Bible-how to interpret

September 21, 2021

September 19: “Like Children, Like Disciples” (Series opener)

James 3:13 – 4:3, 7-8a ; Mark 9:30-37

Jesus doesn’t usually address a message to just anybody. Often, like today, he has something specific to say to his disciples. (We think of the 12 men called the Apostles, but he had a larger group of close followers that included, most unusual for that time, many women.) The message he gives at the start of our gospel reading is only for the disciples—we can call them Jesus’ Special Agents; indeed, he doesn’t want anyone else to hear it. And so there’s a really important question for us as we approach this text: Does he want us to hear it? Are we disciples of Christ? Is this message for us?

That’s not a rhetorical question. Because Jesus often asks his disciples to give up everything they have, to leave everything to follow him, to prepare for persecution and death. Now I take my faith in Christ very seriously, but if that’s what it means to be a disciple, then I’m not one. And that’s ok. Jesus came for everyone, and he did many acts of healing, liberating, forgiving; and often he does not ask the people he helps to become his disciples, to leave everything, and to follow him. And so they continue their lives as shepherds, fishermen, parents, and also children—and we’ll see several stories about children in the weeks to come.

         I never noticed this simple fact about the gospel stories until my friend and fellow pastor-scholar, Peter Milloy, gave me a wonderful book he wrote called “Disciples and Other Believers.” Peter is an accomplished New Testament Scholar, and leads a local group of pastors that meet weekly to read and translate the New Testament in Greek. His notes in his book that preachers have often read Jesus’ words to his disciples as if they were incumbent on all Christian to follow to the letter—as if we’re all disciples. “Leave everything and follow me.” “Sell all that you have, give to the poor, and follow me.” “If someone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other cheek also.” “If you eye causes you to stumble, tear it out.” (That occurs just after our reading for today.)  When I started to consider Christian faith in earnest for myself, in my early teens, I read these passages in a panic. They weighed heavily on me. I felt inspired to strive to a rigorous life of following Jesus, but I also felt a lot of guilt about how far from this ideal of discipleship I was. Did you ever feel that? For me at that tender age it was especially sayings like, “Everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery.” So here I am, a young teen who only recently started taking interest in girls, and already I’m an adulterer. Poor, hormonal, teenage Bill!

         Now, often pastors have been at pains to soften these injunctions Jesus makes to the disciples. I’ve never heard a pastor dwell on the lust bit, although it does happen in some kinds of churches. We pastors often try to interpret away the hard and unyielding demands Jesus makes on his followers; we don’t want to scare people away from church! But some pastors have also selectively laid some of these commands on us, trying to inspire us to a righteous life, but often instead we just feel guilty and inadequate. Progressive-minded UCC pastors have usually focused on the injunctions to poverty—give up all that you have to follow Jesus! Especially when it’s pledge time. And then the same pastor may go home with a modestly comfortable salary. I have known a few pastors who really live like disciples, and they are amazing; but only a few. And no, I’m not one of them.

         Peter Milloy considers all this, and then carefully notes that Jesus does not ask everyone to be a disciple. Those injunctions weren’t necessarily for everyone. And I cannot do justice to the scholarly rigor he puts into his very accessible book. So I’ve asked him to offer a Zoom Bible study in the next several weeks, and he has agreed, starting on Monday, September 27 at 7 pm. Be aware: I agree with Peter about this fact that there is a special category of disciple in the New Testament. But we probably think differently about what to do with that fact today. What do we do with this important category of “disciple” in the Gospel? How does it apply to us?

         I have two concerns about it. One is that we take the category of “disciple” too seriously. We assume that everything Jesus commanded of his disciples applies just the same to all Christians, and so to us—and all the time! And so we bring upon ourselves guilt and inadequacy, or we scare off people who don’t want to sell all that they have. But worst of all, we risk preaching what we aren’t willing to practice. The word for that is hypocrisy. And one clear message that Jesus has for everybody is, don’t be a hypocrite. Nonetheless, Christians from time to time have taken on a moralistic air, like we are the holy ones, we are the pure and the good. Everyone can smell that sanctimony a mile away, and we Christians have brought much dishonor to God and to our cause whenever we’ve put on those airs. (And we’ve probably all done it a little.) Calling ourselves disciples and then pretending like we’ve left everything for Jesus is an invitation to hypocrisy.

         But my other concern is the opposite: that we don’t take the category of “disciple” seriously enough. Not knowing what to do with the really tough demands Jesus lays on his disciples, we just pass over them, and imagine that Jesus came writing blank checks of forgiveness, as if he just wanted to make everyone feel good about themselves. And sure enough he does that for some, without expecting anything in return: For those desperate for healing who believe he can help; he does this. And again, especially for children. He never commands anything of children, nor certainly scolds them. He just blesses them, and tells us to bless and welcome them. But on those capable adults who would follow him, he sometimes makes very serious demands. And those opponents of Jesus who seek to undermine him, he doesn’t hesitate to cut them to the quick. Jesus didn’t offer a one-size fits all message. Which makes interpreting his words much more interesting.

         So how do we deal with this category of disciple—neither taking it too seriously, nor ignoring it as an inconvenient truth? Well, that will be the question behind my upcoming sermons. I think you have to take it one passage at a time.

         Thankfully, in Mark we almost never have to worry about taking the disciples too seriously. Because they regularly act like buffoons. They should be wise, and well-instructed. We hear in the first verse that Jesus was avoiding the crowds, traveling in secret, just so he could explain to his disciples and only to them about his coming betrayal, murder, and yet rising again. The disciples are clearly special, clearly set apart. And yet this special attention is lost on them. Worse still, in the next scene, Jesus catches them arguing about who among them is the greatest. And they knew perfectly well that this boastful argument was petty and unbecoming. Notice they don’t say anything when Jesus asks them, they just stand there silently chagrined. But Jesus knew.

         So Jesus calls the twelve—those boasting-prone males among his many followers—and repeats one of those famous sayings of his about the Kingdom of God: The last shall be first. So if you want to be first, you should be last, and a servant to all. Don’t argue about who is or will be first.

         And then he does this remarkable gesture with the child that we talked about already. Now, children in Jesus’ time had a different symbolic meaning than children in our time. We have romantic-and Victorian-era ideas about children: they are innocent, sinless, special; we even say children are the real wise ones. We should all strive to connect with our inner child. So we are quick to think Jesus is saying something like that; that we all should be more childlike—innocent, unpretentious, naïve.

         But these modern symbolic representations of children are not to be found in the Bible. Judaism prized children more than most of the other surrounding cultures, but children needed to be instructed. Until that happened, they weren’t terribly interesting. Moses talks about teaching your children, but he never hung out with them. Prophets like Hosea used their children as symbols, but no other prophets I can think of are shown embracing children. For Jesus the unmarried prophet to warmly embrace a child is surprising, and probably gender non-comforming as well—we might say, unmanly, especially when contrasted with the boastful and competitive disciples.

         Children in Jesus’ day were not cool. If you are interested in status, then you don’t hang out with children. But Jesus often did. But what is the meaning of this final verse? “Whoever welcomes [or receives] one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Again, he’s not telling us to become like children. He will say something closer to that in the next chapter. But here he says if you welcome a child in my name, you welcome me, and not just me, you welcome even God, the one who sent Jesus. What does welcoming a child have to do with welcoming God, and with being a servant to all, instead of vying to be first?

         There’s so much we could say about children—and I bet you have some ideas of your own to share with me. One thing I appreciate is that children are wonderfully disinterested in the status of adults. We adults are quietly aware of what makes others or ourselves impressive—our list of accomplishments. Children couldn’t care less. They respond to how you treat them here and now. How you welcome them.

         By the way, the same thing applies to dogs and cats. Try saying to your dog when you get home, “Hey, Bowser, the board really liked my presentation today. Looks like I’m moving onward and upward.” You’ll get the same [pant]. Or say that to a child and you’ll get, “daddy, come look at my doll house!” Just go ahead and check your boasting at the door, and enjoy being yourself. Because if you want to welcome Jesus and indeed the very living God into your life, you have to act just the same. That, at least, is not much to ask of the disciples. I bet we can handle that.  

March 23, 2021

A New Chapter: First Congregational Church of Hadley

My family and I are thrilled to be welcomed by the good folk at Hadley. The spirit has been very good at this new beginning, and I am confident it will blossom this spring as we all slowly emerge from our covid restrictions. What an exciting time to be the church!

This was the longest sermon I ever preached. I got a little over-inspired! But it’s a good message that begins to connect me to you and you to me. I thought some want to read the text.

3/21/22 Call Sunday: “A Permanent Give-Away”

Texts: Jeremiah 31:31-34 ; John 12:20-26, 31-36

This is a Call Sunday, an exciting and anxious moment for all of us—kind of like a first date. And worse, it’s an internet date. I want to preach like I normally do, so you can get a feel of what it’s like to live with me, before you vote on whether to do so. But I also want to talk about how I do things and why today. That means it’s going to take a little longer than normal.

