“What Shall We Do?” Luke 3:7-16 Lawrence Jackman
The person on a soap box use to be a very real image. People stood on a busy street with whatever they could bring to raise themselves above the crowd. Their job, of course, was to get out a message with no budget and no ability to really get an audience.
The last time that I can remember of really confronting one of those folks was a year and a half back when the General Assembly was meeting in San Jose, California. Coming back to the convention center late one afternoon we were confronted by a little group of people—complete with picket signs. The male leader of the group appeared to have his son with him—a teenage boy. There were also two female members of the party. Now, as nearly always happens, this group was very busy making sure that we all knew that we were going straight to hell.
They waved their bibles, shouted words of condemnation, frothed at the mouth and generally yelled at the heathen Presbyterians. One group of folks from the Presbyterian meeting stood in a circle, held hands and sang hymns. I stood for a long time between the two groups and simply looked at the leader of the other folks.
We watched each other for quite a while. I didn’t believe that I should approach him unless he offered some sign of relaxing. He didn’t. I really wanted him to approach me, but that didn’t happen. We just ended the encounter with a bit of a standoff.
John the Baptizer was pretty much the first century equivalent of the nutty looking street preacher on the busy corner in a major city. He was and they are mostly full of hell and brimstone. He came across the desert floor to set up shop on the route that many took to travel from the north or the east to go to Jerusalem. The place was just a few miles from the north edge of the Dead Sea. Here, you had to cross the Jordan at a sort of a ford.
So just like the street preacher John came with a message of pure threat. “Who warned you to escape the wrath that is coming? You brood of snakes. Time to get right and to get there right away.”
Somehow struck by the message (more that I was with the street preacher in San Jose) groups began to ask the question, “What shall we do?” John’s answer to that was terribly interesting from three perspectives.
One was that his answer about what to do was specific to groups. He does not have a “one size fits all” approach to salvation. Secondly, when you look at the answers to groups of people, the direction is pretty trivial and not so very profound. John wasn’t asking for some sort of deep cleaning of he human soul. Instead what he gave off were very practical messages that were targeted to issues of socially good behavior and also toward community as the profound value. That is the third perspective—this is all about community. That community direction is consistently toward the creation of wider community.
Now contrast those simple points (which maybe number three) to the directions given to us by folk like the street preacher. You know some of those guys have hit it big and don’t need a soap box. They have TV and the internet. Some of them still stand on the street corner or in the pulpit of a church—where ever, it does not matter.
Most of those folks seem to me to do it differently than the Baptizer on all three fronts. They do talk about “one size fits all” theory of salvation. The corrective actions they ask for are a total remaking of the human personality (in a way that is impossible, by the way). And lastly they keep arguing to make community smaller and smaller.
Here is what the message of John the Baptizer is trying to tell us. First, the road to a greater relationship with God is incredibly individualized. We do not need to all be at the same place either before or after our experience together. There are many roads and millions of travelers. It is the height of arrogance to suggest that everyone must be on one path. John didn’t see it that way. Jesus didn’t see it that way.
Yet throughout history we seem to always be seduced into expressing the faith in culturally specific ways. We favor our pet sins that are considered “acceptable failures” and we condemn other people’s behaviors as though they were never acceptable.
I use to work with a man who was just totally consternated by a whole group of folks who worked with us and who lived very differently. All of us claimed Christian churches as our spiritual home. “Don’t they understand that they need to take sexual sins more seriously?”, Ernie would rhetorically demand. “I am guessing not, Ernie.” I would say. “Maybe it is something like your church and greed. Isn’t that almost a virtue over at your church as long as the church gets 10%?” I could have confessed Presbyterian sins to him also. I just wasn’t in the mood to tell him we can be self righteous and smug.
You get the point. We all start from differing places. No one gets to tell you where to start from. They may well be behind you anyway. Everyone of us is responsible for our own journey and not one of us is responsible for another’s. So, do your job. That is, take care of your own spiritual journey and quest. If it is good, bad or indifferent share it with others. One size does not fit all. We can all learn from each other and if you already know it, you are probably in the wrong universe.
Focus, John suggests, on some very tangible and practical behaviors. The day to day crowds got the advice to share and to do so according to some very practical ways. You got two coats? Give one of them away. You got extra food? Share it. The tax collectors want to know what to do. Well do your job honestly—don’t take more than is due. Soldiers, don’t plunder and steal from people. You guys have power, swords and can pretty much do as you please. Don’t use your force to rob and steal.
This is practical stuff, but it is the absolute preparation for the journey. The issue is not a great big thing. It is simple. Focus on your human interactions if you want to be ready to receive God’s arrival in your life. Somehow, John is telling us, we must treat others in a fair, just, honest, and benevolent way. When we do that we will be ready. If we don’t do that then remember that the wrath is coming.
That third lesson is pretty strong too. It is essentially a statement that community is to be expanded. The crowds are to look around them. They are all travelers. Nobody is out here at the Jordan River crossing except travelers. It would be like being on I 65 where it crosses the Muscattuck River.
So, you are to look around you—at your fellow travelers—see which one of them doesn’t have a coat. If you have two give him one. Is someone you can see hungry? Do you have extra food? Feed them.
Community is bigger than your group of travelers. Community is all travelers.
Tax collectors were outcasts—they could associate with each other and not many other people. That made it easy for them to treat people like economic opportunities. The message to them was treat those people like you belonged to the same family.
Soldiers had power and were not so well thought of either. There were literal walls between and the society. Soldiers, you are supposed to treat others like they are family.
Community is to be expanded. You have no right to exclude, isolate, or wall off others. Open up—don’t close up.
Here is the key word of John’s message. Repent. Literally that means “turn around”. At it’s core it means “change your mind”. That is it. Refuse to see things the way you do now. Every one of us—do that. See the world differently. See your fellow travelers differently. See them all as sisters and brothers. Love them like that.
There is nothing else. Turn around.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
November15, 2009 Sermon
“Sunday is a Coming” Mark 13:1-8 Lawrence Jackman
My mother seemed to me to be olfactory fixated. She had a whole series of things that she would say that were all about aroma. “I smell a rat’” “Something is rotten in Denmark” (I am aware that wasn’t quite original). “That just stinks.” “That is a stinking lie.” Coach, as we called her, named the pet cat of the family. His name was “Stinky”. Now I wanted her to say something memorable—maybe, “Life is like a box of chocolates”. She didn’t.
My dad said lots of memorable things, but I can’t quote very many of them in a pulpit. That is not the point anyway. Here is my point, under certain circumstances lots of people (my mom included) resort to symbolic language that is well understood within their culture, but which makes almost no literal sense. The rat was not real nor did it smell It was a way of saying, “there is a hidden agenda here and maybe even a hidden player in this drama. I know it is here, I just can’t put my finger on it, but I am going to tell you when the smell gets stronger.”
So it is often with the Bible. So it is with Mark 13 -- what is called the “little apocalypse of Mark”. It is a passage full of symbolic images and standard expressions that were well understood in the culture of the day, but which are not to be understood in a literal sense. That chapter of Mark (corresponding places in the other Gospels,) the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation are all apocalyptic literature. To really dig down into the message of any of this, you need to start with the fact that it is all symbolic and coded.
Apocalyptic literature was created by cultures of folks who lived in a time of persecution and peril. It was a way of talking about their current realities that would be “under the radar” of persecutors. This was not unique to Jewish or Christian style. It was shared by other cultures. Many believe, for instance, that the Book of Revelation is merely a Christianized retelling of an old Mithraic tale called the Baman Rasht. At least within the Semitic peoples this material was understood.
Now I am as big a fan of Dan Brown as anybody, but cracking the code here doesn’t really interest me. There is a big story about Mark 13 and similar passages. It is that overall story or picture which fascinates me and which I believe holds the powerful meaning. .
Just like in New Testament times, stories of an apocalyptic nature emerge in tough times. The global story is about groups, tribes, nations and religions trying to describe a crisis and a way through what seems to be an impossible world scene.
There is a reason why right now the movie offerings include such things as “2012”, “Deep Impact”, “The Core”, “Independence Day”, and other films that include the plot of an impending cataclysm. The tale is one of defiant human survival (or of a group) against the disaster that is about to happen. We started these stories in earnest again in the fall of 2001. Enough said.
These are the tales that humans tell themselves on the brink of (or in the midst of) massive crisis. Most often they are thrown back against an historical drop as in the Book of Daniel. In truth these tales have nothing to do with history—they are tales of a present day.
Here was the New Testament’s present day tale. Again, one thrown back on history. In New Testament times, Jerusalem was about to fall and be destroyed. A.D. 70 would mark the end of the Jewish state till 1947. The Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke are written either just before or at the time of this impending doom. Mark places the words of an apocalypse into the mouth of Jesus.
Here are the elements of this and any other apocalyptic tale 1) the end of life as we know it is just around the corner. 2) the marshalling of good people and bad people has begun. Pick your side. 3) hang on tightly for a time of trial and tribulation while the world ends and begins again. 4) you need not be afraid (this is only the end of the world) and you can hear the promise ringing in your ears—“It will not end here for the children of the Light.”
The Apostle’s Creed, which we often use as an affirmation of faith, is part and parcel of this sort of statement. We say, “I believe in—birth, life, suffering, crucifixion, death, burial”. And then we say we believe in one more thing. “I believe in resurrection”. That is a pattern written into the DNA of this universe. At the end there is Resurrection.
We stand in the midst of Good Friday; but Sunday is a coming.
For so many every Friday is a Good Friday of sickness. Over the last two years our small group of people has lost an eighth of our membership to illness. We are disciplined to think of prayer requests that are all about cancer, heart disease, and other serious illness. We dread the capricious impact of this new influenza. HIV / AIDS remains over humanity’s shoulder like a relentless predator. We have our share of and continue to live in the midst of illness. We got a Good Friday, now, of illness. But, Sunday is a coming.
We live in the midst of a Good Friday of fear. We combated fear by building bigger barns, larger portfolios, more substantial IRAs and bank accounts. We knew while we were building that these were not really a dependable way to have security. Yet we did it. The world shrank impressively over a matter of a few months and left us only with our fears. Today we have a Good Friday of fear; but Sunday is a coming.
We have for ourselves a good Friday of conflict, hostility and of war. The unquenchable fire of destructive wars touches our shores now. Human inhumanity plagues us always as we try to change the fundamental way in which we settle disagreements. We are engaged in conflicts now in which only the primary players seem to change and never the reality of war. These clashes are like “tag team” wars. If it is not one nation in a theater of conflict it is another. It is a Good Friday of crucifixion through war. And the children of light can affirm only one thing. Sunday is a coming.
To me the world seems to have more than its share of Evil. Manifested in people who act in ways that are almost too dark to even describe, evil appears to reign. The man in Cleveland and his house of murderous torture and murder holds our attention. He, however, wrested that attention form the kidnapping story in California. And the story in California had been preceded by another story in Missouri. In each case the perpetrators of Evil seem so incredibly dark that you know even a flashlight would reveal the fase of Satan himself. It is Friday and we have way more evil that it takes to go around….but…..Sunday is a coming.
It is Good Friday now and even that most profound enemy of the human condition, death, lurks at the door. No matter what we manage to survive, work our way through, or avoid in this life; we know in our heart of hearts that this last enemy remains. This one always appears to win. This is what the first Good Friday was about—the final enemy: the one that always appears to win. Children of the Light have been this route before. We know even in the face of death there is this much we can affirm. Sunday is a coming.
So, then, in the midst of sickness, fear, war, evil and even in the face of death the children of the light gather. We gather, join hands, embrace one another, comfort one another and encourage one another with these incredible words of promise. “It is Good Friday now, but that means only one thing to us sisters and brothers. It means that Sunday is a coming.”
My mother seemed to me to be olfactory fixated. She had a whole series of things that she would say that were all about aroma. “I smell a rat’” “Something is rotten in Denmark” (I am aware that wasn’t quite original). “That just stinks.” “That is a stinking lie.” Coach, as we called her, named the pet cat of the family. His name was “Stinky”. Now I wanted her to say something memorable—maybe, “Life is like a box of chocolates”. She didn’t.
My dad said lots of memorable things, but I can’t quote very many of them in a pulpit. That is not the point anyway. Here is my point, under certain circumstances lots of people (my mom included) resort to symbolic language that is well understood within their culture, but which makes almost no literal sense. The rat was not real nor did it smell It was a way of saying, “there is a hidden agenda here and maybe even a hidden player in this drama. I know it is here, I just can’t put my finger on it, but I am going to tell you when the smell gets stronger.”
So it is often with the Bible. So it is with Mark 13 -- what is called the “little apocalypse of Mark”. It is a passage full of symbolic images and standard expressions that were well understood in the culture of the day, but which are not to be understood in a literal sense. That chapter of Mark (corresponding places in the other Gospels,) the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation are all apocalyptic literature. To really dig down into the message of any of this, you need to start with the fact that it is all symbolic and coded.
Apocalyptic literature was created by cultures of folks who lived in a time of persecution and peril. It was a way of talking about their current realities that would be “under the radar” of persecutors. This was not unique to Jewish or Christian style. It was shared by other cultures. Many believe, for instance, that the Book of Revelation is merely a Christianized retelling of an old Mithraic tale called the Baman Rasht. At least within the Semitic peoples this material was understood.
Now I am as big a fan of Dan Brown as anybody, but cracking the code here doesn’t really interest me. There is a big story about Mark 13 and similar passages. It is that overall story or picture which fascinates me and which I believe holds the powerful meaning. .
Just like in New Testament times, stories of an apocalyptic nature emerge in tough times. The global story is about groups, tribes, nations and religions trying to describe a crisis and a way through what seems to be an impossible world scene.
There is a reason why right now the movie offerings include such things as “2012”, “Deep Impact”, “The Core”, “Independence Day”, and other films that include the plot of an impending cataclysm. The tale is one of defiant human survival (or of a group) against the disaster that is about to happen. We started these stories in earnest again in the fall of 2001. Enough said.
These are the tales that humans tell themselves on the brink of (or in the midst of) massive crisis. Most often they are thrown back against an historical drop as in the Book of Daniel. In truth these tales have nothing to do with history—they are tales of a present day.
Here was the New Testament’s present day tale. Again, one thrown back on history. In New Testament times, Jerusalem was about to fall and be destroyed. A.D. 70 would mark the end of the Jewish state till 1947. The Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke are written either just before or at the time of this impending doom. Mark places the words of an apocalypse into the mouth of Jesus.
Here are the elements of this and any other apocalyptic tale 1) the end of life as we know it is just around the corner. 2) the marshalling of good people and bad people has begun. Pick your side. 3) hang on tightly for a time of trial and tribulation while the world ends and begins again. 4) you need not be afraid (this is only the end of the world) and you can hear the promise ringing in your ears—“It will not end here for the children of the Light.”
The Apostle’s Creed, which we often use as an affirmation of faith, is part and parcel of this sort of statement. We say, “I believe in—birth, life, suffering, crucifixion, death, burial”. And then we say we believe in one more thing. “I believe in resurrection”. That is a pattern written into the DNA of this universe. At the end there is Resurrection.
We stand in the midst of Good Friday; but Sunday is a coming.
For so many every Friday is a Good Friday of sickness. Over the last two years our small group of people has lost an eighth of our membership to illness. We are disciplined to think of prayer requests that are all about cancer, heart disease, and other serious illness. We dread the capricious impact of this new influenza. HIV / AIDS remains over humanity’s shoulder like a relentless predator. We have our share of and continue to live in the midst of illness. We got a Good Friday, now, of illness. But, Sunday is a coming.
We live in the midst of a Good Friday of fear. We combated fear by building bigger barns, larger portfolios, more substantial IRAs and bank accounts. We knew while we were building that these were not really a dependable way to have security. Yet we did it. The world shrank impressively over a matter of a few months and left us only with our fears. Today we have a Good Friday of fear; but Sunday is a coming.
We have for ourselves a good Friday of conflict, hostility and of war. The unquenchable fire of destructive wars touches our shores now. Human inhumanity plagues us always as we try to change the fundamental way in which we settle disagreements. We are engaged in conflicts now in which only the primary players seem to change and never the reality of war. These clashes are like “tag team” wars. If it is not one nation in a theater of conflict it is another. It is a Good Friday of crucifixion through war. And the children of light can affirm only one thing. Sunday is a coming.
To me the world seems to have more than its share of Evil. Manifested in people who act in ways that are almost too dark to even describe, evil appears to reign. The man in Cleveland and his house of murderous torture and murder holds our attention. He, however, wrested that attention form the kidnapping story in California. And the story in California had been preceded by another story in Missouri. In each case the perpetrators of Evil seem so incredibly dark that you know even a flashlight would reveal the fase of Satan himself. It is Friday and we have way more evil that it takes to go around….but…..Sunday is a coming.
It is Good Friday now and even that most profound enemy of the human condition, death, lurks at the door. No matter what we manage to survive, work our way through, or avoid in this life; we know in our heart of hearts that this last enemy remains. This one always appears to win. This is what the first Good Friday was about—the final enemy: the one that always appears to win. Children of the Light have been this route before. We know even in the face of death there is this much we can affirm. Sunday is a coming.
So, then, in the midst of sickness, fear, war, evil and even in the face of death the children of the light gather. We gather, join hands, embrace one another, comfort one another and encourage one another with these incredible words of promise. “It is Good Friday now, but that means only one thing to us sisters and brothers. It means that Sunday is a coming.”
