2 Kings 2:1-12; Mark 9:2-9; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6
There are some passages of scripture that become indelibly etched in one’s memory. I can’t remember the when, but I do remember the how of my first encounter with Elijah and Elisha and the chariots of fire. It was back in the time when religious programs were easily found on popular radios stations. I can’t remember the name of the program but it came on every Sunday afternoon and was a kind of radio theater of Bible stories. If I recall there was an adult character or two and a couple of children who interacted with them around the details of the story as it was told. It was a kind of mini church school class. I don’t remember all the stories which were told, but this one has stuck with me all these years.
There are a variety of levels in this story. There is the near-heart-wrenching break up of the teacher-student relationship of Elijah and Elisha. And if you think about the whole of the Elijah saga, you realize that at this point Elijah has his spunk back. He was pretty demoralized after the contest on Mt. Carmel when he caused the thrice-drenched sacrifice and stone altar to be incinerated which made a mockery of the 450 prophets of Baal attached to Queen Jezebel’s court. Elijah had the failed prophets put to death. The queen then put a bounty on Elijah. He fled to the desert, was nourished by an angel from God for forty days until he encountered God in the stillness of silence. God told him to stop feeling sorry for himself because he wasn’t the last of God’s prophets or followers. God told Elijah to get up, go anoint kings over Aram and Israel, and train Elisha as his successor.
In this reading, this transfer of prophetic authority from Elijah to Elisha is seen to be more than just the transfer of power, as we do every quadrennial Inauguration Day when one elected President hands over the government to the next elected President. To be Elijah’s heir entails a great deal more than simply doing miracles similar to those of the master. To go in the footsteps of Elijah, Elisha must go wherever Elijah went – Bethel, Jericho, Jordan – bear the same burdens, risk the same dangers, experience the same hardships, and venture into times of both solitariness and solidarity in order to receive and ultimately bear the word of the Lord.
Prophetic work is not something that is taken up lightly. It is not fair weather work. It is not an “easy A” course at the rabbinical university. In fact the exchange of the prophet’s mantle between Elijah and Elisha manages to crumple up all the romantic notions we have of prophet’s peering into the mists of the future and announcing what will one day come to pass, or calling down God’s wrath on divine enemies and miscreants.
To be a prophet is not to be the solitary future-gazer or the herald of God’s impending judgment. To be a prophet is to enter deeply into the realities and relationships of the people to whom the prophet is sent. To be a prophet is not to be anonymous or dispassionate. Nor does a prophet stand impersonally outside of or apart from the community. The prophetic word is potent because it comes from the community to which it is addressed. The word is driven by the anguish of witnessing the disparity between the grand desire of God for God’s people and the extreme poverty of the reality God’s people have been forced to accept. To be a prophet is, in the words of David Lose, to love God’s people enough to tell them the truth about their condition.
This potent God-blessed, God-sparked love is the basis for the Confession of Belhar which the Sunday morning class finished studying last week. South African people of color like Allan Boesak, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and countless others dared to say to the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, once spawned for blacks and coloreds by the white Dutch Reformed Church, and say to the world at-large, that the reality of apartheid was not the reality that God desired for South Africans or for anyone else.
To be a prophet in this tradition is to step out into the open, to refuse the institutional armor as David refused Saul’s armor for the combat with Goliath. To be a prophet like Elijah and Elisha is to take up vulnerability, to lay aside all the human-made physical, ideological, and theological armaments and to live totally dependent on God’s word and God’s mercy. This is what Jesus spoke to when he swept aside the idea of Peter to build shrines for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus on the mountain of transfiguration. Nothing must stand between the prophet and God or between the prophet and God’s people to whom the prophet is sent and with whom the prophet stands against the anti-divine reality the people have been forced to accept.
That is why the need for two helpings of Elijah’s spirit which Elisha requests as the elder prophet’s parting gift to his successor. Only Elijah doesn’t have the power to make that gift. Elisha’s prophetic ministry will depend ultimately on God and on Elisha’s willingness to commit the totality of his life to God, to make himself without obstruction vulnerable to God’s will for his life and to the antagonism and antipathy of the world in desperate need of God’s saving grace.
Even though the parting of Elijah and Elisha and the transfiguration of Jesus are epic moments of God’s presence breaking into human existence, this attitude of vulnerability is the key link between fiery chariot and horses and the mist-enshrouded mountaintop voice reiterating the divinely spoken message from Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, whom I dearly love.” The message at the baptism was addressed to Jesus, “With you I find happiness.” On the mountain the message was addressed to the two disciples and eventually the entire community: “Listen to him!”
The command often has an exclamation point. It is not likely a “pretty please” kind of request. It is the kind of command that a parent gives a child. Yet there is still some possible variation there. Does it mean, “Do as I say! Now! Or Else!” or does it mean, “Pay attention! Watch what I am doing so you can do it too.” I think it is more of the latter. While Jesus did preach from time to time, he was much more of an educator. He once said to a group of listeners, “Put on my yoke, and learn from me” (Matthew 11:29).
