loving others

September 30, 2021

Some thoughts about Thomas Edsall on polarization and religion

Edsall regularly writes rather sprawling columns in the NY Times on political polarization, citing a plethora of social scientists. In a recent column on abortion, he cites a book that sounds interesting (one among many on a similar topic):

Michele Margolis, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, in her 2018 book “From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity,” argues that “instead of religiosity driving political attitudes, the shifting political landscape — in which Republicans have become associated with religious values and cultural conservatism to a greater extent than Democrats — could have instead changed partisans’ involvement with their religious communities.”

“If,” Margolis continues:

“Republicans and Democrats select into or out of religious communities in part based on their political outlooks, they will find themselves in more politically homogeneous social networks where they encounter less diverse political information. Rather than churches being places where people with different political viewpoints come together, religious communities may become more like echo chambers populated by like-minded partisans.”

•••

This is not a new idea to me, but Margolis states it well. Houses of worship are being affected by political polarization just like most institutions. Churches are more and more becoming ideological echo-chambers, whether liberal or conservative. This process has been going on for a long time.

What to do about this? A typical reaction is to seek to enforce church as a “politically neutral” space–that is, a politics-free zone. If “politics” means driving partisan wedges between people, as it more and more has come to mean, than the advice is well taken. But forcing religion into a “non-political” mold is itself a political agenda. It is to say that religion must be shaped and controlled by the interests of society. Usually, what is advocated is the idea that religion or faith is a “purely individual and private concern.” I’ve heard people tell me pastors can’t address anything remotely political because of “separation of church and state”–which obviously is not in the Bible. In fact, no traditional religion conforms to the idea of religion as a purely private affair. All religions are concerned with not just private faith, but community and, in various ways, society, including issues of justice.

It seems to me that the church is a “political” community, in that the church is very concerned with how we live a good life together. What makes the church’s politics distinctive is that it places self-giving love as the primary political value (as opposed to “equality” or “personal responsibility,” as our political parties might typically have it). That makes us a very odd fit in a society whose politics–liberal or conservative–is primarily rights-based, and the mobilizing aggregates of individuals sharing the same rights-based interests. Church politics is somewhat more individual than are typically progressive identity politics (where issues are defined by disadvantaged groups), although the Bible is clearly concerned with disadvantaged groups. But church politics is decidedly more communitarian than the rugged-individualist strain of conservative ideology (as distinguished from communitarian conservatism).

I see no other way to put this, but to make it very clear: there are no grounds within church politics for libertarianism (which can be leftish but is usually conservative). The Bible just doesn’t care about securing my freedom to do whatever I want. It puts mutual love over personal freedom every time. There is (sometimes) a strong concern in Scripture for what we could call “freedom of conscience” (see for example Paul in 1 Corinthians 4 and 9). But it is more like a “personal responsibility of conscience before God,” than the modern notion that I get to make up my own mind about everything. And this makes sense: a loving community would never compel someone to agree with something; but a loving community only works if everyone freely seeks to share the “one mind of Christ” (Philippians 2).

Now, that is not to say that the church should oppose all libertarianism in society. One mistake Christians (liberal and conservative) make is to directly translate the political values of the Christian community into a social program for what is in fact a secular state. Here I like Douglas John Hall’s way of thinking about post-Christendom church as “salt” or “leaven” in society, rather than as a political power broker. The love that drives internal church politics will hopefully spread out into the rest of our lives and our surrounding community–“a little leaven leavens the whole lump.” And that in no way means the church can’t very directly advocate for social issues in the larger public. But, I suppose, such “politicking” should arise organically from the life of the congregation, rather than being an agenda that seeks to dominate or manipulate the congregation as a tool of political power. Obviously, that would violate the politics of love and the sole lordship of Christ.

These are just my general thoughts on the state of religion and politics across our country right now. There is a great variety of ways individual congregations could implement the politics of love. I think a safe bet right now is for a congregation to work deliberately and covenantally to counter the partisan forces that are turning churches into “echo chambers,” as Margolis put it. Such measures include covenanting to abstain from news sources distorted by partisan agendas, or at least to incorporate some diversity into partisan sources, for those who insist on them. It also seems healthy to me for most congregations to take up local political issues or policy issues as they pertain to our communal contexts, rather than taking positions on matters of national, legislated policy. These look to me like viable ways to resist the polarization overtaking churches without resorting to the artificial and unbiblical idea of apolitical religion.

I welcome thoughts. Anyone want to read Margolis’ book?

May 9, 2021

6th in Easter (5/9): “Joy is Abiding in Love (not Ego)”

1 John 5:1-6 ; John 15:9-17

         At the end of this sermon, I’ll come back to that outrageous claim in First John: “This is the victory that conquers the world, our faith! Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” “Really?” you say. How is my little faith going to conquer the world? Do we even want to conquer the world? We’ll get to that. But let’s start with not conquering the world, but with love right here in the church, which is what our Gospel reading talks about.

After over a month being here, I have gotten to know some of you, and observed more of you at church together, mostly on Zoom. There definitely is love for one another here in the First Congregational Church of Hadley. I know you all find being together in church pleasant and meaningful.

But on those other, hopefully rare occasions, what makes church unpleasant for you? I bet it’s when you find yourself locked in a struggle with a fellow member (or maybe the pastor). She wants it her way, you want it your way. And one or both of you try to game the system to have your way. We all recognize this as “church politics,” and it is be found in every church I’ve known. But conflicts in church do not all go that way. Sure, people inevitably disagree—it’s our human condition. But we can value those who disagree with us. One wants resources to go to the building, one to Christian Education or Mission—for example. But all of these are important. We can value each of our commitments like Paul values the many gifts of the Spirit. And then disagreement becomes exciting and illuminating; disagreement expands my vision: “Wow, I’ve never thought of it that way!”

Well, why does disagreement not always feel that way?  Here’s a simple reason: It’s because of ego. Human beings have a strong tendency toward self-assertion for its own sake. We say that we really only care about the church clock, or Take and Eat, or protecting the minister, but our ego gets involved. And so we get locked into struggles, often repeatedly, with the same person. Some personality types even thrive on that kind of struggle (although it doesn’t actually make them happy). It’s a disease of the ego, that we all are probably infected with (even if we are “asymptomatic”). Martin Luther described the unhappy ego as “curved in on itself,” and usually that means walled up like a citadel, at turns defensive and aggressive.

Now, I’m still new enough here that I can be authentically innocent about if and where this problem with ego exists here. So I’m not talking about anyone in particular. But I also know that the problem with ego exists everywhere, and sometimes is even worse in churches, despite the fact that no other organization on earth, except the church, hears its founder say, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” The ugliest fight I’ve had in as long as I can remember happened with a church member (not here). This person chased me to my car in order to hound me and blame me for everything wrong with the world, forcing me to defend myself, which I can do if I have to. But I left with that churning feeling in my stomach, and a shaky feeling in my knees. And the other person probably did not feel great, either. When people are curved in on themselves, defensive and aggressive, you have the very opposite of joy. Our bodies cry out against it.

