the Resurrection and we want to believe, but the prospect of living it is alarming. What will we do with ourselves? We run away from the new life right before us, just like the women did. Like them, we panic. It's too good to be true.
As I said, I have spent way too much time in my life not living the resurrection. The difference for me is that I have known the risen Christ in my life and return to him whenever I start falling back into my old ways. Now, by the power of the risen Christ I life up my eyes and see the goodness and possibility of life. Now I stop asking myself who is going to roll away the stones of my life and trust that God is already on it. And I let go of the hold my tombs have on me and set out boldly into the Galile to find Jesus who has gone ahead of me. That's why, on Easter, I love to sing the song “I woke up this morning with my mind...stayed on Jesus.”
April 12, 2009 – Easter Sunday Scripture: Mark 16: 1-8
Here we are again on Easter, the most important Holy Day in our lives as Christians. Easter defines us as God's people, as resurrection people who live rejoicing in the power of the risen Christ. People love Christmas and there obviously could not be Easter without Christmas, but Easter is what makes us Christians.
I particularly love Mark's telling of the Easter story because it rings so true for me. Most people prefer the Easter story in John as it is so neat and tidy, so warm and fuzzy: Mary Magdalene in the garden alone, Jesus calling her by name, her great joy. But Mark's telling has always been more true for me; not true as in factually more accurate, but true as in what it means and how it resonates with my experience of the risen Christ.
There are four truths in Mark's Easter story which I would like to lift up for you this morning. First, the story opens with Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome “walking around with their eyes down.” Isn't that the truth? It certainly is for me. I have spent way to many days walking with my eyes cast down, days when I woke up wishing I could sleep some more; days I woke up and sort of took it for granted that I woke up, like that very fact was not reason enough for great joy and celebration. Like I woke up, got out of bed, put on my bathrobe and slippers, went to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, got the kids up, helped make breakfast for myself and the family which we then ate together, got showered, shaved and dressed, helped get the kids dressed, took the kids to daycare and the dog for a walk, went to work, and nothing much impressed me with any of that. Like people to love and be loved by, having a home, food to eat, and the physical ability to do everything I had done between the moment my eyes first opened in the morning until they closed at night was not reason enough for great joy and celebration. No. Sadly enough, I miss most of it on far too many days because my eyes are cast down. You see, that's real truth for me. How about you? Do you spend a lot of days walking around with your eyes cast down?
Then comes the second big truth in the question the women asked themselves on their way to the tomb: “who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb for us?” Oh, if that isn't me! Who is going to make things right in my life? Who is going to finally step up and take responsibility for all the ways they are messing up my world? Which one of the people in my life who have offended me or done me wrong is going to be man or woman enough to ask me for forgiveness? Who is going to finally realize what a great person I am and give me the break I deserve and have deserved for a long time now? How about you? Do you spend a lot of your life asking yourself who is going to roll away the stone from the tombs of your life?
The third big truth comes when we see the women poking their heads into the tomb. That's me too. I have spent way too many days poking around in the tombs of my life, digging at and rehashing the same old disappointments, the same tired frustrations, and the same unchanged angers I have rehashed a thousand times before, like a cow chewing her cud. Like all the days I wake up and for one reason or another I start thinking about my resentment towards someone who is blowing up my world, all the days I wake up and start rehashing in my mind a disagreement I have had with someone and in the process of replaying it for myself I become even more convinced of how right I was then and still am and how pigheaded and difficult the other person was then and still is. Like all the days when my mind nags me about how things are not the way they ought to be, how I am not who I might have been or should be, how there are so many things I have to do, how there are so many things others have not done for me, and so on. That no one in my life seems to be quite who they ought to be. THANK GOD FOR THE DOG! At least she is just right! You see, the women poking their heads into the tomb is real truth for me. How about you? Do you spend a lot of days poking around in the tombs of your life?
Those are three big truths that accurately describe way too much of how I have spent my life. It's not just me though. Isn't the truth that all of us have these interior conversations going on in our heads? We human beings spend most of our lives walking around with our eyes cast down, wondering who is going to roll away the stones which are keeping us closed off or closed in from the life we want and the people we want to be, and poking around in the tombs of our lives
My friends, let me be the young man in a white robe for you this morning, the man you find at the tomb this Easter, as Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome found that other young man in white robes sitting inside Jesus' tomb all those years ago. I am not an angel, but let me tell you this: “Do not be alarmed: you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Go, he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”
Jesus is not dead. He has been raised and he goes before us right now into our lives as he told us he would. Easter is not some historical puzzle about what happened at that tomb nearly two thousand years ago. Don't waste your time trying to figure that one out. That's just more tomb gazing and questions about stone rolling. No, Easter is about living in the recognition of the power of the risen Christ in our lives, the power to bring life out of death, the power to bring us out of our tombs into new life, the power to live from a clean slate with other people whose slates are equally clean, the power to help us see possibility where we see finality, the power to strengthen us to live abundantly when we see limitation and scarcity, the power to help us to be love when hiding in fear is much easier. It's about opening yourself to that presence and power and allowing it to change you.
Many of you know exactly what I am talking about, the times in your lives when it was suddenly a new day, when you had been released from whatever had kept you entombed, when life just seemed possible again. Most of usually notice these sorts of things in retrospect and then we connect the dots, saying to ourselves, because we are Yankee Congregationalists after all for whom professions of faith are kept to ourselves, “Wow. So that's what Jesus was talking about?!? It happened to me! Wow, you know I think God saved me.”
I think we all of us have had this experience or we wouldn't be here. Most of us, however, either take it for granted, or chalk it up to luck or the cyclical nature of things. To those of you who have not called this new life by it's Christian name, the resurrection, the power of the risen Christ in both your life and in the world, get excited. This is what it's all about. The risen Christ is going ahead of you into your lives to make all things new.
I am not talking about false optimism or shallow buoyancy, the power of positive thinking or the comfort of delusional living. It's not even wishful thinking. I am talking about opening ourselves to the power of the risen Christ, about living the resurrection. So many Christians like us think that being Christian is all about learning what Jesus said and did, that he lived a great life, died a bad death, and then something else happened, and then trying our best to live our lives that way, but that is missing the main point. Being a Christian is about living the resurrection, about feeling the power of the risen Christ, knowing somehow that Jesus really is alive because you feel it and experience it, and then, out of that experience, living as Jesus taught us to.
Which brings me to fourth and biggest truth in Mark's Easter story. Did any of you find it strange when that other young man in white robes said to Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome all those years ago, “Do not be alarmed.” Why would they be alarmed? Why? Because all of us who spend our days walking around with our eyes cast down, all of us who spend our days poking around in the tombs of our lives, all of us who spend our days wondering who is going to roll away the stones from the tombs of our lives, all of us panic when we first come face to face with the reality of the Resurrection. We hear the Good News of the Resurrection and we want to believe, but the prospect of living it is alarming. What will we do with ourselves? We run away from the new life right before us, just like the women did. Like them, we panic. It's too good to be true.
As I said, I have spent way too much time in my life not living the resurrection. The difference for me is that I have known the risen Christ in my life and return to him whenever I start falling back into my old ways. Now, by the power of the risen Christ I life up my eyes and see the goodness and possibility of life. Now I stop asking myself who is going to roll away the stones of my life and trust that God is already on it. And I let go of the hold my tombs have on me and set out boldly into the Galile to find Jesus who has gone ahead of me. That's why, on Easter, I love to sing the song “I woke up this morning with my mind...stayed on Jesus.”
Monday, April 6, 2009
And on the Other Side of Town
And on the Other Side of Town Higganum Congregational Church
April 5, 2009 – Palm Sunday Scripture: Mark 11: 1-11
It's hard for us to get ourselves inside that first Palm Sunday, imagine what it was like, what was happening and what it meant for those involved. This morning I would like to try to paint a picture for you.
The scene is Jerusalem right before the festival of Passover. Jerusalem, the holy city of Judaism, the home of the temple, the place where God had chosen to dwell on earth, the focus of Jewish devotion and the destination of pilgrimage. Mecca for Muslims. Rome for Catholics. The Ganges River for Hindus. New York for capitalists. Washington DC for Americans. All of that rolled into one, with the additional emotional electricity of Roman occupation, which further heightened the city's significance for the Jews of Jesus' day.