Sunday, November 1, 2009
November 1, 2009 Sermon
“Getting Warm” Mark 12:28-34 Lawrence Jackman
“Love God and do as you please.” I first heard those words from Arthur. Don’t start your memory banks running on Arthur. You are not supposed to know him and he isn’t famous. I went to both college and to seminary with the good reverend. We were in our Middler year at Louisville Seminary and working at a state hospital when five of us were riding home together on a Monday evening and somehow we were talking about “the rules of the faith”.
Arthur put forth the proposition that there were not so many rules as the rest of us thought. He quoted Augustine’s famous line, “Love God and do as you please.” It was understandable that Arthur might say this. He was a 60’s wild child…probably a little before his time. He knew more loopholes in the biblical system than most of us ever dreamed of. Whatever he quoted always seemed to be a bit self serving and could always be a pretext for him doing most anything he wanted. Never mind the of perceived limitations to Christian behavior. It was normal for Arthur Lee. What was disconcerting was that an icon of the Christian faith said it way back in the fourth century. Augustine, after all, was not some wild child. Well…he was pretty much a wild child if the truth were known. But like anyone back there far enough we guarded ourselves from the truth.
As I remember Arthur left seminary with the same deep conviction that he shared with us in the car that day. He went to Alaska to take a church which seemed not to warm to his observation about the rules of the Kingdom. He popped up again in my awareness in coal country in Illinois. There too, curse the luck, people did not seem to understand his brand of Christian life. Last I heard of him, he was working in Arkansas as a therapist in a mental health clinic. He was probably still looking for someone to agree with his fundamental understanding of Christian life. Everyone could listen to the “Love God” part. It was just he “do as you please” that they couldn’t appreciate.
This passage from Mark’s Gospel that we read this morning might give Arthur some solace. My guess is that I have preached this passage someplace between 8 and 15 times over the years. I don’t think I ever realized how very much it was having Jesus say, “Love God, do as you please. And, of course, love your neighbor too.” This is a pretty powerful, if incredibly simple, message.
Jesus is holding a debate sort of conversation with some Sadducees and he was being overheard by a scribe. The scribe eave drops enough to be impressed with Jesus holding his own with the others. He approaches. In sincere curiosity he asks he question. “Teacher, what it the prototypical commandment?”
Just as we do, the scribe lived in a world full of variety for answers to almost anything and particularly for things religious. He sought a prime commandment to cut through the maze of viewpoints. He looked for one answer which would bring order and sense to the rest of religious life. I feel a real kinship with this guy because I am always testing what I would call my “prime metaphor”—the one image or story which is the yardstick with which I measure experience and all other stories which purport to be fact.
So Jesus answers. “Here is the prototype. Measure everything by this. Love the One God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. And, secondarily, love your neighbor as yourself.”
So, if it is really that simple, then why is it hard?
Maybe it is worth noting two parenthetical points in this narrative. One is that the scribe does not precisely quote back to Jesus what was said to him. He, according to Mark, changes the work for “mind”. Translated to English the word Jesus uses is translated “mind”. The word that the Scribe says back translates to “understanding”. That point, made by some, is pretty insignificant.
The second point that some discuss is the fact that Jesus says to the scribe, “you are close to the Kingdom”. Does that mean he is only part way there? Not really. It is like playing blind man’s bluff when you were a kid. We told the player, “you are getting warm.” “You are getting hot.” It wasn’t that we were trying to say, “you only have it half right.” We were saying, and Jesus was saying, “you are just about to solve this problem”. It is not significant. Jesus is telling the scribe, “You got it.”
It is that simple. Jesus literally calls this two sentence statement the prototype of the commandments. This is the foundation on which a Godly life is based. In the conversations we are having about the “Unbinding the Gospel” have included the notion that in the end we are called to “fall in love with God”.
That is the incredible message of Mark 12. And what is it like to be in love? It is a whole bunch of things that we never actually talk about in religious conversation. It is too human to turn about and apply to our religious lives.
Being “in love” takes a lot of stuff we talk about in church straight out of play. We say we are in church to gain a reward. When we are “in love” rewards are totally secondary and sometimes they are not even present. We sometimes say in church that God must be the best, or the most wonderful, or the most potent. When we are “in love” those are not really meaningful categories.
When we pledge love we say it will be “in sickness, in poorer conditions, and worse conditions.” When we are “in love” we say, you are so much TO ME, and if no one agrees with me, it doesn’t matter. We say, “you need not be the most handsome, the most beautiful, the most graceful, the one that everyone envies, or anything else. We only say, “I love you.”
Strangely enough we seem to say something quite different when we talk of God. We say, implicitly, I love you because you do the most for me, because you have the gifts that I want, because you are the biggest/best/only game in town God that I know. Seems like to me, that God would want at least the unreserved love that we offer to our family, spouses and those close to us. That is the definition of love that Jesus offers. And if someone is falling short of that sort of offering, I have a feeling it is not the scribe.
The only reason that this is hard is because we complicate it. We make it a way more complex message than it is.
We make it way more complicated because the fear of intimacy is great. Beneath every one of life’s requests for intimacy is a demand that we simply put ourselves on the line and accept the vulnerability that is going to be there.
It is easy to love a child when they are young, stay within arm’s length and we will not have to risk much at all about their independent behavior. Now, my older grandchildren are older—they are still wonderfully appealing, but they are now way past arm’s reach. They present the possibility of offering pain every time they take a risk. It is no longer easy to love them as it was when we could keep them safe. Yet, still, it is impossible not to love..
When we are older and seek a partner for life, we know the incredible risk involved. We know that means we will hurt in ways that we can’t even dream of. We know when we make the affirmations of love that they are for better and for worse, in health and in sickness, in prosperity and in want. We know all this and still risk all that for the gift of intimacy.
We are called on today to remember the looses we have. It is All Saints day—a day we are called to remember all the times we bet everything on love. We acknowledge that every time we did that the risk ended in pain and grief.
This day is to remind us also that they is an Ultimate Love which binds us together even in the face of death. The love of our Creator holds us always. The Love of Our Creator continues to beckon and invite us to fall in Love with God. When that happens, nothing else matters.
“Love God and do as you please.” I first heard those words from Arthur. Don’t start your memory banks running on Arthur. You are not supposed to know him and he isn’t famous. I went to both college and to seminary with the good reverend. We were in our Middler year at Louisville Seminary and working at a state hospital when five of us were riding home together on a Monday evening and somehow we were talking about “the rules of the faith”.
Arthur put forth the proposition that there were not so many rules as the rest of us thought. He quoted Augustine’s famous line, “Love God and do as you please.” It was understandable that Arthur might say this. He was a 60’s wild child…probably a little before his time. He knew more loopholes in the biblical system than most of us ever dreamed of. Whatever he quoted always seemed to be a bit self serving and could always be a pretext for him doing most anything he wanted. Never mind the of perceived limitations to Christian behavior. It was normal for Arthur Lee. What was disconcerting was that an icon of the Christian faith said it way back in the fourth century. Augustine, after all, was not some wild child. Well…he was pretty much a wild child if the truth were known. But like anyone back there far enough we guarded ourselves from the truth.
As I remember Arthur left seminary with the same deep conviction that he shared with us in the car that day. He went to Alaska to take a church which seemed not to warm to his observation about the rules of the Kingdom. He popped up again in my awareness in coal country in Illinois. There too, curse the luck, people did not seem to understand his brand of Christian life. Last I heard of him, he was working in Arkansas as a therapist in a mental health clinic. He was probably still looking for someone to agree with his fundamental understanding of Christian life. Everyone could listen to the “Love God” part. It was just he “do as you please” that they couldn’t appreciate.
This passage from Mark’s Gospel that we read this morning might give Arthur some solace. My guess is that I have preached this passage someplace between 8 and 15 times over the years. I don’t think I ever realized how very much it was having Jesus say, “Love God, do as you please. And, of course, love your neighbor too.” This is a pretty powerful, if incredibly simple, message.
Jesus is holding a debate sort of conversation with some Sadducees and he was being overheard by a scribe. The scribe eave drops enough to be impressed with Jesus holding his own with the others. He approaches. In sincere curiosity he asks he question. “Teacher, what it the prototypical commandment?”
Just as we do, the scribe lived in a world full of variety for answers to almost anything and particularly for things religious. He sought a prime commandment to cut through the maze of viewpoints. He looked for one answer which would bring order and sense to the rest of religious life. I feel a real kinship with this guy because I am always testing what I would call my “prime metaphor”—the one image or story which is the yardstick with which I measure experience and all other stories which purport to be fact.
So Jesus answers. “Here is the prototype. Measure everything by this. Love the One God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. And, secondarily, love your neighbor as yourself.”
So, if it is really that simple, then why is it hard?
Maybe it is worth noting two parenthetical points in this narrative. One is that the scribe does not precisely quote back to Jesus what was said to him. He, according to Mark, changes the work for “mind”. Translated to English the word Jesus uses is translated “mind”. The word that the Scribe says back translates to “understanding”. That point, made by some, is pretty insignificant.
The second point that some discuss is the fact that Jesus says to the scribe, “you are close to the Kingdom”. Does that mean he is only part way there? Not really. It is like playing blind man’s bluff when you were a kid. We told the player, “you are getting warm.” “You are getting hot.” It wasn’t that we were trying to say, “you only have it half right.” We were saying, and Jesus was saying, “you are just about to solve this problem”. It is not significant. Jesus is telling the scribe, “You got it.”
It is that simple. Jesus literally calls this two sentence statement the prototype of the commandments. This is the foundation on which a Godly life is based. In the conversations we are having about the “Unbinding the Gospel” have included the notion that in the end we are called to “fall in love with God”.
That is the incredible message of Mark 12. And what is it like to be in love? It is a whole bunch of things that we never actually talk about in religious conversation. It is too human to turn about and apply to our religious lives.
Being “in love” takes a lot of stuff we talk about in church straight out of play. We say we are in church to gain a reward. When we are “in love” rewards are totally secondary and sometimes they are not even present. We sometimes say in church that God must be the best, or the most wonderful, or the most potent. When we are “in love” those are not really meaningful categories.
When we pledge love we say it will be “in sickness, in poorer conditions, and worse conditions.” When we are “in love” we say, you are so much TO ME, and if no one agrees with me, it doesn’t matter. We say, “you need not be the most handsome, the most beautiful, the most graceful, the one that everyone envies, or anything else. We only say, “I love you.”
Strangely enough we seem to say something quite different when we talk of God. We say, implicitly, I love you because you do the most for me, because you have the gifts that I want, because you are the biggest/best/only game in town God that I know. Seems like to me, that God would want at least the unreserved love that we offer to our family, spouses and those close to us. That is the definition of love that Jesus offers. And if someone is falling short of that sort of offering, I have a feeling it is not the scribe.
The only reason that this is hard is because we complicate it. We make it a way more complex message than it is.
We make it way more complicated because the fear of intimacy is great. Beneath every one of life’s requests for intimacy is a demand that we simply put ourselves on the line and accept the vulnerability that is going to be there.
It is easy to love a child when they are young, stay within arm’s length and we will not have to risk much at all about their independent behavior. Now, my older grandchildren are older—they are still wonderfully appealing, but they are now way past arm’s reach. They present the possibility of offering pain every time they take a risk. It is no longer easy to love them as it was when we could keep them safe. Yet, still, it is impossible not to love..
When we are older and seek a partner for life, we know the incredible risk involved. We know that means we will hurt in ways that we can’t even dream of. We know when we make the affirmations of love that they are for better and for worse, in health and in sickness, in prosperity and in want. We know all this and still risk all that for the gift of intimacy.
We are called on today to remember the looses we have. It is All Saints day—a day we are called to remember all the times we bet everything on love. We acknowledge that every time we did that the risk ended in pain and grief.
This day is to remind us also that they is an Ultimate Love which binds us together even in the face of death. The love of our Creator holds us always. The Love of Our Creator continues to beckon and invite us to fall in Love with God. When that happens, nothing else matters.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
October 25, 2009 Sermon
“Son of Dirt” Mark 10:46-52 Lawrence Jackman
Today is Reformation Sunday. We Protestants make quite a thing of it usually. Now I am not exactly here to kill the sacred cow, but…… is anyone up for hamburger? My belief is that the whole business is infinitely more complex than we make it generally.
In 1500 the world of Europe was literally in the initial pangs of labor and giving birth to change on many fronts. The Reformation was something that had to happen just as a birth does when it is time.
There was political change underway. City-states were rising to the top of the political ladder. They had evolved from an earlier system but the change was of real substance. There was social change. The Feudal definitions of who people were and what they would do had broken down. In the between space of princes and serfs there arose a middle class of entrepreneurs and manufacturers. Division of labor really began to push the old definitions.
Economic change was afoot also. It was the start of the demise of the Agricultural age when everything pivoted around crops and movement into an age of manufacturing and toward improved farming as a sort of industry, if not yet industry in the full sense.
Technological change was out there dramatically. Now, I guess we have a hard time seeing it as true technology, but it was. The movable type printing press truly was a pivot point in history. It pulled together groups of people and made the world much smaller. It was as radical as the internet. Learning, education science were all under significant pressures to change. The Muslim world kick started a lot of our Western tradition into movement forward.
So all this stuff is out there. And for every new force of change there is an equal and opposite reaction to hold onto what has been. There is a literal life and death struggle to keep the world as it is. As with all such struggles there were serious attempts to co-opt God on behalf of one side or the other.
It is into this swirl of chaotic forces stumbles a little Augustinian monk named Martin Luther. He really had little to no grasp of the cosmic issues. His was a personal issue. Luther was about extreme pathological guilt. He burned with a sense of his own unworthiness. He was so driven by his sense of guilt that he literally wore out confessors. On his way to his quarters from confession he would remember something or become remorseful that he didn’t confess more freely. He would return to confession to fess up to this new deficit in his character.
Luther, quite unwittingly became the spark which ignited a re-formation of the whole business of the Church. He was teaching the book of Romans and a verse lit up for him. The citation was one that suddenly allowed the gift of lifting of his sense of guilt. The news he had never really appreciated was that “the righteous are made so through trust”. Had he been around in our experience we would have pumped him full of Zoloft and prayed for the best. There were no pharmaceuticals, but there was this promise. You do not need to be burdened with guilt—you can be free: just trust and be made just.
The awareness unleashed in Luther a sincere desire to talk the issue in scholarly dialogue. So, he went over to the chapel door and posted his thesis statements about his thoughts on the door. It was an invitation to debate—not a manifesto.
But the forces were out there. They played themselves out with Luther, the Papacy and the rest of the players being simply that—players in theater that they only scarcely influenced. And so, history was written by forces too strong to resist and it was shaped by the deep inner need in a single person.
Jesus walked down the road one day through Jericho. It was a different world from ours and certainly from the world of Luther. In really broad brush terms here was the problem and the fix of the religious world in which Jesus was born. The problem was, according to the religious people, that humans were not clean—they were impure. Some, of course, were more impure than others. Some were dirt. The fix, according to religious people, was that you did something, if possible, to become clean. You washed yourself of the dirty reality of your own outside and made it all better.
In short that was the religious reality. Well there sat this man by the road in Jericho. It was a bit of an equivalent of say Meridian Street in Indianapolis. He was the first century’s version of a homeless beggar with HIV. He was seen as dirty. His name literally meant “Bar” the son; “Timeaus” dirt. He was the Son of Dirt. He is tolerated and generally ignored. But there are some social conventions which regard him. He is to be quiet and as invisible as possible and to graciously/silently accept whatever alms may be dropped at his feet.
So the man is sitting there in his dark silence. And he hears the commotion going on in the street. He breaks the rule of social convention and begins to call out. And the good religious folk tell him to shut up. So he decides the rule needs to be fractured instead of just broken. He cries out all the more for the mercy he intuits is present in the man he cannot see. Religion has told him the solution for his filthiness. But Jesus offers him his first opportunity to diagnose his own problem. “What do you want?” “I want to see.” “You have got it. Want to go with us to Jerusalem?”
The world of Luther had the problem diagnosed for him, too. The problem, the good religious people said, was eternal salvation. Luther redefined the problem and when he did the forces waiting to play restructured and re formulated the Christian faith. Bar Timeaus was a spark among many in Jesus’ ministry. The forces present in the world of the first Century redefined religious reality.
Here is the most radical thing about the faith that Jesus brought to us. Jesus’ delivery on promise is this, “bring your problem; I am the way”. Jesus says clearly, that he can fix the problem that we define. Bar Timeaus’ issue was not dirty. It was that he could not see. Luther’s issue was not that he was in danger of hell, it was that he was tormented by the devils of guilt.
Now, lets think about that. I define my problem and I go in faith to Jesus. That is the story. Not, of course, that someone else defines it. And, of course, the problems may change from person to person and time to time. It may well be that we have a problem of an age.
It is true that, just like in the first century, there are forces at play that we do not even understand. The world is more than ripe for a new spark which explodes into a newly reformulated Church. The question is not whether this will happen, it will. The question is two fold—what will our response to newness be and where is the spark?
We are politically changing. In our country from Nixon to Clinton, diplomacy has emerged as the way to solve differences rather than war. That alone is enough political change to do heaven knows what.
There is social change and it is radical. Take, if you will, only the change around issues of gender in our society. In someplace between the age of “Rosie the Riveter” and now we have experienced a massive change that will continue.