No one should ever have to leave church with a churning stomach and shaky knees. There’s no excuse for that kind of behavior and the conflict-prone ego that causes it, here in the church: because being released and liberated from your ego is at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian (as in many other religions as well). The letter of John tells us that whoever believes Jesus is the Christ has been “born of God.” This phrase refers back to what John said in chapter 4: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” Jesus is our prime example of love, as our gospel reading shows: “No one has greater love that this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Perfect love involves giving up something of oneself—at the extreme, one’s own life. But more ordinary loving also involves self-giving: every romantic lover and parent knows something of self-giving—and Mother’s Day is the perfect time to remember this. But Jesus lives perfect love to the point of laying down his whole life, and in doing so he shows us that God is the source and the reality of this love. In other words, God has no ego. Everything God does is for our good, not for God’s—including judging our self-centeredness and freeing us from our egos.

This is the open secret of the Christian faith, the pearl of great price that anyone with any sense should be searching for. Here is a place, and a community, where you can lay down your ego, and we can all lay down our egos and our hang-ups and our hostilities and know real peace with one another. It’s at the heart of what we are as a community, it’s the stuff of our sacraments and our worship. This communion of selfless love is what the world so desperately wants and needs, because deep down everyone knows it is right, that selfless love represents a pinnacle and perfection of human life.

But of course, we are distracted from this knowledge, and blinded to this need, because we live in a culture that likes to tell us “it’s all about me,” at least for those who are white and privileged (like me). We are taught above all to guard and exercise my rights and my personal liberty to do whatever I want. And so we guard our privacy, the private citadel of my ego. And we resent anyone who wants to invade it. Sometimes we even resent God for invading our privacy.

I may sound un-American to question our obsession with personal liberty. I’m not, really. Liberty and self-interest has its place in the created order, especially given the colonial tyranny of the British in the 1700s. But our jealously guarded, American sense of freedom—as relatively justified and economically useful as it is—finds almost no support in Scripture. (If I’m missing it, please comment in my blog.) Real freedom, according to the Bible, isn’t doing what you please. Jesus defines real freedom in John 8: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” That word is above all the command to love one another. True freedom is obeying that command.

Personal liberty can lead to the unhealthy stress that comes with always having to advance your own agenda and assume that everyone else is doing the same. The church can be a sanctuary from personal liberty and its discontents. It can be a safe place to heal from the pressure of trying to make it on your own. The church should be a community where I can let go of self-control and not fear that I will be exploited, be someone’s sucker (which is a real danger, given human sin). The church should be a place where instead of looking out for myself, we look out for one another. It should be in short a place of love first, not liberty first. (Paul speaks beautifully of this in Corinthians.) And if you have real love, you don’t need to fall back on your private citadel of personal liberty. I see that love at work here.

But of course the church can fail terribly in this regard, and it has. The church and the church alone stands condemned by God whenever we violate the trust that has to be rock solid in order to be a community of selfless love. That should scare us, and especially scare any clergy who have ever abused that trust.

So if we are to risk being a community of love, we must be transparent and vigilant to protect the weak from abuse. This congregation has a fine Safe Church policy. You have also made developing a communication covenant one of your top priorities. This is wise. Law and policy are important and a good start. There are practices we can adopt that will make sure conflict is addressed constructively, and that everyone in the community, especially those most vulnerable, are respected. Respect is a minimum, and law and policy can be good at preserving respect and dignity for all.

And respect is satisfying, but I don’t find it fulfilling. Respect brings contentment but not ecstatic joy. And joy is what Jesus is going for. The verse before our gospel reading says, “I have said these things to you so that…your joy may be complete.” Completion, perfection, and joy come from perfect love, perfect egoless love. Friends who lay down their life for one another. Who doesn’t want that?

I had a great conversation this week with Jean about all this. “Yeah, but,” she replied, “selfless love is really hard.” Of course it is. I mean, Jesus did it. And he tells us that this kind of love is not just what God commands but who and what God is and what human perfection is all about. But my goodness, I am just about constantly stuck in my ego, more attentive to my own thoughts and feelings than to those around me. Stuck in my so-called freedom. There have been precious few moments in my life when I really felt and acted out of egoless love—and this did not make me anyone’s sucker, by the way. These moments were the most joyful I have ever known. They are real; they are the most real. No ethical principles or policies or rules did this for me; only giving myself to Jesus took me out of my ego. Maybe you know what I’m talking about, maybe you don’t. Either way, we’re probably in the same boat. I know of no one aside from Jesus who lived that kind of selfless life to its perfection. But that’s why we need him, and that’s why God raised him from the dead. We don’t need to be perfectly egoless, although being so is absolutely beautiful. We only need to believe, as individuals and as a community, in what perfection is, because mostly the world doesn’t believe in it. In our words and sacraments and worship, we testify to this belief; a little later on, First John says “Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts.” We believe, we testify, we try to live it out together through loving one another, because trying to be egoless all by yourself doesn’t make a lick of sense, if you think about it. And when we fail to love one another, as we will, again and again, we practice mercy and compassion with one another. You know, policies and laws are necessary but complicated; love really is very simple. And my friends this is how our faith, our belief in and testimony about selfless love, becomes “the victory that conquers the world.” Amen.

Selfless, egoless love is our goal. It is what it means to share in God’s own being. But belief and testimony are all that is required to begin. We confess our faith and testify to Jesus by praying in his name.  So let us turn now together in prayer.

October 19, 2020

October 18: “How to Love Yourself”

Leviticus 26:9-13 ; Romans 8:31-39

[Sung in imitation of Justin Bieber:] “Cause if you like the way you look that much, oh baby you should go and love yourself.”        

Loving yourself should be easy, right? You’ve got to live with yourself. But because we are messy inside, it’s not always so easy. And our inability to rightly love ourselves may lie behind a lot of our problems. So I want to talk about it today. Now, loving yourself might sound like the opposite message I just spent many weeks on: leaving behind your ego in mystical oneness with God. But as you’ll see, they go together quite well.

I remember a friend long ago confiding in me: I’ve been told all my life that God loves me. And I know I’m supposed to love and accept myself. But there are things I’ve done in the past, things I got away with and wasn’t punished for. And there are things I did that I’m not proud of. I may not understand why I did them, but I did them and I can’t forget. And even now—I’m no criminal. I’m not an obviously bad person. But I know what a truly good person looks like. I see some of them here at church. I know I’m not one of them. And I have these thoughts that dart through my head—mean thoughts, petty thoughts, selfish, maybe even violent thoughts. I have fantasies that I don’t want to have, but they’re in my head. And I’ve got this habit I cannot master, I cannot break. I tell myself again and again I won’t do it next time, but then I do. And I kind of hate myself for it. But I don’t let on. I don’t disclose my feelings to anyone. I cover up the discomfort I have in my own skin by masquerading in friendly smiles and busy hands. Or I retreat into indifference. But underneath all that, I don’t know how to love myself, because I know myself too well. Telling me I’m forgiven doesn’t work on me. It doesn’t make me a better person. It doesn’t make me love myself. And it’s hard to love others when I don’t love myself. Love has to come from a fullness within, doesn’t it?

