Why Me? Them? Us? Luke 13:1-9
You may remember that I promised you that I wanted to continue another couple of weeks focused in sermons on the issue of community building. If you do not remember that at all—my promise—then I am going to consider running for political office. Integrity suggests to me that I disclaim the prior promise. Here is what I would rather do; go back to the lectionary passages which are seasonal and move through the rest of the season of Lent.
In my reading of the Gospel for today, there is a powerful partial addressing of issues that are before us in many ways. Jesus is talking to people who somehow have the belief that some folks are better than others. They are pretty convinced that because no terrible evil has befallen them, God must favor them.
I am not even sure whether the message is comforting for anyone that Jesus then teaches. “So folks”, he says, “you remember those rebels up in Galilee? You know the ones that the Romans came and brutally suppressed? Do you think they were worse or better than anyone else?”
About 20 years before this time, A.D. 10 or so, there was an abortive tax revolt in the north. A number of folks were running around with their version of the Tea Party agenda. “You don’t owe money to Rome, don’t pay it.” So Rome, as they were often want to do, decided to make an example of some of them. A number of them were ambushed and slaughtered on the altar that they used for animal sacrifices. The point was for Pilate to make a horrible and bloody example of these randomly chosen victims and intimidate the rest of the citizenry back into compliance. It was an act of terror, but the victims were random. The people killed might or might not have even been ones who were involved in the revolt. It didn’t matter to Pilate.
Reaching for another example Jesus reminds his listeners that a tower in the south side of Jerusalem (the Tower of Siloam) had fallen and killed 18 men. This, again, was a relatively recent lesson from the History of Jesus’ time. There were probably people in the crowd who remembered this event. “Do you think these people were worse than others?” Jesus asks. “No”.
There are two points in these illustrations that Jesus used. One is actually his primary lesson to the listeners. That is he is telling them to change their minds lest they fall victim to some disaster and not be “prepared” by having joined the Kingdom.
But now the secondary lesson that Jesus is teaching. That lesson is “the catastrophe is random, indiscriminate, and capricious.” The lesson is not that the catastrophe is a punishment, but rather that it has no relationship to a Godly punishment. It is an accident of this world.
Now why would I want to look at that lesson? Maybe…..just maybe…..it is because so called religious leaders want us to see events of random nature very much like people wanted to look at that sort of thing in New Testament times. And Jesus, by the way, says NO to both.
You have heard them…..The earthquake in Haiti is a result of some deal with the Devil. God needs to get even for something we don’t like, therefore there is untold human suffering. Therefore innocents die.
By biblical standards it is sometimes hard to demonstrate that God doesn’t like whatever it is, but Pat Robertson doesn’t. The disaster itself is supposed to be the proof of God’s contempt for something. Well God’s aim isn’t so good a lot of the time if that is all correct. Or maybe it is just not timely. If a deal with Satan were made, the disaster struck 206 years late, missed all the people in France and the United States who were involved and butchered a devastated island. I am not sure whether some of these folks are giving God, the Devil or organized religion a bad name—maybe it is all three.
Leaving my tirade, I am troubled by how much we do, theologically, the same sort of thing at least on the upside of things. Someone escapes an accident, a deadly diagnosis, powerful harm of some sort. Our solution to that is so often, “God delivered, healed or otherwise fixed it.” My problem is with the flip side of the coin. An equally deserving person did not escape. I am good with God getting credit. But I am a logic creature and wonder about the blame.
What does the God whom we identify as totally good have to do with disaster? Why do bad things happen to some people? ( I am going to take Jesus’ lesson to heart and avoid saying bad things to good people. )
It isn’t about deserving good or bad. That was Jesus’ lesson and it works for me. It isn’t about praying for better things and having a magical God intervene sometimes and not on others. That is something that experience teaches us all.
We all testify to the notion that God does indeed care. And, at the same time, we all know that God doesn’t always fix everything. How do we live with those beliefs? Assuming they are correct, is it possible that we believe some other things that just are not correct? After all lots of what Christian’s say about God was written by Pagan Greek philosophers and was never written in the Bible. Maybe some of that isn’t right.
So we are stuck in the middle of an incredible paradox. In the midst of a world declared completely good we must face and deal with undeserved evil and pain. There appears no way to make logical sense of that reality. Maybe we are not supposed to.
Instead we are called on to live life in the middle of this paradox—affirming at one and the same time God’s love and compassion, and a world filled with bad things. In the midst of that complicated and contradictory environment we make affirmations with our voices and with our actions.
God’s good world and the bad things in it call for us to affirm “hope as a lasting value”. This last few days have seen an iconic photo from Chile. The man with the national flag that was pulled from the muddy remains of the family home has been posted many places. In the middle of disaster and catastrophe we know the lesson of hope. Pandora’s box told the story. When she opened the box, everything flew into the innocent world. Then she looked inside. The one remaining item was hope. The man in Chile found it in his national flag. We find it many places, but we find it as we live in the paradox.
In the middle of God’s good world and the bad things in it we seek and find community. In late December of 2005, I found myself in the middle of a physical health crisis. It was a shock to my thought process. The first day in the hospital the chaplain came into the room. She was kind enough, but I had enough Presbyterians in the room to make a quorum for a presbytery meeting. I could tolerate the paradox and the evils of this world with my sisters and brothers around me. Sunday morning I woke up exhausted. It was New Year’s day. I had been home 12 hours. The kids were headed back to their homes. Deb and I headed off to Church. Community in the midst of the paradox of this life—that is what life is about.
I can sit and brood about the paradox or try to live within it with integrity. When I choose the first, the second calls to me and says, “Hey real life is over here.” Watch the news footage on any day. In the middle of the bad things of this life, people are reaching out and embracing one another. What good people do in the middle of bad things, is not stop and read a book. What they do is love each other. That doesn’t make sense of anything, but is sure makes life, in the real world, worthwhile. Love for each other is our value in the middle of the paradoxical reality of this life.
Love for God in the midst of the real world is the way believing people of integrity live. Job’s story means that, and that alone. In the end, God. There is a beaten up and used term in Church. It is Lord. The archaic meaning of that word—the one from biblical time is worth our thinking about sometimes. Watch an old Robin Hood movie and think about the religious term Lord. The word means just what it did in the Robin Hood movie. It means. “You are the one who directs my life. What you ask, I do.” It does not mean (never has) that I will be spared all consequences or hurt or pain. It means, “I love you and I am listening for your instruction”.
That is the Lord we need to find in the midst of our paradoxical world. Where bad happens in this world, I believe that God is saying, “Get off your duff and help.”
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Saturday, December 12, 2009
“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.
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.
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
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