There is economic change that is powerful. I always make it a point, when talking to a tech support person, of asking where they are from. You know the story—I am apt to be talking to someone in Texas, Colorado, India, Malaysia, or any point around the world. We live in a world economy and it gets more profound each day. When I get up in the morning and wonder what will happen on Wall Street today, I check Hong Kong where they have already closed trading.
Technological change is absolutely incredible. The internet is the printing press of our new world and it will reformulate us like nothing else. I have one internet site for Bible study that probably replaces 10,000 pages of books.
Our religious world, however, “ain’t doing so well”. Want this in down home terms? Bartholomew County, Indiana, counting nominal Christians, has more non-Christians than Christians. And we are the buckle on the Bible belt, for heaven’s sakes. Now it is really close to 50/50. There are 135 more non Christians than Christians in this county. And, as you may guess, the largest group of non Christians—matter of fact—the largest group of anything are folks who just do not relate to religion at all. They are not un-churched—they are simply areligious.
Here is what I think. I think we are promoting (again) an answer for which there is no longer a question. I think there is a desperate need for us to begin to listen for the real question in each individual and in the society as a whole. It isn’t that Jesus couldn’t fix dirty for Bar Timeaus, it isn’t that he couldn’t fix damnation for Martin Luther, it isn’t that he can’t fix sin for a person in this age. It is that the diagnosis belongs to the potential believer.
What is going to happen is this. Somebody in the majority portions of our world is going to begin to define the problem from their point of view. And I am hoping that they discover, buried in the debris of forgotten church messages, the answer to their question.
I think the diagnosis will be and the statement of need will sound like, “we need to belong”. The world is already saying in a myriad of ways that the deepest and profound need that is going unmet is the need to belong to others and to whatever gives order to this universe.
Someone is going to studying forgotten religious thoughts and is going to happen upon a biblical phrase (just as Luther did with justification by faith). And the new phrase is going to carry the impact, “I will be your God and you will be my people”.
And some Halloween soon we are going to look at our church doors and find the invitation to discussion about belonging and the faith.
Some tortured Luther like character, some incessant Son of Dirt, is going to clamor for a solution to THEIR issue. And when we start to pay attention, the volatile atmosphere that we have now—the world in labor for a new birth—will explode around us and emerge into a reformulated Christianity.
Get ready for the ride, because this is all going to happen.
We are going to hear the self diagnosed needs of the majority of our world. We are going to listen to the potential answer they have discovered. We are going to figure out whether we want to move with the spirit or fight the current of true reformation.
I think we are going to rise up on the wings of eagles and soar with the spirit.
Amen
Today is Reformation Sunday. We Protestants make quite a thing of it usually. Now I am not exactly here to kill the sacred cow, but…… is anyone up for hamburger? My belief is that the whole business is infinitely more complex than we make it generally.
In 1500 the world of Europe was literally in the initial pangs of labor and giving birth to change on many fronts. The Reformation was something that had to happen just as a birth does when it is time.
There was political change underway. City-states were rising to the top of the political ladder. They had evolved from an earlier system but the change was of real substance. There was social change. The Feudal definitions of who people were and what they would do had broken down. In the between space of princes and serfs there arose a middle class of entrepreneurs and manufacturers. Division of labor really began to push the old definitions.
Economic change was afoot also. It was the start of the demise of the Agricultural age when everything pivoted around crops and movement into an age of manufacturing and toward improved farming as a sort of industry, if not yet industry in the full sense.
Technological change was out there dramatically. Now, I guess we have a hard time seeing it as true technology, but it was. The movable type printing press truly was a pivot point in history. It pulled together groups of people and made the world much smaller. It was as radical as the internet. Learning, education science were all under significant pressures to change. The Muslim world kick started a lot of our Western tradition into movement forward.
So all this stuff is out there. And for every new force of change there is an equal and opposite reaction to hold onto what has been. There is a literal life and death struggle to keep the world as it is. As with all such struggles there were serious attempts to co-opt God on behalf of one side or the other.
It is into this swirl of chaotic forces stumbles a little Augustinian monk named Martin Luther. He really had little to no grasp of the cosmic issues. His was a personal issue. Luther was about extreme pathological guilt. He burned with a sense of his own unworthiness. He was so driven by his sense of guilt that he literally wore out confessors. On his way to his quarters from confession he would remember something or become remorseful that he didn’t confess more freely. He would return to confession to fess up to this new deficit in his character.
Luther, quite unwittingly became the spark which ignited a re-formation of the whole business of the Church. He was teaching the book of Romans and a verse lit up for him. The citation was one that suddenly allowed the gift of lifting of his sense of guilt. The news he had never really appreciated was that “the righteous are made so through trust”. Had he been around in our experience we would have pumped him full of Zoloft and prayed for the best. There were no pharmaceuticals, but there was this promise. You do not need to be burdened with guilt—you can be free: just trust and be made just.
The awareness unleashed in Luther a sincere desire to talk the issue in scholarly dialogue. So, he went over to the chapel door and posted his thesis statements about his thoughts on the door. It was an invitation to debate—not a manifesto.
But the forces were out there. They played themselves out with Luther, the Papacy and the rest of the players being simply that—players in theater that they only scarcely influenced. And so, history was written by forces too strong to resist and it was shaped by the deep inner need in a single person.
Jesus walked down the road one day through Jericho. It was a different world from ours and certainly from the world of Luther. In really broad brush terms here was the problem and the fix of the religious world in which Jesus was born. The problem was, according to the religious people, that humans were not clean—they were impure. Some, of course, were more impure than others. Some were dirt. The fix, according to religious people, was that you did something, if possible, to become clean. You washed yourself of the dirty reality of your own outside and made it all better.
In short that was the religious reality. Well there sat this man by the road in Jericho. It was a bit of an equivalent of say Meridian Street in Indianapolis. He was the first century’s version of a homeless beggar with HIV. He was seen as dirty. His name literally meant “Bar” the son; “Timeaus” dirt. He was the Son of Dirt. He is tolerated and generally ignored. But there are some social conventions which regard him. He is to be quiet and as invisible as possible and to graciously/silently accept whatever alms may be dropped at his feet.
So the man is sitting there in his dark silence. And he hears the commotion going on in the street. He breaks the rule of social convention and begins to call out. And the good religious folk tell him to shut up. So he decides the rule needs to be fractured instead of just broken. He cries out all the more for the mercy he intuits is present in the man he cannot see. Religion has told him the solution for his filthiness. But Jesus offers him his first opportunity to diagnose his own problem. “What do you want?” “I want to see.” “You have got it. Want to go with us to Jerusalem?”
The world of Luther had the problem diagnosed for him, too. The problem, the good religious people said, was eternal salvation. Luther redefined the problem and when he did the forces waiting to play restructured and re formulated the Christian faith. Bar Timeaus was a spark among many in Jesus’ ministry. The forces present in the world of the first Century redefined religious reality.
Here is the most radical thing about the faith that Jesus brought to us. Jesus’ delivery on promise is this, “bring your problem; I am the way”. Jesus says clearly, that he can fix the problem that we define. Bar Timeaus’ issue was not dirty. It was that he could not see. Luther’s issue was not that he was in danger of hell, it was that he was tormented by the devils of guilt.
Now, lets think about that. I define my problem and I go in faith to Jesus. That is the story. Not, of course, that someone else defines it. And, of course, the problems may change from person to person and time to time. It may well be that we have a problem of an age.
It is true that, just like in the first century, there are forces at play that we do not even understand. The world is more than ripe for a new spark which explodes into a newly reformulated Church. The question is not whether this will happen, it will. The question is two fold—what will our response to newness be and where is the spark?
We are politically changing. In our country from Nixon to Clinton, diplomacy has emerged as the way to solve differences rather than war. That alone is enough political change to do heaven knows what.
There is social change and it is radical. Take, if you will, only the change around issues of gender in our society. In someplace between the age of “Rosie the Riveter” and now we have experienced a massive change that will continue.
There is economic change that is powerful. I always make it a point, when talking to a tech support person, of asking where they are from. You know the story—I am apt to be talking to someone in Texas, Colorado, India, Malaysia, or any point around the world. We live in a world economy and it gets more profound each day. When I get up in the morning and wonder what will happen on Wall Street today, I check Hong Kong where they have already closed trading.
Technological change is absolutely incredible. The internet is the printing press of our new world and it will reformulate us like nothing else. I have one internet site for Bible study that probably replaces 10,000 pages of books.
Our religious world, however, “ain’t doing so well”. Want this in down home terms? Bartholomew County, Indiana, counting nominal Christians, has more non-Christians than Christians. And we are the buckle on the Bible belt, for heaven’s sakes. Now it is really close to 50/50. There are 135 more non Christians than Christians in this county. And, as you may guess, the largest group of non Christians—matter of fact—the largest group of anything are folks who just do not relate to religion at all. They are not un-churched—they are simply areligious.
Here is what I think. I think we are promoting (again) an answer for which there is no longer a question. I think there is a desperate need for us to begin to listen for the real question in each individual and in the society as a whole. It isn’t that Jesus couldn’t fix dirty for Bar Timeaus, it isn’t that he couldn’t fix damnation for Martin Luther, it isn’t that he can’t fix sin for a person in this age. It is that the diagnosis belongs to the potential believer.
What is going to happen is this. Somebody in the majority portions of our world is going to begin to define the problem from their point of view. And I am hoping that they discover, buried in the debris of forgotten church messages, the answer to their question.
I think the diagnosis will be and the statement of need will sound like, “we need to belong”. The world is already saying in a myriad of ways that the deepest and profound need that is going unmet is the need to belong to others and to whatever gives order to this universe.
Someone is going to studying forgotten religious thoughts and is going to happen upon a biblical phrase (just as Luther did with justification by faith). And the new phrase is going to carry the impact, “I will be your God and you will be my people”.
And some Halloween soon we are going to look at our church doors and find the invitation to discussion about belonging and the faith.
Some tortured Luther like character, some incessant Son of Dirt, is going to clamor for a solution to THEIR issue. And when we start to pay attention, the volatile atmosphere that we have now—the world in labor for a new birth—will explode around us and emerge into a reformulated Christianity.
Get ready for the ride, because this is all going to happen.
We are going to hear the self diagnosed needs of the majority of our world. We are going to listen to the potential answer they have discovered. We are going to figure out whether we want to move with the spirit or fight the current of true reformation.
I think we are going to rise up on the wings of eagles and soar with the spirit.
Amen
Sunday, October 18, 2009
“All About Power” Mark 10:35-45 Lawrence Jackman
Jimi Hendrix sang, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” That was way back in the 60’s.
The corollary to the Hendrix proposition is this: “Within me, when the power of love outweighs the love of power, I will know peace.” I do believe the first affirmation and I am completely convinced that the second is equally true.
However, the truth is that power, true power, is not what we think it is. The power of the faith and of the faithful really turns the worldly perception of power literally up-side-down. Jesus, in Mark, argues that power isn’t the way we understand it at all.
James and John are perhaps the most aristocratic of the Disciples. I think it is worth knowing that the story we create about the poor fishermen, sad tax collectors and simple people called the Disciples were not that at all. Fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were owners of boats and had prized products. The fish that Peter and the others drug in their nets were sold as far away as Rome. Matthew, the tax man, was a person of real wealth. He had accumulated enough to give away a lot of money—twice what he had defrauded of anyone. So it was with the others—these were businessmen of some means. They could simply take time off to pursue religious inquiry. They elected one to be the group’s treasurer and went off to seek their spiritual fortunes.
So James and John were part of a powerful family in the area of Galilee. They were the Sons of Zebedee (a.k.a. the Sons of Thunder). Some suggest that their momma put them up to the proposal they make to Jesus. It sounds like their thinking is still all about a very earthly Kingdom and not the Reign of God. “Lord”, they proffer, “do us a favor. Make us your two chief Lieutenants. Let my brother be Secretary of State and I will hold down the Defense Department.”
So Jesus clarifies what real power is all about. “The last will be first. The first will be last”. “We are not like the norms of this world. We are rather devoted to a completely different set of norms. If you want to be greatest, you need to become slave of all the others. Catch on guys, we are here not to be served—but rather to serve.”
Now I know that it is not going to strike us as practical anymore than it struck the Disciples as particularly practical. The person with power to them was the person in the corner office, the persons with more stripes on his sleeve, the person who said “jump” and the people without power would say “How high?”
Again, the truth seems to be that those folks, at their very best, can manage and control very superficial elements of behavior and those only for a little while. Now what of a sort of power that controls and manages outcomes for a long time?
Lots of us own dogs and/or cats. One of the primary differences in these two critters is that you can manage dog behavior and you can adjust to cat behavior. They each appeal to a sort of power definition operational in the human being. Our Golden and Border Collie mix will fall over himself to do anything that pleases Kati the granddaughter. Our junk yard cat Cirrus will sometimes grace her with his presence and even allow her to pet him.
Dwight Eisenhower, Henry III, Napoleon and others who couldn’t stand anyone who didn’t come when called or salute when commanded and they also hated cats. Mohammed, Schweitzer, Florence Nightingale, Mark Twain and others who could handle life with some patience and./ or humor all loved cats.
Which list of people do you believe shaped the world more? Beneath the surface of things God knows that we are all a bunch of cats. We are not led by those who “Lord it over us” or at least not for very long. We are led, if you can call it that, by a loving and gentle hand.
Nearly all of us can make a couple of lists of people who wanted to impact us. One list would be the folk who would control from the “top down” approach. They would herd us, nip at our heels like a Border Collie working sheep, harness us in teams, structure us and always make choices for us. They include not just people close but also people in levels of leadership. They probably include some choices we could make for a pastor of this church. Those folk work themselves very hard trying to mold others.
We are a bunch of cats. We don’t herd all that well. It isn’t that we can’t be domesticated, we can. We just do it on our terms. And there is a second list of folk who have real power and lasting power over us. For me it includes folks like my Granddad, my mother and a long list of folks you don’t know. Kearney Adams, Wilbur Davis, George Edwards and so many others. Those people knew I was a cat and couldn’t be herded. They led from beneath and the irony is that they did (and do) mold me. They continue to make me into everything that I am every day of my life.
Now given that, what do you think real power is about (at least for me)?
The short term stuff of power (the worldly definition) is really about control. And control is really all about fear when it is talking about us and our worldly approach. We want to manage a child’s behavior for their own good. We may want the same for a spouse, an employee, a student, or any of a number of people. We want to control them, because we can see the long term consequences better than they can. We know what is best.
Perhaps we do, but you know what? It doesn’t matter. The question is not do we know more, but rather how can we have the best, most lasting and most positive impact with our lives. The answer is, we can practice a different sort of faith filled leadership.
Now what sort of impact will I have on other people’s lives if I can but manage to subordinate the fear in my life to the love and trust in my soul. I know me. I am not going to be able to get rid of fear. What though, if I can run my human relationships as though the rule is really love and not fear. What Hendrix didn’t really seem to understand is that the “love of power” rests in a very frightened place in the human soul. Those who “love power” are ultimately people need our compassion.
If I trust the future; if I believe that the “universe is a friendly place”; if I believe that God’s hand is really all that is needed at the helm-- then maybe I can give myself to a servant sort of leadership.
One of the things I used to do was work with kids in the foster system. Often they would live half or more of their lives in a system of control. All choices and decisions were made for these kids and very few, if any, were made by them. Where they would live tomorrow, when they would see parents, what they would study in school, and everything about their lives would be carefully and usually very lovingly managed.
Then, about the time they turned 17 and we knew that the system would simply drop them into the world in another year, we got worried. We knew in our hearts that they had been controlled and not really nurtured or served. We prayed that the love which had gone into our care would outweigh the rightful fear that they couldn’t manage. We started, with some despair, to try to make them ready for their date with the world.
We had transitional living programs as a crash course in responding to leadership. I always looked for people to work in those programs who loved a lot and trusted a lot. I looked for servant leaders and not for worldly ones. Sometimes the best people I could get were frankly not all that bright or great at living their own lives, but they ultimately trusted that life was a survivable thing. Those were the people who could mold human beings into better beings.
My sincere belief is that Jesus’ teaching about power in Mark’s Gospel is not some warm fuzzy ideal that can only happen in another realm. It is the most practical advice that you will ever get or give to another. Want to change the world? Do it from beneath and not from on top. Want to help another grow? Be a servant and not a ruler. Maybe you are really ambitious, do you want to change the whole course of history and the future of this world? Seek servant status and not a ruler’s throne.
I have an experimental observation for you to make as you go home today. First remember what the worldly powers were all about in Jesus’ day. Caesar had control of so much. The Caesars had the money, the government, the army, the ships. Rome had much of the world under their rule. They could, in the words of Jesus, “lord it over others”.
Christians had not so much worldly power. They were fed to lions, crucified, persecuted and dominated. They came from a country that was a puppet of the government in Rome. Not so much….. not so much of everything for the Church. Except they had this lesson about real power—about being servants.
On your way home today make me a count of two things. How many Roman soldiers you can see and how many crosses you can see. Who won that decisive battle of history and what was the operational definition of power?
Amen
Jimi Hendrix sang, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” That was way back in the 60’s.
The corollary to the Hendrix proposition is this: “Within me, when the power of love outweighs the love of power, I will know peace.” I do believe the first affirmation and I am completely convinced that the second is equally true.
However, the truth is that power, true power, is not what we think it is. The power of the faith and of the faithful really turns the worldly perception of power literally up-side-down. Jesus, in Mark, argues that power isn’t the way we understand it at all.