The city was much more than just a city. It represented the closely interwoven political and religious hopes and dreams of the Jewish people. It was also a remarkable, cosmopolitan place. Home to probably 80,000 people, it dwarfed the villages most people lived in. Herod the Great had died around the time of Jesus' birth, but he had built on a massive and extravagant scale during his long lifetime and rule. The city was encircled by massive walls, but on the east side of the city, the side through which Jesus would have come, the side Jesus would have looked at from the Mount of Olives where he stayed throughout Holy Week, was a 150 wall. 150 feet. Much higher then the top of our steeple, a height even more impressive as it rose from the top of a steep incline out of the Kidron Valley, the deep ravine separating the Mount of Olives from the city. This high wall formed one side of the truly enormous platform on which the temple stood. Herod had started rebuilding the temple, destroyed centuries before by the conquering Babylonians, so that it was one of the wonders of the ancient world and the work was still going on.
Jerusalem at Passover. As many as 150 to 200,000 pilgrims would have come to the city for this most important of Jewish festivals, camping out on the hills all around the city. Passover, the celebration, the remembrance of Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt. A joyous time in Jewish life, yet one marred by the Roman occupation of their homeland and their holy city. Had the time come for God to act decisively again for the people of Israel and deliver them from slavery? This thought was on many devout minds every Passover and is still one of the prayers every year.
These thousands of pilgrims would have been impressed and awestruck by the crowds, by the grandeur of the city, by the enormity of the Temple, by the cacophony of animals bleating and bellowing as they were sold in street stalls for the coming sacrifice. As they made their way towards the city they would have seen enormous stones being pulled by teams of oxen, stones as much as 50 feet tall and weighing hundreds of tons, stones for the completion of the Temple. For people who lived in wattle and daub or adobe style homes, the scale of the project was almost beyond belief. The physicality of it all was marvelous and amazing, and then there was God in the Temple. Just imagine what must have been going through the minds of the Passover pilgrims almost two thousand years ago.
And into this bubbling pot of excitement and anticipation, aspiration and resentment, came Jesus. He had been walking down the Jordan River valley from Galilee for a few weeks, telling his disciples that he was going to Jerusalem where he would to be handed over by the religious authorities to the Romans and be killed. They did not want to hear it, tried to argue Jesus out of it, but he explained that this was inevitable. The authorities would not tolerate him. They could not tolerate him. But God had something bigger in store.
Jesus stayed in the village of Bethphage, on the side of the Mount of Olives facing away from the city. Mark's Gospel is quite clear that Jesus planned a demonstration for the Sunday before Passover. The events we remember as Palm Sunday were intentional and provocative. Jesus told the disciples where to go to get the donkey. He was very clearly trying to evoke the message of the prophet Zechariah who had proclaimed: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, you king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ens of the earth” (Zech. 9:9-10). Strange, isn't it? A message of peace for Jews dreaming of a warrior king, dreaming of a new Messiah like King David of old. I'm sure there were heads scratching in the crowd that day.
A planned demonstration. When you think about it, probably a pretty pathetic demonstration at that. At most a few hundred folks or so, maybe more, probably less, but hardly a major disturbance in the midst of the thousands of people swarming in and around Jerusalem. A country rabbi, riding on a donkey with a bunch of peasants singing Hosannas, waving branches, as Jesus passed through this massive 150 foot high wall, through the Beautiful gate and into the city, where he went into the Temple, looked around, and went back to the Mount of Olives.
“Hossana!” A word used in worship at the Temple meaning “please save” or “save now.” Where was the salvation in Jesus' message of salvation through peace from Zechariah? It's almost ludicrous, isn't it, this little bunch of pilgrims with their “King” on a donkey, riding into a city which probably didn't even notice. But then again, Jesus was just doing what Jewish prophets did. How ludicrous did Jeremiah look when he smashed a pottery jar in front of the senior priests and elders in Jerusalem, warning them or the coming destruction of Jerusalem? Or another time when Jeremiah walked around naked, making a similar point about the coming captivity in Babylon? Or Ezekiel in a public square making a toy city surrounded by a toy army? This kind of seemingly absurd street theater was standard operating procedure for Jewish prophets warning their people and their leaders. God's prophetic Word often seems ludicrous in the face of the political, social and economic realities of the world.
So there's Jesus making his point, and on the other side of town a very different demonstration is underway. I only learned this for the first time this year when, yet again, Marcus Borg opened my mind to the deeper meaning behind so much of what Jesus said and did.1 Jesus procession was not the only procession to enter Jerusalem at Passover. On the other side of town, there was another procession. Quoting Borg, “The other procession was an imperial one. On or about the same day, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, rode into the city from the opposite side, the west, at the head of a very different kind of procession: imperial cavalry and foot soldiers arriving to reinforce the garrison on the Temple Mount.”2
Digressing for a moment from Borg, it should be noted that this garrison, the Antonia (named after Marc Antony of Cleopatra fame), had 2 - 3,000 soldiers. It was placed directly next to the Temple with guard towers overlooking the Temple courtyards where the pilgrims would gather to pray. In the words of David Van Biema of Time magazine, “the Roman garrison...loomed over the Temple courtyards like a watchtower over a prison.”3
Now back to Borg, “They (the Roman governor and reinforcements) came each year at Passover, coming to Jerusalem from Caesarea Maritima, the city on the Mediterranean coast from which the Roman governor administered Judea and Samaria.”4 They came to keep a lid on the Passover aspirations of those Jewish pilgrims. Keep the whole liberation a spiritual one, eh?
Coming through the east gate, a bunch of peasants, their “King” on a donkey, waving palm branches and crying “Save us! Hosanna!” Coming through the west gate, weapons, helmets, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. The pounding of horse hooves, the clinking of bridles, the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the beating of drums, the swirling of dust.”5 And silence from the onlookers, some awed, some resentful. No Hossanas here!
Jesus staged the whole thing to embody the central conflict of his last week in the juxtaposition of these two contrasting processions: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of imperial domination. The choice was there for the people of Jerusalem to see. A choice of two kingdoms. A choice between two visions of life on earth. A choice between peace and shalom or domination and oppression. Jesus' Word is as pointed and timely today as it was then. Imagine our congregation “descending” on the capitol in Washington DC, waving palms in the rotunda, and lobbying our representatives and senators as they draw up the federal budget. Hosanna! Save us, please. Spend our tax dollars for peace, shalom, community, not for war. That's about the closest thing I can imagine for folks like us to live Palm Sunday this year.
1Marcus J. Borg. Jesus. Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. HarperCollins: NY, 2006.p. 229-232.
2Ibid., 232.
3Time. April 16, 2001.
4Borg, 232.
5Ibid.
April 5, 2009 – Palm Sunday Scripture: Mark 11: 1-11
It's hard for us to get ourselves inside that first Palm Sunday, imagine what it was like, what was happening and what it meant for those involved. This morning I would like to try to paint a picture for you.
The scene is Jerusalem right before the festival of Passover. Jerusalem, the holy city of Judaism, the home of the temple, the place where God had chosen to dwell on earth, the focus of Jewish devotion and the destination of pilgrimage. Mecca for Muslims. Rome for Catholics. The Ganges River for Hindus. New York for capitalists. Washington DC for Americans. All of that rolled into one, with the additional emotional electricity of Roman occupation, which further heightened the city's significance for the Jews of Jesus' day.
The city was much more than just a city. It represented the closely interwoven political and religious hopes and dreams of the Jewish people. It was also a remarkable, cosmopolitan place. Home to probably 80,000 people, it dwarfed the villages most people lived in. Herod the Great had died around the time of Jesus' birth, but he had built on a massive and extravagant scale during his long lifetime and rule. The city was encircled by massive walls, but on the east side of the city, the side through which Jesus would have come, the side Jesus would have looked at from the Mount of Olives where he stayed throughout Holy Week, was a 150 wall. 150 feet. Much higher then the top of our steeple, a height even more impressive as it rose from the top of a steep incline out of the Kidron Valley, the deep ravine separating the Mount of Olives from the city. This high wall formed one side of the truly enormous platform on which the temple stood. Herod had started rebuilding the temple, destroyed centuries before by the conquering Babylonians, so that it was one of the wonders of the ancient world and the work was still going on.
Jerusalem at Passover. As many as 150 to 200,000 pilgrims would have come to the city for this most important of Jewish festivals, camping out on the hills all around the city. Passover, the celebration, the remembrance of Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt. A joyous time in Jewish life, yet one marred by the Roman occupation of their homeland and their holy city. Had the time come for God to act decisively again for the people of Israel and deliver them from slavery? This thought was on many devout minds every Passover and is still one of the prayers every year.