So I’m preaching on the lectionary texts, like I usually do, for this fifth Sunday in Lent. I’m a biblical preacher, but I’m no slave to the Bible. I am not always happy about what some of our biblical texts say. To me the Bible is a divine book only in and through its humanity. Sometimes that humanity obscures more than it reveals. But I always listen carefully to it and do my best to let the Bible speak truth to me. We may think we’ve heard it all, but the Bible is full of surprises for all of us.      

And what I’m looking for in the Bible, and in its main character, Jesus the Christ, who shows us God in his humanity, is precisely not just average, ordinary humanity, like we all know only too well. I’m not looking for common-sense truths that we get from life in general, although it’s fine if those truths are in there too. I’m not looking for a confirmation of conventional morality, or of the truisms of pop psychology or of child rearing, or of political messaging of one stripe or another. No, from the Bible I’m looking above all for a truth about life and God that I can’t get anywhere else. That kind of truth doesn’t come easy, although some Christians pretend it does—as if the Bible is an inerrant faucet of truth: not really human, just a dispenser of the pure Word of God—better than Jesus, apparently.

By the way, you might notice I skipped a few verses from John, and it would take a lot of time to say why. But it has to do with the very human process by which John was composed as well the human needs of this moment. (I don’t usually skip verses, just for the record.)

So: I’m looking for the truths in our readings from Jeremiah and John today that may not come easy, but that we won’t get anywhere else. And why is it important that these truths can’t be gotten “from anywhere else?” Not because we Christians alone have the truth. I don’t believe that. Rather, it’s because if there isn’t something uniquely true in our faith, why are we here? Why do we talk so much about this book? And why should our children keep coming to hear about it, when they might not be crazy about the music and most of their friends don’t come to church? If we’re just teaching ourselves and our children the commonsense truths that they already hear in school and sports and Disney movies, why bother? You know, movies, video games and Ted talks can animate stories much better than I can.

Well, I’ll tell you what our children won’t hear anywhere else, and neither will we adults: “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Now, I can tell you right now that what’s true in that verse does not come easily. I don’t entirely like the way it sounds, or the way I hear other Christians talking about that verse. Unlike many Christians, I don’t think Jesus is just talking about getting to heaven. I think he’s talking about how to live in this world. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I even get to what this verse could mean, I just want to lift it up for now, because this verse is the kind of thing I’m drawn to, the kind of truth I won’t get anywhere else; and that’s the kind of biblical preacher I am.

         The call to serve as minister here became more real when Shari and Tom gave my family a tour of the building a few weeks ago. Rick Ward provided some commentary on the worship space and Brian gave us a marvelous tour of the clock mechanism. (I could say Silas was especially excited, which is true, but then again so was I.)

         There we were, inside this tall spire, perched on some narrow, rather rickety steps, inspecting the gears and shafts extending the tiny motions of that escapement (really interesting word) to the four clock dials, which in perfect unity then tell the whole world in all directions, north south east and west, what time it is. (We’ll see that Jesus is very interested in telling what time it is.)

This was the same spire that I had driven by a hundred times, like millions of people over hundreds of years, with passing admiration for its grandeur, sometimes with a light frown twisting my lips when the time was a few minutes off. Brian made me appreciate the frequent adjustments required in this clock; no more frowning from me! (We’re doing better than Grace Episcopal.) Now that I could see for myself, up close and personal, concealed within the first-growth timber shoulders of this spire, the beauty and intricacy of that ticking, beating heart, mounted on ribs of cast iron—seeing it with my family brought home to me the great responsibility of all this: the history, the building, the generations of people it has housed. It was encouraging to me that Shari, Tom, and Brian wore that responsibility with evident joy and gratitude. But no one bears responsibility for it all—not only the working of the mechanism of the church, which is pleasingly concrete and seems timeless, but also the invisible spirit signified in it all, which is disturbingly ethereal—no one bears responsibility for all this like the pastor…and the responsibility to broadcast a spiritual message about just what time it is to the world passing by—truly, this responsibility is on all of us, but it is finally on the pastor to bring a message to the north, south, east, and west (and now, to the boundless internet) that, as we heard from the gospel for this day, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified…. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.”

         The responsibility for what has come before is heavy. The building only embodies that past in part. The collection of chalices brought home to me the story of this church back to the beginning. 1659. I don’t know anything about my ancestry going back anywhere near that far. The pastor here assumes an office that is older than the office of the President of the United States. This is an enormous responsibility we are considering together this morning. Yes, you too. Can you imagine the ancestors of this church listening in and watching us all? If they are alive in God, then they can see you at home too. You can’t hide.

         For me until recently, and for all those passers-by on route 9 this morning doing their big-box shopping, all of this is quaint. Something kind of outdated and no longer relevant, they imagine, but pretty enough to be worth keeping around a little longer. That tour helped me see how much more there is to it. And I could tell that Shari, Tom, Rick, and the search committee see how much more there is to it than quaint. But it’s easy to fall into the perspective of the passer-by on route 9. How do we keep ourselves focused on that “much more than quaint?” Both the history, as well as the potential God calls us to. The past, and the future of this church; And telling the time now. And how on earth do we convey all that to the people in their cars who’ve never stepped inside and gotten to know the congregational beating heart of this church? Is there a way to make people driving by see Jesus lifted up on that spire? And if so, will he really “draw all people to himself,” as he promised he would?

         Those are some of the questions that I look forward to pondering with you all (perhaps). But today, it’s you who have to tell what time it is. You have an important congregational meeting. Today the weight of that spire, and that 300-pound pendulum ticking away time and history, and the ethereal presence of God that all of this was designed to invite and invoke, is on your shoulders. You have to decide whether to heave it on me to share. Our congregationalist ancestors who build this heavy building made sure you would have to bear the responsibility for it along with the pastor. (They never imagined you’d be doing it on Zoom.)

You know, I think this great blessing that we easily take for granted—our congregational governance—is maybe what Jeremiah is prophesying about in our first reading. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel.” Now, Jeremiah was also telling what time it is, or actually, what time it will be. In this new covenant, God says “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” Now, what exactly would change if the law were written on our hearts? Jeremiah could have gone on to say: they will all know just what to do in every situation. Wouldn’t that be nice. But he doesn’t. He says: “No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” Jeremiah is anticipating what is essentially a congregational covenant—at least, what we ideally are. No more kings and priests and prophets who alone can exercise authority. No more popes or bishops who assign you a pastor. No more priest whose word is final. No more top-down authority; no more teachers even! (I’m going to preach myself out of a job if I’m not careful.) With God on his breath, Jeremiah dares to look toward a future where there is no more compulsion by authority, where all have an equal voice. And all it takes to make it work perfectly, to get all of the gears of community meshing flawlessly, is that each of us has Torah or God’s instruction or the law written on our hearts. All of us must know God from within.

Well, whenever the prophets dreamt of the future, and when Jesus came along and said, “Now it’s here,” we can receive it in one of two ways: the future they describe is what we have already become, thanks to Christ—the prophetic future, in other words, is our past, for the words of the prophets have come to pass in Jesus; or, the prophetic dream of the future shows us how far we have yet to go, and Jesus just takes away any excuse—”Oh, that’s for some time in the future.” With this being Lent, I feel like I should favor the latter perspective: how far I have yet to go. Is God’s Torah written on my heart? Do I know God from within? I confess I do not, or only in part. Is our heart beating with God’s, so that we know how to tell what time it is? Or is our internal clock always running behind what God is doing now.

More important questions. But the clock is ticking. Call Sundays are just so strange! It’s almost like having to decide whether to get married at the end of a first date. Even after I’ve done my thing here this morning, you won’t know exactly what you are voting for; neither will I. Is she going to give me what I need for the rest of my life? (Or at least, for five years.) Are you going to get out of me what you want? Do we just throw caution to the wind and jump into it together, and hope for the best?

Well, there is always some risk, and some blind trust. Fortunately, we have a really good match maker: the Search Committee! I bet you didn’t think of yourselves that way. But before we go too far with it, the whole marriage metaphor is not really right to begin with (and it makes me uncomfortable, to tell the truth). Jeremiah mentions—did you catch it?—“I was their husband, says the Lord.” Israel is God’s bride, not Jeremiah’s; and so the church also came to call itself the bride of Christ. We—you and I—are church together already, sharing one baptism and one table of fellowship, like a family. And Jesus, sometimes called a bridegroom in Scripture, is in any event already the head of our family. We are not just “two ships passing in the night;” we do not walk in the dark, so long as the light is with us. Indeed, I think our passage from John’s gospel is getting something critical to this decision we make today. It’s still a weighty and difficult decision to make. But seeing it in the light of Christ, without removing the burden of it, still lightens the load for all of us. And here’s the key: Because if we are servants and disciples of Christ, we die to ourselves: “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.” And while that sounds scary and painful and costly, it actually makes bearing this enormous weight of time and architecture and the fear of the future much easier.