James and John are perhaps the most aristocratic of the Disciples. I think it is worth knowing that the story we create about the poor fishermen, sad tax collectors and simple people called the Disciples were not that at all. Fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were owners of boats and had prized products. The fish that Peter and the others drug in their nets were sold as far away as Rome. Matthew, the tax man, was a person of real wealth. He had accumulated enough to give away a lot of money—twice what he had defrauded of anyone. So it was with the others—these were businessmen of some means. They could simply take time off to pursue religious inquiry. They elected one to be the group’s treasurer and went off to seek their spiritual fortunes.
So James and John were part of a powerful family in the area of Galilee. They were the Sons of Zebedee (a.k.a. the Sons of Thunder). Some suggest that their momma put them up to the proposal they make to Jesus. It sounds like their thinking is still all about a very earthly Kingdom and not the Reign of God. “Lord”, they proffer, “do us a favor. Make us your two chief Lieutenants. Let my brother be Secretary of State and I will hold down the Defense Department.”
So Jesus clarifies what real power is all about. “The last will be first. The first will be last”. “We are not like the norms of this world. We are rather devoted to a completely different set of norms. If you want to be greatest, you need to become slave of all the others. Catch on guys, we are here not to be served—but rather to serve.”
Now I know that it is not going to strike us as practical anymore than it struck the Disciples as particularly practical. The person with power to them was the person in the corner office, the persons with more stripes on his sleeve, the person who said “jump” and the people without power would say “How high?”
Again, the truth seems to be that those folks, at their very best, can manage and control very superficial elements of behavior and those only for a little while. Now what of a sort of power that controls and manages outcomes for a long time?
Lots of us own dogs and/or cats. One of the primary differences in these two critters is that you can manage dog behavior and you can adjust to cat behavior. They each appeal to a sort of power definition operational in the human being. Our Golden and Border Collie mix will fall over himself to do anything that pleases Kati the granddaughter. Our junk yard cat Cirrus will sometimes grace her with his presence and even allow her to pet him.
Dwight Eisenhower, Henry III, Napoleon and others who couldn’t stand anyone who didn’t come when called or salute when commanded and they also hated cats. Mohammed, Schweitzer, Florence Nightingale, Mark Twain and others who could handle life with some patience and./ or humor all loved cats.
Which list of people do you believe shaped the world more? Beneath the surface of things God knows that we are all a bunch of cats. We are not led by those who “Lord it over us” or at least not for very long. We are led, if you can call it that, by a loving and gentle hand.
Nearly all of us can make a couple of lists of people who wanted to impact us. One list would be the folk who would control from the “top down” approach. They would herd us, nip at our heels like a Border Collie working sheep, harness us in teams, structure us and always make choices for us. They include not just people close but also people in levels of leadership. They probably include some choices we could make for a pastor of this church. Those folk work themselves very hard trying to mold others.
We are a bunch of cats. We don’t herd all that well. It isn’t that we can’t be domesticated, we can. We just do it on our terms. And there is a second list of folk who have real power and lasting power over us. For me it includes folks like my Granddad, my mother and a long list of folks you don’t know. Kearney Adams, Wilbur Davis, George Edwards and so many others. Those people knew I was a cat and couldn’t be herded. They led from beneath and the irony is that they did (and do) mold me. They continue to make me into everything that I am every day of my life.
Now given that, what do you think real power is about (at least for me)?
The short term stuff of power (the worldly definition) is really about control. And control is really all about fear when it is talking about us and our worldly approach. We want to manage a child’s behavior for their own good. We may want the same for a spouse, an employee, a student, or any of a number of people. We want to control them, because we can see the long term consequences better than they can. We know what is best.
Perhaps we do, but you know what? It doesn’t matter. The question is not do we know more, but rather how can we have the best, most lasting and most positive impact with our lives. The answer is, we can practice a different sort of faith filled leadership.
Now what sort of impact will I have on other people’s lives if I can but manage to subordinate the fear in my life to the love and trust in my soul. I know me. I am not going to be able to get rid of fear. What though, if I can run my human relationships as though the rule is really love and not fear. What Hendrix didn’t really seem to understand is that the “love of power” rests in a very frightened place in the human soul. Those who “love power” are ultimately people need our compassion.
If I trust the future; if I believe that the “universe is a friendly place”; if I believe that God’s hand is really all that is needed at the helm-- then maybe I can give myself to a servant sort of leadership.
One of the things I used to do was work with kids in the foster system. Often they would live half or more of their lives in a system of control. All choices and decisions were made for these kids and very few, if any, were made by them. Where they would live tomorrow, when they would see parents, what they would study in school, and everything about their lives would be carefully and usually very lovingly managed.
Then, about the time they turned 17 and we knew that the system would simply drop them into the world in another year, we got worried. We knew in our hearts that they had been controlled and not really nurtured or served. We prayed that the love which had gone into our care would outweigh the rightful fear that they couldn’t manage. We started, with some despair, to try to make them ready for their date with the world.
We had transitional living programs as a crash course in responding to leadership. I always looked for people to work in those programs who loved a lot and trusted a lot. I looked for servant leaders and not for worldly ones. Sometimes the best people I could get were frankly not all that bright or great at living their own lives, but they ultimately trusted that life was a survivable thing. Those were the people who could mold human beings into better beings.
My sincere belief is that Jesus’ teaching about power in Mark’s Gospel is not some warm fuzzy ideal that can only happen in another realm. It is the most practical advice that you will ever get or give to another. Want to change the world? Do it from beneath and not from on top. Want to help another grow? Be a servant and not a ruler. Maybe you are really ambitious, do you want to change the whole course of history and the future of this world? Seek servant status and not a ruler’s throne.
I have an experimental observation for you to make as you go home today. First remember what the worldly powers were all about in Jesus’ day. Caesar had control of so much. The Caesars had the money, the government, the army, the ships. Rome had much of the world under their rule. They could, in the words of Jesus, “lord it over others”.
Christians had not so much worldly power. They were fed to lions, crucified, persecuted and dominated. They came from a country that was a puppet of the government in Rome. Not so much….. not so much of everything for the Church. Except they had this lesson about real power—about being servants.
On your way home today make me a count of two things. How many Roman soldiers you can see and how many crosses you can see. Who won that decisive battle of history and what was the operational definition of power?
Amen
Sunday, October 11, 2009
October 11, 2009 Sernon
“That Which Weighs Us Down” Mark 10:17-31 Lawrence Jackman
Today we read from what is one of the more disturbing passages from the New Testament and from a terribly unsettling book of the Old Testament. Don’t ask me why the lectionary took us here, but it did. Both passages, it seems to me bring us “face to face” with the issue of what is allowed to stand between our souls and the Devine. It is axiomatic in the story from Mark that “possessions can stand between us and God.”
The book of Job, however, goes several more steps in laying out a picture of righteousness that lets nothing stand between Job and God. The clear intent of the book is to lay out the proposition that, for the righteous individual, nothing will stand between God and good people. Even as Job develops personal contempt for God, the relationship is still there. Job does not like the relationship and is clearly angry, yet he does not abandon the working principle of his life—that he is and is to be in relationship to God.
Now neither of these stories have much comfort to offer us. There are some caveats that really need to be mentioned. First of all, you need to understand that the Book of Job is some very powerful things and, at the same time, it is not a whole bunch of things. It is not a story to be appreciated in a concrete way. This is a morality play. It is akin to any other morality story that spins a yarn in order to, in the end, assert a rather simple lesson. But the story itself, puts the lesson in a setting like a gemstone in an extravagant ring. The lesson would mean not near as much if the story wasn’t told for setting.
Aesop’s Fables, Uncle Remus’ Tales and others come to mind as this sort of literary form. You can hardly say, “slow and steady wins the race”, without someone chiming in with “the hare and the tortoise”. “Don’t throw me in the briar patch” is equivalent with another being outsmarted and punishment ends up meaning that you just got turned loose from real pain or even death. Now, even though people will finish your quote when you say, “the patience of a ……” , with “Job”. The book has a bigger message than that one simple word.
So here is what not to get carried away with when you hear the story of Job. Skip right over the malevolent set up for this story, that is not what it is about. The set up is God and Satan playing a chess game in which the character Job becomes a pawn. “Let’s see how much grief we can give him before he curses you and the life you propose”, says Satan. “You are on”, answers God and the play is begun. That is all literary device to establish the sequential ripping away of all the tangible things in Job’s life in what ends up being a trial of unbelievable proportions. This story is about the character Job and not about God or Satan. It is most certainly not about who wins the chess match.
While part of the issue may be patience, much more of this story is about the perseverance of a single human as he seeks to be faithful to the creator. This is a story about a human and his relationships with his family, with his well meaning friends, and with the Creator.
This story is not about God testing a man in a game of “one-up” with Satan. It is, rather, a story about a man’s passion for God that will not be overcome.
The story in Mark is a bit different. It is about a person who lets possessions come between him and doing what he knows to be the homecoming of his soul. Now this is also a story that really needs some perspective. We say, rightly, this is the story of the rich young ruler. Look, I am old, I don’t rule anybody and I am not rich—it is not about me. And, we add in our hearts, this is certainly not about my possessions. I am not wealthy enough. The message is from us to God, “don’t mess with my possessions”.
And that boils down almost to a threat—it says this is something that can come between me and God.
We probably ought to explore, just for honesty’s sake, the assumption that we are not indeed rich. There is some stunning information out there. A high school student working fast food for 20 hours a week makes more money than, ready for this? That student makes more than 85 percent of the world’s population. Throw in a very minimum value for the housing, food and transportation that the parents provide and you have someone who rates up there in the 90’s.
Last Thursday our presbytery approved a minimum salary schedule that places a starting minister in the top couple percent. A starting teacher in this country is richer than more than 90 people out of 100. A starting lawyer is in the top three percent.
My observation is that we are, everyone of us, rich young rulers. Some of us just happen to be not terribly young. The ruler lets his stuff come between him and God.
So what is it we let enter and stay in that space between God and our soul? Because however proximate we are to another being. However close to the other, there is always a space or a gap. There is the arena where “freedom of choice” lays. And the things we allow in that space are that which weigh us down. They weigh us down when they are on a purely human level and certainly when they involve us and God.
It isn’t that those things must be selfish or that they are bad. It is what our free choice makes them to be that can become a problem.
We can be weighed down by good and wonderful and highly valued things and even by people. It is clearer when it is something material that we can measure objectively but it is just as operational when it is something like a human relationship, or even the cleanest human love of which we are capable.
My friend Jay was a good man. He came from and lived in a rough and tumble world where people struggled, confronted and intimidated each other. Tears were streaming down his face because he had just lost his dear son to an illness. “I just left to go get a sandwich in the cafeteria. I was only gone for a minute.” He said to me.
I responded to his implied question. “Kenny couldn’t get out of here with you hanging onto his ankles. You were holding him down. He needed to go home.” That could have been a cheap thing to say. But what I said was born in a relationship with me and Jay and Kenny and it was OK to say. Then, when it was no longer Kenny, it became a conversation that said Jay still sought, loved, and wanted God more than ever. The loss wasn’t going to weigh him down.
So what floats around in that space for you or for me? What are the highest and best and most beloved realities that you let hover up there with God in that divine arena where we can and do make choices?
For the rich young ruler it was his things. If he had to make a choice between God and his stuff, he would turn his back on God. Remember it was not without sadness that he did this, he was sorry that he was making the choice. It wasn’t about belief—he believed in God and even in Jesus. It wasn’t about understanding; he had that too. It wasn’t about good or bad behavior because that too was in place. This was a good behavior young man. One might presume that this man had it up on more than half the disciples as presenting good character. He would have made a pretty good Presbyterian, you know? He was a presentable, correct, and appropriate guy—just what a person might want for a son-in-law.
My space is occupied by good and wonderful things along with a good and wonder filled God. My space of most dear things is occupied by a wife, by my kids and grandkids, by the lifestyle I want to live and by valuable chores to attend. My space has a lot of church stuff floating through it. There is a rich heritage of tradition, of education and of types of service. None of that is bad. All of it is good. But I can’t let any of those most dear realities come between me and God.
The challenge here is not about money, much that stewardship season might want us to see. It is simply and always about ultimate priorities.
In organizational work of planning a direction for an organization we often go through a process. You put all the good ideas up on the board. Then you rank them in a sort of moral ranking. This set of things are good, but low on the list. This set is higher but not yet the highest. Then, left, is a set of realities that are highest and best.
But even that set must be prioritized. So up there someplace are the things which you rightly claim as the highest and best. God’s claim on your life is among the items on that list. Now is time to look at what is highest.
Amen
Today we read from what is one of the more disturbing passages from the New Testament and from a terribly unsettling book of the Old Testament. Don’t ask me why the lectionary took us here, but it did. Both passages, it seems to me bring us “face to face” with the issue of what is allowed to stand between our souls and the Devine. It is axiomatic in the story from Mark that “possessions can stand between us and God.”
The book of Job, however, goes several more steps in laying out a picture of righteousness that lets nothing stand between Job and God. The clear intent of the book is to lay out the proposition that, for the righteous individual, nothing will stand between God and good people. Even as Job develops personal contempt for God, the relationship is still there. Job does not like the relationship and is clearly angry, yet he does not abandon the working principle of his life—that he is and is to be in relationship to God.
Now neither of these stories have much comfort to offer us. There are some caveats that really need to be mentioned. First of all, you need to understand that the Book of Job is some very powerful things and, at the same time, it is not a whole bunch of things. It is not a story to be appreciated in a concrete way. This is a morality play. It is akin to any other morality story that spins a yarn in order to, in the end, assert a rather simple lesson. But the story itself, puts the lesson in a setting like a gemstone in an extravagant ring. The lesson would mean not near as much if the story wasn’t told for setting.
Aesop’s Fables, Uncle Remus’ Tales and others come to mind as this sort of literary form. You can hardly say, “slow and steady wins the race”, without someone chiming in with “the hare and the tortoise”. “Don’t throw me in the briar patch” is equivalent with another being outsmarted and punishment ends up meaning that you just got turned loose from real pain or even death. Now, even though people will finish your quote when you say, “the patience of a ……” , with “Job”. The book has a bigger message than that one simple word.
So here is what not to get carried away with when you hear the story of Job. Skip right over the malevolent set up for this story, that is not what it is about. The set up is God and Satan playing a chess game in which the character Job becomes a pawn. “Let’s see how much grief we can give him before he curses you and the life you propose”, says Satan. “You are on”, answers God and the play is begun. That is all literary device to establish the sequential ripping away of all the tangible things in Job’s life in what ends up being a trial of unbelievable proportions. This story is about the character Job and not about God or Satan. It is most certainly not about who wins the chess match.
While part of the issue may be patience, much more of this story is about the perseverance of a single human as he seeks to be faithful to the creator. This is a story about a human and his relationships with his family, with his well meaning friends, and with the Creator.
This story is not about God testing a man in a game of “one-up” with Satan. It is, rather, a story about a man’s passion for God that will not be overcome.
The story in Mark is a bit different. It is about a person who lets possessions come between him and doing what he knows to be the homecoming of his soul. Now this is also a story that really needs some perspective. We say, rightly, this is the story of the rich young ruler. Look, I am old, I don’t rule anybody and I am not rich—it is not about me. And, we add in our hearts, this is certainly not about my possessions. I am not wealthy enough. The message is from us to God, “don’t mess with my possessions”.
And that boils down almost to a threat—it says this is something that can come between me and God.
We probably ought to explore, just for honesty’s sake, the assumption that we are not indeed rich. There is some stunning information out there. A high school student working fast food for 20 hours a week makes more money than, ready for this? That student makes more than 85 percent of the world’s population. Throw in a very minimum value for the housing, food and transportation that the parents provide and you have someone who rates up there in the 90’s.
Last Thursday our presbytery approved a minimum salary schedule that places a starting minister in the top couple percent. A starting teacher in this country is richer than more than 90 people out of 100. A starting lawyer is in the top three percent.
My observation is that we are, everyone of us, rich young rulers. Some of us just happen to be not terribly young. The ruler lets his stuff come between him and God.
So what is it we let enter and stay in that space between God and our soul? Because however proximate we are to another being. However close to the other, there is always a space or a gap. There is the arena where “freedom of choice” lays. And the things we allow in that space are that which weigh us down. They weigh us down when they are on a purely human level and certainly when they involve us and God.
It isn’t that those things must be selfish or that they are bad. It is what our free choice makes them to be that can become a problem.
We can be weighed down by good and wonderful and highly valued things and even by people. It is clearer when it is something material that we can measure objectively but it is just as operational when it is something like a human relationship, or even the cleanest human love of which we are capable.
My friend Jay was a good man. He came from and lived in a rough and tumble world where people struggled, confronted and intimidated each other. Tears were streaming down his face because he had just lost his dear son to an illness. “I just left to go get a sandwich in the cafeteria. I was only gone for a minute.” He said to me.
I responded to his implied question. “Kenny couldn’t get out of here with you hanging onto his ankles. You were holding him down. He needed to go home.” That could have been a cheap thing to say. But what I said was born in a relationship with me and Jay and Kenny and it was OK to say. Then, when it was no longer Kenny, it became a conversation that said Jay still sought, loved, and wanted God more than ever. The loss wasn’t going to weigh him down.
So what floats around in that space for you or for me? What are the highest and best and most beloved realities that you let hover up there with God in that divine arena where we can and do make choices?