These thousands of pilgrims would have been impressed and awestruck by the crowds, by the grandeur of the city, by the enormity of the Temple, by the cacophony of animals bleating and bellowing as they were sold in street stalls for the coming sacrifice. As they made their way towards the city they would have seen enormous stones being pulled by teams of oxen, stones as much as 50 feet tall and weighing hundreds of tons, stones for the completion of the Temple. For people who lived in wattle and daub or adobe style homes, the scale of the project was almost beyond belief. The physicality of it all was marvelous and amazing, and then there was God in the Temple. Just imagine what must have been going through the minds of the Passover pilgrims almost two thousand years ago.
And into this bubbling pot of excitement and anticipation, aspiration and resentment, came Jesus. He had been walking down the Jordan River valley from Galilee for a few weeks, telling his disciples that he was going to Jerusalem where he would to be handed over by the religious authorities to the Romans and be killed. They did not want to hear it, tried to argue Jesus out of it, but he explained that this was inevitable. The authorities would not tolerate him. They could not tolerate him. But God had something bigger in store.
Jesus stayed in the village of Bethphage, on the side of the Mount of Olives facing away from the city. Mark's Gospel is quite clear that Jesus planned a demonstration for the Sunday before Passover. The events we remember as Palm Sunday were intentional and provocative. Jesus told the disciples where to go to get the donkey. He was very clearly trying to evoke the message of the prophet Zechariah who had proclaimed: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, you king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ens of the earth” (Zech. 9:9-10). Strange, isn't it? A message of peace for Jews dreaming of a warrior king, dreaming of a new Messiah like King David of old. I'm sure there were heads scratching in the crowd that day.
A planned demonstration. When you think about it, probably a pretty pathetic demonstration at that. At most a few hundred folks or so, maybe more, probably less, but hardly a major disturbance in the midst of the thousands of people swarming in and around Jerusalem. A country rabbi, riding on a donkey with a bunch of peasants singing Hosannas, waving branches, as Jesus passed through this massive 150 foot high wall, through the Beautiful gate and into the city, where he went into the Temple, looked around, and went back to the Mount of Olives.
“Hossana!” A word used in worship at the Temple meaning “please save” or “save now.” Where was the salvation in Jesus' message of salvation through peace from Zechariah? It's almost ludicrous, isn't it, this little bunch of pilgrims with their “King” on a donkey, riding into a city which probably didn't even notice. But then again, Jesus was just doing what Jewish prophets did. How ludicrous did Jeremiah look when he smashed a pottery jar in front of the senior priests and elders in Jerusalem, warning them or the coming destruction of Jerusalem? Or another time when Jeremiah walked around naked, making a similar point about the coming captivity in Babylon? Or Ezekiel in a public square making a toy city surrounded by a toy army? This kind of seemingly absurd street theater was standard operating procedure for Jewish prophets warning their people and their leaders. God's prophetic Word often seems ludicrous in the face of the political, social and economic realities of the world.
So there's Jesus making his point, and on the other side of town a very different demonstration is underway. I only learned this for the first time this year when, yet again, Marcus Borg opened my mind to the deeper meaning behind so much of what Jesus said and did.1 Jesus procession was not the only procession to enter Jerusalem at Passover. On the other side of town, there was another procession. Quoting Borg, “The other procession was an imperial one. On or about the same day, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, rode into the city from the opposite side, the west, at the head of a very different kind of procession: imperial cavalry and foot soldiers arriving to reinforce the garrison on the Temple Mount.”2
Digressing for a moment from Borg, it should be noted that this garrison, the Antonia (named after Marc Antony of Cleopatra fame), had 2 - 3,000 soldiers. It was placed directly next to the Temple with guard towers overlooking the Temple courtyards where the pilgrims would gather to pray. In the words of David Van Biema of Time magazine, “the Roman garrison...loomed over the Temple courtyards like a watchtower over a prison.”3
Now back to Borg, “They (the Roman governor and reinforcements) came each year at Passover, coming to Jerusalem from Caesarea Maritima, the city on the Mediterranean coast from which the Roman governor administered Judea and Samaria.”4 They came to keep a lid on the Passover aspirations of those Jewish pilgrims. Keep the whole liberation a spiritual one, eh?
Coming through the east gate, a bunch of peasants, their “King” on a donkey, waving palm branches and crying “Save us! Hosanna!” Coming through the west gate, weapons, helmets, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. The pounding of horse hooves, the clinking of bridles, the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the beating of drums, the swirling of dust.”5 And silence from the onlookers, some awed, some resentful. No Hossanas here!
Jesus staged the whole thing to embody the central conflict of his last week in the juxtaposition of these two contrasting processions: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of imperial domination. The choice was there for the people of Jerusalem to see. A choice of two kingdoms. A choice between two visions of life on earth. A choice between peace and shalom or domination and oppression. Jesus' Word is as pointed and timely today as it was then. Imagine our congregation “descending” on the capitol in Washington DC, waving palms in the rotunda, and lobbying our representatives and senators as they draw up the federal budget. Hosanna! Save us, please. Spend our tax dollars for peace, shalom, community, not for war. That's about the closest thing I can imagine for folks like us to live Palm Sunday this year.
1Marcus J. Borg. Jesus. Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. HarperCollins: NY, 2006.p. 229-232.
2Ibid., 232.
3Time. April 16, 2001.
4Borg, 232.
5Ibid.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The Pink Elephant in the Room
The Pink Elephant in the Room Higganum Congregational Church
March 29, 2009 – 5th Lent Scripture: Jeremiah: 31:31-34, John 12: 20-33
“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also” (Jn 12:24-26a).
Throughout Lent, I have been preaching the way of the Cross, alternating Sundays with the individual and personal way of the Cross one week and the communal way of the Cross the next. This morning I would like to invite you to hear these words of Jesus and think big, really big. The way of the Cross not just for me or for us, not just for our church, our town, or even for our nation, but for all of God's creation. If we really allow Jesus' words to open our hearts and minds to what God hopes for us, we'll see that the very biggest of visions is what is called for.
From beginning to end, the center of Jesus' life and teaching was his proclamation and living of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is another way of saying “the living here and now of God's dream for us, God's will for us,” on earth as it is in heaven. Have you ever wondered why Jesus called his vision the “kingdom” of God? Why he didn't call his vision the community of God, or the family of God, or the people of God? Those all sound so much nicer, so much homier and friendly, than a “kingdom”? Kings and their kingdoms, the very words imply domination and oppression. To be quite honest with you, this important point had slipped by me until Marcus Borg pointed it out in one of his great books about Jesus.1
Jesus called his vision the kingdom to deliberately and provocatively contrast God's kingdom with the kingdoms of this world. In Jesus' own day, the kingdom he was contrasting God's kingdom with was the Roman Empire and all of its domination systems, political, economic, judicial, social and military, all the means Rome used to oppress the people under its control, including Jesus. Of course, Jesus did not use the words “Domination system.” Those are a modern term to describe the way politics work so that the powerful remain powerful at the expense of everyone else; the way economics work so that the rich remain rich at the expense of everyone else; the way justice works so the influential can do whatever they want at the expense of everyone else; the way the use of force works so that those who are aggressive can push everyone else around; the way religion works to keep people passive, comforted and content.
And Jesus said, God's passion is diametrically opposed to these domination systems. God's will is diametrically opposed to these domination systems. God's kingdom is the opposite of life lived under these domination systems. And most to the point, if we want to be part of God's kingdom, we really can be, right here and right now, the moment we decide that we want to live the kingdom, the very moment we start seeing the domination systems for what they are, start actively resisting them as opposed to God's will for creation, and start living God's passion.
We do not have to just carry on with the way things are. The really Good News is that there is another way. When you begin to think about that, you realize what a painful dying process it is at first for those who choose it, because the way things are is the only way we have ever known life to be. The way things are is just the way life is, just something we have to accept and get used to, something we have to make the best of. But I ask you, do any of you really believe that accepting things the way they are, just getting used to things the way they are, just making the best of a bad situation, is really Good News? That sounds more like coping and enduring rather than new and abundant life to me. That surely does not sound a lot like what I think of when I hear the words salvation or redemption. How can we believe that the way things are in the world is God's will for us, God's passion for us?
I cannot remember which contributor to our Living the Questions series said it, but it was observed that if Jesus were born today, he would be born a landless peasant in a place like Guatemala. That is just about the closest thing in our day and age to being a landless Jewish peasant in the backwater part of the Roman Empire we now call the Holy Land. And the Empire Jesus would be preaching against today from Guatemala would be our own, the American economic, political, military and cultural domination of the world.