Ok, that wasn’t just one friend speaking a long time ago. IT was a little bit of all of us. The Bible tells us that we are good creatures who do God’s will; but in its capacious wisdom and insight, the Bible also sees us deep down for the sad and broken children of God we are, who don’t know how to love ourselves.

Now we’ve been hearing all our lives that God loves us. God accepts us just as we are. It’s actually hard to find a Scripture that says this. The Prodigal Son does, maybe. Our reading from Romans assures us that “nothing can separate us from God’s love,” but it seems to be talking about threats outside of us—“hardship, distress, persecution, famine…”—not our own inward guilt and shame.

But we’ve made this our message: God loves us no matter what. And that inspires some folk to be able to love themselves. But not everyone. Maybe we need to tweak our message for those folks who hear again and again the God loves you, and still they don’t find the deep-down peace of loving themselves. What about you? Hearing about the love of God that, to quote another bad song, is “soft as an easy chair” may make you feel good temporarily, but has it healed you? Or do you go home after church to the same dismal thoughts? I put that as a question because only you can answer it for yourself. I hope I’m wrong.

If you are not fundamentally at peace with yourself, it can come out in all kinds of bad ways. Maybe you feel the need to boost yourself and show yourself better than other people and even put them down. Maybe you let others put you down and can’t shake it off when they do. Maybe you hold on to hurts and grudges, you nurse them because you need an opponent. Maybe you resent others who think they are more successful or better than you. Or maybe you feel inadequate when you compare yourself to others. If you’re not at peace with yourself, maybe you become more inflexible and insist on your own way. Or maybe you let others push you around and don’t know how to stand up for yourself. Maybe you don’t value yourself enough to do what is good for you, and chaos reigns in your life. Or maybe you clamp tight to maintain control, doing everything you can to hold chaos at bay.

We are complicated and messy. The same lack of self-love, of peace with yourself, can manifest itself in so many contrary ways, depending on everything else that went into us. Sermons aren’t great for addressing this problem, because our challenges and hang-ups are so individual and personal. Counseling is better, and some of you have shared freely with me and I really appreciate it.

But what I can do in a sermon is look at the ideas and assumptions that may be causing us problems. So what is it about our ideas and assumptions that makes the words “God loves you” sometimes ineffective? Powerless? Why do those words often just bounce off of us like a beach ball full of air? They should be sweeping us off our feet; healing us; changing us.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. Because life is complicated, there are a lot of reasons. For instance, if we hear “God loves us,” but we aren’t loving one another, then those words will sound empty. But at one church I attended, the minister at the passing of the peace told us to greet one another, saying God loves you and so do I. Dare we try that? I won’t, But why do we resist?

So much of our self-love has to do with our parents. Were you raised with a rock-solid love and stability and affection from your parents? If not, there’s so much going on in the world that will make you feel judged and inadequate and not loved. It’s hard to replace the security we should get from early parental love. Again, counseling and therapy can be really helpful.

But is there a general insight I can share with all of you that might help? Here goes. God loves us. What do we mean by love? Do we mean admiration? Liking someone a whole lot? If someone loves me, is it because deep down I am worth it? (I bet Justin Bieber thinks so.) Does it mean I am unmarred by flaws? If so, then if I fail, if I show myself to have flaws, then the one that loves me might not love me anymore.

We expect our parents to love us no matter what. But is that because they look past our flaws, or remain happily ignorant of them? Don’t parents sometimes say, “No matter what happens, you will always be my beautiful baby.” That can be a limit to parental love. As we grow and become more aware of our flaws, it can be hard to share that side of ourselves with our parents. One of those flaws, of course, is a very normal resentment that we carry toward our parents. (We were all teenagers once, right?) Usually it is easiest for both parents and children to pretend that simply isn’t there.

But that leaves a gap between parent and child, an inevitable gap. Sure mom or dad love me, but they don’t know the real me. If love for us means holding on to an image of innocence and purity from my childhood, then it only penetrates so far. Because we carry conflict and trouble deep within our very being. We can never remain innocent and pure. Rooted in our biology are drives to self-assertion and survival and competition; this is part of the fabric of nature. And then there are all these forces of conflict inherent in human society, every human society. (Freud is really insightful about all of this.) There’s a lot built into us that wants to react with anger and violence; we want to assert ourselves at the expense of others; we are going to have uncontrollable thoughts that are disturbing or malicious. We didn’t have these thoughts as babies, although babies are very self-assertive: it’s called crying. We didn’t choose to have aggressive and conflictual impulses. But this is how we are, and it goes all the way down into our deepest selves. And as we mature we become more aware of all of these murky feelings residing in us. Not everything in us is beautiful and good.

But if we think of love as admiration for what is beautiful and good, then we either look deep within and feel we cannot be rightly loved, or we imagine that love must ignore the murky stuff within. And then that love looks superficial. Our parents and friends are good at loving our best selves. But that can leave us feeling deeply alone. Nobody knows the real me.

Maybe it will help if we think differently about love. Love doesn’t mean a blanket approval, or a looking past everything in me that is not beautiful and perfect. It certainly can include celebrating what is beautiful in us. But fundamentally loving each other means something different: simply that we belong to one another. God doesn’t say to us, you are so wonderful, so perfect; don’t ever think there’s anything wrong with you, or that you should change. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” There’s no love like that to be found in the Bible, because that’s not God’s love. Of course we should change. Of course we should be truer to the good in us and leave behind what is false and petty. God’s love is a fire that calls us higher and higher, and that heals us because it changes us.

But fundamentally, God’s love is an unchanging belonging. God declares it to Israel: “I will be your God, you will be my people.” I’m yours, you’re mine. That’s both the fundamental origin of love, as between parent and child, and it is the maturity of love between spouses. That God loves us doesn’t mean we’re so hot or awesome or got straight As. God doesn’t admire us. God simply chose us to belong to God. In our Romans reading, Paul sees election as inherent to God’s love: “Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn?” To understand God’s love, we need to get comfortable with being chosen. God instituted this bond, this mutual ownership by which God is ours and we are God’s, and all of this mutual belonging of God and humanity comes to a head in Christ Jesus.

So if you look deep within and don’t like everything you see, or if you can’t keep those murky thoughts at bay when you lie awake at night, and you say, surely I’m unlovable—then how can you be sure of God’s love? You’ll not going to believe me. By your baptism. And if you aren’t yet baptized, you can be sure of God’s love, sure that you belong to God, just because you are here, listening to God’s claim on you as his very own. It’s a done deal and there’s no going back: you belong to God. And no misdeed, no disordered or nasty thought, no bad habit, no pettiness or small mindedness, no shame or resentment weighing you down from the past, no misplaced pride, no hatred you bear for others, is going to break that mutual belonging between you and God. And that, by the way, is the love that frees you from your ego and allows you not just to belong to God but to be God’s own presence and power.

So there you have it: God loves you. But just be aware of something else. God’s love is a belonging love, not a “everything you do is just perfect, don’t ever change” kind of love. Because we belong to God, God will also judge us. When we are ready, God will show us that we are not yet what we need to become, for the same reason: because we belong to God. If you don’t believe me, keep reading in Leviticus 26.