For the rich young ruler it was his things. If he had to make a choice between God and his stuff, he would turn his back on God. Remember it was not without sadness that he did this, he was sorry that he was making the choice. It wasn’t about belief—he believed in God and even in Jesus. It wasn’t about understanding; he had that too. It wasn’t about good or bad behavior because that too was in place. This was a good behavior young man. One might presume that this man had it up on more than half the disciples as presenting good character. He would have made a pretty good Presbyterian, you know? He was a presentable, correct, and appropriate guy—just what a person might want for a son-in-law.
My space is occupied by good and wonderful things along with a good and wonder filled God. My space of most dear things is occupied by a wife, by my kids and grandkids, by the lifestyle I want to live and by valuable chores to attend. My space has a lot of church stuff floating through it. There is a rich heritage of tradition, of education and of types of service. None of that is bad. All of it is good. But I can’t let any of those most dear realities come between me and God.
The challenge here is not about money, much that stewardship season might want us to see. It is simply and always about ultimate priorities.
In organizational work of planning a direction for an organization we often go through a process. You put all the good ideas up on the board. Then you rank them in a sort of moral ranking. This set of things are good, but low on the list. This set is higher but not yet the highest. Then, left, is a set of realities that are highest and best.
But even that set must be prioritized. So up there someplace are the things which you rightly claim as the highest and best. God’s claim on your life is among the items on that list. Now is time to look at what is highest.
Amen
Sunday, September 27, 2009
September 27 Sermon
“How Big is Our Tent?” Mark 9:38-50 Lawrence Jackman
When I was a kid, I was something of a geek. Oh, OK not something—a totally geeky little kid with interests that ranged from the esoteric to the just plain idiosyncratic and sometimes crossed the line to weird. ( I am much older now.) So, one of my kid interests was in raising and breeding Guppies. I wanted an easy task, that was the breeding part. But I also wanted color patterns and behavioral characteristics – that was the highly geeky part. So I got lots of observation time in with my silent little friends. And something that I discovered very quickly is a principle that I have never forgotten about animal behavior (including humans) is what I call the “Guppies in the fish bowl” lesson.
Essentially the population of Guppies in any container will expand to fill the capacity of the container. Then they will self limit. At a certain point the population will level out and no more expansion of population will happen unless there is contraction. If I took out a couple of dozen fish to give to a friend, they would be replaced rather quickly. If I did not take any out, no more would come along. This was a fascinating reality to a geeky little kid. And it fascinates me yet.
There is a lot of church organizational issues that parallel the issue of “Guppies in the fishbowl”. For instance, in some organizationally subconscious way we appear to develop as congregations a notion of appropriate size for our colony of faithful. We max out at that level and will exchange positions, but not really grow. If we loose a few families we will work to replace them, if not we will work to limit the population of our bowl. This is true of church congregations across the board. It is just something that churches do.
It is easier to see in others than it is in ourselves. I had a friend who was a Southern Baptist Lay Preacher before I helped him see the Presbyterian Light. David and I were observing a very successful Baptist group in our town. “Watch”, he said, “in another few months they will have a fight and then split into two groups. It is the way Baptists do it.” While one denomination may manage their bowls differently—every group seems to, again on a subconscious level, manage the size of their bowls.
Further, different congregations elect different sizes to “top out” at. Some of our congregations cap population at a couple of dozen worshiping persons. Some go to 100 as a top number; some cap things at higher numbers, etc.
Now all that is just a fact of life. It is no fault and if any of it fits this congregation, you need to know that it fits almost every congregation in every denomination. There ends up being a sort of a dynamic tension between inclusion and exclusion of others.
The passage from Mark discusses both the issue of inclusion and of exclusion of others. It is Jesus himself making some incredibly inclusive statements about who belongs in the tent or in the bowl as it were. But then, it turns 180 degrees and in the next sentence Mark sees Jesus saying some of the more powerfully exclusive statements of the New Testament. Which is true? Or are they both true in a sort of continuum or tension?
A couple of things about the passage. For more reasons than one the two parts do not seem to have originally been said together. The first part, the one that is so very inclusive seems more primitive and quite a bit more straightforward. The second part is one that is exclusive. It is symbolic in nature, more sophisticated in language, and implies a much more developed sense of the church than simply the disciples group with Jesus.
These two stories being made into one is an indication that as early as there was church history, there was a push and pull between being radically inclusive and being intentionally exclusive. It is almost like Mark spun these two stories together to explain and expand the first story itself.
The first one is pretty straight forward. The disciples have been out on a short mission and Jesus has stayed behind. They come back, find him and make a report that has little to do with their mission. “Teacher, we saw a man casting out demons in your name. We took care of that and told him not to do it.” “Aren’t you proud of us?”
“Oh, come on friends”, says Jesus, “if this man is not against us, he is for us. He is doing something good in my name. How bad can he be? And, even if he is bad and we have no evidence of that, how long can he stay that way doing good things and using my good name?” “Leave him alone.”
That is three of this baker’s dozen verses. Now the other nine seem to spin a different story. First this is symbolic talk according to most people. If the church is the body of Christ, then this talk of parts of the body become symbols for members of the church. This part of the passage becomes a discussion of excommunication at its earliest level in the church. A foot, a hand or an eye are individual members of a body. Causing the church to stumble is the sin of consequence, according to the passage. The lesson is this, if a member causes the whole system to go down—kick them out. Better to amputate a piece of the body than to have the whole thing go down.
That is exclusive!
(I have a felt obligation to say one more time: this is symbol language. It is not meant to suggest that people go around performing self amputations on their own bodies. It never was that and is not now. This is about the body of Christ—the church.)
That said, this is exclusive stuff. So how does the tension work out between radical inclusive and powerful exclusion?
It may not seem it, but this is quite practical stuff. Suppose that a group of people who come to worship here sometimes begins to sense some ownership in the ministry of this place. They open up a web site to host a “Friends of Fairlawn” page teaching some biblical content, offering prayers for others, and promoting service missions in the community. Remember that this group is using the church’s name but is completely outside of the church. The session has no control, not even on a theoretical level over what the group does or says. How would we respond to that issue, keeping in mind Jesus’ directive to, “Leave them alone!”
That, by the way, is an issue before our Presbytery in precisely parallel fashion about the Presbytery and not a congregation. What is the biblical way to respond ? No surprise to you, perhaps, my impression is that we should run with the biblical imperative, “If they ain’t agin us, they are for us.” Let them run without a leash.
Now my perspective is jaded with the benefit of things like being old. After all, how far are they going to run on my watch? I believe that the tent ought to be monstrous in size. Can a church have half a dozen adulterers, three or four shady business people, a gossip or two, and a partridge in a pear tree? I have seen churches with more of every group except the partridge in the pear tree. (I’ve never seen one of those anywhere.) The question is not are bad behaviors present, but rather are those behaviors ones that either lead the innocent astray or cause the body to stumble.
It isn’t that those defects aren’t present that is important. It is rather that those defects in some, do not lead others astray. That they do not cause others to stumble.
The trick becomes determination of what is truly against. The assumption being, if it is not against us, it must be for us. Secondly the evaluation that is necessary is discerning that which “makes the body stumble” or “leads a little one astray”.
If someone’s defect, or sin, or life leads innocent people astray, then it is a problem. If it causes other people to stumble it is a problem. If my bad behavior truly leads others to fail in coming into Christian life, that is a serious problem and someone needs to leave or straighten up immediately.
Back in 1983 Presbyterians were involved in a massive effort to reunite the northern and southern churches. Like we do everything else, this was great committee, commission and Assembly wide processing and debate. A powerful and persuasive leader in the southern branch of the church kept us focused on framing the constitution of the church in a way that served a particular political purpose. The two entire denominations were literally stumbling over themselves to accommodate this clergyman.
All Andy Jumper did in that whole process was keep us stumbling on the road to reunion. I kept feeling and saying, “He is not our friend. He is going to leave anyway. Why are we doing what he says?” “Let’s put our backs to the wall and tell him NO!”
Well we didn’t do that. We continued to frame who we were and would become based on trying to appease this man. He did leave anyway, shortly after we took our last stumbling steps toward reunion. We should have done better and recognized our stumbling. That is the stumbling side of the issue.
Based in risk, there is a valid position for exclusion.
If, on the other hand, my sins (or yours) cause the church to be embarrassed – big deal. It is time for the church to get over itself.
My belief is that our tent is supposed to be big—great big. It needs to include almost everyone and nearly every group. We need not artificially identify some conditions for correction and others for benign neglect UNLESS this is about stumbling or leading astray.
There is a story about Pope John XXXIII. He was the revolutionary old man who lead the way into Vatican II. John was elected because they could not find a successor who enough people would agree on. John was old and somewhat frail. The logic was he would be an interim pope for a year or so because he would not live long. He lived for five years and changed the world.
So when he was first feeling his oats as pope, he was in the Vatican and a Cardinal was trying to talk some sense into him. “Holy Father”, he intoned, “what are we doing to the church?” John went over to one of the windows—the stained glass kind that you can’t see through—opened it and declared, “We are letting in a little fresh air.”
Time for us to do the same. Let our tent be an open one and big enough for all.
When I was a kid, I was something of a geek. Oh, OK not something—a totally geeky little kid with interests that ranged from the esoteric to the just plain idiosyncratic and sometimes crossed the line to weird. ( I am much older now.) So, one of my kid interests was in raising and breeding Guppies. I wanted an easy task, that was the breeding part. But I also wanted color patterns and behavioral characteristics – that was the highly geeky part. So I got lots of observation time in with my silent little friends. And something that I discovered very quickly is a principle that I have never forgotten about animal behavior (including humans) is what I call the “Guppies in the fish bowl” lesson.
Essentially the population of Guppies in any container will expand to fill the capacity of the container. Then they will self limit. At a certain point the population will level out and no more expansion of population will happen unless there is contraction. If I took out a couple of dozen fish to give to a friend, they would be replaced rather quickly. If I did not take any out, no more would come along. This was a fascinating reality to a geeky little kid. And it fascinates me yet.
There is a lot of church organizational issues that parallel the issue of “Guppies in the fishbowl”. For instance, in some organizationally subconscious way we appear to develop as congregations a notion of appropriate size for our colony of faithful. We max out at that level and will exchange positions, but not really grow. If we loose a few families we will work to replace them, if not we will work to limit the population of our bowl. This is true of church congregations across the board. It is just something that churches do.
It is easier to see in others than it is in ourselves. I had a friend who was a Southern Baptist Lay Preacher before I helped him see the Presbyterian Light. David and I were observing a very successful Baptist group in our town. “Watch”, he said, “in another few months they will have a fight and then split into two groups. It is the way Baptists do it.” While one denomination may manage their bowls differently—every group seems to, again on a subconscious level, manage the size of their bowls.
Further, different congregations elect different sizes to “top out” at. Some of our congregations cap population at a couple of dozen worshiping persons. Some go to 100 as a top number; some cap things at higher numbers, etc.
Now all that is just a fact of life. It is no fault and if any of it fits this congregation, you need to know that it fits almost every congregation in every denomination. There ends up being a sort of a dynamic tension between inclusion and exclusion of others.
The passage from Mark discusses both the issue of inclusion and of exclusion of others. It is Jesus himself making some incredibly inclusive statements about who belongs in the tent or in the bowl as it were. But then, it turns 180 degrees and in the next sentence Mark sees Jesus saying some of the more powerfully exclusive statements of the New Testament. Which is true? Or are they both true in a sort of continuum or tension?
A couple of things about the passage. For more reasons than one the two parts do not seem to have originally been said together. The first part, the one that is so very inclusive seems more primitive and quite a bit more straightforward. The second part is one that is exclusive. It is symbolic in nature, more sophisticated in language, and implies a much more developed sense of the church than simply the disciples group with Jesus.
These two stories being made into one is an indication that as early as there was church history, there was a push and pull between being radically inclusive and being intentionally exclusive. It is almost like Mark spun these two stories together to explain and expand the first story itself.
The first one is pretty straight forward. The disciples have been out on a short mission and Jesus has stayed behind. They come back, find him and make a report that has little to do with their mission. “Teacher, we saw a man casting out demons in your name. We took care of that and told him not to do it.” “Aren’t you proud of us?”
“Oh, come on friends”, says Jesus, “if this man is not against us, he is for us. He is doing something good in my name. How bad can he be? And, even if he is bad and we have no evidence of that, how long can he stay that way doing good things and using my good name?” “Leave him alone.”
That is three of this baker’s dozen verses. Now the other nine seem to spin a different story. First this is symbolic talk according to most people. If the church is the body of Christ, then this talk of parts of the body become symbols for members of the church. This part of the passage becomes a discussion of excommunication at its earliest level in the church. A foot, a hand or an eye are individual members of a body. Causing the church to stumble is the sin of consequence, according to the passage. The lesson is this, if a member causes the whole system to go down—kick them out. Better to amputate a piece of the body than to have the whole thing go down.
That is exclusive!
(I have a felt obligation to say one more time: this is symbol language. It is not meant to suggest that people go around performing self amputations on their own bodies. It never was that and is not now. This is about the body of Christ—the church.)
That said, this is exclusive stuff. So how does the tension work out between radical inclusive and powerful exclusion?
It may not seem it, but this is quite practical stuff. Suppose that a group of people who come to worship here sometimes begins to sense some ownership in the ministry of this place. They open up a web site to host a “Friends of Fairlawn” page teaching some biblical content, offering prayers for others, and promoting service missions in the community. Remember that this group is using the church’s name but is completely outside of the church. The session has no control, not even on a theoretical level over what the group does or says. How would we respond to that issue, keeping in mind Jesus’ directive to, “Leave them alone!”
That, by the way, is an issue before our Presbytery in precisely parallel fashion about the Presbytery and not a congregation. What is the biblical way to respond ? No surprise to you, perhaps, my impression is that we should run with the biblical imperative, “If they ain’t agin us, they are for us.” Let them run without a leash.
Now my perspective is jaded with the benefit of things like being old. After all, how far are they going to run on my watch? I believe that the tent ought to be monstrous in size. Can a church have half a dozen adulterers, three or four shady business people, a gossip or two, and a partridge in a pear tree? I have seen churches with more of every group except the partridge in the pear tree. (I’ve never seen one of those anywhere.) The question is not are bad behaviors present, but rather are those behaviors ones that either lead the innocent astray or cause the body to stumble.
It isn’t that those defects aren’t present that is important. It is rather that those defects in some, do not lead others astray. That they do not cause others to stumble.
The trick becomes determination of what is truly against. The assumption being, if it is not against us, it must be for us. Secondly the evaluation that is necessary is discerning that which “makes the body stumble” or “leads a little one astray”.
If someone’s defect, or sin, or life leads innocent people astray, then it is a problem. If it causes other people to stumble it is a problem. If my bad behavior truly leads others to fail in coming into Christian life, that is a serious problem and someone needs to leave or straighten up immediately.
Back in 1983 Presbyterians were involved in a massive effort to reunite the northern and southern churches. Like we do everything else, this was great committee, commission and Assembly wide processing and debate. A powerful and persuasive leader in the southern branch of the church kept us focused on framing the constitution of the church in a way that served a particular political purpose. The two entire denominations were literally stumbling over themselves to accommodate this clergyman.
All Andy Jumper did in that whole process was keep us stumbling on the road to reunion. I kept feeling and saying, “He is not our friend. He is going to leave anyway. Why are we doing what he says?” “Let’s put our backs to the wall and tell him NO!”
Well we didn’t do that. We continued to frame who we were and would become based on trying to appease this man. He did leave anyway, shortly after we took our last stumbling steps toward reunion. We should have done better and recognized our stumbling. That is the stumbling side of the issue.
Based in risk, there is a valid position for exclusion.
If, on the other hand, my sins (or yours) cause the church to be embarrassed – big deal. It is time for the church to get over itself.
My belief is that our tent is supposed to be big—great big. It needs to include almost everyone and nearly every group. We need not artificially identify some conditions for correction and others for benign neglect UNLESS this is about stumbling or leading astray.
There is a story about Pope John XXXIII. He was the revolutionary old man who lead the way into Vatican II. John was elected because they could not find a successor who enough people would agree on. John was old and somewhat frail. The logic was he would be an interim pope for a year or so because he would not live long. He lived for five years and changed the world.
So when he was first feeling his oats as pope, he was in the Vatican and a Cardinal was trying to talk some sense into him. “Holy Father”, he intoned, “what are we doing to the church?” John went over to one of the windows—the stained glass kind that you can’t see through—opened it and declared, “We are letting in a little fresh air.”
Time for us to do the same. Let our tent be an open one and big enough for all.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
September 20, 2009 Sermon
Who Is This Jesus? Mark 8:27-38 Lawrence Jackman
Mark 8:27-38
27Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" 28And they answered him, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets." 29He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah." 30And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
31Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
34He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Seminary students are taught somewhere very early on about what is called the Messianic secret in the Gospel of Mark. The story is this. For the first half of the Gospel of Mark there is a consistent emphasis on Jesus being the “undercover” Savior. He is the Son of God as he sees it, and for that matter, as the devil sees it and the spirits of the world see it. Jesus just does not seem to want any people to know this secret.
Jesus admonishes spirits that he casts out to be silent. He charges those whom he has healed to be quiet about what has happened to them. Of course, these efforts meet with mixed success. Sometimes the persons who have been healed go out immediately and
tell the story to others. Some of the healings are actually potent enough that they point to the secret identity of Jesus.