When Rome ran the domination systems, everything functioned to grossly benefit the very few at the very top. We know that as historical fact and accept it because that was them and then and not us and now. We know and accept similar historical judgments about the Spanish, British, and Soviet Empires in their day. And now that the dominations systems emanate from the United States, everything functions to grossly benefit the very few at the very top in our country.
“Whoa! Hold on a second, Mr. Revolutionary Preacher! We're the land of the free and the hope of the world!”
Fair enough, but doesn't the political system of the world bend to our “national interests”? And doesn't the economic system of the world favor our “national interests”? And aren't we the only superpower in the world? Doesn't everyone have to learn American English and use American dollars to get ahead in the world? Not so very different from life in the Roman Empire, in other words. The distance separating the very poorest peasant in Guatemala from the wealthiest investment banker in Manhattan is as great as that which separated folks like Jesus from the Emperor in Rome.
The truth, which a lot of folks like us do not want to see because it is our country after all and we love our country, is that the distance separating the poorest homeless person in Chicago from the wealthiest computer tycoon in Seattle is as great as that which separated folks like Jesus from the Emperor in Rome. You and I, we are comfortable and reasonably prosperous and this sort of talk makes us uneasy. We aren't Guatemalan peasants or homeless Chicagoans for whom Jesus' Kingdom vision is a no-brainer, something to get really excited about. We do not live in that kind of hopeless misery, but most of us do live with a certain level of anxiety, waiting for the shoe to drop and our retirement savings to be radically devalued, for our jobs to be shipped overseas, for further bad news about environmental collapse, for yet another war that our soldiers will have to go fight, and everything else we hear in the news if we choose to listen. I think this latest economic crisis has shown us how vulnerable just about everyone is, everyone, that is, except the folks at the very top, vulnerable to the faceless and nameless forces at work in our world, what the political pundits are calling Washington and Wall Street for lack of anything more specific.
People want the Gospel to remain unpolitical, but when we pray together as Jesus taught us to “Give us this day our daily bread”, we're not praying just for me or just for us, but for all of us, as in all people praying this prayer at all times. Not just Max in Higganum, but Samuel in Zimbabwe, Lee in Shanghai, Pablo in Mexico and Anna in Calcutta too. And not bread enough for a thousand years, but bread for this day, as in enough for every one of God's children to survive. Just enough for me, so that there is enough for all. That, my friends, is political.
Or when we pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it already is in heaven,” aren't we praying for peace, justice, freedom from oppression, food enough for all, care for all God's children including ourselves but excluding no one, right here and right now?
I have yet to meet a liberal or a conservative who is in favor of poverty, oppression, hunger and starvation, children dying of malnutrition and preventable diseases, war, homelessness, misery, prejudice, injustice. Have you? What I have met, and am myself when I get lazy or am caught up in my own concerns, is a world full of people who pray for God's kingdom on Sunday, but who think there is nothing they can do the other six days of the week, who think that the problems are just too big, it's the way things always have been and always will be. Go to sleep. Relax and ignore the problems, except those which are right in your face. Give in to the domination systems and hope for the best for yourself and those closest to you.
A wise old teacher of mine named Jan Philipps once said, “Manifesting the reality you want takes four steps: visualize your hearts desire, speak of it to others, imagine it so clearly that you body feels the joy of it like it already happened, and commit yourself to the vision.” We are here, you and I, disciples of this man, Jesus of Nazareth, to do just that with his vision: to have the Kingdom of God as our heart's desire, speak of the Kingdom of God to others, to imagine the Kingdom of God so clearly that our bodies feel the joy of it like it already happened, and to commit ourselves to this vision and start making it real. The first step will be dying to our passive acceptance of the ways things and that there is nothing we can do about it.
1Marcus J. Borg. Jesus. Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. HarperCollins: NY, 2006.p. 252.
March 29, 2009 – 5th Lent Scripture: Jeremiah: 31:31-34, John 12: 20-33
“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also” (Jn 12:24-26a).
Throughout Lent, I have been preaching the way of the Cross, alternating Sundays with the individual and personal way of the Cross one week and the communal way of the Cross the next. This morning I would like to invite you to hear these words of Jesus and think big, really big. The way of the Cross not just for me or for us, not just for our church, our town, or even for our nation, but for all of God's creation. If we really allow Jesus' words to open our hearts and minds to what God hopes for us, we'll see that the very biggest of visions is what is called for.
From beginning to end, the center of Jesus' life and teaching was his proclamation and living of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is another way of saying “the living here and now of God's dream for us, God's will for us,” on earth as it is in heaven. Have you ever wondered why Jesus called his vision the “kingdom” of God? Why he didn't call his vision the community of God, or the family of God, or the people of God? Those all sound so much nicer, so much homier and friendly, than a “kingdom”? Kings and their kingdoms, the very words imply domination and oppression. To be quite honest with you, this important point had slipped by me until Marcus Borg pointed it out in one of his great books about Jesus.1
Jesus called his vision the kingdom to deliberately and provocatively contrast God's kingdom with the kingdoms of this world. In Jesus' own day, the kingdom he was contrasting God's kingdom with was the Roman Empire and all of its domination systems, political, economic, judicial, social and military, all the means Rome used to oppress the people under its control, including Jesus. Of course, Jesus did not use the words “Domination system.” Those are a modern term to describe the way politics work so that the powerful remain powerful at the expense of everyone else; the way economics work so that the rich remain rich at the expense of everyone else; the way justice works so the influential can do whatever they want at the expense of everyone else; the way the use of force works so that those who are aggressive can push everyone else around; the way religion works to keep people passive, comforted and content.
And Jesus said, God's passion is diametrically opposed to these domination systems. God's will is diametrically opposed to these domination systems. God's kingdom is the opposite of life lived under these domination systems. And most to the point, if we want to be part of God's kingdom, we really can be, right here and right now, the moment we decide that we want to live the kingdom, the very moment we start seeing the domination systems for what they are, start actively resisting them as opposed to God's will for creation, and start living God's passion.
We do not have to just carry on with the way things are. The really Good News is that there is another way. When you begin to think about that, you realize what a painful dying process it is at first for those who choose it, because the way things are is the only way we have ever known life to be. The way things are is just the way life is, just something we have to accept and get used to, something we have to make the best of. But I ask you, do any of you really believe that accepting things the way they are, just getting used to things the way they are, just making the best of a bad situation, is really Good News? That sounds more like coping and enduring rather than new and abundant life to me. That surely does not sound a lot like what I think of when I hear the words salvation or redemption. How can we believe that the way things are in the world is God's will for us, God's passion for us?
I cannot remember which contributor to our Living the Questions series said it, but it was observed that if Jesus were born today, he would be born a landless peasant in a place like Guatemala. That is just about the closest thing in our day and age to being a landless Jewish peasant in the backwater part of the Roman Empire we now call the Holy Land. And the Empire Jesus would be preaching against today from Guatemala would be our own, the American economic, political, military and cultural domination of the world.
When Rome ran the domination systems, everything functioned to grossly benefit the very few at the very top. We know that as historical fact and accept it because that was them and then and not us and now. We know and accept similar historical judgments about the Spanish, British, and Soviet Empires in their day. And now that the dominations systems emanate from the United States, everything functions to grossly benefit the very few at the very top in our country.
“Whoa! Hold on a second, Mr. Revolutionary Preacher! We're the land of the free and the hope of the world!”
Fair enough, but doesn't the political system of the world bend to our “national interests”? And doesn't the economic system of the world favor our “national interests”? And aren't we the only superpower in the world? Doesn't everyone have to learn American English and use American dollars to get ahead in the world? Not so very different from life in the Roman Empire, in other words. The distance separating the very poorest peasant in Guatemala from the wealthiest investment banker in Manhattan is as great as that which separated folks like Jesus from the Emperor in Rome.
The truth, which a lot of folks like us do not want to see because it is our country after all and we love our country, is that the distance separating the poorest homeless person in Chicago from the wealthiest computer tycoon in Seattle is as great as that which separated folks like Jesus from the Emperor in Rome. You and I, we are comfortable and reasonably prosperous and this sort of talk makes us uneasy. We aren't Guatemalan peasants or homeless Chicagoans for whom Jesus' Kingdom vision is a no-brainer, something to get really excited about. We do not live in that kind of hopeless misery, but most of us do live with a certain level of anxiety, waiting for the shoe to drop and our retirement savings to be radically devalued, for our jobs to be shipped overseas, for further bad news about environmental collapse, for yet another war that our soldiers will have to go fight, and everything else we hear in the news if we choose to listen. I think this latest economic crisis has shown us how vulnerable just about everyone is, everyone, that is, except the folks at the very top, vulnerable to the faceless and nameless forces at work in our world, what the political pundits are calling Washington and Wall Street for lack of anything more specific.