September 30, 2020

Mysticism series: “Sharing Experiences” (9/13)

Acts 19:1-6 ; 1 Corinthians 2:10b-16

You regulars know that I put a premium on the Word of God. Not just the Bible as written, but on our shared language and tradition that gives us a shared access to God, and shared accountability. We must rely on this Word to find our common identity and make decisions together. I don’t think we should come to board meeting and say, I had a personal revelation last night. I can’t describe it to you, but now I know we should divest our stock holdings.

But this series on mysticism is going a different direction. When we talk about our inner spirituality, it’s inevitable that the Spirit takes first place. Because the spirit works uniquely in each of us. I can use the Word to guide you to the Spirit, but I can’t experience the Spirit for you. The gifts of God’s spirit are spiritually discerned, as Paul puts it. So we must attend to our inner experience to understand the spirit.

In that spirit, I invite you into a brief meditation. Talking about mysticism only gets us so far; we need to taste it and take the Word into ourselves.

Meditation. Recall when you most felt the presence of God. (If never, don’t panic. You don’t have to be a mystic, but then you should rejoice that others around you have that gift. And it might come to you yet.) Recall when you most felt the presence of God or of something uncanny, some extraordinary presence that you didn’t have a name for. Go back to the time and place. Recall what was going on in your life. Recall the feeling.

How old were you? Was it a calm time in life? Or were you suffering? In trouble? Not sure where to turn. I bet it was more likely there than when everything was going well and the world was singing your praises. We have a just God who comes to us when we are helpless and vulnerable.

Was it anything miraculous? A wonder? Or just an awareness, a feeling?

Really important: what did you do with that experience? How is it still with you? Do you remember it often? Did it change you and how you live? Did it make you connect more closely to the church, and did the church help you make that experience bear ongoing fruit? Or did that experience wither and drop into the recesses of your memory?

I encourage you to write down your experiences. My father just  a few years ago shared a spiritual experience he had as a young man. I’d love to read about your experiences. You can email me. Or It can be anonymous (leave an envelop in the offering basket or slide it under my door.) •••

We benefit greatly from the inner depth and power that comes with spiritual experiences, what I want to call mystical experiences. We face such uncertain times, scary times. We need a source of inner strength to get us through, and to keep us from being driven by fear. So many people want to manipulate us with fear. “Perfect love casts out fear,” as Paul says elsewhere. People think of mysticism sometimes as emotional and subjective, and contrast it to rational belief that can be demonstrated. But we need a deeply rooted spiritual center to insulate us from the manipulative use of fear. So actually, mysticism is our greatest tool for staying rational in an emotional time. Paul … rational perception and thinking, what Paul calls “discernment.” The Spiritual discerns all things ….

Now, what was your experience like, when you felt closest to God? Maybe you experienced a wonder or minor miracle. I’ve heard some stories like that from some of you. And there are amazing stories in the Bible. I can’t speak to them personally. I’ve had very little by way of spiritual experiences that defy natural law. And what Paul talks about in Corinthians, spiritual discernment, does not sound miraculous. Speaking in tongues, as happens in our passage from Acts, is amazing, and we must respect the power of the Holy Spirit. But it’s not necessarily miraculous. And that’s fine for me. It may be that God intervenes in the natural world, sending rain, stilling the wind, working healing. And experiencing wonders like these is very powerful. But we have to admit that most of the time, God works through or alongside ordinary natural processes. Either that, or you must believe that when a miracle isn’t happening, God is absent. That’s not the God I know. I know a God who is a daily guide and presence.

So if for me mysticism, which involves the Holy Spirit working in me, is not about wonders and miracles, what’s the big deal? What makes it so great and so helpful and life-giving?

         I’ve mentioned my primary mystical experience before. I was sixteen. I had joined my family’s Presbyterian church two years before. But like many mainline kids, joining the church didn’t stick. I pretty much stopped going after I joined. (I’m so glad that never happens here!) I’m not sure why it didn’t take. I was pretty into science, and perhaps the idea of God being born as Jesus raised too many questions for me. I was spiritually interested, however. I was open to a basic belief in God; one of my sisters was interested in Judaism, which made some sense to me. I was also interested in Chinese culture, and learned a little about Daoism, which has a rich connection to nature that attracted me.

         My social life was in shambles. My three best friends had turned on me and harassed me regularly. I spent a year trying to be proudly friendless. I turned inward and began rethinking my whole world. But I took too much pride in my thoughts; I suppose I was desperate for some way to affirm who I was, and I tried to rely on no one but myself. But suffering primes us for grace. I became friends with another intellectual classmate, but he was a serious Christian. One night, amid a conversation that included religion, he confronted me about my arrogant attitude. Like a good narcissist, I sprung to my own defense, but something began to break in me. Soon I was an emotional mess. I think my friend didn’t know what to do with me, so after tending to me briefly, he left.

         I was overcome with repentance that night; in retrospect, I dwelled too much on feeling guilty about teenage hormones. But when I woke the next day, I felt like a new person, and this lasted through the day. Everything seemed bright and clear and buoyant. It’s not that I was absorbed in my relation with God. I didn’t spend all day looking up, although I was quite conscious that I now belonged to God. Nor did I spend the day looking inward, lost in my thoughts. In fact, I was more self-aware that usual, but in a new way. As I went through the day, I had to laugh as I recognized the bitter, defensive way I normally acted and felt. And I had become intensely aware of how my little actions could affect others. But I was only briefly detained in my own thoughts, mostly shaking my head at my old self.

Instead, I spent most of the day looking out. Suddenly, I could see the people all around me, as if for the first time—friends, enemies, and people I had never noticed. I could call it love, but to us love suggests overlooking faults, seeing only the good in people. But I saw people clearly. I saw their faults, and I also could begin to see the sad ways they had fallen into their faults. I saw them warts and all, as I saw now saw myself. But everyone was so beautiful.

         So it was love I felt, meaning I effortlessly desired the best for everyone I encountered. But it wasn’t just lots of feeling in here [the heart], mostly it was focused attention to people as they were, unclouded by my usual self-obsessions. I call it seeing with the eyes of Jesus. Because when we read the gospels, we don’t hear Jesus going on and on about his mystical experiences, about his incredible consciousness of God. Mostly he is really attentive to people he meets. He sees them, really well. He’s not full of gushy sentiment. In fact, Jesus can really cut people to the quick. But he does it for their good and for the good of the whole world that is being reborn through him. He can do this because because he never stops to ask, what’s in it for me?

         This new way of being came upon me from I know not where. I would never have guessed this power was possible for me. I was very ignorant of the Bible and Christian faith, and I had many questions to work out. So this joyful attention streaming out of me was a miracle to me, and I credit it to the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in me. This power faded after that wonderful day. But it was enough to keep me hungering for more, and I began a long quest to understand the Christ who had brought God to me.

         Three and a half decades later, I am still coming to understand better what happened then. I’ll talk more next week about how this wonderful power may not be some inconceivable miracle, a zap from the finger of God. Instead I see it as God’s Word working with the natural wonders of our mind and human being. And that means it’s not so far out of reach for any of us. We can’t master this power, but we can prepare for it, or we can hold it at bay. The right baptism, the right laying on of hands, as our Acts passage shows us, can bring the Spirit upon us.