All this secret stuff builds through the first half of the Gospel. You remember perhaps that the Gospel is only 16 chapters long. So, half way through, in Chapter 8 comes time for the secret to be revealed. From this point on the identity of Jesus is more and more revealed and clear. The mighty mission becomes the march to Jerusalem. So the first half the gospel is a secret being kept and the second half is a secret being revealed.
The initial opening up of the secret is this fascinating dialogue between Jesus and Simon Peter. They are walking along and Jesus turns to the close followers. “What are people saying about me? Who do they think I am?” The followers reply, “Well some folks are saying John the Baptist, others Elijah, maybe one of the other prophets.” That’s a pretty impressive array of identities, but Jesus isn’t quite satisfied.
“OK guys, who do you think I am?” Silence. Then it is Peter who makes the revealing statement, “You are the Christ.” It is on that three word confession that the entire story of salvation pivots. This Gospel is a teeter totter balanced across these three words of Peter. “You are the Christ”. From that watershed everything else flows toward the confrontation in Jerusalem.
Seminary students were taught that this was an editorial device. That a way to tell the story was to grab this secret/revelation theme and to spin the story about that single issue. Maybe so, but there is a deeper thing here. Why did Mark choose this theme? And the simple answer to that is; for the writer of the Gospel of Mark the single critical issue of spiritual life was in answering the question, “Who is this Jesus?”
Now I find that to be a fitting theme for the day when, in this church, we christen the educational efforts for a new program year. For it is in those efforts to provide Christian education that we, in this place, deal most fundamentally with the issue of “who is this Jesus?”
Several points in the total scriptural story of the day seem to me to mandate features for the base for real educational ministry. They are these: 1) scripturally the question is a real one and not an editorial device, 2) the answer to the question represents a kind of foundational base for a process, and 3) the answer immediately began to evolve and continues to evolve—it is not static.
I believe that the process of religious education (done rightly) follows that pattern.
1) Ask the question. 2) Formulate an answer. 3) Repeat steps one and two.
Step one, ask the question. I use to have a need to explain Presbyterianism to dozens of people every year. They were new employees in the programs of our church related social service/mental health agency. They pretty well always came from Christian backgrounds. So I would start by saying, “there are two kinds of Christian groups. In one you are told, this is what you think. In the other you are asked what do you think. Presbyterians are a ‘What do you think?’ religion.”
I believe that is pretty much accurate. At our best, we are more about the questions than rigid answers. That is our strength. It makes everything else more complicated, but it makes everything else more real. Life, the faith, our tradition is about process much more than specific content. Asking the question is critical the specific answer is not.
The question in the case of the Gospel reading is asked in a interesting place. Jesus and his friends have traveled north outside of Galilee they have come to a region called Caesarea Philippi. What an incredible context for the original question. It was a pagan place. It was around the base of Mount Hermon one of the water sources for the river Jordan. This place had been a place of worship of many gods and spirits. The Roman and Greek gods were worshipped here. The lush green of the mountain sides had lent themselves to the worship of gods of nature.
So Jesus takes his friends to a pagan place to ask the most important question of life, “who am I?” The great question and the great answer are not from a safe and known place. They do not happen in the comfy context of padded pews or familiar chants—they occur in the middle of life and in the middle of all sorts of secular mix.
In our old neighborhood in Saint Louis there was a street that was pretty eclectic religiously. At the base of a hill there was a Masque. A few hundred yards away was a fairly large Catholic church. The street then became lined for quite a little way with both a county park where nature lovers frequented. Then there were McMansions, lots of them. Finally near the top of the hill there was the most beautiful Hindu Temple you could imagine. Over the top of the hill you stand nearly on the grounds of the most prestigious Christian Science academy and that was just down the street from a synagogue. Weidman Road was Caesarea Philippi. Picture the local Baptist pastor taking his flock over to that road to talk about religion. If you can do that you should have a picture of Jesus and the disciples that day. It was not the safe and predictable place.
Our questions are not developed or answered on familiar turf and safe places. That is a lesson for us as we teach. Go into the world—the real world—to ask the questions. The context of the faith for us is the middle of life. Out there where greed and avarice are the gods of the day; Out there where self help books and new age philosophy abound; out there where science and soul struggle to meet; that is the place of our real religious questioning.
Now about the answers to our questions—let them be bold. Peter’s confession is incredible when you stop to think of it. He has walked with Jesus. He has watched the teacher sweat, eat, sleep, become fatigued, get angry, maybe get the stomach flu and everything else that is human. It is in the middle of that when he makes his affirmation: you are the Christ. Think about how bold an affirmation that is.
And while the answer is, for a moment, perfect. This is the formulae of all Christianity that we confess Jesus as Lord. And in half a minute it is rebuked as satanic. Jesus begins to talk with the disciples about what the affirmation means—he begins to spell out the implications. Peter immediately takes him aside and says, “No way Jesus! That is not what being the Christ means.” And Jesus rebukes saying, “Get to my backside Satan”.
Now here is the point of that. The answers, no matter how great they may be, are in a state of evolution. They are always such or they are not real answers. This is taking the results of questioning and answering around the turn and having it become a new level of questioning and answering. We are never done with the process. There is no “faith once and for all delivered to the saints”. That is baloney. There is a way to put your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee, of continuing to walk through the very pluralistic world asking questions, answering questions and evolving our answers through a continuation of that process.
That is the business of the faith. It is the business of education within the church. It is our business and our responsibility to our own souls.
Who is this Jesus? I’ll tell you what the answer is today. And if he is alive to me, then I will not fear that the answer will grow throughout the day into a new one tomorrow.
Amen
Mark 8:27-38
27Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" 28And they answered him, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets." 29He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah." 30And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
31Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
34He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Seminary students are taught somewhere very early on about what is called the Messianic secret in the Gospel of Mark. The story is this. For the first half of the Gospel of Mark there is a consistent emphasis on Jesus being the “undercover” Savior. He is the Son of God as he sees it, and for that matter, as the devil sees it and the spirits of the world see it. Jesus just does not seem to want any people to know this secret.
Jesus admonishes spirits that he casts out to be silent. He charges those whom he has healed to be quiet about what has happened to them. Of course, these efforts meet with mixed success. Sometimes the persons who have been healed go out immediately and
tell the story to others. Some of the healings are actually potent enough that they point to the secret identity of Jesus.
All this secret stuff builds through the first half of the Gospel. You remember perhaps that the Gospel is only 16 chapters long. So, half way through, in Chapter 8 comes time for the secret to be revealed. From this point on the identity of Jesus is more and more revealed and clear. The mighty mission becomes the march to Jerusalem. So the first half the gospel is a secret being kept and the second half is a secret being revealed.
The initial opening up of the secret is this fascinating dialogue between Jesus and Simon Peter. They are walking along and Jesus turns to the close followers. “What are people saying about me? Who do they think I am?” The followers reply, “Well some folks are saying John the Baptist, others Elijah, maybe one of the other prophets.” That’s a pretty impressive array of identities, but Jesus isn’t quite satisfied.
“OK guys, who do you think I am?” Silence. Then it is Peter who makes the revealing statement, “You are the Christ.” It is on that three word confession that the entire story of salvation pivots. This Gospel is a teeter totter balanced across these three words of Peter. “You are the Christ”. From that watershed everything else flows toward the confrontation in Jerusalem.
Seminary students were taught that this was an editorial device. That a way to tell the story was to grab this secret/revelation theme and to spin the story about that single issue. Maybe so, but there is a deeper thing here. Why did Mark choose this theme? And the simple answer to that is; for the writer of the Gospel of Mark the single critical issue of spiritual life was in answering the question, “Who is this Jesus?”
Now I find that to be a fitting theme for the day when, in this church, we christen the educational efforts for a new program year. For it is in those efforts to provide Christian education that we, in this place, deal most fundamentally with the issue of “who is this Jesus?”
Several points in the total scriptural story of the day seem to me to mandate features for the base for real educational ministry. They are these: 1) scripturally the question is a real one and not an editorial device, 2) the answer to the question represents a kind of foundational base for a process, and 3) the answer immediately began to evolve and continues to evolve—it is not static.
I believe that the process of religious education (done rightly) follows that pattern.
1) Ask the question. 2) Formulate an answer. 3) Repeat steps one and two.
Step one, ask the question. I use to have a need to explain Presbyterianism to dozens of people every year. They were new employees in the programs of our church related social service/mental health agency. They pretty well always came from Christian backgrounds. So I would start by saying, “there are two kinds of Christian groups. In one you are told, this is what you think. In the other you are asked what do you think. Presbyterians are a ‘What do you think?’ religion.”
I believe that is pretty much accurate. At our best, we are more about the questions than rigid answers. That is our strength. It makes everything else more complicated, but it makes everything else more real. Life, the faith, our tradition is about process much more than specific content. Asking the question is critical the specific answer is not.
The question in the case of the Gospel reading is asked in a interesting place. Jesus and his friends have traveled north outside of Galilee they have come to a region called Caesarea Philippi. What an incredible context for the original question. It was a pagan place. It was around the base of Mount Hermon one of the water sources for the river Jordan. This place had been a place of worship of many gods and spirits. The Roman and Greek gods were worshipped here. The lush green of the mountain sides had lent themselves to the worship of gods of nature.
So Jesus takes his friends to a pagan place to ask the most important question of life, “who am I?” The great question and the great answer are not from a safe and known place. They do not happen in the comfy context of padded pews or familiar chants—they occur in the middle of life and in the middle of all sorts of secular mix.
In our old neighborhood in Saint Louis there was a street that was pretty eclectic religiously. At the base of a hill there was a Masque. A few hundred yards away was a fairly large Catholic church. The street then became lined for quite a little way with both a county park where nature lovers frequented. Then there were McMansions, lots of them. Finally near the top of the hill there was the most beautiful Hindu Temple you could imagine. Over the top of the hill you stand nearly on the grounds of the most prestigious Christian Science academy and that was just down the street from a synagogue. Weidman Road was Caesarea Philippi. Picture the local Baptist pastor taking his flock over to that road to talk about religion. If you can do that you should have a picture of Jesus and the disciples that day. It was not the safe and predictable place.
Our questions are not developed or answered on familiar turf and safe places. That is a lesson for us as we teach. Go into the world—the real world—to ask the questions. The context of the faith for us is the middle of life. Out there where greed and avarice are the gods of the day; Out there where self help books and new age philosophy abound; out there where science and soul struggle to meet; that is the place of our real religious questioning.
Now about the answers to our questions—let them be bold. Peter’s confession is incredible when you stop to think of it. He has walked with Jesus. He has watched the teacher sweat, eat, sleep, become fatigued, get angry, maybe get the stomach flu and everything else that is human. It is in the middle of that when he makes his affirmation: you are the Christ. Think about how bold an affirmation that is.
And while the answer is, for a moment, perfect. This is the formulae of all Christianity that we confess Jesus as Lord. And in half a minute it is rebuked as satanic. Jesus begins to talk with the disciples about what the affirmation means—he begins to spell out the implications. Peter immediately takes him aside and says, “No way Jesus! That is not what being the Christ means.” And Jesus rebukes saying, “Get to my backside Satan”.
Now here is the point of that. The answers, no matter how great they may be, are in a state of evolution. They are always such or they are not real answers. This is taking the results of questioning and answering around the turn and having it become a new level of questioning and answering. We are never done with the process. There is no “faith once and for all delivered to the saints”. That is baloney. There is a way to put your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee, of continuing to walk through the very pluralistic world asking questions, answering questions and evolving our answers through a continuation of that process.
That is the business of the faith. It is the business of education within the church. It is our business and our responsibility to our own souls.
Who is this Jesus? I’ll tell you what the answer is today. And if he is alive to me, then I will not fear that the answer will grow throughout the day into a new one tomorrow.
Amen
Sunday, September 6, 2009
September 6, 2009 Sermon
“Healing” Mark 7:24-37 Lawrence Jackman
From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go-the demon has left your daughter." So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened." And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, "He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak."
There is probably no concept in Christian life more complicated and more difficult to balance and rationalize that that of healing. The Gospels are filled with stories about Jesus working miracle healings of all sorts of people. The Gospel reading today is a strong example. In our daily lives, when something happens that was good and we did not expect it, we say, “Thank God” or proclaim “God healed in this situation”. Now we are all creatures of logic. The logical corollary to those statements is that when something terrible happens, then, at least, God has failed us in that situation.
Because we always give God praise for the good things, many of us are at severe odds with God when the bad happens. In crude terms, if God always gets the credit, who gets the blame?
You and I both know these are not theoretical or entirely philosophical in nature. This THE theological discussion of everyday life. I had an email yesterday morning. It was about beloved friends in Saint Louis. Like Deb and me, they are grandparents. The two grandsons in the family are both victims of a terribly rare blood disease which is genetic in nature. Andrew was two years and two months old exactly yesterday morning when he died. Our friends are so Christian. They have been praying for miracles for two years of this child’s life. They have elicited the prayers of a wonderful, caring and loving Church. They had my buddy Carol praying for them. On a personal level Carol is someone I call when I want. It doesn’t sound real clergy like, but I believe that if God listens to anyone it is Carol.
None of that seemed to matter yesterday morning. Cindy and Vince, the grandparents, Justin and Kristin, the parents, are left in the very non theoretical place of contradiction between how we respond to bad and how we react to that which is good.
Complicate that one more level with the fact that, since we do not understand at all, we Christians and especially our clergy make up stuff. Period. We make it up. And the inventions of our little logical brains are even more insulting than the horrific binds we find ourselves in trying to figure out life.
I remember a speaker in the basement of First Pres, Alton, Illinois. This was way back and he was a chaplain in the Air Force stationed at Scott AFB. He had become somewhat charismatic and was completely sold on the idea of divine healing. He stood talking and pontificating about how it was assured for people who had enough faith—they would get divine healing. If it didn’t happen, in this speaker’s mind, it was a failure on the part of the person asking.
As this “holy person” spoke, I looked across the back rows to see a wonderful elderly woman with tears streaming down her face. She had lost her husband a month earlier from disease. Mildred was a completely righteous person and I know that she prayed for Eldon every day of their life together whether he was sick or well. And now this clergy was telling her that she just didn’t believe enough of it would have been fixed. I resisted the impulse to slap the snot out of him. As I think back on it, I am not sure that was a good choice. Someone did need to help him understand how insulting to the faith he was being.
Focus on the Gospel reading. The story of the Syrophonecian woman is, according to most scholars, one of the single earliest tales told of Jesus. Very early, before much of anything was written down there began to be both stories that were told and repeated from on listener to another. And just as the news about Jesus was being written in the very first formats there were stories like this one and also there were “sayings”. They sort of amounted to “The Sayings of Chairman Jesus”.
Just like the experiences of life that I cited, here is an unvarnished account. It has no polish or sanding to make it more smooth. This is about a close to the actual words that one first century person told another as you can get. Here is a raw story or two about Jesus and healing.
First, I want you to consider that there is no mention of anything like a miracle in either of these stories. Both stories assume power and strength in Jesus, but neither story actually calls what happened a supernatural miracle. There are really two points to the stories. One is that Jesus’ compassion does not stop at human boundaries. The second is that the healing capacity is an indicator of goodness and strength, but does not prove anything else.
The Syrophoenician woman was Greek. That was her ethnic identity and her place of origin was Syria occupied Phoenicia. She was a citizen of the world in a way that no one in Jesus’ company could even be expected to appreciate. Definitely she was not a Hoosier Presbyterian—or even a Jew. So this sophisticant comes begging an intervention from the Jewish shaman. The story says he blew her off. “The children eat first. Why would I do a favor for a non Jew? That would be like feeding the dogs before your own children.” Well the lady is not going to be discouraged with the slap and she argues back in his own words. “The dogs get to eat whatever is dropped from the table.” “OK”, says Jesus, “let it be done”. The daughter is healed of demon possession. There is no faith issue in the story, no if you believe enough question, and no if you think the right thing issue. It is simply an exercise of real power but not necessarily seen as Godly power.
Then comes the next healing right on the heels of this one. Walking down through some border country between Galilee and Samaria he comes to the area called “Ten Towns”. This is El Paso, Texas or Tijuana, Mexico in our world. This is border country in every sense of the words. Identity of an individual in this area as to specific race, religion, or faith is impossible. These folks are the “mutts” of the world. And a man is brought out to Jesus who is hearing impaired and has a speech impediment. Again there is some very physical talk here. Jesus spits on his fingers and places them physically in the man’s ears. It sounds more like a medicine man behavior than our general picture of Jesus. But, hey it works. The man speaks and hears. And the people are impressed. Again, not because it is a miracle, but rather because it is effective display of power. They say, “he has done very well”, not, “Surely he is God”.
So maybe all that is one clue. The healings of the New Testament are seen in historical context as being somewhat within the norms. They are not from some other world, but rather consistent with the order we experience here. They were as comfortable watching and appreciating these events as we are watching a hospital staff helping someone through an illness. Healing? “Yes” both cases. Grateful to God? “Of course” both cases.
But not on our part or on first century mindset do we see this as a change in the order of things. It is consistent with the way things happen. There is still one death per customer in this world. That is not a happy reality, but a reality nonetheless. Anyone in the room who can tell me the two times that was not true in the biblical record will get extra credit at the end of the semester. Faith, belief, trust has nothing to do with the ultimate outcome or our exit from this plane of existence. Sad but true.
The simple lesson of these two healing stories in the Gospel today has only incidentally to do with healing. The lesson is that boundaries do not matter. The Greek woman born in Syria was not worthy of much to any Jewish person in the first century. Doing her a favor seemed like an insult to the faithful Jewish people. Yet, since for God boundaries are not so terribly important, the intervention happens through the natural strength that belongs to the good man, Jesus. He may be more than that, we acknowledge that he is, but that is not about the healing part.