People want the Gospel to remain unpolitical, but when we pray together as Jesus taught us to “Give us this day our daily bread”, we're not praying just for me or just for us, but for all of us, as in all people praying this prayer at all times. Not just Max in Higganum, but Samuel in Zimbabwe, Lee in Shanghai, Pablo in Mexico and Anna in Calcutta too. And not bread enough for a thousand years, but bread for this day, as in enough for every one of God's children to survive. Just enough for me, so that there is enough for all. That, my friends, is political.
Or when we pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it already is in heaven,” aren't we praying for peace, justice, freedom from oppression, food enough for all, care for all God's children including ourselves but excluding no one, right here and right now?
I have yet to meet a liberal or a conservative who is in favor of poverty, oppression, hunger and starvation, children dying of malnutrition and preventable diseases, war, homelessness, misery, prejudice, injustice. Have you? What I have met, and am myself when I get lazy or am caught up in my own concerns, is a world full of people who pray for God's kingdom on Sunday, but who think there is nothing they can do the other six days of the week, who think that the problems are just too big, it's the way things always have been and always will be. Go to sleep. Relax and ignore the problems, except those which are right in your face. Give in to the domination systems and hope for the best for yourself and those closest to you.
A wise old teacher of mine named Jan Philipps once said, “Manifesting the reality you want takes four steps: visualize your hearts desire, speak of it to others, imagine it so clearly that you body feels the joy of it like it already happened, and commit yourself to the vision.” We are here, you and I, disciples of this man, Jesus of Nazareth, to do just that with his vision: to have the Kingdom of God as our heart's desire, speak of the Kingdom of God to others, to imagine the Kingdom of God so clearly that our bodies feel the joy of it like it already happened, and to commit ourselves to this vision and start making it real. The first step will be dying to our passive acceptance of the ways things and that there is nothing we can do about it.
1Marcus J. Borg. Jesus. Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. HarperCollins: NY, 2006.p. 252.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Grumbling and Circles
Throughout Lent this year I have been alternating between the individual message of the Cross and the communal message. This week I tried to combine the two and perhaps fell short, aiming for too much for a listening audience. In the reading, however, it might work.. So here it is:
Grumbling and Circles Higganum Congregational Church
March 22, 2009 – 4th Lent Scripture: Psalm 107, John 3: 14-21
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). In these twenty seven words, John sums up the person and life of Jesus. Read Luke's parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan. These are illustrations of John's summary. Read the miracle stories in Mark and Matthew, the healings, the feeding of the multitudes, even walking on water. These are illustrations of John's summary. Read any of Jesus' teachings about the Kingdom of God. These are illustrations of John's summary.
Summaries are great memory aids. When I was in high school, a lot of kids bought Cliff's Notes to help them remember Shakespeare's plays for tests. When I taught at university, my students demanded that I put my lecture notes on-line to help them remember the course content for mid-terms and finals.
Perhaps those are not the best examples, as both you and I know that Cliff's Notes and lecture notes are more short cuts than memory aids. Rather than struggle through Richard III, kids would try to take a short cut and get the main points from the summary. Rather than come to 30 lectures on Old Norse Mythology, kids would prefer to go skiing and get all the information off the website to pass the exam.
You and I know the Good News of Jesus Christ. Sunday after Sunday it rolls off of the pages of the Bible, our hymnals, and our prayers. The problem for us, for you and me and most Christians like us that I know, is that we have so much working against us. On the one hand, we are so habituated to completely different ways of being and thinking than Jesus' way of being and thinking that our minds get clouded and the vision grows obscure. On other hand, our society pushes us towards such completely different ways of life than kingdom living that the Good News just slips through our fingers when we're stressed out, overwhelmed, burned out, frustrated, running around in circles, or just getting dry and dusty. Quite simply, our habits take over and shut us off from the Good News.
What we need to remember. We need to constantly remember the Good News. John's summary, these 27 words, can be a mantra we can memorize and repeat for ourselves when we find ourselves forgetting what life with Jesus is all about, how much better it is than the life we now lead. Just memorize them, repeat them, let them sink in and work on us, let them work their transformation on us. That is, after all, the point of the Good News of Jesus Christ, to transform us. Spend enough time remembering these words and you and your life will be opened up to another whole dimension of being you and living your life, what Jesus called being a child of God living in the Kingdom of God.
This may all sounds sort of silly and simplistic, but I assure you it is not. It is simple, but good beginnings usually are and we are talking about getting started here. You and I, we struggle with two fundamental spiritual challenges: one fundamental way of thinking and one fundamental way of being, both of which get between us and the Good News of new and abundant life in Jesus Christ. I call these two fundamental spiritual challenges grumbling and circles.
Grumbling. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” God so loved the world. God so loves the world. Most of us have heard it so many times now that it slips through our fingers. We know it but we forget it in the rough and tumble of our lives. This is the beginning of faith: falling in love with this vision of God so loving the world. This is our primary orientation, our starting point and the path we must follow. We too must so love the world. Love life. So many Christians think of Jesus as otherworldly but Jesus was as earthy as it gets: meals with friends, strangers and outcasts, a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine, flowers in the field, sitting under a tree, walking down a road, watching a woman make bread, washing someone's feet.
Well that sounds easy enough, doesn't it? We all love life, don't we? When we're out playing golf, gardening, or doing whatever we do that we enjoy, we love life. When we are having a special moment with a child, a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a friend, we love life. When everything is going our way and we have the world by the tail, how can we but love life? But aren't these occasional moments just that, occasional, as in “extra-ordinary” interludes, as in “out of the ordinary” lapses, in the midst of our quite different day in day out existence? Isn't the truth more that we spend a lot of time and energy not loving life, not appreciating life? If we could train ourselves to listen to the conversation we have internally with ourselves much of the time, isn't the truth actually that we would hear a lot of grumbling, things like “life is a hassle, a bother, a struggle, a challenge, exhausting, frightening, confusing, one problem after another, and still too short?” And the people in ours lives, aren't they often “pains, distractions, problems, drains on our energy, depressing , annoying, just wrong, even a bunch of grumblers?” And the things we do with our days: “a list of things to be gotten through until we get to the good stuff?” Don't many of us feel that we just do not have enough time to live our lives? And the world around us: expensive, limited, stingy, confusing, threatening, dangerous? Maybe not all the time, but enough of the time.
When we say our confession together and I confess that I have sinned against God in thought, word and deed, that I have not loved God with my whole heart, I am most often confessing this lack of love and appreciation for life. I am not an adulterer, a thief, a slanderer, but I do lack love and appreciation. This, my friends, is not the abundant life which is ours in Christ, but a slow death. I am perishing, to use John's word. I do not break a lot of commandments, but I do stand condemned as John puts us, because Jesus has shown me the light and I have chosen to walk in the darkness.
When I talk to you about prayer, I am not talking about learning a bunch of words to say or rituals to perform, but practices that I have learned from other people of faith, practices which help me honestly listen to my internal conversation and how little love and appreciation of life there is in there, how much I grumble. They help me snap out of it and let go of the darkness. I come back to the center point of life, the light in which life is to be loved and appreciated, and I begin again from there, often many times every day.
Grumbling and circles. God so loved the world. God so loves the world. The world. All of it. Nothing excluded. Nothing outside that love. All of us would agree with this conceptually. Sure. The world is a lovely place. But in practice, all of us, and I mean all of us, draw little circles around ourselves in life, within which is the world we love and outside of which is the world we dislike, fear, or distrust. What do I mean by circles? Well, me and my spouse... there's a circle! On the inside, everything is love and light. Outside is outside and darkness. Or me, my spouse and my family. There's another circle! Or me, my spouse, my family, and my friends. There's yet another circle! Or me and all those people, as well as the people I like from my church and community (“like” because they're like me and think like me). And so on. All of us have these circles we draw around ourselves, with love on the inside and fear or dislike on the outside. Truly loving the world the way God in Jesus loves the world is to erase all those circles. Actually, that's too wishy washy. It's not about erasing circles. It's about intentionally going to those places and those people whom we would not want inside our circles before we fell in love with Jesus and learning how to love them: those who have hurt us, our enemies, the unclean, the outcast. Truly loving means no more circles at all.
Once again, when we say our confession together and I confess that I have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, by what I have done and by what I have left undone, that I have not loved my neighbor as I love myself, this is what I am confessing most often. I have stayed in my little circle, which I convince myself, because it is my circle, is full of light. Maybe I push it out a bit here or there, but it's still a little, bitty circle with me at the center and those I invite in all around me. The rest is darkness surrounding me. That, my friends, is not real life but a vain attempt to hold back death.