         So as you reflect on your own experiences of nearness to God, maybe your experience was like mine. Or maybe it was something very different. I hope you’ll share it with me and challenge my understanding of how God works in us.

September 10, 2020

Fall Series Introduction: “Find Your Inner Mystic” (September 6)

Psalm 119:33-40 and Galatians 2:16b-21

         I want to talk about our innermost spiritual lives in this series. So I can’t just talk at you; maybe I never should. I want to begin each week with a meditation; and I’ll give you some short phrases and concentrated images to chew on, meditate on. I hope you will make them your own and let them sink in.

         I want us to meditate on just one verse from our Galatians reading: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Can you say that for yourself? Can you insert yourself as I in that verse, and mean it? (repeat) What would it feel like if you could say that for yourself and really mean it? What would life look and feel like if I no longer lived? If I no longer said, “Well I think…” “I’d rather do this…” “I don’t care what you think…” What if we never said or thought or felt I, me, mine. And not because I denied myself, and had no thoughts, feelings, or desires; but because this I was so overwhelmed with the presence of Christ living in me, so powerfully aware that the words coming out of my mouth and thoughts in my head and desires in my heart truly belonged to Christ, and though him to God, that talking about me was just not very interesting anymore. / Imagine to yourself what that would be like. How it would change you. How even the ordinary things you would be experienced and done differently. Then breathe slowly, close your eyes if you don’t mind, and repeat this verse three times with me, to yourself: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”

•••

         When we meditate on it in this way, this verse can become for us a perfectly mystical verse. What does the word mystical or mysticism mean to you? I’m writing a book about it, because I think lots of people have experiences that are mystical. I don’t think mysticism is some exotic trippy pasttime for people sitting on mountain peaks. Lots of us have mystical experiences of at least a mild sort, and lots more of us probably could. Now, I’m no mystic. I’ve had a few mild mystical experiences. Some of you are far more accomplished as mystics than I am. But even a little mysticism can go a long way toward addressing a great need within us, which is: how can I feel closer to God? How can I know God more intimately—the real and true God, who has power and authority in my life, not something I pretend is God. I want to write a book that will help people find God in that way.

         Now you may be saying to yourself: “I didn’t know I needed that.” “I’m doing just fine without being a mystic, thank you.” So right, I’m not trying to make everyone into a mystic. Like I said, I’m not really one myself. And I doubt if any of us can say Paul’s words, “Christ lives in me,” with the same conviction he had. Let us remember what he says elsewhere: we each have spiritual gifts. The church needs all kinds of gifts. We need practical people who can run the organizational side of things, others who can focus on acts of justice and compassion, others to be counselors and encouragers. But you can do any of those things and be a mystic too.

And what Paul is talking about is not just an activity of the church, it is what we confess when we baptize any Christian: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into his death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” In other words, baptism means: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” Probably none of us perfectly lives into the full meaning of our baptism, not even Paul. But we all confess as the ultimate goal and are all called to die to myself and rise into having Christ live in me.

         And that is mysticism, so say I. In the weeks to come we’ll come back to defining it. But what this baptismal faith of Paul, and this one verse from our reading show us is that faith, religion, our relationship to God, is not at its heart a transaction. Not a deal between God and me. You might think the religion goes like this: I do something for God, and God rewards me for being good. I stay out of trouble, and I even donate to the food pantry or the clothing drive, and God rewards me with eternal life. Quid pro quo (remember when that phrase was in the news every day)? And we use prayer to negotiate the deal with God.

Religion for the mystic is nothing like this. Faith for the mystic is not about what I do for God and what God does for me. Actions matter. Paul mentions how the Son of God “loved me and gave himself for me.” But the heart of the matter is not deeds and actions. It’s being, not doing. It’s not what you do that makes you a Christian, it’s who you are. It’s about my identity. “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Not just my loyalty is to God, my obedience, my hope, but my very identity is in God. That’s mysticism.

 Now, I would love to leave it at that, but I just can’t just lift one verse from a reading and ignore the context. The scholar in me won’t allow it. So let’s look at this reading a little more. Why is Paul here sounding all mystical on us? Well, it appears that the Christians in Galatia, who were probably not born Jewish, have been trying to adopt Jewish Torah practices—keeping dietary regulations, observing festivals, or whatever. Now Paul says elsewhere that Jews like him who now believe Jesus is the Messiah can continue their Jewish traditions; Paul does himself. And there’s nothing wrong with the sincere, spiritual devotion to the law that we heard in our Psalm reading. But he gets very concerned when he hears that the gentile Christians in Galatia are trying to follow Jewish law.

What’s the problem? Well, if dietary regulations and dress and festivals aren’t just your habit, then you are probably using them to prove something about yourself. Look at me! I’m no longer just another Gentile! I’ve taken on God’s ancient commands to the Israelites. And you are still eating that disgusting pork. It pains me to think about it.” If that’s my attitude, then it’s clear that these practices are all about me. “Look what I’m doing. I’m proving what a holy person I am. And I’m distinguishing myself from you by these outward acts.” That kind of ego-driven showboating is very bad for community; and community is central to Paul’s message, especially the famous verse in chapter 3: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Christians today are not going to adopt Jewish Torah practices like the Galatians did. But the essence of what Paul is saying is valid for us and indeed vitally important. If we want to restate that wonderful quote today, we’d have to add: “There is no longer Republican and Democrat; there is no longer “Thank you, Granby Police” or “Black Lives Matter,” for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” I tell you that in this election season we are going to be severely tested. We will want to display the practices that distinguish our kind of people from those kind of people. Lawn signs, buttons, liking posts on Facebook—these are our works of the Law. There is so much pressure to carve this nation up into two tribes, us versus them, and there is so much pressure on each one of us to show whose side we’re on. And many of us will take sides, because the issues are important. I’m not telling you not to put up lawn signs. I think we should be very active politically, and I pray that each of us has tested our political views against our Christian commitments. (That’s not easy to do. I’d love to help you do that; but you probably have no interest in my help.)

But if we can all find that mystical center, in which I no longer live, but Christ Jesus lives in me, then not only will we find a peace from all the political anxiety; but we will be able to participate in political debate without having it all mixed up in defending my identity, my I. If I no longer live, if I have been crucified with Christ, then I won’t be so defensive towards those who disagree. I’ll be willing to admit that I could be wrong. (One of my favorite recent bumper stickers simply say, “I could be wrong.”) If I no longer live, I won’t put defending my views and my party above caring for the human being in front of me. I won’t try to build up my self-righteous self by putting down this one, even in my own thoughts: “What an idiot.”

So go ahead and challenge each other. Call out those dubious claims on Facebook. And let yourself be challenged; indeed, be thankful that someone cares enough to disagree with you. We as a nation need to work this thing out somehow, because I genuinely fear where our division is heading, and it’s right here among us. But if you want to do debate peacefully and effectively, learn to find your inner union with Christ; learn to say and mean it, “I no longer live.” Then you too can love the one in front of you and give yourself to that one, as Jesus did.