Likewise the whole story of the deaf man. The boundary and the border nature of his life did not matter. Power was there to be accessed. Again, only the acknowledgement that this was “Well done” nothing about a miracle. And if this power is within the norms, let me suggest to you a new place to focus our energy and attention.
You and I are “normal people”. Well at least I understand that you are—not so sure about me. If we are normal and healing is a normal thing. Are we not called to be healers? I think we are.
You got to step over boundaries and you have to be willing to risk touching the unfortunate citizens of this planet. When looking at news footage of the troubles of the world; when reading the painful stories of children, women and men; when considering the violence, illness and despair; don’t you hear the call. God is saying, “Who will we send and who will go for us?”
And the biblical answer to that question is pretty clear, “I am over here God. Send me. Let me be a healer in a broken world”. Maybe the world’s craziness would make more sense if we were able not just to pray for healing, but also to pray to be healers.
A few years ago Deb, a friend and I were traveling through Italy and Greece. Along the roadsides in Italy (where we went first) were these thousands of little shrine memorials. They were much more ornate and complex than the crosses we see beside the road where someone died in an auto accident, but they were the same sort of thing.
In Greece there were even more of them. Up in the mountains in a little town I was talking to a shopkeeper. Between us we shared enough bad Greek, poor English and pathetic German to handle a conversation. She told me the difference between Italy and Greece on the issue of the shrines. “Here it is not just the place where something bad happened. It is also places where something didn’t happen: or maybe where a good thing happened.”
The Greek people are still building their little shrines. In the middle of bad events, in the context of risk when threat was escaped, and in the middle of good things: they are building little shrines which say “God was with me here”.
That more holistic celebration of God’s presence is what we need also.
We need to refuse to see boundaries.
We need to pray for healing while we pray to be healers.
We need to celebrate God’s presence in all of life.
Amen.
From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go-the demon has left your daughter." So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened." And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, "He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak."
There is probably no concept in Christian life more complicated and more difficult to balance and rationalize that that of healing. The Gospels are filled with stories about Jesus working miracle healings of all sorts of people. The Gospel reading today is a strong example. In our daily lives, when something happens that was good and we did not expect it, we say, “Thank God” or proclaim “God healed in this situation”. Now we are all creatures of logic. The logical corollary to those statements is that when something terrible happens, then, at least, God has failed us in that situation.
Because we always give God praise for the good things, many of us are at severe odds with God when the bad happens. In crude terms, if God always gets the credit, who gets the blame?
You and I both know these are not theoretical or entirely philosophical in nature. This THE theological discussion of everyday life. I had an email yesterday morning. It was about beloved friends in Saint Louis. Like Deb and me, they are grandparents. The two grandsons in the family are both victims of a terribly rare blood disease which is genetic in nature. Andrew was two years and two months old exactly yesterday morning when he died. Our friends are so Christian. They have been praying for miracles for two years of this child’s life. They have elicited the prayers of a wonderful, caring and loving Church. They had my buddy Carol praying for them. On a personal level Carol is someone I call when I want. It doesn’t sound real clergy like, but I believe that if God listens to anyone it is Carol.
None of that seemed to matter yesterday morning. Cindy and Vince, the grandparents, Justin and Kristin, the parents, are left in the very non theoretical place of contradiction between how we respond to bad and how we react to that which is good.
Complicate that one more level with the fact that, since we do not understand at all, we Christians and especially our clergy make up stuff. Period. We make it up. And the inventions of our little logical brains are even more insulting than the horrific binds we find ourselves in trying to figure out life.
I remember a speaker in the basement of First Pres, Alton, Illinois. This was way back and he was a chaplain in the Air Force stationed at Scott AFB. He had become somewhat charismatic and was completely sold on the idea of divine healing. He stood talking and pontificating about how it was assured for people who had enough faith—they would get divine healing. If it didn’t happen, in this speaker’s mind, it was a failure on the part of the person asking.
As this “holy person” spoke, I looked across the back rows to see a wonderful elderly woman with tears streaming down her face. She had lost her husband a month earlier from disease. Mildred was a completely righteous person and I know that she prayed for Eldon every day of their life together whether he was sick or well. And now this clergy was telling her that she just didn’t believe enough of it would have been fixed. I resisted the impulse to slap the snot out of him. As I think back on it, I am not sure that was a good choice. Someone did need to help him understand how insulting to the faith he was being.
Focus on the Gospel reading. The story of the Syrophonecian woman is, according to most scholars, one of the single earliest tales told of Jesus. Very early, before much of anything was written down there began to be both stories that were told and repeated from on listener to another. And just as the news about Jesus was being written in the very first formats there were stories like this one and also there were “sayings”. They sort of amounted to “The Sayings of Chairman Jesus”.
Just like the experiences of life that I cited, here is an unvarnished account. It has no polish or sanding to make it more smooth. This is about a close to the actual words that one first century person told another as you can get. Here is a raw story or two about Jesus and healing.
First, I want you to consider that there is no mention of anything like a miracle in either of these stories. Both stories assume power and strength in Jesus, but neither story actually calls what happened a supernatural miracle. There are really two points to the stories. One is that Jesus’ compassion does not stop at human boundaries. The second is that the healing capacity is an indicator of goodness and strength, but does not prove anything else.
The Syrophoenician woman was Greek. That was her ethnic identity and her place of origin was Syria occupied Phoenicia. She was a citizen of the world in a way that no one in Jesus’ company could even be expected to appreciate. Definitely she was not a Hoosier Presbyterian—or even a Jew. So this sophisticant comes begging an intervention from the Jewish shaman. The story says he blew her off. “The children eat first. Why would I do a favor for a non Jew? That would be like feeding the dogs before your own children.” Well the lady is not going to be discouraged with the slap and she argues back in his own words. “The dogs get to eat whatever is dropped from the table.” “OK”, says Jesus, “let it be done”. The daughter is healed of demon possession. There is no faith issue in the story, no if you believe enough question, and no if you think the right thing issue. It is simply an exercise of real power but not necessarily seen as Godly power.
Then comes the next healing right on the heels of this one. Walking down through some border country between Galilee and Samaria he comes to the area called “Ten Towns”. This is El Paso, Texas or Tijuana, Mexico in our world. This is border country in every sense of the words. Identity of an individual in this area as to specific race, religion, or faith is impossible. These folks are the “mutts” of the world. And a man is brought out to Jesus who is hearing impaired and has a speech impediment. Again there is some very physical talk here. Jesus spits on his fingers and places them physically in the man’s ears. It sounds more like a medicine man behavior than our general picture of Jesus. But, hey it works. The man speaks and hears. And the people are impressed. Again, not because it is a miracle, but rather because it is effective display of power. They say, “he has done very well”, not, “Surely he is God”.
So maybe all that is one clue. The healings of the New Testament are seen in historical context as being somewhat within the norms. They are not from some other world, but rather consistent with the order we experience here. They were as comfortable watching and appreciating these events as we are watching a hospital staff helping someone through an illness. Healing? “Yes” both cases. Grateful to God? “Of course” both cases.
But not on our part or on first century mindset do we see this as a change in the order of things. It is consistent with the way things happen. There is still one death per customer in this world. That is not a happy reality, but a reality nonetheless. Anyone in the room who can tell me the two times that was not true in the biblical record will get extra credit at the end of the semester. Faith, belief, trust has nothing to do with the ultimate outcome or our exit from this plane of existence. Sad but true.
The simple lesson of these two healing stories in the Gospel today has only incidentally to do with healing. The lesson is that boundaries do not matter. The Greek woman born in Syria was not worthy of much to any Jewish person in the first century. Doing her a favor seemed like an insult to the faithful Jewish people. Yet, since for God boundaries are not so terribly important, the intervention happens through the natural strength that belongs to the good man, Jesus. He may be more than that, we acknowledge that he is, but that is not about the healing part.
Likewise the whole story of the deaf man. The boundary and the border nature of his life did not matter. Power was there to be accessed. Again, only the acknowledgement that this was “Well done” nothing about a miracle. And if this power is within the norms, let me suggest to you a new place to focus our energy and attention.
You and I are “normal people”. Well at least I understand that you are—not so sure about me. If we are normal and healing is a normal thing. Are we not called to be healers? I think we are.
You got to step over boundaries and you have to be willing to risk touching the unfortunate citizens of this planet. When looking at news footage of the troubles of the world; when reading the painful stories of children, women and men; when considering the violence, illness and despair; don’t you hear the call. God is saying, “Who will we send and who will go for us?”
And the biblical answer to that question is pretty clear, “I am over here God. Send me. Let me be a healer in a broken world”. Maybe the world’s craziness would make more sense if we were able not just to pray for healing, but also to pray to be healers.
A few years ago Deb, a friend and I were traveling through Italy and Greece. Along the roadsides in Italy (where we went first) were these thousands of little shrine memorials. They were much more ornate and complex than the crosses we see beside the road where someone died in an auto accident, but they were the same sort of thing.
In Greece there were even more of them. Up in the mountains in a little town I was talking to a shopkeeper. Between us we shared enough bad Greek, poor English and pathetic German to handle a conversation. She told me the difference between Italy and Greece on the issue of the shrines. “Here it is not just the place where something bad happened. It is also places where something didn’t happen: or maybe where a good thing happened.”
The Greek people are still building their little shrines. In the middle of bad events, in the context of risk when threat was escaped, and in the middle of good things: they are building little shrines which say “God was with me here”.
That more holistic celebration of God’s presence is what we need also.
We need to refuse to see boundaries.
We need to pray for healing while we pray to be healers.
We need to celebrate God’s presence in all of life.
Amen.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
August 30, 2009 Sermon
Cardinal Sins and Not so Big Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Lawrence Jackman
There is a memorable exchange between Anne Sullivan (The Miracle Worker) and her boss (Helen Keller’s dad, Captain Keller). Anne is about to be sent along and is asking for another week or so with Helen to accomplish the next task:
Captain Keller: What would another week accomplish? We are more than satisfied. You taught her things to do, how to behave. She's more manageable, cleaner. Annie Sullivan: Cleaner? Captain Keller: Well, we say cleanliness is next to godliness. Annie Sullivan: Cleanliness is next to nothing!
Jesus and his followers were verbally confronted by the scribes and Pharisees. At issue, and it was a critical issue, was the question of cleanliness. The disciples casually ate without washing. They were not washing hands, food from the field, and food from the market. They were just willing to eat.
The Pharisees, on the other hand, practiced a heavy ritual of washing and cleansing. They ceremonially washed hands, food products, and utensils. (Now I need to tell you that either washing or not washing had much to do with sanitation. The water wasn’t clean, the methods were not sanitary and there wasn’t any soap.) It was about being ritually clean.
So the Pharisees come with the complaint about not washing. “Look Jesus”, they say, “Don’t you get it? Cleanliness is right up there with Godliness”. And Jesus replies back to them, “Cleanliness is right up there with nothing.” “It is what is inside of a human that makes that person either clean or not—it is not the outside stuff or the surface. It is what is deep down inside.”
The Christians of the early centuries began to attempt to categorize what Jesus had to say here about what was inside and could “defile” humanity. They came up with a differentiation of two types of sin. One was the garden variety and the other was this internal list that Jesus spoke of—the Cardinal sins/ deadly sins/ mortal sins call them what you will. The Scholastics of the middle ages crystallized thinking about all this. They identified Pride, Envy, Anger, Gluttony, Lust, Greed and Laziness as the 7 sins that kill. Now I don’t know where or why we got away from that concept, but it pretty well got lost in the Protestant movement. We got to the point where we focused much more on the surface sins and lost track of the core lesson that Jesus was teaching. “It is what is inside that really matters”.
Now you’ all know that I generally believe that Sin is an overworked term and almost a pointless one in the way Christians talk and think. I am not sure, at all, that it is meaningful. One proof of that I might offer is the fact that we work this into the worship service every week. We say a group prayer of confession and then we dedicate time for us to think about our personal and private needs for forgiveness. I counted the seconds today and we dedicated ……14 seconds to the private prayer time. Now, if we really believed this stuff wouldn’t we need to dedicate more than that?
We talk about this stuff and think about it so much because, if we didn’t spend our time and spiritual energy here, we might be forced to spend it where it would matter.
And we fend off core reality of Jesus’ lesson. You know the mechanism. It is the same one that assures me that my child is assertive while someone else’s kid is a bully. The one that makes us believe that we take care with our physical presentation and another person is vain. It is the mechanism that makes a welfare recipient greedy and someone of my middle class background a person of shrewd business acumen.
We invest energy in the 10 Commandments and even convince ourselves that this is the best expression of obedience to God and also of failure to obey. Fact is, the Commandments are, at least 9 out of 10 times, external. They are not about the really big issue of what is inside. They describe external behaviors. They are terribly important not because they describe morality, but rather because they describe a social code. If they are broken you also break community. The violation of this code assures a ripping apart of the very core fabric or a society. But none of that is about morality or of having a soul that is fit for an intimate relationship with God.
In short, we worry about the exhaust of a dirty engine and ignore the issues inside of the engine itself.
These issues (the ones traditionally called the deadly sins) are deadly for a single reason. They are building blocks in a wall that prevents our souls from being accessible to other souls; including the Ultimate Soul. How that works is incredibly simple. Everyone can understand the mechanism.
Let’s take pride. Jesus names it not as sin, but rather as an “evil”. Further, the word for evil is more like error than it is anything else. Dirty or unsanitary comes to mind as a way to get to the precise meaning. So, back to pride. If I have it I want the world and even God (if I think I can get away with it) to think very well of me. I want that so badly that I will create an image that is better than I am. I will show only my best side and I will polish and varnish that best side till it is just perfect. Then, my sisters and brothers in this life (and maybe even God) will love me.
Of course the problem is pretty clear. They didn’t love me. They loved the painting of myself that I showed to them. That even exacerbates the underlying belief in me that I am indeed not lovable or worthy or cherished. I dig for my own salvation an even deeper hole from which escape seems impossible.
So here is what confession is really all about. It is about taking away, even if only for a moment, the blocks we use to build our walls. If I can but remove pride from my own insides, then someone on the outside can get a better glimpse of the real me. If I am loved at that point, it is the real me that finds comfort in that love. If, at that point, I am a mess that only God can love then at least I will be able to claim God’s love. And it will be me making that claim, not an image I present.
Billy Joel sang about the person behind the wall of evils we call the cardinal sins. That person was “The Stranger”. The contention being that deep inside we are actually fascinated by and in love with the stranger within. Billy provoked us with this lyric line:
You may never understandHow the stranger is inspiredBut he isn't always evilAnd he is not always wrongThough you drown in good intentionsYou will never quench the fireYou'll give in to your desireWhen the stranger comes along.
The deadly sins (if they are sins) are deadly for precisely this reason. They keep the stranger inside and the stranger is my soul. I don’t want that to be locked away or out of view or in a closet. I want it to be right there on the table for you and for God and for anyone else in this world to see.
All I have to do is have courage and remove the blocks. Helen Keller in some sense is a powerful metaphor along with being heroine. For we too are isolated by blindness, by the inability to hear. Just like for Helen the deficits are acquired and not essential reality.
So if we remove the blocks—the stuff from within that defiles—we can claim life, but not until we do that removal.
One last word from Anne Sullivan. When she got through the blocks of blindness and muteness she made this promise to Helen: “there is one more word I need to teach you—EVERYTHING.”
That is the promise beyond the wall for each of us, EVERYTHING. Drop the pretense and claim the prize for the prize is everything.
There is a memorable exchange between Anne Sullivan (The Miracle Worker) and her boss (Helen Keller’s dad, Captain Keller). Anne is about to be sent along and is asking for another week or so with Helen to accomplish the next task:
Captain Keller: What would another week accomplish? We are more than satisfied. You taught her things to do, how to behave. She's more manageable, cleaner. Annie Sullivan: Cleaner? Captain Keller: Well, we say cleanliness is next to godliness. Annie Sullivan: Cleanliness is next to nothing!
Jesus and his followers were verbally confronted by the scribes and Pharisees. At issue, and it was a critical issue, was the question of cleanliness. The disciples casually ate without washing. They were not washing hands, food from the field, and food from the market. They were just willing to eat.
The Pharisees, on the other hand, practiced a heavy ritual of washing and cleansing. They ceremonially washed hands, food products, and utensils. (Now I need to tell you that either washing or not washing had much to do with sanitation. The water wasn’t clean, the methods were not sanitary and there wasn’t any soap.) It was about being ritually clean.
So the Pharisees come with the complaint about not washing. “Look Jesus”, they say, “Don’t you get it? Cleanliness is right up there with Godliness”. And Jesus replies back to them, “Cleanliness is right up there with nothing.” “It is what is inside of a human that makes that person either clean or not—it is not the outside stuff or the surface. It is what is deep down inside.”
The Christians of the early centuries began to attempt to categorize what Jesus had to say here about what was inside and could “defile” humanity. They came up with a differentiation of two types of sin. One was the garden variety and the other was this internal list that Jesus spoke of—the Cardinal sins/ deadly sins/ mortal sins call them what you will. The Scholastics of the middle ages crystallized thinking about all this. They identified Pride, Envy, Anger, Gluttony, Lust, Greed and Laziness as the 7 sins that kill. Now I don’t know where or why we got away from that concept, but it pretty well got lost in the Protestant movement. We got to the point where we focused much more on the surface sins and lost track of the core lesson that Jesus was teaching. “It is what is inside that really matters”.