Grumbling and circles. These are our habitual ways of life to which Jesus is our solution, our antidote. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Believing in Jesus is the key. Marcus Borg, one of the best scholars of Jesus in our tradition of Christianity in my opinion, writes that “the object of the verb “believe” was always a person, not a statement. ... To believe in a person is quite different from believing that a series of statements about the person are true. In pre-modern English, believing meant believing in and thus a relationship of trust, loyalty, and love. Most simply, to believe means to belove.”1 To believe means to belove.
In the words of another favorite writer of mine, Brian C. Taylor, an Episcopal priest in New Mexico, “the word for “faith” in New Testament Greek is a verb. It is not something we have; it is something we do. To “faith in Jesus” means that we walk the path he walked...To faith in Jesus means that we surrender to and stake our life on his path.”2 We walk the path he walked. We surrender to and stake our life on his path.
In my own words, at some point, we become so powerfully attracted to the vision of Jesus the man from Nazareth, we become so powerfully attracted to his vision of life, that we find ourselves falling in love with him and his vision. Once in love, we cannot help but try to live it. We resist our grumbling and seek to break the bounds of our circles.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Can you see how this is our Cross, you and I? How we have to really give up everything, our very way of being, our habitual indifference and lack of appreciation for life, our closed circles of love, our discontent with our lives and our dislike of the world, our fear of new life and desire for separation from so much of life? If we really want to belove Jesus, follow Jesus, this is our Cross. If, however, we get started, and I have started so I speak from experience, we will find this thing John calls eternal life, not necessarily happiness in heaven in the future but happiness right here on earth as it is in heaven. That is what Jesus taught of the pray for after all, isn't it?
Brian Taylor writes, “I am convinced that the extent to which we surrender ourselves to the Jesus path will be the measure of our happiness in this life.”3 To which I can only say, “AMEN.”
1Marcus J. Borg. Jesus. Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. Harper: NY, 2006. p. 20
see also Borg's the Heart of Christianity. Rediscovering a Life of Faith. Harper: NY, 1989. pp. 25-41.
2Brian C. Taylor. Setting the Gospel Free. SCM Press: London, 1996. p. 118.
3Ibid., 119.
Grumbling and Circles Higganum Congregational Church
March 22, 2009 – 4th Lent Scripture: Psalm 107, John 3: 14-21
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). In these twenty seven words, John sums up the person and life of Jesus. Read Luke's parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan. These are illustrations of John's summary. Read the miracle stories in Mark and Matthew, the healings, the feeding of the multitudes, even walking on water. These are illustrations of John's summary. Read any of Jesus' teachings about the Kingdom of God. These are illustrations of John's summary.
Summaries are great memory aids. When I was in high school, a lot of kids bought Cliff's Notes to help them remember Shakespeare's plays for tests. When I taught at university, my students demanded that I put my lecture notes on-line to help them remember the course content for mid-terms and finals.
Perhaps those are not the best examples, as both you and I know that Cliff's Notes and lecture notes are more short cuts than memory aids. Rather than struggle through Richard III, kids would try to take a short cut and get the main points from the summary. Rather than come to 30 lectures on Old Norse Mythology, kids would prefer to go skiing and get all the information off the website to pass the exam.
You and I know the Good News of Jesus Christ. Sunday after Sunday it rolls off of the pages of the Bible, our hymnals, and our prayers. The problem for us, for you and me and most Christians like us that I know, is that we have so much working against us. On the one hand, we are so habituated to completely different ways of being and thinking than Jesus' way of being and thinking that our minds get clouded and the vision grows obscure. On other hand, our society pushes us towards such completely different ways of life than kingdom living that the Good News just slips through our fingers when we're stressed out, overwhelmed, burned out, frustrated, running around in circles, or just getting dry and dusty. Quite simply, our habits take over and shut us off from the Good News.
What we need to remember. We need to constantly remember the Good News. John's summary, these 27 words, can be a mantra we can memorize and repeat for ourselves when we find ourselves forgetting what life with Jesus is all about, how much better it is than the life we now lead. Just memorize them, repeat them, let them sink in and work on us, let them work their transformation on us. That is, after all, the point of the Good News of Jesus Christ, to transform us. Spend enough time remembering these words and you and your life will be opened up to another whole dimension of being you and living your life, what Jesus called being a child of God living in the Kingdom of God.
This may all sounds sort of silly and simplistic, but I assure you it is not. It is simple, but good beginnings usually are and we are talking about getting started here. You and I, we struggle with two fundamental spiritual challenges: one fundamental way of thinking and one fundamental way of being, both of which get between us and the Good News of new and abundant life in Jesus Christ. I call these two fundamental spiritual challenges grumbling and circles.
Grumbling. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” God so loved the world. God so loves the world. Most of us have heard it so many times now that it slips through our fingers. We know it but we forget it in the rough and tumble of our lives. This is the beginning of faith: falling in love with this vision of God so loving the world. This is our primary orientation, our starting point and the path we must follow. We too must so love the world. Love life. So many Christians think of Jesus as otherworldly but Jesus was as earthy as it gets: meals with friends, strangers and outcasts, a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine, flowers in the field, sitting under a tree, walking down a road, watching a woman make bread, washing someone's feet.
Well that sounds easy enough, doesn't it? We all love life, don't we? When we're out playing golf, gardening, or doing whatever we do that we enjoy, we love life. When we are having a special moment with a child, a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a friend, we love life. When everything is going our way and we have the world by the tail, how can we but love life? But aren't these occasional moments just that, occasional, as in “extra-ordinary” interludes, as in “out of the ordinary” lapses, in the midst of our quite different day in day out existence? Isn't the truth more that we spend a lot of time and energy not loving life, not appreciating life? If we could train ourselves to listen to the conversation we have internally with ourselves much of the time, isn't the truth actually that we would hear a lot of grumbling, things like “life is a hassle, a bother, a struggle, a challenge, exhausting, frightening, confusing, one problem after another, and still too short?” And the people in ours lives, aren't they often “pains, distractions, problems, drains on our energy, depressing , annoying, just wrong, even a bunch of grumblers?” And the things we do with our days: “a list of things to be gotten through until we get to the good stuff?” Don't many of us feel that we just do not have enough time to live our lives? And the world around us: expensive, limited, stingy, confusing, threatening, dangerous? Maybe not all the time, but enough of the time.
When we say our confession together and I confess that I have sinned against God in thought, word and deed, that I have not loved God with my whole heart, I am most often confessing this lack of love and appreciation for life. I am not an adulterer, a thief, a slanderer, but I do lack love and appreciation. This, my friends, is not the abundant life which is ours in Christ, but a slow death. I am perishing, to use John's word. I do not break a lot of commandments, but I do stand condemned as John puts us, because Jesus has shown me the light and I have chosen to walk in the darkness.
When I talk to you about prayer, I am not talking about learning a bunch of words to say or rituals to perform, but practices that I have learned from other people of faith, practices which help me honestly listen to my internal conversation and how little love and appreciation of life there is in there, how much I grumble. They help me snap out of it and let go of the darkness. I come back to the center point of life, the light in which life is to be loved and appreciated, and I begin again from there, often many times every day.
Grumbling and circles. God so loved the world. God so loves the world. The world. All of it. Nothing excluded. Nothing outside that love. All of us would agree with this conceptually. Sure. The world is a lovely place. But in practice, all of us, and I mean all of us, draw little circles around ourselves in life, within which is the world we love and outside of which is the world we dislike, fear, or distrust. What do I mean by circles? Well, me and my spouse... there's a circle! On the inside, everything is love and light. Outside is outside and darkness. Or me, my spouse and my family. There's another circle! Or me, my spouse, my family, and my friends. There's yet another circle! Or me and all those people, as well as the people I like from my church and community (“like” because they're like me and think like me). And so on. All of us have these circles we draw around ourselves, with love on the inside and fear or dislike on the outside. Truly loving the world the way God in Jesus loves the world is to erase all those circles. Actually, that's too wishy washy. It's not about erasing circles. It's about intentionally going to those places and those people whom we would not want inside our circles before we fell in love with Jesus and learning how to love them: those who have hurt us, our enemies, the unclean, the outcast. Truly loving means no more circles at all.