Jesus led his companions down the mountain and back to the reality of the people to whom and for whom he was called. He told the two to keep the details of what they had experienced to themselves until the time after the Human One – the Son of Man – Jesus – had risen from the dead. He knew that only then would they be able to process what had happened and what the message was for them and for all God’s people.
Jesus went down the mountain to be vulnerable: to love God and love the people, to be betrayed, and to be made to suffer and die on the cross. He anticipated and accepted this reality only by trusting completely in God’s mercy.
Jesus calls us to be vulnerable. This is not the “Keep calm and have stiff upper lip” mentality that is so often doled out. We have received it, and we have given it. “Buck up.” “Stop being a cry baby.” “Get a grip.” Jesus was not impassive. Jesus was not a stoic. In taking on human life – your and my life – he allowed himself to be open to and to experience to the fullest every human emotion, every human pain and elation, every human reality.
If a person believes that life is against them, that everyone is out to get them, life will be bleak. But if a person believes the overwhelming mercy of God, then no matter what life throws at us, we will not be overcome. The prophet’s tears pour out of his vulnerability. Jesus wept for Jerusalem. Jesus invites us to weep for the world.
Our strength does not come through stiff upper lips but through broken hearts and helping hands. Our strength does not come from hate but from love. Our strength does not come from ourselves but from God. To be prophetic in our community is to be immersed in the challenges confronting God’s people and, amid those difficulties, to throw ourselves to the mercy of the God of Elijah and Elisha, the God we know most fully in the dearly loved Son, and to give voice to God’s vision for wholeness and life, both for us and through us for the world.
May it be so. Amen.
General Resource: David J. Lose, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, pp. 435-439.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Awe, Not Terror
Psalm 111; Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Mark 1:21-28
Our calendar year has seasons. Can you believe it? We are already halfway through the season of winter. It’s less than three weeks until baseball spring training starts, and six weeks to the first day of spring.
The church year has seasons, too. We have come through the season of Advent, which started the fourth Sunday before Christmas. It is a season of expectation, of watchfulness, of waiting. Then Christmas came and lasted twelve days until the day of Epiphany, which traditionally celebrates the arrival of the magi to worship the Christ child. Epiphany means manifestation or revelation. God’s activity in Christ is revealed to the world, represented by the worldly magi who were not of Jesus’ own people. Jesus is revealed, in the words of Simeon, as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory for [God’s] people Israel” (Luke 2:32).
Epiphany is a season of the church year which bridges the time between Christmas and Lent. The gospel readings almost always point to the character and mission of Jesus as displayed early on in his ministry, whether or not people recognized him or not.
The reading three weeks ago was about his baptism, when Jesus was baptized by John, anointed with the descending dove/Spirit and confirmed by God’s affirmation, “my beloved.” Last week the reading was the beginning of his ministry following John’s arrest and Jesus’ first call of disciples.
So with the beginning core of his leadership team, Jesus began to circulate. When the next Sabbath arrived, they were in Capernaum and they went to the local synagogue, just as people today may drop in to a church in a town they are visiting on vacation.
I don’t know if the local rabbi embarrassed Jesus by asking who he was. Perhaps he was known as the carpenter Joseph’s son. Instead of being given a loaf of guest bread, he was invited to join the adult class and he jumped into the discussion. He apparently didn’t do a word by word, verse by verse discussion of the text. He brought an in depth understanding of the reading and amazed everyone. It was evident that he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t just beating his gums with the same passe explanations which had been repeated for the last fifty or one hundred years.
Jesus was not just revealing something about himself, he was revealing something about his father, something about the God for whom he was the flesh and bone representative living in the midst of God’s creation. Jesus may have been coming into his own as a teacher and healer, but more importantly his revelation was of God. He wasn’t just a representation of God, he was a window through which people could see God, a portal through which people could experience the depth and breadth of God’s never-failing love and grace.
The God that Jesus enabled people to see was both personal, operating within a domain of reality, and distant, lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience. God is complex, so complex that we can only know a tiny fraction of God’s reality at any one time. God operates both within and beyond our reality. God is a close as the next breath we take and as distant as the farthest reaches of the universe, a distance which seems to grow in both time and distance the more we discover about the universe.
This paradox of closeness and distance, of cozy companionship and icy aloofness, of never-failing love and unremitting justice is the God whom Jesus brought close to anyone he encountered. Some welcomed this presence while others refused to welcome it. Some were awe-struck and other were angry. Some people who had no reason to know him knew who he was, and some who should have known him, never caught on to his identity or refused to know him.
The posthumous writings of the 17th century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal included what has come to be known as “Pascal’s Wager.” Pascal posited that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually exists and assuming an infinite gain or loss associated with belief or unbelief in God (as represented by an eternity in heaven or hell), a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God exists, the person gains everything, and if God does not actually exist, the person loses little or nothing.
Believers tend to respond to God in one of two ways: awe or terror. Today’s psalm captures some of this bipolar response to God. The psalmist tries to lay out a balanced view of God. The same God who is both above (distant) and within (near) is also named as a God whose presence and involvement within the faith community can be intimately felt.