In this passage of John’s gospel, right after the triumphal entry into Jerusalem (which we actually celebrate next Sunday), some Greeks show up with a keen interest in Jesus. They are in Jerusalem for Passover, which means they could be converts to Judaism or just foreigners who are interested in Judaism. When Jesus hears about their interest, it is a signal to him about what time it is. “The hour has come for the Son of Man (that’s Jesus) to be glorified.” These Greeks are the first taste of what he predicts will be possible when Jesus is lifted up—which in John’s gospel means both crucified and resurrected, namely this: “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”

But what Jesus goes on to talk about is not how the whole world will call on his name, or how he will forgive everyone’s sin. He doesn’t talk about himself at all, really. He talks about his disciples, for they will remain when Jesus is lifted up. By dying, Jesus will no longer be just a single grain of wheat; he will be planted in the earth and bear much fruit—that’s us. In other words, Jesus will establish by his death a new community with a unique way of life, and this way of life (in his name) will draw people from every nation and background. What is that unique way of life? It is the way of those who “hate their life in the world.”

Now, here I get uncomfortable, and maybe you do too. Are we supposed to hate our life in this world? That’s not what our UCC “be the church” poster says: the last motto is “Enjoy this life.” That is wisely said against thousands of years of Christians preaching that this world is worth nothing, that we should only care about the next world. So if you are poor or enslaved, don’t bother protesting or demanding justice; just pin your hopes on the afterlife. That’s wrong. Surely Jesus’ words have been misused, for he himself took actions to free people now, just as God freed the Israelites and protected the widow and orphan. And when you read John carefully, you see that the phrase “eternal life” does not refer only to a life beyond this one, but to a new way to live right now.

So what does it mean to “hate your life in the world?” The word translated “life” is psychē, like the English word psyche. It’s your life force, your soul, or we could call it our “self,” our identity.  Jesus makes a contrast: “Those who love their life [their self] lose it.” I think he’s just stating a simple fact here: if the only thing you attend to is your-self, your own interests, your own enjoyment—to the extent that you are self-centered—know that you will lose that, it will end in nothing. He doesn’t say here you’ll burn in eternal torment. You just die, and that self that you spent your whole life attending to amounts to nothing.

Secondly, when Jesus contrasts that with “those who hate their life in this world,” he is using “the world” symbolically, as in “the way of the world;” and he thinks that the way of this world is to encourage us to be exactly self-interested and self-centered. Now, there is of course much good, natural love in this world. Not just people but most animals love their young. Many people realize that the way to really enjoy this life is to enjoy it with others, and even for others. We usually live this way at least toward our family and friends. But we should also see the world through Jesus’ eyes: he was opposed and eventually murdered by people who saw him as a threat to their self-interests, their power. And these people claimed to be guardians of either God’s revelation, or the common good.

It is this self-centered, even to the point of murder, “life in the world” that Jesus tells us to hate: “Those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Jesus is the one who shows us how to hate this whole system of life corrupted by self-centeredness. The positive side of hating that system looks precisely like his great commandment: love one another. Live by giving, not by hoarding. Make others’ joy your joy, rather than resenting their joy. Help others secure the basic goods of survival, rather than pursuing endless luxuries for yourself. Help them become their best self, rather than gloating in feeling superior to them. That much has already become, to some extent, common sense. Many people, save the crassest materialists and ego-centrists, grasp something of this wisdom. Glory to God.

But Jesus realizes with a tragic sensibility just how deeply engrained self-interest is, the “love of this self or life,” is in our world—and in many ways it is worse today than in his time. He will talk about the positive alternative of loving one another, but he realistically knew that he must confront the deep, systematic (as we say these days) self-interest of the world, which cannot accept the love of God. The negative side of this equation is the judgment of God, as Jesus says: “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.”

We try to avoid this word, judgment. And we can by focusing on our own lives. We as individuals can find greater joy by living for others, rather than just our own self-interests. But as individuals we can hardly touch the world itself and the ruler of this world—the active, wayward power of self-interest in this world. To begin to drive out that ruler, you need a counter-kingdom. You need a people living by different rules. A people who doesn’t live just to protect their own prerogatives and privileges. A people who doesn’t maintain the status quo just because that’s what suits them.

Notice that Jesus does not say, I myself will defeat Satan and the powers that be. That would involve violence and war. (Which sometimes the Bible does imagine—a great, final Armageddon.) Jesus has no desire to capture this world’s seat of power for himself. He has no desire to rule the kingdoms of this world, as Satan tempted him with in the wilderness. He knows that he must instead give up his life and self—and that this self-giving shape of life is what will “draw all people to myself.” This self-giving shape of life, perfected by giving up his life for all, belongs to Jesus alone. We individually do not have to give up our life, literally. I want to enjoy this life as long as possible. But we can each give up our life freely, as we are called to do; this is the very spirit of our church community. Where Jesus goes—living solely for God and not for self—is where his servants, his disciples will go also. He doesn’t say this to everyone; he tells Phillip and Andrew about dying to this life, not the crowds. We likewise can live for the Father’s honor and glory alone—if not fully and perfectly like Jesus or a disciple, then we can live for God as a community, and individually as we are called.

And isn’t it this new shape of life, revealed perfectly by Jesus and at least partially among us, that draws people to this church? Is that what drew you here? To be among people who live for God and others, no longer just for themselves, as the world constantly tells us to do? It is a simple and beautiful way to see what Jesus is all about. And still 2000 years later, it is a shape of life so badly needed, so radically different from much of what passes as life. Even now, this shape of living for God and others is a judgment upon the world, and it is the only way to drive out the ruler of this world without installing just another substitute playing by the same rules.

There are other things that can draw people here. There’s the pleasure of community and friendship, the beauty of music and of this space, the sense of heritage and history, the good food—and other good things here I look forward to hearing about. There is the quaintness. I no more want to give up on these real goods of creation than I want to give up enjoying my life. But I believe we as a church have to make sure that Jesus, lifted up from the earth, glorified by the Father as the bearer of this new life for others that if you are his disciple he says you must follow, that this Jesus is somewhere felt in our friendship, sounded out in our music, highlighted in our heritage and history, tasted in our good food and in how we share it; that this Jesus is clearly heard in the ringing of our bell, in the way we tell what time it is, and is even lifted up on our spire. In-spiring, isn’t it? And so we come back to this wonderful building and history, and the question: how does our reading from John helps us think about our responsibility to it?

The crowd answered Jesus, “We have heard from the law that the Messiah (or the Christ) remains forever. How can you that that the Son of Man must be lifted up?” The crowd believes in a Messiah, a savior, who remains present. Who relieves them of the burden of living on their own in the now. A Lord who will rule over them permanently, just like the kings of the world do. They want a leader who remains forever. Our recent, stressful presidential election confirms that many of us are still very concerned about who is in power over us. If we no longer seek a king or queen or absolute authority, we are still drawn to things that hold the promise of stability, of remaining. Things like buildings. Things that suggest the promise that we do not have to lose our life in this world, that God will just make permanent what we have in this life. That’s why we are drawn to things that are grand, and fabulous, and impressive. We are not drawn to the small and ephemeral grain of wheat.

What we have and are in this world is fine and good, but it’s not what Jesus died for, and its not how he draws people to himself. Why is this pastorate still here after 362 years? Not because people spent their time celebrating the pastor, or because the pastor sold themselves to the congregation. It’s because the pastors in this pulpit did not love their life, but hated the self-interest that threatens to invade even church politics, and sought instead to be lifted up with Christ. Why is this building still here? Not because it is quaint; remember this building was once new. Not because the people who gave so much of themselves to build it and care for it thought to themselves: “How can we make a building that people will pay to see?” (Yes, I’ve seen the chart in the back of how much each pew went for in the old days. Never mind that. I’m not saying we were perfect.) But rather, they asked: “How can we create a space where we can share in Christ’s self-giving life together, that will lift people above calculating what’s in this for me?

We must make an intense decision today, you and I. Moments of decision tend to be stressful, and they almost have to be, because they force us to calculate, and to fear miscalculating. The self-interested part of our brain goes into overdrive at such moments, and that’s to some extent inevitable. But what is truly permanent in our lives and in the long history of this church is this Christ Jesus, who did not calculate for himself. Come what may of this hour, he will remain as our true past, as well as being the future into which we are called. Let us serve him, so that where he is, we will be also; and so let us be lifted up with him, in this and every anxious moment of decision and responsibility.

 
November 15, 2020

Nov. 15: “Stewards of Creativity”

“Stewards of Creativity”

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30

         This is Stewardship Month. And from Matthew we just heard the weirdest stewardship parable in the Bible. It begins with the master, who seems to represent God, entrusting different amounts of money to his three slaves. A talent is a piece of gold worth perhaps 5000 denarii, a denarius being about a day’s wage, so today those 5 talents are equivalent to $3 ¼ million. This parable is where our word “talent” comes from, but here the talents have nothing to do with talent-show talent, as in our beloved stewardship phrase, “time, talent, and treasure.” In this parable a talent is all about the treasure.

And from there the parable seems to teach us all about being good capitalists. God gives a few people enormous sums of money so they can make more money for God. And those who are lazy or bad investors will end up in hell. So this looks like the prooftext for the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, with the clincher at the end: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have in abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” If we assume this parable is all about stewardship of money, that’s where we end up.

So let’s not go there. It doesn’t fit with anything else in the Bible. Let’s look for a better interpretation.