Once again, when we say our confession together and I confess that I have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, by what I have done and by what I have left undone, that I have not loved my neighbor as I love myself, this is what I am confessing most often. I have stayed in my little circle, which I convince myself, because it is my circle, is full of light. Maybe I push it out a bit here or there, but it's still a little, bitty circle with me at the center and those I invite in all around me. The rest is darkness surrounding me. That, my friends, is not real life but a vain attempt to hold back death.
Grumbling and circles. These are our habitual ways of life to which Jesus is our solution, our antidote. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Believing in Jesus is the key. Marcus Borg, one of the best scholars of Jesus in our tradition of Christianity in my opinion, writes that “the object of the verb “believe” was always a person, not a statement. ... To believe in a person is quite different from believing that a series of statements about the person are true. In pre-modern English, believing meant believing in and thus a relationship of trust, loyalty, and love. Most simply, to believe means to belove.”1 To believe means to belove.
In the words of another favorite writer of mine, Brian C. Taylor, an Episcopal priest in New Mexico, “the word for “faith” in New Testament Greek is a verb. It is not something we have; it is something we do. To “faith in Jesus” means that we walk the path he walked...To faith in Jesus means that we surrender to and stake our life on his path.”2 We walk the path he walked. We surrender to and stake our life on his path.
In my own words, at some point, we become so powerfully attracted to the vision of Jesus the man from Nazareth, we become so powerfully attracted to his vision of life, that we find ourselves falling in love with him and his vision. Once in love, we cannot help but try to live it. We resist our grumbling and seek to break the bounds of our circles.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Can you see how this is our Cross, you and I? How we have to really give up everything, our very way of being, our habitual indifference and lack of appreciation for life, our closed circles of love, our discontent with our lives and our dislike of the world, our fear of new life and desire for separation from so much of life? If we really want to belove Jesus, follow Jesus, this is our Cross. If, however, we get started, and I have started so I speak from experience, we will find this thing John calls eternal life, not necessarily happiness in heaven in the future but happiness right here on earth as it is in heaven. That is what Jesus taught of the pray for after all, isn't it?
Brian Taylor writes, “I am convinced that the extent to which we surrender ourselves to the Jesus path will be the measure of our happiness in this life.”3 To which I can only say, “AMEN.”
1Marcus J. Borg. Jesus. Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. Harper: NY, 2006. p. 20
see also Borg's the Heart of Christianity. Rediscovering a Life of Faith. Harper: NY, 1989. pp. 25-41.
2Brian C. Taylor. Setting the Gospel Free. SCM Press: London, 1996. p. 118.
3Ibid., 119.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Jesus Came Proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church
Jesus Came Proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church
Higganum Congregational Church
March 15, 2009 – 3rd Lent Scripture: John 2: 13-22, 1 Corinthians 1: 18-25
“Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.” The words of John Dominic Crossan, one of the contributors to Living the Questions, the adult faith inquiry series which we have been following the last few months.
“Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.” This is what Jesus' cleansing of the Temple stirred up in me this week.
The church of my childhood was a respectable place where propriety was a virtue. We were a bunch of respectable, proper, middle to upper middle class, white Americans. We inherited a church that fit right in with who we were, how we thought, and what we wanted out of life. To all intents and purposes, church was first and foremost a civic organization, not noticeably different from town government, the Rotary Club, the PTA, the YMCA, the Junior League, the library directors, and so on. Back then in our little town, that worked because everyone was expected to go to church, everyone fit in and that is what everyone recognized as normal and proper, the way things were done. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
Because we were all so very similar inside the church, the people who did not fit in...well, did not fit in. They're not fitting in did not challenge or upset us very much, for the simple reason that we were largely unaware of their absence. Since they did not fit in to begin with, they probably stayed away because they did not want to stand out. We'll never know, will we? What we did become aware of from time to time, however, was those people whose lives became difficult due to abnormalities like divorce, job loss, alcoholism, physical disability, mental illness, cancer, untimely death in the family, irregularities with children. All of a sudden, these folks stood out. It was very hard for these folks to come to coffee hour and answer the traditional “how's it going?” with the traditional “just fine, thank you. And you?” They knew that saying anything more, like the truth, would make most church folks uncomfortable. So they kept it to themselves, knowing full well that in our small town the whiff of rumor was probably already in the air. In the very place intended by Jesus to hold, cherish and heal them, they no longer fit in and so they drifted away to therapy, social services, less proper churches, or to some other town for a fresh start. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
The 1960s and 70s was the beginning of the period of societal change which we are still in. Many of the fundamental things which our grandparents and parents had taken for granted were suddenly suspect and often shown to be deeply flawed. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing. The Women's movement was getting going. The Vietnam War was pulling the country apart. Annihilation by nuclear weapons was a real possibility. An ecological awareness was beginning to dawn on scientists. The real poverty and exploitation of people in the Third World was becoming inescapably evident. We knew that our good life was lived at their expense. The truth of our faith was actually being held up for comparison with the truths of other faiths. Our white, middle class, super power, peaceful small town, comfortable, christian with a small “c” way of life was being cracked open for examination and criticism. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
Believe it or not, it was as if none of this was even going on in some churches. The church just chugged along with the same old sermons, the same old calendar of meetings, fund raisers and social events. A lot of people loved that. That was exactly what they wanted: a place of continuity and shelter amidst all the frightening change and confusion. They wanted to be reassured that our middle class American way of life was essentially a Christian way of life. If the minister at the time dared to preach about any of these subjects from a Christian with a capital “C” point of view, which is to say a critical point of view, he might be taken aside by a deacon and warned quietly to stick to the “timeless truths.” If he kept at it, and it usually was a he back then, either he was privately asked to leave or the people who were most offended by the minister threatened loudly to leave, in which case the minister was sacked or he backed down. In the end, things went back to “normal” and the church chugged along, seeming more and more irrelevant to those outside it and some of those inside it. Church and life outside the church became disconnected. The timeless truths were not translated for modern life and the church did not speak to the things that were really on people's minds. Church was a Time Out. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
Our church always prided itself on its intellectualism: a “thinking person's church” we told ourselves, as opposed to those ritualistic churches and emotional and enthusiastic churches we felt superior to. We told ourselves that our sermons challenged our intellects and gave us food for thought. The truth was that we valued propriety, order, and longtime member satisfaction more than provocation. Most ministers wanted to keep their jobs. So many subjects, so many important subjects that were at the center of public debate, were out of bounds. There were people who really longed for their faith to be intellectually ahead of them, all the truly faithful people who wanted to know what their faith had to say about these pressing issues of the day. My own parents used to burst out after church, once we were safely in the car with the windows rolled up (you rolled up windows back then), “We're napalming villages in Vietnam and he talks about Jesus loving little children?” Or, “Palestinian terrorists kill Israeli athletes at the Olympics and he talks about church order!” Or, “we're seeing the first pictures of the earth from outer space and he tells us stories about growing up on a farm!” These folks went hungry and also drifted away, looking elsewhere for intellectual stimulation. Our sermons just did not hold a candle to the New York Times, or even John Updike for that matter, who stayed in the church I should add. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
If they were environmentalists, they joined Greenpeace. If they wanted to do something about hunger, they volunteered in soup kitchens. If they wanted to help the folks in the Third World, they joined the Peace Corps. If they were interested in homelessness, they started building Habitat for Humanity houses. They became politically active and left the church, joining organizations that were doing something to address their deepest concerns, organizations that intended to transform the world. And the church chugged on, struggling to make budget and complaining in a sort of low grade habitual way about how much work it was to be a member of this or that committee. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
We loved our old church, our sermons, our Pilgrim Hymnals, our organ, standing up in unison for the Gloria Patria and the Doxology, sighing and rustling as we sat down in unison. It conveyed the assurance of tradition. We did not understand that a lot of people were starting to look for something called “experiential faith” to complement our intellectual faith. These folks drifted away to yoga classes, Trappist retreat centers, Zen Buddhism, running and other forms of exercise, backpacking in the mountains, their own gardens, anyplace where they could feel that God was close without all the rest. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
A lot of us who stayed because we were being nurtured by tradition and friendships did not notice how many people were either thinking about drifting away or were actually doing so, because that was another thing you didn't chat about at coffee hour. It only really started to show up on people's radar screens when the young people who were raised in the church did not come back as adults. “What's wrong with these kids?” “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
I loved our old hymns and traditional worship forms (I am one of the very few who stayed after all), but for most people my age and younger the words “joyful celebration” would not be the first ones to come to mind to describe what we did on Sunday morning, except for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, where the celebration was largely celebratory because of the tradition invoked. For us, celebration sounded like a Beatles song, jazz, the blues, folk music, anything with a good beat and memorable lyrics. Celebration meant dancing, talking, laughing, being yourself, participating. Except for the holidays, church felt constrained, a program we had to get with, a performance to watch, an order of worship if you will. The beauty and wonder of celebrating life with God was not translated into our idiom. We did that at youth group and summer camp and so a lot of us drifted away. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
In the last few decades we are seeing a remarkable spiritual awakening in our country. At the same time, fewer and fewer people are going to church. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.” All evidence tells us that these spiritual seekers want to tap into something that will become the most important thing in their life. They want to know and experience God. They want a way of life that challenges them. They want to pray together, talk together about their faith experience, and build honest, gutsy relationships with other faithful people. They want to be transformed. Church offers them an hour on Sunday and, if they're really enthusiastic, a place on a committee. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
We scratch our heads and wonder why so many people are becoming evangelical enthusiasts. They want something to be that important, demanding and different. They like the energy and music. They want transformation. If they find these churches to be too rigid or judgmental, they end up as Buddhists, yoga instructors, artists, musicians, or something else they can do on their own. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
When I was in seminary, I thought that the best thing that could happen to most of our churches would be for them to burn down so we could start again from scratch with renewed priorities. Obviously I did not to become an arsonist. I love the church, but Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God.