Now you’ all know that I generally believe that Sin is an overworked term and almost a pointless one in the way Christians talk and think. I am not sure, at all, that it is meaningful. One proof of that I might offer is the fact that we work this into the worship service every week. We say a group prayer of confession and then we dedicate time for us to think about our personal and private needs for forgiveness. I counted the seconds today and we dedicated ……14 seconds to the private prayer time. Now, if we really believed this stuff wouldn’t we need to dedicate more than that?
We talk about this stuff and think about it so much because, if we didn’t spend our time and spiritual energy here, we might be forced to spend it where it would matter.
And we fend off core reality of Jesus’ lesson. You know the mechanism. It is the same one that assures me that my child is assertive while someone else’s kid is a bully. The one that makes us believe that we take care with our physical presentation and another person is vain. It is the mechanism that makes a welfare recipient greedy and someone of my middle class background a person of shrewd business acumen.
We invest energy in the 10 Commandments and even convince ourselves that this is the best expression of obedience to God and also of failure to obey. Fact is, the Commandments are, at least 9 out of 10 times, external. They are not about the really big issue of what is inside. They describe external behaviors. They are terribly important not because they describe morality, but rather because they describe a social code. If they are broken you also break community. The violation of this code assures a ripping apart of the very core fabric or a society. But none of that is about morality or of having a soul that is fit for an intimate relationship with God.
In short, we worry about the exhaust of a dirty engine and ignore the issues inside of the engine itself.
These issues (the ones traditionally called the deadly sins) are deadly for a single reason. They are building blocks in a wall that prevents our souls from being accessible to other souls; including the Ultimate Soul. How that works is incredibly simple. Everyone can understand the mechanism.
Let’s take pride. Jesus names it not as sin, but rather as an “evil”. Further, the word for evil is more like error than it is anything else. Dirty or unsanitary comes to mind as a way to get to the precise meaning. So, back to pride. If I have it I want the world and even God (if I think I can get away with it) to think very well of me. I want that so badly that I will create an image that is better than I am. I will show only my best side and I will polish and varnish that best side till it is just perfect. Then, my sisters and brothers in this life (and maybe even God) will love me.
Of course the problem is pretty clear. They didn’t love me. They loved the painting of myself that I showed to them. That even exacerbates the underlying belief in me that I am indeed not lovable or worthy or cherished. I dig for my own salvation an even deeper hole from which escape seems impossible.
So here is what confession is really all about. It is about taking away, even if only for a moment, the blocks we use to build our walls. If I can but remove pride from my own insides, then someone on the outside can get a better glimpse of the real me. If I am loved at that point, it is the real me that finds comfort in that love. If, at that point, I am a mess that only God can love then at least I will be able to claim God’s love. And it will be me making that claim, not an image I present.
Billy Joel sang about the person behind the wall of evils we call the cardinal sins. That person was “The Stranger”. The contention being that deep inside we are actually fascinated by and in love with the stranger within. Billy provoked us with this lyric line:
You may never understandHow the stranger is inspiredBut he isn't always evilAnd he is not always wrongThough you drown in good intentionsYou will never quench the fireYou'll give in to your desireWhen the stranger comes along.
The deadly sins (if they are sins) are deadly for precisely this reason. They keep the stranger inside and the stranger is my soul. I don’t want that to be locked away or out of view or in a closet. I want it to be right there on the table for you and for God and for anyone else in this world to see.
All I have to do is have courage and remove the blocks. Helen Keller in some sense is a powerful metaphor along with being heroine. For we too are isolated by blindness, by the inability to hear. Just like for Helen the deficits are acquired and not essential reality.
So if we remove the blocks—the stuff from within that defiles—we can claim life, but not until we do that removal.
One last word from Anne Sullivan. When she got through the blocks of blindness and muteness she made this promise to Helen: “there is one more word I need to teach you—EVERYTHING.”
That is the promise beyond the wall for each of us, EVERYTHING. Drop the pretense and claim the prize for the prize is everything.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
The Thinkable and the Unthinkable John 6:56-69 Lawrence Jackman
John Kocur told me the other day that, given my appearance and my tone sometimes he thought maybe I could be channeling George Carlin. I found that flattering pretty much because George was skinny. Inside a robe you just can’t tell huh? One of Carlin’s bits was a list of words you couldn’t say on TV. It was a pretty obnoxious bit actually. For a long time, though, I have thought seriously about the things that you can’t say in church. (at least not very well).
One thing you aren’t really able to say is the truth about biblical people.
We make up some pretty interesting stories about biblical times. Even the characters in the Bible itself made up some pretty interesting stories about things they should have known about. Ah…lets face it, they put a spin on things that had very little to do with reality. Solomon probably didn’t want to speak ill of his father, David. Was he really asking us to believe that God wanted to use David as a model for future generations? The king David was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. He was an awful moral mess. Of all people Solomon had to have known that. Yet for Solomon that wasn’t a speakable truth. And the more that the truth could not be spoken, the more you could not really even think this through.
Jesus thought the unthinkable. He said the unspeakable. And he was not universally accepted because he did just these things. The passage from John is pretty interesting because it includes a fact that we just do not ever think about. Men and women were walking with Jesus. They were listening to his words, hanging on his every word, watching miracles happen. They were believing. They were close enough to God on earth to reach out and touch him.
When Jesus then began to explain some of his most profound thoughts, what happened? It looks like from the record that a majority of his followers simply left him. They walked away. It looks like maybe only the twelve are left. Maybe it is more, but it doesn’t sound much like very many more. And even they sounded more like resignation than commitment. Jesus says, “So, you guys going to leave too?” They answer, “There is nobody else to go to. You have the words about eternal life.”
In a day, maybe an hour or two, Jesus lost the majority of the flock. If he had been a minister in a church, he would have been fired.
So, in order to honor a Savior who thought the unthinkable and spoke the unspeakable, what do you say we spend a little time this morning getting use to the idea that we are called precisely to the unthinkable. Those folk who left Jesus were the ones who could not tolerate a new idea. The people who stayed were perhaps not too impressed with or enthusiastic about the brand new ideas, but were impressed with the fact that no one else had answers and Jesus did.
The fact of the matter is that the “faith” /Christianity is not a settled place or a settling in place. It is more of a way that we travel. It is not the destination—it is the sandals we wear as we move along a journey. And those sandals are just like you would imagine they ought to be. They are dirty, damp with human sweat, scuffed by the surface of the road, smelly and altogether very human tools. That is the faith—our sandals. They take us on this journey through unthinkable and unspeakable realities that need to become both thinkable and speakable.
Can we talk about new forms for church in the church? Generally the answer is no. We need to. Let me spin you a bit of a personal yarn about new forms. We have in the Presbytery both a church transformation group and a church planting group. It costs money to start a church or to redevelop one—a lot of money. I am guessing that in this environment and time it would cost something over a million dollars to actually found a church and get it off the ground. Would it be worth it? Of course it would, if that church nurtured members and strengthened the kingdom. But, it would take all that money and maybe 5 years for the group to become self supporting.
There might also be a way to start a church for one percent of that much money and three percent of the time and have it be self supporting in a couple of months. All we would have to do is give up everything that we think about when we think “church”. Bricks, mortar, pews, rooms, and whatever else.
There was a church fire in one of our places in Florida last week. The members of that church stood around the ashes and declared what every congregation facing that situation that I have ever seen declared. They said, “That was the building. We are the church.” When push comes to shove we do know that the church is such a greater thing than any room we sit in. Who says that there isn’t a First Church of Starbucks, of the Web, or of the public meeting room or the living room?
All we have to do is think the unthinkable. And when we do, we can foster the Kingdom of God in ways we have not dreamed of.
Can we mentally go where the people are? The world is hungry for the spiritual value that Christianity offers. All we have to do is go where the world is. But we have answers and they have doubts. Can we tolerate the doubts of the world? They doubt our sincerity. They doubt that we believe as completely as we say we do. They doubt that we have our “act all together” like we want the world to think.
Can we have the courage to go where the world is? God did in sending Jesus. Jesus did in walking the highways and byways. The disciples did who packed up and followed on the roads. God, Jesus and those people led with their weakness instead of their strength. It was vulnerability, displayed weakness, and open lives that converted the world the first time. It will be those qualities again. We will be like the disciples who stayed on board—not flinching from the challenges of being weak. We will look at our brothers and sisters in this world and say quite honestly, “We don’t know either. But we do have an extra pair of scruffy sandals. Take them and let us walk together.”
We do not have answers, but we do have relationships founded in love. However tenuous that fact may be it is the one reality that we need to learn to serve like no other. Jimi Hindrix said, (and you know I am out on a limb when I quote a musician of any stripe) “When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” Love is the single transformational principle of individual or corporate life.
Think about that and the Church. I believe all the way to the bottom of my heart that we can become the Kingdom if we but latch onto that single principle. We are here for a lot of reasons. Sense of duty; I made a promise; it is a good habit I just can’t seem to break; I want to learn more; I am hoping that I can find meaning, purpose or belonging; I want to meet God. We are all different and sometimes we have to work pretty hard to tolerate each other. We do that tolerating because we have an institution to maintain, programs to promote, and a structure to support.
What a different world it might be if we were gathered for a single purpose. What if we all said, “I am here because I love you”. What if we believed that so deeply that we would say it to God and to each other individually? Even just trying that on as an idea or a fantasy is truly transformative. Ah. lets do that. Lets become a new thing.
Once a long time ago in my life, I had a period of trial. It pales in comparison to many people’s experiences and I am deeply aware of that. I was working 6 days a week and commuting 90 miles each way to work. I was trying very hard to be a person and a half at work and a single parent at home. I was trying to survive divorce and a redefinition of my professional life simultaneously. Poor me. Here was an epiphany I had one night late when I got home and collapsed in my bed. I was both too tired and too depressed to even figure out how to pray. I lay in the dark and said perhaps the most authentic prayer of my entire life. I said, “I love you God”. And I went to sleep. That was a pivotal moment in my life. That was all there was. And that was all there needed to be.
Love for each other individually and love for God individually that is the transformational principle on which our faith is founded. “For God so loved…..” If we move nothing else in this world, let us move the concept of love from the unspeakable and unthinkable to the speakable, thinkable and doable skills of the church.
We can’t say the church should have new forms. Lets change that. We can and we will either by leading the way into the future or by being dragged kicking and screaming into the night. The church can be a new and transformed reality.
We can’t say in the church that we need to be where the world is. Lets change that. We can sanctify the world with our presence. We can transform the world like leaven. Lets not be afraid of that.
We can’t say in the church, “I love you”. Oh for heaven’s sake, (literally) lets change that. We have been given the power of love lets make it work like the power it is for all women, men and even the little ones. Amen
John Kocur told me the other day that, given my appearance and my tone sometimes he thought maybe I could be channeling George Carlin. I found that flattering pretty much because George was skinny. Inside a robe you just can’t tell huh? One of Carlin’s bits was a list of words you couldn’t say on TV. It was a pretty obnoxious bit actually. For a long time, though, I have thought seriously about the things that you can’t say in church. (at least not very well).
One thing you aren’t really able to say is the truth about biblical people.
We make up some pretty interesting stories about biblical times. Even the characters in the Bible itself made up some pretty interesting stories about things they should have known about. Ah…lets face it, they put a spin on things that had very little to do with reality. Solomon probably didn’t want to speak ill of his father, David. Was he really asking us to believe that God wanted to use David as a model for future generations? The king David was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. He was an awful moral mess. Of all people Solomon had to have known that. Yet for Solomon that wasn’t a speakable truth. And the more that the truth could not be spoken, the more you could not really even think this through.
Jesus thought the unthinkable. He said the unspeakable. And he was not universally accepted because he did just these things. The passage from John is pretty interesting because it includes a fact that we just do not ever think about. Men and women were walking with Jesus. They were listening to his words, hanging on his every word, watching miracles happen. They were believing. They were close enough to God on earth to reach out and touch him.
When Jesus then began to explain some of his most profound thoughts, what happened? It looks like from the record that a majority of his followers simply left him. They walked away. It looks like maybe only the twelve are left. Maybe it is more, but it doesn’t sound much like very many more. And even they sounded more like resignation than commitment. Jesus says, “So, you guys going to leave too?” They answer, “There is nobody else to go to. You have the words about eternal life.”
In a day, maybe an hour or two, Jesus lost the majority of the flock. If he had been a minister in a church, he would have been fired.
So, in order to honor a Savior who thought the unthinkable and spoke the unspeakable, what do you say we spend a little time this morning getting use to the idea that we are called precisely to the unthinkable. Those folk who left Jesus were the ones who could not tolerate a new idea. The people who stayed were perhaps not too impressed with or enthusiastic about the brand new ideas, but were impressed with the fact that no one else had answers and Jesus did.
The fact of the matter is that the “faith” /Christianity is not a settled place or a settling in place. It is more of a way that we travel. It is not the destination—it is the sandals we wear as we move along a journey. And those sandals are just like you would imagine they ought to be. They are dirty, damp with human sweat, scuffed by the surface of the road, smelly and altogether very human tools. That is the faith—our sandals. They take us on this journey through unthinkable and unspeakable realities that need to become both thinkable and speakable.
Can we talk about new forms for church in the church? Generally the answer is no. We need to. Let me spin you a bit of a personal yarn about new forms. We have in the Presbytery both a church transformation group and a church planting group. It costs money to start a church or to redevelop one—a lot of money. I am guessing that in this environment and time it would cost something over a million dollars to actually found a church and get it off the ground. Would it be worth it? Of course it would, if that church nurtured members and strengthened the kingdom. But, it would take all that money and maybe 5 years for the group to become self supporting.
There might also be a way to start a church for one percent of that much money and three percent of the time and have it be self supporting in a couple of months. All we would have to do is give up everything that we think about when we think “church”. Bricks, mortar, pews, rooms, and whatever else.
There was a church fire in one of our places in Florida last week. The members of that church stood around the ashes and declared what every congregation facing that situation that I have ever seen declared. They said, “That was the building. We are the church.” When push comes to shove we do know that the church is such a greater thing than any room we sit in. Who says that there isn’t a First Church of Starbucks, of the Web, or of the public meeting room or the living room?
All we have to do is think the unthinkable. And when we do, we can foster the Kingdom of God in ways we have not dreamed of.
Can we mentally go where the people are? The world is hungry for the spiritual value that Christianity offers. All we have to do is go where the world is. But we have answers and they have doubts. Can we tolerate the doubts of the world? They doubt our sincerity. They doubt that we believe as completely as we say we do. They doubt that we have our “act all together” like we want the world to think.
Can we have the courage to go where the world is? God did in sending Jesus. Jesus did in walking the highways and byways. The disciples did who packed up and followed on the roads. God, Jesus and those people led with their weakness instead of their strength. It was vulnerability, displayed weakness, and open lives that converted the world the first time. It will be those qualities again. We will be like the disciples who stayed on board—not flinching from the challenges of being weak. We will look at our brothers and sisters in this world and say quite honestly, “We don’t know either. But we do have an extra pair of scruffy sandals. Take them and let us walk together.”
We do not have answers, but we do have relationships founded in love. However tenuous that fact may be it is the one reality that we need to learn to serve like no other. Jimi Hindrix said, (and you know I am out on a limb when I quote a musician of any stripe) “When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” Love is the single transformational principle of individual or corporate life.
Think about that and the Church. I believe all the way to the bottom of my heart that we can become the Kingdom if we but latch onto that single principle. We are here for a lot of reasons. Sense of duty; I made a promise; it is a good habit I just can’t seem to break; I want to learn more; I am hoping that I can find meaning, purpose or belonging; I want to meet God. We are all different and sometimes we have to work pretty hard to tolerate each other. We do that tolerating because we have an institution to maintain, programs to promote, and a structure to support.
What a different world it might be if we were gathered for a single purpose. What if we all said, “I am here because I love you”. What if we believed that so deeply that we would say it to God and to each other individually? Even just trying that on as an idea or a fantasy is truly transformative. Ah. lets do that. Lets become a new thing.
Once a long time ago in my life, I had a period of trial. It pales in comparison to many people’s experiences and I am deeply aware of that. I was working 6 days a week and commuting 90 miles each way to work. I was trying very hard to be a person and a half at work and a single parent at home. I was trying to survive divorce and a redefinition of my professional life simultaneously. Poor me. Here was an epiphany I had one night late when I got home and collapsed in my bed. I was both too tired and too depressed to even figure out how to pray. I lay in the dark and said perhaps the most authentic prayer of my entire life. I said, “I love you God”. And I went to sleep. That was a pivotal moment in my life. That was all there was. And that was all there needed to be.
Love for each other individually and love for God individually that is the transformational principle on which our faith is founded. “For God so loved…..” If we move nothing else in this world, let us move the concept of love from the unspeakable and unthinkable to the speakable, thinkable and doable skills of the church.
We can’t say the church should have new forms. Lets change that. We can and we will either by leading the way into the future or by being dragged kicking and screaming into the night. The church can be a new and transformed reality.
We can’t say in the church that we need to be where the world is. Lets change that. We can sanctify the world with our presence. We can transform the world like leaven. Lets not be afraid of that.
We can’t say in the church, “I love you”. Oh for heaven’s sake, (literally) lets change that. We have been given the power of love lets make it work like the power it is for all women, men and even the little ones. Amen
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