I’ll rely on my friend Peter Milloy and what my Greek reading group discussed this week when we read this text. Peter is a real New Testament scholar, unlike me, and he proposed an interpretation of this parable that makes sense for Jesus’ original context. He first paid attention to that phrase used at the beginning of the parable. The man “entrusted his property to” his slaves. The Greek word is often translated as “hand over,” and used for revelation or traditions, as in Matthew 11:27: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” Paul uses the same Greek word when he passes on the institution of the Lord’s supper to the Corinthians, saying “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you…” So this parable is not about money, which Jesus elsewhere calls “mammon” and says you either have to serve it or God. It’s about God entrusting or handing over revelation. And revelation is the most valuable thing we can receive, aptly symbolized by a wealth of gold.

Now, at the time of Jesus, there were different factions of Jews. The most narrow in their traditionalism were the Sadducees, a name you might recognize from the gospels. They only recognized one section of the Bible: the Pentateuch or Torah, which makes up the first five books of our Bible. They did not accept newer ideas, including the resurrection of the dead. And they had one holy place, the Temple in Jerusalem, which they controlled in collaboration with the pagan Roman empire.  

Another party was the Pharisees. Now by the time the gospels were written, perhaps 40 years after Jesus’ death, the Pharisees and the first Christians had had a falling out. So the Pharisees are often portrayed as Jesus’ enemies, as in Matthew 23. But in some stories Jesus dines with the Pharisees and they show each other mutual respect. Like Jesus, the Pharisees accepted the Torah along with the prophets and the writings—all the books of our Old Testament. Like Jesus, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead. And they committed themselves to studying scripture and worshipping in synagogues in every town, not in the temple only. The Pharisees are the true ancestors of Judaism today.

The third faction of Jews were the disciples of Jesus, who recognized Torah, prophets, and writings, but also the words of Jesus, who told them in chapter five: “I have come not to abolish [the Torah and the prophets] but to fulfill.”

So you have in Jesus’ time three groups of Jews, who have received, or really accepted out of faith, greater or lesser amounts of revelation. It certainly seems likely that Jesus tells this parable in reference to these three servants of God: his followers are the servant who received five talents, the Pharisees received two, and the Sadducees one.  

The parable is not about why they received different riches of revelation, but what they do with the riches they received. And notice that only the Sadducees are condemned here, not the Pharisees. The 5- and 2-talent slaves, entrusted with much, create twice as much with what they were given. So when the master returns—and this looks like the final judgment or the return of Christ—they are each put in charge of many things. And each is told, enter in the joy of your master. Notice that they don’t end up with more money, which after all isn’t the real point here. They end up in charge of many things; and elsewhere Jesus indicates that his disciples will be the ones who will be in charge of God’s kingdom on earth.

But then there’s the sad fellow with one talent—still a good $600,000 by today’s standards. He tells the returning master, with a good bit of cheek: “I knew you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed. So I was afraid, and hid your talent in the ground.” And how did he know this about God? It’s not because the God of the Old Testament is harsh, while the God of the New Testament is loving and merciful. Just recall that the New Testament is about to have God throw this man into hell, and we can dispense with that unfounded prejudice.

Maybe the one-talent slave is referring to Exodus 20, where God says “I the Lord am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of their parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me.” That may sound harsh to us, and perhaps it did to the one-talent slave, but perhaps it’s very wise. When parents reject God or fail to follow God truly, it has very bad effects on the generations to follow. Besides, God goes on to say that he shows love to the thousandth generation of those who love me.

But what’s interesting about this passage in the Torah is that it is one place where the prophets present a different picture of God: Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 18 revise this teaching, saying “It is only the person who sins that shall die.” (That may still sound harsh to us, but at least the children are spared.) The point is, the one-talent slave who did not recognize the prophets as valid might have easily ended up with a harsher view of God.

So, thinking God jealous, he buries the little revelation he does have. He doesn’t let it be added to. He doesn’t expand upon it, as both the Pharisees and Jesus did, in their own way. He doesn’t actually get out and do things with it. He is miserly with it, not sharing it with the people, like the Pharisees did in the synagogues. This slave jealously guards God’s talent, in the same way the Sadducees guarded the temple. And so God will take away their revelation and their temple, and give it to the one with 10 talents. (That’s why he’s so sad, you see?) That is to say, the followers of Jesus, not the Sadducees, will be the real inheritors of Moses’ teaching. And that message fits perfectly with Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as the new Moses.

So: isn’t that better than saying the parable is about the rich getting richer and the poor losing everything? It’s about what Jesus and his contemporaries did with the true riches of God, the revelation that has been handed over to us. I am persuaded that we have here the true original meaning of Jesus’ parable.

But what does that mean for us? So this parable is not about money. Is it only about the Pharisees and Sadducees?

The first lesson for us here is that what stewardship refers to first and foremost, as both Jesus and the Jewish tradition recognize, is a custodianship over the revelation of God. The stewardship that matters is not about money or this temple (with all due respect and thanks to our trustees who do this hard work for us); it is about what we all do with the Word of God that has been handed over to us: the Gospel. If you are not doing something with the Word of God, you are going to forfeit God’s most precious gift.

And what do we do with that Word? Do we hold on tight to it? Do we bury it in the ground, to make sure it doesn’t change or grow? To make sure we don’t lose control over it? In our search for what Thessalonians calls “peace and security,” do we protect and safeguard the Word in such a way that we ensure it will do no valuable work in the world? Do we think God wants us to just parrot back what we heard long ago? So we can say, when the new era dawns, “Here you go God, I kept what I was taught just the way I received it. I didn’t change a thing.” Apparently not.

Or do we work with the revelation we’ve received, allowing it to grow and expand in creative fidelity? Do we bring it into the light, being “children of the day?” The 5- and 2-talent slaves are both faithful or trustworthy; they don’t just make up their own new revelation. But they take what God has given them and creatively expand upon it.

The church has shown such creative fidelity in critical moments of its 2000-year history. And I believe such a time is upon us again. Like Israel in the time of Jesus, we are in a time requiring of us a transition in the basic way we understand how God acts. What was handed down to many of us is that God is omnipotent over everything in the world. To have faith in God then means to believe that everything that happens to me or to anyone was sent by God for some secret purpose. I just have to trust that it is from God, that there’s a silver lining behind every cloud, and that if I trust what God is doing, it will all come out for the best. That’s the little nugget of revelation that has been handed over to many of us. Faith means all is right with the world because God is in control.

While it may be true on a mysterious level, I don’t think this teaching is true to the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I think it has no answer for why so many bad things happen in the world, with often very little good coming from it. That’s why many young people and old people aren’t buying it anymore. Even many who do stick around can only pretend to believe in this God who is secretly in control.

I hope that over the last five years, I have handed on to you, good stewards, the resources to transition out of this teaching that no longer works, to a teaching that is faithful to the Gospel and gives us the answers we need. For I would hate to see even what little we now have be completely taken away.

Although we may long for peace and security, our time is a time of travail, like a woman in labor pains. It is a hard “transition” to make, calling us to our very best in creative fidelity. But the way to see God anew that I have proposed is in essence very simple: God’s real omnipotence, God’s real control, is to be found in the most valuable gift we have received: in the Word, in revelation. Don’t look for God in some secret meaning behind whatever is happening in your life, or in the mess that is our world; look to the Word we have received, and let it define what is real. Seek this Word together, as those destined for salvation; and in that Word “encourage one another and build up each other.”

June 14, 2020

June 14 (Almost) Live-streamed service: “Ethnicity Then and Now”

There are many things that need to be said, as people of faith grapple with the uprising going on after George Floyd’s death. If my audience were activists on the front line, I would want to thank them, but also ask questions about how useful it is to call for abolishing the police (although that’s not what everyone means by the suddenly popular slogan, “Defund the police”). But my audience is our congregation. What I think we need to think about, to be able to hear the anger and wisdom coming from the protests, is to understand and acknowledge the reality of institutional racism. That’s my real point in this sermon. 

Romans 3:28-30

I’ve commented only seldom on race and racism; and this week I’m feeling ashamed about that. Our denomination puts out powerful messages about it, and offers training in anti-racism; I’ve done such trainings and they are really illuminating. I have friends and colleagues who work in anti-racist advocacy or have published anti-racist scholarship. I was ordained by an African American congregation. I have no excuse: for a white person, I am well-equipped to talk about race.

Perhaps I’ve been held back by our fear of political issues in church. Surely it’s not too political to denounce racism and to work as a congregation to counter racism in our community. I think you will agree that there is a need for this in Granby, and I’m not sure what other institution in town can lead the way on this issue. We carefully came to a consensus that we are an Open and Affirming congregation. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that being Open and Affirming is a promise to all people, especially people of color, that we are committed to being a refuge from racism and an ally in the struggle against it.

I think we can all agree racism is a sin, something to be excluded from God’s kingdom. Thank goodness it’s still not ok to be pro-racist in America. But what kind of sin is racism? What does it mean to be racist? I think that’s where we still have a ways to go to find unity.