God’s transcendent qualities, the ones that define God as very different from human beings are readily evident in the psalmist’s words:
Of course, many of us have some trouble with that. We are very rational. We were bottle-fed on cause and effect, and if God is cause, then we don’t like a lot of the effect that we see or experience. Too often we know just enough science to think that there is no connection between it and God. We doubt the power of God’s works or God’s involvement in things we think we can clearly and unabashedly define as solely human causation.
Being awe-struck by God is not something to be gotten over like recovering from an illness or a bad employment experience. If God is awesome, that awesomeness doesn’t diminish with time or experience. The psalmist says that “fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” That suggests that the awesomeness of God is something that actually grows over time, something that deepens as our relationship with God develops. The “fear of the Lord” is not terror. It is respect, it is wonderment, it is wide-eyed amazement. It is awe.
We see a shift in the middle of the psalm. “God gives food to those who honor him.” This links the faraway-ness God with God’s closeness. Not only does the believer have an experience of awe in the presence of God, that very experience is what leads us into the relationship that intimately nourishes us.
If we are terrified of God, afraid of God, fearful of God, we will work to keep God at arm’s length, pushing God away from us. We will deny God’s intimacy with us and echo what the person imprisoned by an evil spirit screamed at Jesus in the Capernaum synagogue, “What have you to do with us?” That approach wants nothing to do with God nor God’s doing anything with us. On the other hand, awe is an invitation for a more fulfilling relationship, a deeper intimacy from both sides, we with God and God with us.
Jesus – divine and human – Word made flesh – bridges the chasm between terror and awe, between fear and joy, between icy resentment and warm welcome.
“Fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” And wisdom is the knowledge that, in the words of Paul to believers in Rome,
May God’s praise last forever!
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Our calendar year has seasons. Can you believe it? We are already halfway through the season of winter. It’s less than three weeks until baseball spring training starts, and six weeks to the first day of spring.
The church year has seasons, too. We have come through the season of Advent, which started the fourth Sunday before Christmas. It is a season of expectation, of watchfulness, of waiting. Then Christmas came and lasted twelve days until the day of Epiphany, which traditionally celebrates the arrival of the magi to worship the Christ child. Epiphany means manifestation or revelation. God’s activity in Christ is revealed to the world, represented by the worldly magi who were not of Jesus’ own people. Jesus is revealed, in the words of Simeon, as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory for [God’s] people Israel” (Luke 2:32).
Epiphany is a season of the church year which bridges the time between Christmas and Lent. The gospel readings almost always point to the character and mission of Jesus as displayed early on in his ministry, whether or not people recognized him or not.
The reading three weeks ago was about his baptism, when Jesus was baptized by John, anointed with the descending dove/Spirit and confirmed by God’s affirmation, “my beloved.” Last week the reading was the beginning of his ministry following John’s arrest and Jesus’ first call of disciples.
So with the beginning core of his leadership team, Jesus began to circulate. When the next Sabbath arrived, they were in Capernaum and they went to the local synagogue, just as people today may drop in to a church in a town they are visiting on vacation.
I don’t know if the local rabbi embarrassed Jesus by asking who he was. Perhaps he was known as the carpenter Joseph’s son. Instead of being given a loaf of guest bread, he was invited to join the adult class and he jumped into the discussion. He apparently didn’t do a word by word, verse by verse discussion of the text. He brought an in depth understanding of the reading and amazed everyone. It was evident that he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t just beating his gums with the same passe explanations which had been repeated for the last fifty or one hundred years.
Jesus was not just revealing something about himself, he was revealing something about his father, something about the God for whom he was the flesh and bone representative living in the midst of God’s creation. Jesus may have been coming into his own as a teacher and healer, but more importantly his revelation was of God. He wasn’t just a representation of God, he was a window through which people could see God, a portal through which people could experience the depth and breadth of God’s never-failing love and grace.
The God that Jesus enabled people to see was both personal, operating within a domain of reality, and distant, lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience. God is complex, so complex that we can only know a tiny fraction of God’s reality at any one time. God operates both within and beyond our reality. God is a close as the next breath we take and as distant as the farthest reaches of the universe, a distance which seems to grow in both time and distance the more we discover about the universe.
This paradox of closeness and distance, of cozy companionship and icy aloofness, of never-failing love and unremitting justice is the God whom Jesus brought close to anyone he encountered. Some welcomed this presence while others refused to welcome it. Some were awe-struck and other were angry. Some people who had no reason to know him knew who he was, and some who should have known him, never caught on to his identity or refused to know him.
The posthumous writings of the 17th century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal included what has come to be known as “Pascal’s Wager.” Pascal posited that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually exists and assuming an infinite gain or loss associated with belief or unbelief in God (as represented by an eternity in heaven or hell), a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God exists, the person gains everything, and if God does not actually exist, the person loses little or nothing.
Believers tend to respond to God in one of two ways: awe or terror. Today’s psalm captures some of this bipolar response to God. The psalmist tries to lay out a balanced view of God. The same God who is both above (distant) and within (near) is also named as a God whose presence and involvement within the faith community can be intimately felt.