March 7, 2020

2nd in Lent (3/8): “On Our Own We Are Lonely”

I’m taking the unusual step of pre-posting my sermon, since I’ll be on the move right after church! I’m going to leave a few personal details out of the online version.

Genesis 12:1-4; 13:14-18 ; Matt 4: 12-13, 17, 23-25

We have this image of Lent and repentance as a downer. You’re supposed to give up something, sacrifice, feel bad about yourself instead of happy. We wrongly assume repentance is the opposite of joy. Lent is the opposite of Easter.

But Lent is about joy. And vice versa, true joy includes repentance. (And, by the way, Easter includes Good Friday.) If you can’t reconcile happiness with pain and loss, you are doomed to cling desperately to happiness and live in constant fear of loss, or change. Life becomes an unbearable emotional rollercoaster.

When, after his temptation, Jesus begins preaching, we hear these two messages held together: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven (or Kingdom of God) has come near.” Turn away from the kingdoms of this world. But that goes with the good news: Jesus went around “proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” The Kingdom requires us to leave something, but it also brings us joy and healing from what ails us.

Repentance will mean departing from where you are; it means separating yourself from who you are, and even from friends, kinsman, and countrymen. This is what Abraham did, without hesitation. But we do so with God’s promise to Abraham as our own: “Raise you eyes and [look around]. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted.” This has indeed been fulfilled for us: the whole church is Abraham’s offspring and our kin, about two billion currently. Not bad, God.

That is God’s foremost promise to Abraham. And it is the joy we all receive in this church community, even though it inevitably sets us apart from our other loyalties and identities. But it comes with healing and blessings. For instance, we know that outside of the community and kinship in faith, there is so much loneliness out there. I’ve been reading articles and studies on loneliness. A lot of them are medical studies; apparently, being lonely can take 15 years off your life. These studies go on to talk at great length about which chemicals released in your brain make you feel lonely. Honestly that does nothing to help me understand or deal with it.

Loneliness is not a brain problem, it is a social problem. It’s about how we live. Now, just living alone does not necessarily make you lonely. We are lonely because we feel isolated, even if others are around. There is some evidence that the size of social networks for older Americans has shrunk by one-third since 1985. But the youngest Generation, Gen Z, reports the highest levels of loneliness. That and other evidence suggests that social media does not help our loneliness; it appears to make it worse. (So guys, are you on your phones?)

I think loneliness has a lot to do with our culture of freedom. Much of our life is lonely by design. We live on lonely streets with no shared public space, no plazas, few marketplaces. Our church is the exception: Dinofest, Chicken Pie Supper, Christmas Bazaar are some of the few opportunities here in Granby to commune with your neighbors, and not be drowned out by music or fireworks. But our society has made it easy for people to withdraw from others, into our isolated homes. (Again, many of us here are the exception in our neighborhoods.) Even within the family home, we can withdraw into entertainment and distractions that are practically designed to not appeal to the whole family. Our music and video production is targeted to narrow age ranges, meaning that adults and children often go their separate ways inside the home, as they do outside. But honestly, much of our culture is designed to dissolve the family; our economy depends on a liquid population, so that workers can go where they are needed.

Well, there’s not much we can do about the demands of our economy. And of course children do need to grow up and find their own life. But I remember my own teenage years. Later on I had good friends, but there was a year or two when I had just about none. I ate alone at lunch every day. My parents loved me but were pretty hands off. They predated the helicopter parent and even the baby boomer almost-too-friendly parent. My older siblings had all moved out. And all the influences of youth culture encouraged me to withdraw from my parents, to hours spent in my room or in front of the tv. They must have found it miserable too. We had no lager community to envelop us together, to break the loneliness. I’m lucky I survived that year. …

Older people living in isolation breaks my heart. But nothing breaks my heart as much as seeing this pall, this terrifying silence that descends on too many of our households during the teen years. No parent is innocent here, and no teen is either. But we’re all at the mercy of a culture that puts a high value on freedom and a low value on community. Consider this: we’ll gladly ship our children away for school, sports, camps. (And hey, nothing wrong with a little time to ourselves.) We gladly send our children out to be trained for success and made “resilient,” a word a lot of people like these days. But how much time do we spend in a community like the church, where adults and children are brought together in a common faith, a common story, common values? Where else can we all be children of God together?

Our values of freedom and prosperity have brought most of us much. But as a parent, I’d leave just about anything behind to hold at bay that deadly silence between me and my son. I’ll gladly give up my pursuits that exclude him; and I’ll fight hard against all the forces that entice him away from me. He has to go to school. He has to go to camp. He needs friends his own age, of course. I want him to succeed, of course. But church is where he an I come together before God, read the same scriptures, take the same sacraments, sing the same “lame” songs, share the same culture and faith. And we served side by side at Cathedral last week; it meant a lot to both of us.

We can repent of all that threatens the church. We can repent of making personal freedom and success more important than community and shared purpose and formation. We can leave our land of loneliness and travel to God’s promised land of joyful togetherness. We can, because we the church have the intergenerational community that our world so desperately needs for its salvation and joy. Let’s lift our hearts and thank God for this glorious gift.

But we must tend it carefully. We must be willing to forsake some of the things that take us away from it. And we in the church must work hard to form ourselves into loving community; that doesn’t happen easily. A lot of us have baggage that can make togetherness, well, challenging. And we need to teach our faith in a compelling way, with confidence that we have the words of life, and you’re not going to find them at school, or sports, or at work. Thanks be to God we have been delivered to this place; now let’s build an altar to God and prepare for all those descendants.

February 24, 2020

Feb 16:(The Spiritual Person:) “Who’s the Baby?”

Deuteronomy 30:15-20 ; 1 Corinthians 3:1-9

The answer to my title, “Who’s the Baby,” just so you don’t jump to the wrong conclusion, is me.

We’re talking about what makes a Spiritual Person as Paul describes it. We’ve seen previously that the Spiritual person must be willing to think differently from people of the world, that she will have a different wisdom and different orientation to power. And this is very difficult, for it will likely put us in conflict with the way people outside of faith act. But I promised before we go out and take on the world, we would need to look at ourselves.

I think what I had in mind was that you would take a look at yourself. My plan was to preach right from Paul: “You are still of the flesh.” Thankfully God intervened and changed my plans. It turns out, the message I got this week was that I am still of the flesh.

Last Wednesday I had a conversation with Loay Barden in my office, a wonderful conversation about his new discovery of faith and about this incredible and joyful power he’s been feeling since he found Christ. He feels so connected to everyone around him. So attentive to everyone around him. It makes him feel light and joyful. “That’s beautiful,” I said, and I meant it. After a minute, I added, “That feeling doesn’t always remain; but I hope it will.” I wonder now if there was a little jealousy, to use Paul’s word, in my comment.