I’m a biblical preacher. Usually, I would try to find an answer to a question like the one about racism in Scripture. And if we take our brief reading in Romans, we see that for Paul and the New Testament, what we call “race” is a major issue. He puts it in terms of Jew and Gentiles, literally “ethnics;” the Greek word for Gentiles is ethnon. Paul is saying that Jesus provides an answer to the ethnic issues of 1st century Rome. And no doubt Jesus still provides an answer to our issues of ethnicity (we might also say “race”) in 21st century America.

But the terms and problems are so very different that turning to Scripture does as much to confuse things as illuminate. We prefer to talk about race, which is a term full of problems itself. Race is as much a human invention as it is a biological reality. It certainly cannot be boiled down to black and white. But we almost have to look at it that way, because we took various peoples from Africa and made them into a single commodity—chattel slaves. We tried to, anyway. And so we made an absolute legal distinction between free white people and enslaved black people. And the effects of that are sadly still very much with us. You can tell so much about who is likely to succeed, to receive better or worse treatment, to be punished in school or by the police, by ignoring all the interesting details about our individual identity, and just looking at whether someone is white or black (if those words really mean anything). You see, race is not real; but it functions in America as if it were real.

Paul’s terms don’t fit our terms, but not because ours are better, or worse. He sees in Jesus an end to the idea that God privileges one extended family of people—the Jews—over others. (Keep in mind, God was by no means easy on the Jews!) Like our words white and black, Paul’s word “ethnon” or gentiles lumps all these different non-Jewish peoples and religions into one vague group—pagans.

Of course, Paul is saying that now, these pagan peoples have access to God through Christ. But that doesn’t necessarily help us with our ethnic problems, either. When we hear that God justifies both Jew and Gentile on the basis of faith, we are likely to hear this: our God is a race-blind God. Our faith is a post-racial faith. God doesn’t look at our race; God only looks at what’s on the inside, at faith, at my heart. God treats us all as individuals. That’s actually not what Paul means, although there’s some truth to it. But on that shaky basis, we might then go on: So why are we still talking on and on about white and black? We should be race-blind too! We should just accept everyone as individuals.

Well, that is to misunderstand what Paul means by faith, and to misunderstand the whole scope of biblical teachings. I could say much more about how to rightly apply Bible teachings to our problem with race, but that would take lots of time and work. It’s good work which we should do, but we don’t have the time today.

So I want to set aside the bible for now, and make just one point about race and racism that might help us today. Hopefully you’ve heard this before. When most Americans, especially white Americans, hear “racism,” they think bigotry. We think about people who hate black people. We think about our bigoted Uncle Gene, or whoever: “Oh he’s such a racist. But I’m not like him. I don’t hate black people.” And so when we hear people denounce “racism,” we get defensive: “So why are these protestors talking about racist this and that? That may be some white people, but not me. It’s not my problem.” We even try to make bigotry inevitable or natural: birds of a feather flock together, right? So if I’m a racist, everyone is racist—that is, a bigot.

But what activists and scholars and leaders in our denomination mean by racism is not in the first place “bigotry.” What we really mean is “institutional racism.” In the first place, individuals are not racist. Racism is a social sickness, an institutional disease. Racism exists whenever one identifiable group of people does not enjoy the same success and privileges as another identifiable group. This might happen without any one individual ever hating people of another group, or intending bad to them.

We should each learn to inspect our own experience for evidence of institutional racism. I have many such stories. Here’s one that is not terribly harmful, but is still very instructive. I am a member of group of theology scholars. Like most scholarly groups, we are committed to be inclusive—to not be just white and male, as we were in the past. And now we are nearly equally male and female. Well, every year we nominate young scholars to be new members. Recently, we had several well-qualified candidates from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. The members discussed them, but no one knew them personally, because we all belonged to schools dominated by white folks. I bet most of your friends and contacts are white, too. So the group was having a hard time figuring out who to vote for. Then someone mentioned another person who was not high on the list: a white woman. She went to school with some of us, and others knew her from their circles. Guess what? People started to say: “Oh, I know Jane! Sure, let’s invite her.” They didn’t stop to think: this is how white privilege happens. This is how white people end up helping other white people, even when they are committed to being inclusive and even to affirmative action. There wasn’t one bigot in that room, I can assure you. But what happened in that room that day among good-hearted, progressive, smart scholars, was racism.

We white people naturally want to scapegoat a few bigots—who are, to be sure, sad, sinful, and sometimes very powerful, even well-armed, individuals. We want to imagine ourselves innocent of racism. But racism is deeply inscribed into our society. We are all either victims of it or perpetrators, and sometimes both. It’s not just a few bad apples. Just ask yourself: is it easier to grow up white or black in America today? You know the answer. Until the answer is genuinely: “It’s just the same either way,” then we are living in a racist society. Take a look at poverty levels, quality of schools, covid-19 vulnerability and other health problems, average total assets, as well as all the studies of situational discrimination, and then try out saying to yourself: America is a racist society. That doesn’t mean every white person is a bigot, far from it. It doesn’t mean we haven’t tried in some ways to address it. But we should be able to confess that, regardless of what’s in people’s hearts, our society still discriminates against people of color.

White Christians should be equipped to lead the way here. We should be used to confessing our sinfulness, rather than trying to exclude sins like racism from our responsibility. One of the great joys and paradoxical strengths of our Christian faith is never having to be defensive. Because we know Christ brings God’s mercy to all, we know for ourselves that we have sinned; none is innocent. This is the real meaning of Original sin. Of course I am a sinner. And as so many leaders and preachers have confessed, Racism is like America’s original sin. So of course our law enforcement institutions are racist. Of course our housing system is racist, and our schools. We white Christians should be models for others by the way we can without anxiety take a critical look at our society and ourselves, without becoming defensive.

And again, it helps to realize that racism in America is first of all an institutional reality, not a matter of bad apples. But without being bigots, this does involve us personally. The benefits that not all, but many white people receive as Americans are tainted by racism. None of us is innocent or untouched. But as individuals, we know by our faith that we are not powerless against sin. By confessing and calling on God, we can resist it, even though we never defeat it. To resist racism, we need confront it in ourselves, in our society and institutions, and adopt a consistent spiritual practice to repent and reform racism. We need to do this as individuals, and better yet, as a church community. Let us confess our need for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Don’t deny the sin of racism is real. Confront it, take responsibility, and let us become God’s agent in dismantling it.

March 25, 2020

6-week Class: Guided Tour through the Bible

Dear Church and Those Curious,

Attached is a Guided Tour through the Bible–a presentation of what the Bible is about, with short, specific readings to illustrate that. We’ll run this as a (perhaps) six-week class on Zoom. Please do all the underlined readings at least, and write down your questions and thoughts to share.

Adults will meet at Sunday, 9:30 on Zoom for 45 minutes. I’ll send out an invitation to the all-church list.

Confirmands will have their own session on Monday, probably at 2:00 pm.

Let’s give thanks for this opportunity to keep exploring our faith–it will give us perspective in this craziness!

Session 1 & 2

March 3, 2020

Lent, March 1: “The Gospel in a Free Society”

I’ve been troubled by some people’s perceptions that my sermons are political, since I pretty much never address current political issues (and believe me, many of my colleagues in ministry do). But a few communicated directly with me, and I could see that their experience was real. So this is my attempt to figure out the truth to their experience. 

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 ;  Matthew 4:1-11

Like in just about every church I’ve known, some people like and benefit from my sermons; others, not as much as I’d like. I’m sure it’s me, a little—my ego may get in the way, as I said two weeks ago. Maybe it’s also the way I impose big claims on you; I was trained as a professor, after all; but please remember that as a professor, I am very comfortable when people disagree with me. Try it!

But I think there’s more going on. I think some of you are hearing something in my message that sets you on edge, although not all of you dislike that. But one of you put it well recently: you said my sermons make your toes curl. It was not a compliment, but it was helpful. You might not be sure why, but you feel a vague discomfort while I preach. That doesn’t do you any good; and it doesn’t do me any good either. So I realized that we should try to figure out together why my message is uncomfortable. Now, I may be giving you the rope to hang me with! But I am not ashamed of the gospel I preach. Even if I sometimes fail to show it clearly and truly, what I’m preaching is a message of God’s Word that we need to hear, a message for joy.

So let me try to bring total transparency into this room. When I look at our culture—our assumptions, the way we think and act and interpret the world—and then read the Bible, I see, in one place at least, a big mismatch. There’s something about how the Bible describes being faithful to God that is very different from being a good member of our secular society. No surprise; the Bible often pits the gospel against the way of the world.

So what’s this mismatch? Well, according to our secular beliefs, we are told and we believe that life is about the choices I make. I have rights, and I am entitled to my own opinion, and no one can tell me what to do. In short, I am my own lord. (The company Forex trading announces their motto on npr: “It’s your world; trade it.”) This is what we call personal liberty. And you know Jesus’ Golden Rule—do to others as you would have them do to you—that’s not the main rule of our society. Our golden rule is this: you are free to do whatever you want, so long as you don’t violate anyone else’s freedom. Doesn’t that sound right? That is as close as we have to an American dogma.