God’s transcendent qualities, the ones that define God as very different from human beings are readily evident in the psalmist’s words:
The works of the Lord are magnificent. ...The God described here is so powerful and present that we are enticed to study, to meditate on, and celebrate God in a community of the faithful. The presence of the Divine is so plain that there really is no option but to give witness to it.
God’s deeds are majestic and glorious.
God’s righteousness stands forever.
God is famous for his wondrous works.
The Lord is full of mercy and compassion. ...
God sent redemption for his people;
God commanded that his covenant last forever.
Of course, many of us have some trouble with that. We are very rational. We were bottle-fed on cause and effect, and if God is cause, then we don’t like a lot of the effect that we see or experience. Too often we know just enough science to think that there is no connection between it and God. We doubt the power of God’s works or God’s involvement in things we think we can clearly and unabashedly define as solely human causation.
Being awe-struck by God is not something to be gotten over like recovering from an illness or a bad employment experience. If God is awesome, that awesomeness doesn’t diminish with time or experience. The psalmist says that “fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” That suggests that the awesomeness of God is something that actually grows over time, something that deepens as our relationship with God develops. The “fear of the Lord” is not terror. It is respect, it is wonderment, it is wide-eyed amazement. It is awe.
We see a shift in the middle of the psalm. “God gives food to those who honor him.” This links the faraway-ness God with God’s closeness. Not only does the believer have an experience of awe in the presence of God, that very experience is what leads us into the relationship that intimately nourishes us.
If we are terrified of God, afraid of God, fearful of God, we will work to keep God at arm’s length, pushing God away from us. We will deny God’s intimacy with us and echo what the person imprisoned by an evil spirit screamed at Jesus in the Capernaum synagogue, “What have you to do with us?” That approach wants nothing to do with God nor God’s doing anything with us. On the other hand, awe is an invitation for a more fulfilling relationship, a deeper intimacy from both sides, we with God and God with us.
Jesus – divine and human – Word made flesh – bridges the chasm between terror and awe, between fear and joy, between icy resentment and warm welcome.
“Fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” And wisdom is the knowledge that, in the words of Paul to believers in Rome,
“If God is for us, who is against us? He didn’t spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. ... Who will bring a charge against God’s elect people? It is God who acquits them. Who is going to convict them? It is Christ Jesus who died, even more, who was raised, and who also is at God’s right side. It is Christ Jesus who also pleads our case for us” (Romans 8:31-34).Friends, fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins. It is awe, not terror, it is joy, not fear, it is life, not death.
May God’s praise last forever!
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Cosmic Career Change
Mark 1:14-20; Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark begins like an alarm clock, persistently declaring the time and demanding a response.(1) “The beginning of the good news,” Mark declares: Jesus fulfills the prophecy. Then there is the new Elijah – John the Baptist – announcing not himself but the one who was coming. Like Elijah castigating Ahab, Jezebel, and their minions, John calls out everyone in Judea and Jerusalem to confess their sins and be baptized, not just into repentance but also into the hope of the one who was coming.
Then there is the time when heaven is split open and the Spirit descends on Jesus, who hears the voice of divine affirmation: “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.” That is followed with the forty-day time in the wilderness as the Spirit and the Adversary spar over Jesus.
We are thrust forward to a time after John had been arrested. The preparation he announced was over before it was scarcely understood. The Spirit-anointed, Adversary-tested Jesus comes out of the shadows: “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom!” Jesus doesn’t just announce the time, he fulfills it in person, in word, in deed.
It’s no wonder that as the days passed neighbors, family members, and religious professionals were transfixed and aghast that so common a man, so ordinary an individual whom many of them had known since toddlerhood, could speak truth with a story-teller’s skillful use of familiar images, and do it with mind-stretching authority.
His announcement wasn’t a question of going somewhere and doing something, an exercise which could be fended off with excuses galore, like the neighbors did when invited to the banquet in one of Jesus’ parables. Jesus was literally “in your face,” demanding an immediate response. When I was a child we used to suddenly snap our fingers or clap our hands in someone’s face, while saying, “Think fast.” Jesus’ encountering of anyone was a “think fast” moment.
“Repent,” “believe,” “follow,” “fish” – these aren’t timeless ethical imperatives. Repenting, believing, following, fishing are “think fast” responses to the fullness of God’s time intersecting the emptiness of human time.
There is a set order to what Jesus announces. Yet so often congregations and individuals reverse the order. Congregations are often more interested in filling the empty seats, so they blindly and erratically fish. Too often the baited hooks come back empty.
Then when they actually get someone to follow, they lay out the method: We’ve always done it this way so don’t rock the boat. And they so drum that ideology into their catch that finally the newbies believe it and repent of having had any wild and crazy ideas that church could be done in any other way. It doesn’t make much sense, but then again, we’ve always done it that way.
But that’s not the way that Jesus laid out ministry. He said: Repent, believe, follow, fish. We can’t fish unless we know the one we are following. We can’t follow unless we believe the purpose for which he was sent and the one who sent him. We can’t believe unless we repent of every belief, every system, every self-deluding idea that we are the centers of our universes.