Because I knew exactly what Loay was talking about. It is what I felt when I first gave myself to God, to Jesus, when I was 16. I can only describe it as being filled the Spirit of God. And Loay has it. And it looks like this: All these people all around you that you divided up into friends and not-friends, people you either relied on as allies, or mistrusted as troublemakers, they suddenly all become real people, each one so precious, so real. The Spirit of God, and the Spirit of God alone, brings a supernatural, miraculous ability to love each one. This love has nothing to do with duty; I get loving out of duty. I’m sure we all do. “Well, I’ve got to love this guy. Doesn’t deserve it.” Duty brings resentment. Duty is about Law, imposed from above; I’m talking pure Spirit, welling up from within. You hardly think of yourself, but you become aware of thoughts like: ‘hm, Normally I would feel stand-offish with this person. Why on earth did I used to feel that? And how can I do right by this person now?” You are still aware of yourself but you are all there for him, and her, and them. Every bit of selfish agenda is gone. Because of that, you can see everyone so clearly.

We can call this loving others, but let’s be clear: it includes seeing their faults. Christian love by the power of the Spirit does not turn a blind eye to the bad and pretend to only see the good. Christian love is nothing like just tolerating and accepting. You love the whole person in front of you, loving this flawed person, desiring the good of this one who may look by all accounts to be unworthy. That’s how God loves us, and God’s Spirit loves like that in us.

I hope you know what I’m talking about; I know some of you do. Because Paul told us last week that only the spiritual discern spiritual things. Above all else I want you to know this Spirit of God. Because let me tell you, there’s nothing better in life, no higher joy, no greater sense of security—in what might, once again, sound like weakness and vulnerability; there’s nothing more beautiful that I’ve ever felt. I don’t think you will ever be fully convinced that God is real until you experience this love.

And it fits with what we’ve been talking about since Epiphany: we are meant to become God’s very presence in the world. The Spiritual Person is one who has been completely transformed into the site, the very presence of God’s love. And if you’ve felt that, you know it is nothing you do on your own power. That Spirit overcomes all your limitations and defenses and you find yourself connected to the world around you without ego, without guile. And you really feel that the whole universe was meant for this; all the tears and all the pain were just stepping stones to the revealing of this infinite love.

I felt this. But then that Spirit faded away. When it does, you wonder where it went and why. You can feel your old self creeping back into you—feel yourself growing heavier again with all those self-centered desires. Soon enough, you find yourself trying to justify this loss of Spirit, even though you knew there could be nothing higher: “Well, I do have my plans that I’ve got to attend to. I’ve got a book to write; and who else can fulfill my destiny as a theologian?” (I did use the word “destiny” not too long ago, didn’t I? I kind of knew I’d regret it.)

Yes, I remember what the Spirit of God did to me. Loay reminded me. And in the wee hours of Monday morning, unable now to forget, I started giving myself over again to the Spirit of God. (Recently, I seem to be clocking a lot of my 25 hours in the middle of the night.) This is because of Loay’s witness, because of what God was able to do in this still wet-behind-the-ears Christian. He was able to school this “Pastor and Theologian in Residence,” that’s Reverend Doctor, thank you, about this reality called the Holy Spirit; he recalled me to this Gold Standard of what it looks like when God really takes over in your life.

And only then, by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, for so long hovering in the wings of my life, I could see what had been going on with me. Oh, everything I’ve been preaching, or at least a lot of it, was pretty much on track. I had what Paul derides as “plausible words of wisdom,” and I could point to many scholarly colleagues to back me up. But without the Spirit of God, without the love of God, wisdom can do nothing. And that worldly power that I talked about—rightly—comes creeping back in. So what happens: I run into a little opposition here and there, and instead of loving my opponent, I boost myself. It sounds like this in my head (and as ashamed as I was, the Spirit made me laugh at myself): “It’s too bad I alone have a sound understanding of the faith. If only I could teach them, if only they’d submit properly to my teaching authority, that would make everything right. My wisdom, my knowledge would fix this place. But they don’t want to listen. So the next best thing I can do is make them aware of just how little they understand. Maybe that will humble them into seeking something higher.” That’s what the Old Adam, the person not living under the power of God’s Spirit, sounds like in me.

Sin is a strange beast; or I should use Paul’s word here: The Flesh, those entrenched “human inclinations” that come creeping back in, once the Spirit releases us. It can corrupt the very best gifts of God and turn them against their Maker. Paul knows this. Oh, I’ve got gifts; and so do you. But you might recognize where Paul is going in Corinthians 13: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels—with all proper theological understanding—but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

What we are all looking for that deep, mind-blowing, soul-transforming Joy that comes with God’s Spirit. And wasn’t I offering the opposite: to put you in your place by boasting of my wisdom. I am ashamed of my own blindness, even if God’s Spirit, when he or she showed me this, showed it to me with joy.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you should fire me. I do have gifts, and they are helpful to many. Like the Corinthians, but differently, we are a broken vessel. We see only as in a mirror, dimly. We are oppressed and have been suckered by many powers that work against the power of Christ on the cross. But there is a power that can set us right, can make us laugh at our foolishness. Others have planted this church. Maybe I can water this field, this building (Paul has no problem mixing metaphors). But “neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” If you want to grow, then don’t rely on me. And if you are unhappy that you aren’t growing, don’t rely on me (although I am happy to do what I can). All you need to experience the Holy Spirit is God, and other people. Turn your life over to the Holy Spirit and get the real deal.

September 29, 2019

Sept 29: “Why Do I Need to Love God?”

The final in a four-week series on our love for God. 

Psalm 8 ; 1st Timothy 6:6-19

Why do I need to love God? Isn’t all that matters in Christian faith what Paul talks about: “to do good, to be rich in good works?” Isn’t faith just about being good people? Why does God need our love, anyway? Is God so vain that he needs us to sing praises and flatter him? (Well, you get the idea. You probably aren’t as irreverent as all that!)

But the answer is no: God doesn’t need our love and praise. When God commands our love and praise, it is for our good and for the salvation or perfection of the world. God doesn’t need to be perfected, and God alone.

But grasping all this stuff about God is hard. Given all the uncertainties of our age, it is quite understandable if some of us find we don’t know God well enough to love God. Maybe God seems too distant. So let’s break it down.

I think loving God is really very similar to all kinds of things ordinary human beings do. When we love God, we are directing our hearts and attention to all that is, all that is seen and beyond what can be seen (as Paul says). We are loving all that is and all that could be.  It’s something intrinsic to human beings, to look up at the moon and stars, or down at the face of a baby and the endless future generations that baby represents and to feel ourselves before this totality of all that is. Even when we don’t consciously address it like poets, philosophers, mystics, and even scientists do, that totality lends unconscious depth to everything we do. When we give ourselves to our lover in passion, we aren’t just loving this one person; we are loving everything in this one person. We do the same when the love we feel for our child is too great to express, and it silently spills out across the cosmos. Or when a work of art or music suddenly captures our entire attention and for a moment we are nothing but its eyes and ears; we are absorbed into this one event of beauty as if it is the only thing that exists.