And by the way, I like being over here. I like personal liberty. I don’t want the government or any other organization telling me what to do—I mean, there will have to be exceptions. But it’s a pretty good system—we call it liberal democracy because of liberty. It’s the American dream. It’s bi-partisan. We all believe in the ultimate value of personal freedom. And while liberal democracies around the world are facing challenges, it still looks like the best secular system we got.

So here we are, a church within a secular world of personal liberty. And we have a problem over here: the Bible doesn’t give a hoot about personal liberty. I mean, read it for yourself! (It’s a free society, after all.) There are two major problems with our belief in personal liberty from a biblical perspective. One is that in God’s kingdom, love and responsibility come before freedom. (The same is usually true within our family, right? Church is trying to be God’s family.) I’ll talk more about that another week. But two, If I am the ultimate lord of my life, if I am free to do as I want, then where is God in the picture? We know our secular government has to respect my free will, as we respect each other’s. But God doesn’t. God doesn’t recognize my rights.

Now, you can find a little freedom here and there in the Bible. Genesis has God telling “the man,” (so it’s a story about us), “You may eat freely of every tree of the garden.” If we stopped right there, I guess we’d have a libertarian God. “But (God continues) of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” God has an absolute right over the man.

Then the serpent tempts the woman, by saying in effect: “Eve, even if God gave you a command, you are entitled to your own opinion.” Then he adds, “When God said you will die, God was speaking metaphorically.” (The Serpent is a good professor, you see, encouraging questions and interpretation.) Curiously enough, the serpent was right. They don’t die, but their relationship with God is spoiled. They have bitten off more than they can chew, receiving a wisdom about good and evil that will wreak havoc. And so they are cursed. But God does not kill them.

The moral of the story for us is not that God cares about personal liberty: eat whatever you want, find your own path, pursue your dream! Rather, it’s that while God warns us of the life-and-death consequences of our mistakes, God is also patient. God endures the wickedness and self-destruction into which we fall, as painful as this is for God. God is patient for human righteousness to arise from the mess. That is of course what Jesus does. He uses those same interpretive skills against the Tempter, but to the opposite effect of complete obedience to God. There is no celebration of freedom for its own sake here; but as our Call to Worship quoted, “by one man’s obedience, we will be made righteous.”

As far as the Bible is concerned, our ultimate purpose is not deciding for ourselves; it’s being righteous through obedience. And as a minister of the Gospel I am not at liberty to make the Bible say something different.

So yes, you are going to hear in my preaching a challenge to our American, libertarian way of life. We are stuck with this challenge, so long as we take that book seriously. There’s no easy answer here. We need to work together to figure out how to live with this mismatch between our culture and our Bible.

But I want to say two things to set you at ease, to assure you that you have nothing to fear in this challenge. One: I really am not being political. I am not suggesting we get rid of our American system of personal liberty. As Americans, we will continue to debate the best way to finesse it. But that is not my concern as your pastor and teacher.

Two: But within the church, as a church community, personal liberty is not king. We are here to honor God as our Lord. We may be here to give up our free will for obedience to righteousness, to die to ourselves by our baptism, to lose our life so we might find it in Christ and in his church, to live-by-faith in total dependence on God, not on myself. And I personally don’t believe that giving up personal liberty is a loss, although the serpent lisping in our ear will make it sound like a loss. To die to oneself is the way to absolute joy. So I want us to spend Lent seeking that joy beyond freedom, beyond self, in a life of total love and obedience.

But don’t sweat it. When we step out of this place, we are all still free persons in a world of personal liberty. That’s not going away. And while you’re in here, you’ll never be subject to domination and commands; we will all be free here, too, if only because we love one another. I’ll be patient with you and I hope you will be patient with me, as God has been patient with all of us.

November 1, 2019

Once again on evangelicals for Trump–but this article stands out

There’s a particularly insightful apex about mid-way through, when the writer is surprised to find that the (white) evangelicals she is interviewing would rather have Trump than a more seemingly Evangelical candidate. Her explanation is persuasive.

I commend this article with a few caveats: it is primarily about white evangelicals, and we should never conflate white evangelicals with all evangelicals. Second, reading articles about evangelicals, even by journalists who are outsiders to that movement, tends to place you within their worldview. Apart from politics, there are all kinds of problems with that worldview. For starters: the literal reading of the End Times, the penchant for black-and-white morality (yes, with its racist connotations) despite the impressive witness to moral ambiguity in Scriptures, the easy assumption that we insiders have the truth and outsiders are suspect or de facto in the “dark.” Etc. Above all, the assumption that the answer to the world’s problems is to have power and authority in our hands. Evangelicals apply that to the Bible first of all, but it can easily be transferred to a Strongman leader. The lusting after power and authority is at the root of the popular longing for fascism. Evangelicals usually check that longing through a variety of biblical-based teachings. But more ‘fundamentally,’ the Bible questions that human lust for power and authority from Genesis 3 onward. It’s ironic that the decisive challenge for evangelicals is to let God be God–something they no doubt think they have licked. 

There is another possible force at work that the article doesn’t quite articulate. (If I may venture some more analysis as an outsider.) The evangelical stress on personal morality and holiness has a tendency toward sanctimony and moralism. That may create a psychic pressure, a longing (that Nietzsche would smile at) to express the nasty, brutish human impulses that evangelical faith has tried to repress. How indeed do you profess to be loving and merciful, while regarding the rest of the world as out to get you and awaiting the vengeful judgment of God? (Granted, I am trading in caricatures of evangelical personality.) Perhaps Trump is a vehicle for evangelicals to embrace their troubling, non-Christian impulses at arms’ length. 

Post article on evangelical support for Trump

 

September 3, 2019

August 25: “The Ten Commandments: Beyond and Back” (Final in series)

A pretty complex wrap-up. But if we want to know how to make sense of the 10 Commandments, we have to think about what difference Christ makes to the covenant made with Moses. 

Call to Worship: Micah 6:6-8

Ezekiel 36:22-36 ; Colossians 2:6-15

We must never forget that most of our life of faithfulness is about doing. That’s the point of Micah’s words from our Call to Worship, and also so much of the message in the NT. You don’t have to get up all in your head to follow Jesus. And even worship can’t be the whole of faithfulness. We all need to be doers of the Word also, and some of us will be doers above all. But there are questions that arise in us that cannot be answered by just doing. I am convinced that churches like ours understand doing (we could do doing better, no doubt); but I’m not sure we understand why worship matters, and why the specific shape and way we worship is important. So today, without taking our eye off doing what God commands, I want to give us a way to talk about how we can understand how all our worship and beliefs as Christians relate to these 10 Commandments given to Moses.

Our worship and beliefs come in, once again, because there are questions that arise as we try to follow the commandments. For instance: Do these simple commandments tell us how to respond as individuals to the great social and global crises, whether raised by people on either the right or left, that claim so much of our attention today: mass migration and immigration; climate change; racism and sexism; the absence of purpose and meaning that leaves youth and adults feeling adrift and feeds into addictions? These are all big problems, bigger than my individual actions. I didn’t cause any of them. But I can’t help feeling responsible to do something about them; I can’t just ignore them and mind my own business. These society-wide or global issues are too large for the 10 C.

At the same time, we struggle to do right in our intimate relationships: with parents, lovers and spouses, friends, children—and church family. Now, we know not to commit murder or adultery, no matter how frustrated we might get. But annoyance and misalignment are so common in our close relationships, and these impede the shalom and joy and mutual fulfillment we want to give and receive. Why? The intricacies of our personal relationships are too small, too intimate for the 10 C, too thick with complicated and nuanced relationship dynamics.

To come at the limits of the 10 C from another angle, why do we sin? Why do we find ourselves not living a truly good life? Is it just because we didn’t know the right 10 rules? Is sin caused simply by a failure to obey a command? That is the way much of the OT saw it. If Israel would only obey the simple rules, all would be well with them. But when we look at what is wrong with our world and what is wrong with me, the problems go much deeper than just not knowing commandments or choosing not to obey. Sin doesn’t consist of only our personal mistakes, our sins. Sin is much larger than you and me, it’s a power residing in the very fabric of our corrupted world; and it’s also a corruption that resides so deep within me that I cannot see it and understand it, let alone just will to change it. Have you come up against that, in your murky inner self?

All that is to say that the difference between the Old Testament’s 10 Commandments and the New Testament and its New Covenant, has a lot to do with how you understand sin. Let’s start with Moses and the 10 C. For Moses, sin is avoided by telling people what not to do. You need to set people straight about what is right and wrong, then it’s on them to decide to do right. You can give them encouragement by telling them, if you obey God, God will reward you. If you disobey God, you will be punished. And to back that up, the Israelites decided they needed a powerful King and priests who can enforce God’s law.

But they made God the ultimate enforcer, who punishes the wicked and rewards the good. Much of the Old Testament, basically from Deuteronomy through Second Kings, repeats this message over and over. There are a lot of warnings, and then ‘I told you sos’—“I warned you that if you didn’t obey, God would let you be conquered by foreign powers! I warned you that God would send you into exile and take away the promised land from you.” And there’s truth in that. Following God’s ways is wise and usually leads to life; sin is destructive and leads to death. But some other voices in the Old Testament objected, saying, ‘Hold up. It doesn’t always go that way. Sometimes the righteous suffer, and the wicked prosper.’ You’ll find this pushback, this questioning in Job, Ecclesiastes, some of the Psalms, and Habakkuk.