We do not repent in order to usher in the time of redemption, because that time is already here. We do not become fishers in order to meet some monthly quota as if we were salespeople on commission, as if meeting that quota will unlock the reign of God. The reign of God is already here. We do not follow Jesus in hopes that one day we might find him, because he has already come and found us. God takes the initiative. The reign of God is not the product of discipleship, it’s the precondition for it.(2)
Repent, believe, follow, fish. That’s the sequence. Whether you realized it or not, that’s the sequence we follow every week. When the prelude starts, when the call to worship is spoken, that is the announcement that God’s reign has already arrived, that it is in our midst and that we are in the middle of it in this time and space.
After recognizing the kingdom’s presence, we repent. Our confession sweeps over a wide variety of sins – corporate and personal, deeds committed and words spoken, deeds and words omitted. We recognize that when we assuage our consciences with some minuscule response to another’s overt or ignorant sin, we affirm and enlarge, not mitigate, our complicity in such wrongful personal and societal behavior. Repentance is something that needs constant renewal. We do it every week.
Repentance is like spring cleaning. It is moving out the old and worthless (no matter how much worth we have accorded it) and making room for the new. Repentance is jettisoning unbelief and mis-directed belief to make room for true belief. Following repentance, pardon, and thanksgiving for God’s grace lavished on us, we turn to belief as it is nurtured in scripture and exposition.
The purpose of sermons is not to confirm narrow belief and to comfort us in small belief. The Word is read and proclaimed to stretch and expand and enlarge belief, to inspire us in our following, to fit us for the hard work of being God’s people in a culture for which God is either a under-inflated concept or a “four-letter” word.
Repenting, believing, following. We follow in prayer, in serving each other, in providing for the needs of Christ in the world far away, the world near at hand – our community, and the world of God’s people gathered in this place. We follow Jesus as he roamed through neighborhoods of immigrants and foreigners, as he walked the back alleys of his own native settlements, as he ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, people in broken relationships, people neglected, ostracized, segregated, and debased by supposedly God-fearing people. We follow Jesus by walking where Jesus walked.
And finally we fish. “Go out into the world in peace; be courageous; hold on to what is good; return no one evil for evil; strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak, and help the suffering; honor all people; love and serve the Lord, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.”
When Jesus called the first disciples, when he called any disciples, the call came out of the announcement of the in-breaking of God’s reign. Discipleship was not another task to burden already overworked people. Jesus called them to new ways of being.
When Simon and Andrew left their nets, they left a way of life. James and John not only left their nets, but also their father. These four, and the ones who would come after them, left behind a whole complex matrix of work, family, and place into order to take up a new identity.(3)
The words seem simple: “I will show you how to fish for people.” Notice the subtlety of the language. Not “make you fish for people” – another activity to enter into the date book (“How about the every third Thursday? Does that fit everyone’s schedule?”) Jesus will show us how to fish for people. It is a new identity, a new career, a whole new life a cosmic career change.
The irony is that Jesus doesn’t ask us to bait hooks in order to catch unsuspecting people and reel them into the church. The new identity, the new career is really one of being the bait. By living a life in the here and now of God’s reign, of repenting any and every aspect of our thinking and living that denies God, by believing the good news of salvation made alive in the flesh and blood of Christ and confirmed in his resurrection, and by going into the same kinds of neighborhoods, life situations, and relationships that Jesus did, we become living examples of life that people are hungering for. “Tell me about what makes you tick.” “Why do you respond to all that life throws at you the way you do?” “Why are you so hope-filled when there is nothing around you to support it?” These kinds of questions open us ways of speaking from the heart about Christ’s presence and power in our lives.
The disciples experienced a cosmic career change. They could no longer fish for fish. They had forgotten how. In one post-resurrection appearance, Jesus had to tell the disciples which side of the boat to fish out of (John 21:5-6).
Friends, Now is the time. The reign of God is here. Repent, believe, follow, fish. It’s a cosmic career change that will change your life forever.
(1) Ted A. Smith “Mark 1:14-20 – Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, p. 285.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Mark begins like an alarm clock, persistently declaring the time and demanding a response.(1) “The beginning of the good news,” Mark declares: Jesus fulfills the prophecy. Then there is the new Elijah – John the Baptist – announcing not himself but the one who was coming. Like Elijah castigating Ahab, Jezebel, and their minions, John calls out everyone in Judea and Jerusalem to confess their sins and be baptized, not just into repentance but also into the hope of the one who was coming.
Then there is the time when heaven is split open and the Spirit descends on Jesus, who hears the voice of divine affirmation: “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.” That is followed with the forty-day time in the wilderness as the Spirit and the Adversary spar over Jesus.
We are thrust forward to a time after John had been arrested. The preparation he announced was over before it was scarcely understood. The Spirit-anointed, Adversary-tested Jesus comes out of the shadows: “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom!” Jesus doesn’t just announce the time, he fulfills it in person, in word, in deed.
It’s no wonder that as the days passed neighbors, family members, and religious professionals were transfixed and aghast that so common a man, so ordinary an individual whom many of them had known since toddlerhood, could speak truth with a story-teller’s skillful use of familiar images, and do it with mind-stretching authority.