Higganum Congregational Church
March 15, 2009 – 3rd Lent Scripture: John 2: 13-22, 1 Corinthians 1: 18-25
“Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.” The words of John Dominic Crossan, one of the contributors to Living the Questions, the adult faith inquiry series which we have been following the last few months.
“Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.” This is what Jesus' cleansing of the Temple stirred up in me this week.
The church of my childhood was a respectable place where propriety was a virtue. We were a bunch of respectable, proper, middle to upper middle class, white Americans. We inherited a church that fit right in with who we were, how we thought, and what we wanted out of life. To all intents and purposes, church was first and foremost a civic organization, not noticeably different from town government, the Rotary Club, the PTA, the YMCA, the Junior League, the library directors, and so on. Back then in our little town, that worked because everyone was expected to go to church, everyone fit in and that is what everyone recognized as normal and proper, the way things were done. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
Because we were all so very similar inside the church, the people who did not fit in...well, did not fit in. They're not fitting in did not challenge or upset us very much, for the simple reason that we were largely unaware of their absence. Since they did not fit in to begin with, they probably stayed away because they did not want to stand out. We'll never know, will we? What we did become aware of from time to time, however, was those people whose lives became difficult due to abnormalities like divorce, job loss, alcoholism, physical disability, mental illness, cancer, untimely death in the family, irregularities with children. All of a sudden, these folks stood out. It was very hard for these folks to come to coffee hour and answer the traditional “how's it going?” with the traditional “just fine, thank you. And you?” They knew that saying anything more, like the truth, would make most church folks uncomfortable. So they kept it to themselves, knowing full well that in our small town the whiff of rumor was probably already in the air. In the very place intended by Jesus to hold, cherish and heal them, they no longer fit in and so they drifted away to therapy, social services, less proper churches, or to some other town for a fresh start. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
The 1960s and 70s was the beginning of the period of societal change which we are still in. Many of the fundamental things which our grandparents and parents had taken for granted were suddenly suspect and often shown to be deeply flawed. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing. The Women's movement was getting going. The Vietnam War was pulling the country apart. Annihilation by nuclear weapons was a real possibility. An ecological awareness was beginning to dawn on scientists. The real poverty and exploitation of people in the Third World was becoming inescapably evident. We knew that our good life was lived at their expense. The truth of our faith was actually being held up for comparison with the truths of other faiths. Our white, middle class, super power, peaceful small town, comfortable, christian with a small “c” way of life was being cracked open for examination and criticism. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
Believe it or not, it was as if none of this was even going on in some churches. The church just chugged along with the same old sermons, the same old calendar of meetings, fund raisers and social events. A lot of people loved that. That was exactly what they wanted: a place of continuity and shelter amidst all the frightening change and confusion. They wanted to be reassured that our middle class American way of life was essentially a Christian way of life. If the minister at the time dared to preach about any of these subjects from a Christian with a capital “C” point of view, which is to say a critical point of view, he might be taken aside by a deacon and warned quietly to stick to the “timeless truths.” If he kept at it, and it usually was a he back then, either he was privately asked to leave or the people who were most offended by the minister threatened loudly to leave, in which case the minister was sacked or he backed down. In the end, things went back to “normal” and the church chugged along, seeming more and more irrelevant to those outside it and some of those inside it. Church and life outside the church became disconnected. The timeless truths were not translated for modern life and the church did not speak to the things that were really on people's minds. Church was a Time Out. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
Our church always prided itself on its intellectualism: a “thinking person's church” we told ourselves, as opposed to those ritualistic churches and emotional and enthusiastic churches we felt superior to. We told ourselves that our sermons challenged our intellects and gave us food for thought. The truth was that we valued propriety, order, and longtime member satisfaction more than provocation. Most ministers wanted to keep their jobs. So many subjects, so many important subjects that were at the center of public debate, were out of bounds. There were people who really longed for their faith to be intellectually ahead of them, all the truly faithful people who wanted to know what their faith had to say about these pressing issues of the day. My own parents used to burst out after church, once we were safely in the car with the windows rolled up (you rolled up windows back then), “We're napalming villages in Vietnam and he talks about Jesus loving little children?” Or, “Palestinian terrorists kill Israeli athletes at the Olympics and he talks about church order!” Or, “we're seeing the first pictures of the earth from outer space and he tells us stories about growing up on a farm!” These folks went hungry and also drifted away, looking elsewhere for intellectual stimulation. Our sermons just did not hold a candle to the New York Times, or even John Updike for that matter, who stayed in the church I should add. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
If they were environmentalists, they joined Greenpeace. If they wanted to do something about hunger, they volunteered in soup kitchens. If they wanted to help the folks in the Third World, they joined the Peace Corps. If they were interested in homelessness, they started building Habitat for Humanity houses. They became politically active and left the church, joining organizations that were doing something to address their deepest concerns, organizations that intended to transform the world. And the church chugged on, struggling to make budget and complaining in a sort of low grade habitual way about how much work it was to be a member of this or that committee. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
We loved our old church, our sermons, our Pilgrim Hymnals, our organ, standing up in unison for the Gloria Patria and the Doxology, sighing and rustling as we sat down in unison. It conveyed the assurance of tradition. We did not understand that a lot of people were starting to look for something called “experiential faith” to complement our intellectual faith. These folks drifted away to yoga classes, Trappist retreat centers, Zen Buddhism, running and other forms of exercise, backpacking in the mountains, their own gardens, anyplace where they could feel that God was close without all the rest. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
A lot of us who stayed because we were being nurtured by tradition and friendships did not notice how many people were either thinking about drifting away or were actually doing so, because that was another thing you didn't chat about at coffee hour. It only really started to show up on people's radar screens when the young people who were raised in the church did not come back as adults. “What's wrong with these kids?” “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
I loved our old hymns and traditional worship forms (I am one of the very few who stayed after all), but for most people my age and younger the words “joyful celebration” would not be the first ones to come to mind to describe what we did on Sunday morning, except for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, where the celebration was largely celebratory because of the tradition invoked. For us, celebration sounded like a Beatles song, jazz, the blues, folk music, anything with a good beat and memorable lyrics. Celebration meant dancing, talking, laughing, being yourself, participating. Except for the holidays, church felt constrained, a program we had to get with, a performance to watch, an order of worship if you will. The beauty and wonder of celebrating life with God was not translated into our idiom. We did that at youth group and summer camp and so a lot of us drifted away. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
In the last few decades we are seeing a remarkable spiritual awakening in our country. At the same time, fewer and fewer people are going to church. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.” All evidence tells us that these spiritual seekers want to tap into something that will become the most important thing in their life. They want to know and experience God. They want a way of life that challenges them. They want to pray together, talk together about their faith experience, and build honest, gutsy relationships with other faithful people. They want to be transformed. Church offers them an hour on Sunday and, if they're really enthusiastic, a place on a committee. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
We scratch our heads and wonder why so many people are becoming evangelical enthusiasts. They want something to be that important, demanding and different. They like the energy and music. They want transformation. If they find these churches to be too rigid or judgmental, they end up as Buddhists, yoga instructors, artists, musicians, or something else they can do on their own. “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God and what we got was the Church.”
When I was in seminary, I thought that the best thing that could happen to most of our churches would be for them to burn down so we could start again from scratch with renewed priorities. Obviously I did not to become an arsonist. I love the church, but Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God.
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