Now, Moses speaks well to the fact that we are always responsible for ourselves and our world. But sin is bigger and deeper than my personal failures. And so justice isn’t as simple as giving rules and dishing out punishment. Anyone who has worked much with our criminal justice system knows this. People don’t break the law simply because they decide to be bad. Nor does throwing people in prison make them better. The violence, humiliation, and stigma they receive, not to mention connections with other criminals, makes reform very unlikely.

Ezekiel had this realization that sin can’t be overcome just by Israel trying harder. While earlier prophets had tried again and again to threaten and promise the people into obedience, Ezekiel announces that God will have to change the people himself. “I will sanctify my great name…when through you I display my holiness…” I will sprinkle you with water and clean you from your idols. “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you…. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.” God commanding from far away and us obeying here far below just doesn’t seem to work. God has to unite with us, work within us. But how? Just by sprinkling clean water on us?

By the time of the New Testament, many Jews followed Ezekiel in seeing that what’s wrong with the world lies deeper than breaking commandments by bad values and poor decisions, although those are very real. They saw that sin is interwoven with human society and with nature. Sometimes they identified the problem as demons or Satan, forces working against God that are bigger than you or me. Paul in our reading from Colossians names these forces mysteriously as “elemental spirits of the universe,” and at the end, “the rulers and authorities;” earlier in the letter he mentions “thrones or dominions or rulers or powers;” in other places he speaks of “principalities and powers.” Today we talk similarly about “the powers that be.” One way we name them is by their infamous addresses: Wall Street, Washington, Madison Avenue, Middle America, Silicon Valley, Beacon Hill. It’s our way of naming powers that control us by constraining and seducing us, forcing and manipulating us, rather than freeing us with truth and compassion, as God has done on the cross.

Sin is ‘out there’ in these powers, but sin also works deep within us. Last week we heard how Paul thinks of sin as some kind of arcane force that twists how we hear and respond to God’s Law: “It was sin, working death in me through what is good,” that is, God’s commandment. Here I think he’s talking about the murky psychic forces that disorder me from within. Above all, sin works through the power of ego, for when threatened or in doubt we fall back on doing what’s good for me, rather than trusting in a greater good.

What really screws up our world is when the big, sinful powers-that-be, which impose their order on the world, work in tandem with the power of sin working in our ego. So it is that the powers that be appeal to our self-interest and our vanity, offering rewards and threatening punishments, dishing out self-affirmation and a sense of superiority to others, dividing us against one another so that I’ll think only about myself and those I identify with, my tribe. The newest “ruler and authority” in town is the internet, which is really good as dissolving compassion and sectioning us off into tribes and vain bubbles. This is the contemporary shape of sin. Are the 10 Commandments any match for it?

Well, the 10 C are still useful and good for us. The first four make us take the way we claim and use God’s name very seriously, against all the tendencies of religion to become self-serving. And the six moral commands are still a useful guide to a minimal moral standard, allowing us to test ourselves, the church, and the world to see where we are flagrantly off the mark.

But the commandments do not save us from the swirling forces of sin, at work high above me in the halls of power and deep within me in my damaged and broken, or at least powerless, inner self. Is there a salvation from this bigger, messier, but more realistic picture of sin, a salvation to be found in our Christian faith, centered on who God is and what God does in Christ?

I believe there is with all my mind and heart; it’s what keeps me going. We saw last week in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus doesn’t fix sin by lowering the standards of the 10 C. Instead, he raises them. He sets our sights on perfection, even selflessness. And Jesus can ask this of us because he proved that our human flesh is capable of it.

But selflessness is the key, as we saw for Paul: it’s ego that makes us unfree. It is ego that the powers of our world play to to keep us in line, to entice us to exchange doing the right thing for doing what is good for me. Baptism is Paul’s answer. Baptism marks the death of our ego, and so he reminds us: “you were buried with Christ in baptism.” To die to your ego doesn’t mean to despise yourself, nor does it mean you become a pushover. It first of all means you become loyal to God alone, you follow God’s righteousness alone. You are no longer, as Paul puts it, “captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits.” You are incorruptible, and even the threat of death cannot move you.

But more than loyalty and faithfulness to God alone, dying to your ego means living out of love alone. For Jesus not only shows us that perfect faithfulness is possible, but that God’s own nature is love. God is not finally another one of the powers and principalities, demanding loyalty by threats and promises that flatter our vanity; God is not another Top Dog or Alpha Male. God is love. We are to have no ego because Jesus has no ego; Jesus has no ego because God has no ego—unlike our kings and rulers. As Paul puts it: “In Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness” or completion in him. If you think about the Trinity, God is more a We than an I. God’s very being is love; Jesus’ very being is love; and as we die to ourselves and rise in him, our very being becomes love.

This love is how Jesus fulfills Ezekiel’s prophesy, that through us God will display God’s holiness, and put God’s spirit in us. His love is not squishy, spineless, and fawning. No, it’s love that is stronger than death; love that can call out the false powers of our world; love that must bring judgment to oneself and to our world, because love is so lacking. This is love that is one with justice.

Jesus’ cross shows this love united with justice. Love which calls out and exposes the powers of injustice, the authorities that serve themselves and entice us to do the same. The cross exposes the falsehood of law and power as opposed to God. Paul describes the cross doing this: “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.”

In the cross we have become the new Israel of the New Covenant. No longer according to commands and law, no longer ruled by kings and priests. But now God’s own being, the Spirit, works in and through us, fulfilling all things by love. We join this new covenant by what Paul calls our “spiritual circumcision,” baptism. (And I’m getting excited about teaching a class in September on Baptism and Original Sin.) Baptism marks the death of our ego and our rising in union with Christ, himself the personal embodiment of God’s steely and very just love. This is the salvation we have in our Christians faith.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Your ego is still alive and well, as is mine. You don’t love as Jesus loved. God’s very being does not seem to dwell bodily in you. I know the situation too well myself. But Jesus didn’t come to make the law more stringent, and so to make us feel all the more guilty and inadequate. He came to forgive us “of all our trespasses,” “to erase the record that stood against us with its legal demands.” To live by faith and to be marked with baptism means I don’t point to myself with boasting to show off the real me. I’m still here, because God is merciful and still receives me as God’s creation. But I come to worship and join in fellowship with the community of the baptized, and receive union with Christ at the table, so I can see the Real Me, not in here but in Christ; I come so I can see in him myself along with my open-ended family that includes all God’s children, all coming to share in God’s own being. No one here is going to ask you to measure up against any legal demands. We just hear God’s open invitation, calling us to lose ourselves in God’s love.

 

August 8, 2019

August 4, 2019: “Un-familiarizing Yourself with the 10 Commandments” (First in 10 Commandments series)

My apologies to regular readers! My blog has not been working in several weeks. I finally signed out and logged back in, and it seems to be working now. 

This opener in the series took some unexpected turns while I wrote it. At first, I planned to focus on how weird and surprising the 10 C are. But then I decided to begin with the familiar, or at least the only somewhat skewed familiar, because God is always both familiar and strange to us. 

Next week I’ll consider how extraordinary are the first four commandments about protecting God’s holiness. And the final two weeks look at how the New Testament deals with the commandments, and then what we should make of them as Christians, considering the whole relation of NT and OT. 

Exodus 19:3-6; 10-19; 24

Exodus 20:1-21

Americans mostly say they value the Bible highly, but don’t test very well on it. Only 45% of Americans were able to rightly name the four gospels. White mainliners like us scored slightly lower than the general population, 43%. I’m sure those of us gathered here have an above-average knowledge of the Bible; and we’re going to prove it with a quiz…

But when it comes to the “Ten Commandments,” however, the problem is over-familiarity. We all know the 10 C—maybe not the exact order or content, but hey, there are 10 of them, right? We certainly know about the 10 C. Maybe we grew up relying on them as a trusty guide to basic morality. Or maybe we’re sick of hearing how some people are always trying to stick the 10 C in courthouses and public places to claim turf for Christian America. (More on that another week.) One way or another, you might think you know all there is to know about the 10 C. That’s kid’s stuff, isn’t it? We adults are done with Sunday school.

We should be very wary when anything of God seems to us too familiar, too comfortable. That’s a sure sign that we’ve domesticated the wildness of God, something Exodus 19 portrays vividly. We seem much more prone than the Israelites to presume to be chummy with the God who descends in a terrifying way on quaking, burning Mt. Sinai. If we, unlike the Israelites, think we know all about God, then haven’t we failed to respect God’s holiness? Haven’t we trespassed on God’s holy space? And if so, surely we must die, as we read: “Any who touch the mountain shall be put to death.” Not literally, of course. (Scared you, didn’t I?) But if we forget about the holiness of God, that burning, out-of-this world perfection, then no one needs to lay a hand on us; we punish ourselves—we cut ourselves off from God and are left holding a mere idol. (More on that next week.)