His announcement wasn’t a question of going somewhere and doing something, an exercise which could be fended off with excuses galore, like the neighbors did when invited to the banquet in one of Jesus’ parables. Jesus was literally “in your face,” demanding an immediate response. When I was a child we used to suddenly snap our fingers or clap our hands in someone’s face, while saying, “Think fast.” Jesus’ encountering of anyone was a “think fast” moment.
“Repent,” “believe,” “follow,” “fish” – these aren’t timeless ethical imperatives. Repenting, believing, following, fishing are “think fast” responses to the fullness of God’s time intersecting the emptiness of human time.
There is a set order to what Jesus announces. Yet so often congregations and individuals reverse the order. Congregations are often more interested in filling the empty seats, so they blindly and erratically fish. Too often the baited hooks come back empty.
Then when they actually get someone to follow, they lay out the method: We’ve always done it this way so don’t rock the boat. And they so drum that ideology into their catch that finally the newbies believe it and repent of having had any wild and crazy ideas that church could be done in any other way. It doesn’t make much sense, but then again, we’ve always done it that way.
But that’s not the way that Jesus laid out ministry. He said: Repent, believe, follow, fish. We can’t fish unless we know the one we are following. We can’t follow unless we believe the purpose for which he was sent and the one who sent him. We can’t believe unless we repent of every belief, every system, every self-deluding idea that we are the centers of our universes.
We do not repent in order to usher in the time of redemption, because that time is already here. We do not become fishers in order to meet some monthly quota as if we were salespeople on commission, as if meeting that quota will unlock the reign of God. The reign of God is already here. We do not follow Jesus in hopes that one day we might find him, because he has already come and found us. God takes the initiative. The reign of God is not the product of discipleship, it’s the precondition for it.(2)
Repent, believe, follow, fish. That’s the sequence. Whether you realized it or not, that’s the sequence we follow every week. When the prelude starts, when the call to worship is spoken, that is the announcement that God’s reign has already arrived, that it is in our midst and that we are in the middle of it in this time and space.
After recognizing the kingdom’s presence, we repent. Our confession sweeps over a wide variety of sins – corporate and personal, deeds committed and words spoken, deeds and words omitted. We recognize that when we assuage our consciences with some minuscule response to another’s overt or ignorant sin, we affirm and enlarge, not mitigate, our complicity in such wrongful personal and societal behavior. Repentance is something that needs constant renewal. We do it every week.
Repentance is like spring cleaning. It is moving out the old and worthless (no matter how much worth we have accorded it) and making room for the new. Repentance is jettisoning unbelief and mis-directed belief to make room for true belief. Following repentance, pardon, and thanksgiving for God’s grace lavished on us, we turn to belief as it is nurtured in scripture and exposition.
The purpose of sermons is not to confirm narrow belief and to comfort us in small belief. The Word is read and proclaimed to stretch and expand and enlarge belief, to inspire us in our following, to fit us for the hard work of being God’s people in a culture for which God is either a under-inflated concept or a “four-letter” word.
Repenting, believing, following. We follow in prayer, in serving each other, in providing for the needs of Christ in the world far away, the world near at hand – our community, and the world of God’s people gathered in this place. We follow Jesus as he roamed through neighborhoods of immigrants and foreigners, as he walked the back alleys of his own native settlements, as he ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, people in broken relationships, people neglected, ostracized, segregated, and debased by supposedly God-fearing people. We follow Jesus by walking where Jesus walked.
And finally we fish. “Go out into the world in peace; be courageous; hold on to what is good; return no one evil for evil; strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak, and help the suffering; honor all people; love and serve the Lord, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.”
When Jesus called the first disciples, when he called any disciples, the call came out of the announcement of the in-breaking of God’s reign. Discipleship was not another task to burden already overworked people. Jesus called them to new ways of being.
When Simon and Andrew left their nets, they left a way of life. James and John not only left their nets, but also their father. These four, and the ones who would come after them, left behind a whole complex matrix of work, family, and place into order to take up a new identity.(3)
The words seem simple: “I will show you how to fish for people.” Notice the subtlety of the language. Not “make you fish for people” – another activity to enter into the date book (“How about the every third Thursday? Does that fit everyone’s schedule?”) Jesus will show us how to fish for people. It is a new identity, a new career, a whole new life a cosmic career change.
The irony is that Jesus doesn’t ask us to bait hooks in order to catch unsuspecting people and reel them into the church. The new identity, the new career is really one of being the bait. By living a life in the here and now of God’s reign, of repenting any and every aspect of our thinking and living that denies God, by believing the good news of salvation made alive in the flesh and blood of Christ and confirmed in his resurrection, and by going into the same kinds of neighborhoods, life situations, and relationships that Jesus did, we become living examples of life that people are hungering for. “Tell me about what makes you tick.” “Why do you respond to all that life throws at you the way you do?” “Why are you so hope-filled when there is nothing around you to support it?” These kinds of questions open us ways of speaking from the heart about Christ’s presence and power in our lives.