As modern people in a pluralistic democracy, we can appreciate both how universally human is this call of all that is on us, and also how fragile and threatened it is. So on one hand, we know people with different kinds of passion for the greater whole that is beyond the merely practical and useful. That passion is what makes us feel both very small and very important, just as the Psalmist felt: “When I look at your heavens, the moon and the stars, what are human beings that you are mindful of them? …Yet you have made us a little lower than God, and crowned us with glory and honor.” Modern life has taught us that our way of attending to all that is through God and Christ is only one way (the good confession, as Paul says). Other people attend to it through the names Allah or Shiva; or through a poem describing a lover who really represents universal love; or through scientific research into the Big Bang. We can relate our Christian love for God to all these profoundly human pursuits.

But on the other hand, modern life is busy trying to brush aside all this, assuring us that money talks, that if you aren’t moving and shaking then you’re a loser, a nobody—you might as well hit the bottle or the opiates. Modern life has flattened what Paul calls “life that really is life” into just the practical, so that business and politics and self-promotion are all there is.

I am sad when people don’t believe in God anymore. But what is still sadder to me is when people don’t believe in mystery anymore, in anything beyond me or what can be procured through human craftiness (and sometimes these same folks go to church). It’s all about money, or power—commerce or politics—or else you’re wasting my time. / So, modern life allows us to discover the breadth and variety of human love for all that is higher and beyond; but at the same time modern life is busy exterminating that love in favor of what’s going down./

Let me tell you what I think is the antidote. We need one foot in the ordinary world of immediate needs and pleasures for ourselves and others, for we are still creatures, still animals; and one foot with which we step toward the heavens and the infinite, for we are created just a little lower than God. One foot on earth; one foot stepping out toward the heavens. And if you walk it right, you can bring heaven and earth in step; you can raise up the ordinary even as you ground the infinite.

That’s what Jesus is all about: the one who is fully divine and fully human, the one reconciling humanity—in all our limitations and our sin and our misuse of our love for what is beyond, for religion is too often used very badly—Our Lord Jesus reconciling this humanity to God. We have in Christ Jesus the perfect model for doing what all humans try to do, at least those who haven’t had their humanity sucked out of them by the quest for money and power. He is our model for keeping one foot firmly on the earth, and one foot striding toward the beyond—toward eternal life, the Kingdom of God (and we can divide the labor, some planted more on the earthly foot, others striding heavenward). It’s in Jesus’ commandment we started with four Sundays ago: Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. You got to do both. You’ve got to love God, reach toward the infinite, but never so that you float away from the one next to you who needs love and justice (maybe that’s yourself). Jesus holds it all together, our humanity and our divinity.

This is the eternal life that Paul commends to us. It is “godliness combined with contentment,” as he puts it—simple contentment, not riches. But eternal life lived by deeds of righteousness, godliness, and love; by being rich in good works and generosity—this eternal life does not exclude having one foot on earth, for as Paul says, “God richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment”—simple clothing and food, shared in good company and enjoyed without haughtiness and sin on our conscience. Let us take hold of eternal life with this generous and contented enjoyment, holding together through Christ the goodness of the earth with our love for “the one who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see”—the totality, the whole, the infinite beyond all we can see—“to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.”

 

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.

 

May 22, 2019

5th in Easter: “Weird Dreams of Conquering Power”

Acts 11:1-18 ; John 13: 31-35

So Peter has this weird, trippy dream about killing and eating the animals forbidden as food for the Jews. And he concludes that the Spirit is telling him something the church hadn’t agreed upon: that Christ has overcome the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, that is, non-Jews. Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘Peter, I think you misinterpreted your own dream. It was about food.’ Well, yeah; but this is the Spirit working. The Spirit is not as direct as the Risen Christ confronting Paul in his vision. The God-is-still speaking Spirit doesn’t always make outward sense. But while the way Peter arrives at his conclusion is hard to follow, the conclusion is nonetheless correct and surely inspired and true to the meaning of Christ.

Now, believe it or not, this weird dream is also about our theme of power, and Christ defeating power. Here’s where the weird dream gets interesting. Notice that Peter dreams that God tells him to kill and eat all these forbidden animals—as pictured on your bulletin cover—that he has never dreamed of eating before. And his response is very visceral: yuk! Let me bring this closer to home. We know that we need to eat less meat, for the good of our environment, our health, and the treatment of animals themselves. So people are devising schemes to replace traditional meat with alternatives. One is grasshopper protein. Imagine a grasshopper burger. Yuk!—right? Now, that reaction we’re having is not completely natural. Some cultures eat grasshoppers; Jessica has seen fried tarantulas for sale in Cambodia. So where is that yuk that we’re feeling, and Peter was feeling, come from?

It’s from the most subtle side of what I’m calling power, the same power that Christ has conquered. Power is anything that constrains us. So we’ll think first of our parents, or the police, or our minister threatening us with hellfire. But the power of yuk is much more subtle that the violent threats of authorities, because it works within us, through the emotionally charged categories we rely on, the mental boxes we use to sort things into good and bad, tasty and yukky. This is the soft power of culture, the power of language and custom. It’s an invisible power, but no less potent than the police, because it works on our insides, viscerally. It’s the power of yuk.

And it’s important to say that this soft power is not always evil; it is a good creation of God, given to enable order in society. Some today see all social categories and any constraint as inherently oppressive, even violent. That’s going too far, I think, because every society needs categories. The rejection of all social power leaves one and only one thing in control: ego; me. Many of our songs and popular stories are about the ego being liberated from all social constraints to be whatever it wants to be: I’ve gotta be me! We eat that stuff up (yum!). Now self-expression is also a good creation, but at the heart of our faith is not an unconstrained ego but a self-giving love that is obedient to God. Both ego and power are fallen, sinful—so our Christian tradition tells us, and both have been conquered by Christ. So power, constraint is necessary and may be used for the good, but it is never innocent. We should always look hard at our system of mental boxes to see if something nefarious isn’t lurking in our yuks.

Now, the most basic category that power uses to order society is the distinction between friend and enemy, native and stranger, citizen and foreigner, Jew and Gentile. These typical categories seem to be in the ascendancy right now, across the globe. And of course, what parent is not going to warn her children about strangers! The Torah sanctified this distinction between Jew and Gentile in order to establish a people set apart for God’s purposes. That’s the main reason for the dietary restrictions that make Peter go yuk; they keep Jews distinct. But notice that the Torah also contains striking injunctions to care for the foreigner, the alien, and the immigrant, and promises that God will one day unite Jew and Gentile.

That day came with Christ Jesus. When the time was right, God overcame this distinction in Christ. At the core of the church’s identity is an overcoming of this fundamental category that is essential to all other societies: insider/outside, member, non-member; citizen/ foreigner. That’s why the church holds fellowship across all borders, across all races, across all lines of what’s considered “normal” sexuality and gender identity. It’s why we say “All are welcome;” it’s why we are Open and Affirming. We are freed by Christ from this pervasive distinction of between inside and outside—not freed so we can do whatever we want; not so we can sing, “I’ve gotta be free”; not freed to be unconstrained egos. We are freed to welcome and love and serve all. That starts here, in this place where we welcome all and we practice loving one another, as Jesus in our reading from John commanded his disciples to do. We need to prove to ourselves and to the world that a community can be grounded in love that transcends distinctions. And that will involve a struggle, against our own yuks and those of people out there. But Easter is the season to be thankful that in Christ, we are already delivered.