And yet what constitutes God’s own perfection is the way God is at once holy and loving; impossibly above and beyond us, and yet gently intimate with us. It is no small feat for God to be “present” with us, as we are so fond of affirming; nothing dramatizes that near impossibility like God descending on Mt. Sinai to be with the Israelites and almost blowing the mountain to bits. And yet God makes a way to be in our midst, to empower us to be God’s people, despite the danger to both God and us.

So we will need to un-familiarize ourselves with this favorite bit of Scripture, and see it afresh, and in the process confess that we don’t know God’s will as well as we thought. Because God is holy and untouchable and makes that clear at Mt. Sinai and in the first four commandments. And yet God is loving and gracious, and has received us forever as God’s own. So God lets us have our good ol’ familiar 10 C. Even though there is much for us yet to understand, we do know them, and we do follow them.

So it is fitting to start with the most familiar ones. When you think of the 10 commandments, what comes first to mind? Isn’t it 5 though 10 (depending on how you number them, and there are several ways)—that is, honor your mother and father, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not covet your neighbor’s house, or wife, or husband, or ox, or snowblower, or Mazarati, or any of that stuff. (That last one breaks the nice concise rhythm of the commandments, and proves a real challenge for those of us who live next to someone with a lot of fancy stuff!) All of that is familiar, even too familiar. Be a good boy or girl, we might summarize. Because, after all, this is kids’ stuff, isn’t it? It’s all pretty obvious.

And yet when we take an honest look around the world, or down the street, or into our own souls, we realize just how badly needed are these commandments, today as always. We see killings on the news every day, and I had to add, this morning is worse than most. Thou shall not kill is the commandment most outrageously violated on a regular basis. Now, the Hebrew word does not normally apply to sanctioned killings, like executions or killing in combat. Thus it makes sense to translate it, You shall not murder. We are all disturbed by the amount of murder in this place we like to call the greatest country in the world; and frankly, it’s at least a little outrageous how we’ve let ourselves become accustomed to it and seemingly incapable of combatting it. We are quick to add, of course, that we ourselves haven’t murdered anyone. Now, we could talk about how to apply these commandments. As far as our secular American law goes, I haven’t murdered anyone. But these commands come from God, not mortals or lawyers. And the Hebrew term for “kill” also includes actions that may lead to death—so it’s broader than our legal term for murder. Have my actions contributed to social conditions or environmental patterns that are daily killing people? Maybe I am too hard on myself, but I would have to answer yes. And do we not slowly kill ourselves, by our unhealthy habits, our penchant for anxiety and stress, and whatever is causing rising rates of drug use and suicide? But whether we judge ourselves innocent or guilty of breaking this commandment, we can’t deny that there is too much murder in the world.

And that goes for the other back-6 commandments. Honoring mother and father in its original context applied to how adults regarded and treated their elderly parents. (So once again, these commandments are not for kids, certainly not only for kids!) I see a lot of lonely and neglected elderly people out there; and I’m not one to talk, living six hours away from my parents. / Would anyone disagree that there’s more than enough stealing and adultery out there, even narrowly understood? “You shall not bear false witness against a neighbor” refers in particular to giving false testimony in court that would wrongly convict someone. Now, based on all the false convictions out there, especially against minorities, this commandment gets broken plenty today. Few of us, it is true, are called to testify in court; but how many of us go along with false claims being made by politicians against people we don’t care for? Politicians worldwide are doing that against immigrants, for instance. And coveting—our whole economy depends on the constant stimulation to covet through advertisements, making our neighbors into rivals instead of those whose good we seek. These commandments aren’t kids’ stuff, the basics that we need to learn before we grow up; they are an indictment of our society and the whole human race.

Let me make the point another way. These commandments are said to “you,” “thou,” that is, you singular rather than plural. And yet their point is not to guilt or shame us. The 10 C do not accuse or call for repentance or prompt us to seek forgiveness. They command you personally, but not so that you’ll get obsessed with your own unworthiness and sin. Nor are they intended to promote pride in what good people we are. That’s why Jesus, in the sermon on the Mount, ratchets up the commandments, making it impossible for us to claim self-righteousness for ourselves: “Oh I’ve never killed or committed adultery. I’m not like those sinners who do such things.” God didn’t give the commandments so we could arrogantly distinguish ourselves from others.

But the 10 C have often been misused or misunderstood. They are said to each of us personally—thou shalt, you singular—but they are about being a people of God. God is telling us all that in a good, healthy, holy, righteous people, individuals don’t do these things. Notice the reason given after “Honor your father and mother”—not because they’ve done so much of you, and what kind of ingrate are you, anyway; or ‘because if you don’t, you’ll get 40 lashes.’ The motive is life-affirming: “So that your days may be long in the land” God is giving you. Life is a gift to be treasured, enjoyed, and shared, and God is giving us the minimal guidelines for preserving a healthy society where that can happen. Or do you want to live in a society where parents are disregarded, where people kill, are unfaithful, steal, corrupt justice, and regard each other with envious desire? No. From deep within our created being, we say, no. A good society does not have such things. A society that enjoys life the way God intended for creation is a place where all are protected and all flourish. God isn’t demanding a perfect society; but it should be free from these very obvious violations. And yet where is such a society? (Don’t tell me it existed back in the good old days.) These commandments are not kids’ stuff; they are not tediously obvious, although in a way they are. They are a very reasonable set of guidelines laid down by a God who desires a good life for all God’s creatures, but these reasonable guidelines are nevertheless a radical indictment of our and every society, because these basic, minimal rules have continuously been violated and are still being violated. These 6 commandments, at least, are as powerful and relevant today as they ever were, not for making me feel like a sinner, but for reminding us that God so much desires a holy people to make the most of creation.

We are supposed to be a holy people where these commandments are not violated. God doesn’t give these commandments to Adam, or to Noah, even though the final six might seem universal and are widely recognized by other religions. God doesn’t say, now post these in the secular courts and try to make people outside the faith follow them. But reading Exodus 19 first reminds us that the 10 C, and as we’ll see next week, especially the first four, are a holy and awesome summons to those God has liberated and chosen. We are summoned to be a set-apart enclave where human decency is honored and practiced, in a minimal way but with absolute seriousness, so that the goodness of creation not be completely obscured by sin. The six social commandments are a mirror for us to hold up to ourselves only. If we are not keeping these basic rules, then we need to do some collective prayerful repentance, and to submit ourselves one and all to God to set us right.

And the sad truth is that Israel didn’t keep the commandments, despite their promise to do so. Indeed, we find that it’s often religious people who most seriously break these commandments. This week’s worst killings were by Boko Haram, falsely invoking God. But with yesterday’s shooting in Texas, white supremacy, often blasphemously claiming the mantle of European Christendom, added 20 more people to its victims. I’m not sure that religious people on the whole do more harm than non-religious people, but the fact remains that people wielding the holy name of God do plenty of harm. They thereby prove an important point made by the first four commandments, the ones we have yet to consider: the more we invoke the name of God, the greater the responsibility we take upon ourselves. Next week, we’ll see something quite unfamiliar about these commandments: they are not best described as good, common sense rules for all; they are a terse reminder that those of us who have accepted God’s election as God’s people, and we alone, are playing with fire.

April 1, 2019

9:30 Class for March 31: Romans 1:15-2

We talked about Paul’s difficult passage on the origin of sin in Romans. A few quick points:

  • Everything he asserts about sin is the obverse (flip side) of the meaning he finds in Jesus (justification by grace, verses 15-16).  So it’s belief in grace that drives Paul to take a hard look at the human condition.
  • His description of the origin of sin is hard to follow (or it hardly follows!). But it provides four human faults that often lie behind sin. We do these things:
    • Not honoring God
    • Not giving thanks
    • Futile in thinking, mind darkened: can’t see the way, can’t figure it all out
    • Claiming to wise when we’re not
    • Putting something else in an ultimate place where only God belongs

That’s a useful way to diagnose where sin comes from; but Paul’s purposes are rhetorical and should not be taken as a complete account.

And then there’s the infamous passage on homosexuality. I offer the following statement, since this passage has been cited by those who disagree with our congregation’s stance on being Open and Affirming:

Paul uses same-sex relations as an illustration of the mistaken “exchange” he sees in idolatry (which is the real sin, as far as he is concerned). Like many in the ancient world, Paul sees gay sex as “unnatural,” as a sign that something has been knocked out of whack. But it’s really just an illustration, perhaps meant to gross people out. It is also a swipe at pagans, whom Jews like Paul would associate with all kinds of immoral behavior (not always fairly). Romans were famous for their sexual libertine ways, and so were the Greeks (where homosexual practices would often have fallen under our category of statutory rape).

There is much written on this topic. It is important to note that Paul does not harp on homosexuality–he does not return to it in his lists of sins. Nor does it come up in the gospels. And frankly the Bible is not going to be very helpful on this issue. No one before recent times has considered the possibility of regularized, monogamous, even marital same-sex couples. And in our experience, it seems to work out fine! The fact that the Bible does not consider what no one considered for another 1900 years is not surprising. Nor need it be disturbing–no more so than that the Bible nowhere questions or condemns the institution of slavery. Including Paul.

Next Sunday (April 6) we’ll continue in Romans 2 (up to 2:15). And we’ll see the whole conversation does a flip!