The disciples experienced a cosmic career change. They could no longer fish for fish. They had forgotten how. In one post-resurrection appearance, Jesus had to tell the disciples which side of the boat to fish out of (John 21:5-6).
Friends, Now is the time. The reign of God is here. Repent, believe, follow, fish. It’s a cosmic career change that will change your life forever.
(1) Ted A. Smith “Mark 1:14-20 – Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, p. 285.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Our Brokenness Is Mended
Acts 19:1-7; Genesis 1:1-5; Mark 1:4-11
Your remember the nursery rhyme:
My mother loved decorative porcelain pieces, especially flowers. When I studied in Scotland I found a wonderful Royal Crown Staffordshire bouquet of bright flowers in a small bowl. The sales assistant packed it securely and I personally carried the box on the flight home. It got home safely and Mom enjoyed it. After her death, I took it back and we had it for a number of years. One day it was sitting – safely we thought – on top of the filing cabinet. One of our cats got on the cabinet, misstepped, and the flowers hit the floor. Several of the flower stems broke and while some of the petals were irreparable, I thought I could glue the stems back together to make the more or less arrangement whole again. I tried one thing and another, but nothing worked. It couldn’t be mended, not by me anyway. I put it in the closet for years. It was not longer beautiful and the memory was too painful. I finally threw it out.
Lives get broken. We can’t mend ourselves. As counselors tell us, we are never cured but always in recovery, whether from an addiction that eats away at our body or mind or from a trauma which causes what is now diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Only a few chapters after the Genesis creation story the wholeness of life was broken by envy, disobedience, lying, blaming, betraying, and murder. Life was broken and it would never be the same. The rest of the Bible is about trying to mend the brokenness of human life.
The Japanese have an art form that not only repairs shattered pottery, it also enhances and illuminates the cracks with a lacquer laced with gold. The artists do this when a precious piece of pottery has been broken. After mixing lacquer resin with powdered gold, they use the resin to put the broken pieces together. What they end up with is a pot with cracks in it, but the cracks are filled with gold.
They call it kintsukuroi (keen-tsoo-koo-roy). Golden repair.
Such restoration creates a gorgeous piece of art and makes a philosophical statement as well. Kintsukuroi asserts that breakage and repair is part of the unique history of an object, rather than something to deny or disguise.
Each of us needs more golden repair in our lives, because we so often hide our brokenness. A friend hurts us deeply, and we retreat inside ourselves. We lose a job or suffer a pay cut, and pretend like everything is really okay. A spouse abuses us, but we never speak up. We sense that we have a drinking problem, but feel too embarrassed to ask for help. A marriage begins with intimacy and anticipation, and ends with alienation and anger. Add your own life breakages to the list.
Life breaks us, in a variety of painful ways. And unfortunately we often deny it. We would rather disguise our cracks than undergo golden repair. We would rather put ourselves in a closet, like I did with the broken porcelain flowers. Only our closet is constructed of denial, fear or shame. We would rather do that than admit our helplessness and our need for golden repair, God’s repair. God practices “kintsukuroi Christianity.”
In Acts, the apostle Paul traveled to Ephesus in Asia Minor – modern-day Turkey. He found twelve disciples there, and asked them if they had received the Holy Spirit when they became believers. They replied, “We’ve not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”
These disciples might not be broken, but they clearly have some cracks. Not only had they not received the Holy Spirit, they didn't even know that it existed!
Paul was perplexed. He asked, “What baptism did you receive, then?” They answered, “John’s baptism.” Paul then understood that they needed some golden repair, some “kintsukuroi Christianity.”
Paul told them that John’s baptism was for repentance to get ready for the one who was to come after him, that is, Jesus. Paul knew that John baptized with water, while Jesus baptized “with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16).
The disciples were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, and when Paul laid hands on them the Holy Spirit entered them. Immediately, they spoke in tongues and prophesied, just like the first Christians on the day of Pentecost.
The gift of the Holy Spirit – that’s pure gold! Suddenly, the gaps in the lives of these disciples were filled, and they were made whole as disciples of Jesus. But notice that there was no attempt to deny or disguise their deficiencies. Instead, God filled their cracks with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, making them stronger and more beautiful in the broken places. That's golden repair. Kintsukuroi Christianity.
In the book Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, Christy Bartlett writes that “not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated.”(1) Not hidden. Not disguised. Illuminated.
Everyone has gaps and breaks in their lives – everyone has been shattered by some destructive experience, whether we brought it on ourselves or it happened to us while we were minding our own business. Mended Japanese ceramics inspire us to show compassionate sensitivity to the broken people around us, and compassionate sensitivity to ourselves as well.
Kintsukuroi Christianity can be defined this way: Whenever I am weak, then I am strong. Whenever I invite Christ to fill my breaks and cracks, then he works powerfully through me. When I am broken, Christ makes me whole.
Paul might express it in different words: When I am weak, I find strength in the presence of Christ. I know that he is making me stronger and more beautiful through his ongoing work of golden repair.
Several decades ago, just ten days after his son was killed in a car accident, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin delivered a sermon to his congregation at Riverside Church in New York City. He said, “As almost all of you know, a week ago last Monday night, driving in a terrible storm ... my 24-year-old son Alexander, who enjoyed beating his old man at every game and in every race, beat his father to the grave.
“Among the healing flood of letters that followed his death was one carrying this wonderful quote from the end of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: ‘The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.’ ”(2)
Friends, this font around which we gather every week, into which we pour simple water, over which we say the words, “In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven,” is the place where God affects the golden repair, kintsukuroi Christianity. It is here that the gaps between the pieces of our lives are filled with Holy Spirit, with hope, with illuminating radiance. Our brokenness is mended by God and our enhanced beauty is made visible.
Paul wrote the following to the Corinthian believers:
General Resource: “Kintsukuroi Christianity,” Homiletics, January 2015
(1) Bartlett, Christy, “A tearoom full of mended ceramics.” Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, 2008, bachmaneckenstein.com.
(2) Coffin, William Sloane, “Eulogy for Alex.” NOW, pbs.org.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Your remember the nursery rhyme:
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.Things get broken in life and they can’t be repaired.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s men and all the king’s horses
couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
My mother loved decorative porcelain pieces, especially flowers. When I studied in Scotland I found a wonderful Royal Crown Staffordshire bouquet of bright flowers in a small bowl. The sales assistant packed it securely and I personally carried the box on the flight home. It got home safely and Mom enjoyed it. After her death, I took it back and we had it for a number of years. One day it was sitting – safely we thought – on top of the filing cabinet. One of our cats got on the cabinet, misstepped, and the flowers hit the floor. Several of the flower stems broke and while some of the petals were irreparable, I thought I could glue the stems back together to make the more or less arrangement whole again. I tried one thing and another, but nothing worked. It couldn’t be mended, not by me anyway. I put it in the closet for years. It was not longer beautiful and the memory was too painful. I finally threw it out.
Lives get broken. We can’t mend ourselves. As counselors tell us, we are never cured but always in recovery, whether from an addiction that eats away at our body or mind or from a trauma which causes what is now diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Only a few chapters after the Genesis creation story the wholeness of life was broken by envy, disobedience, lying, blaming, betraying, and murder. Life was broken and it would never be the same. The rest of the Bible is about trying to mend the brokenness of human life.
The Japanese have an art form that not only repairs shattered pottery, it also enhances and illuminates the cracks with a lacquer laced with gold. The artists do this when a precious piece of pottery has been broken. After mixing lacquer resin with powdered gold, they use the resin to put the broken pieces together. What they end up with is a pot with cracks in it, but the cracks are filled with gold.
They call it kintsukuroi (keen-tsoo-koo-roy). Golden repair.
Such restoration creates a gorgeous piece of art and makes a philosophical statement as well. Kintsukuroi asserts that breakage and repair is part of the unique history of an object, rather than something to deny or disguise.
Each of us needs more golden repair in our lives, because we so often hide our brokenness. A friend hurts us deeply, and we retreat inside ourselves. We lose a job or suffer a pay cut, and pretend like everything is really okay. A spouse abuses us, but we never speak up. We sense that we have a drinking problem, but feel too embarrassed to ask for help. A marriage begins with intimacy and anticipation, and ends with alienation and anger. Add your own life breakages to the list.
Life breaks us, in a variety of painful ways. And unfortunately we often deny it. We would rather disguise our cracks than undergo golden repair. We would rather put ourselves in a closet, like I did with the broken porcelain flowers. Only our closet is constructed of denial, fear or shame. We would rather do that than admit our helplessness and our need for golden repair, God’s repair. God practices “kintsukuroi Christianity.”
In Acts, the apostle Paul traveled to Ephesus in Asia Minor – modern-day Turkey. He found twelve disciples there, and asked them if they had received the Holy Spirit when they became believers. They replied, “We’ve not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”
These disciples might not be broken, but they clearly have some cracks. Not only had they not received the Holy Spirit, they didn't even know that it existed!
Paul was perplexed. He asked, “What baptism did you receive, then?” They answered, “John’s baptism.” Paul then understood that they needed some golden repair, some “kintsukuroi Christianity.”
Paul told them that John’s baptism was for repentance to get ready for the one who was to come after him, that is, Jesus. Paul knew that John baptized with water, while Jesus baptized “with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16).
The disciples were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, and when Paul laid hands on them the Holy Spirit entered them. Immediately, they spoke in tongues and prophesied, just like the first Christians on the day of Pentecost.
The gift of the Holy Spirit – that’s pure gold! Suddenly, the gaps in the lives of these disciples were filled, and they were made whole as disciples of Jesus. But notice that there was no attempt to deny or disguise their deficiencies. Instead, God filled their cracks with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, making them stronger and more beautiful in the broken places. That's golden repair. Kintsukuroi Christianity.
In the book Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, Christy Bartlett writes that “not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated.”(1) Not hidden. Not disguised. Illuminated.
Everyone has gaps and breaks in their lives – everyone has been shattered by some destructive experience, whether we brought it on ourselves or it happened to us while we were minding our own business. Mended Japanese ceramics inspire us to show compassionate sensitivity to the broken people around us, and compassionate sensitivity to ourselves as well.
Kintsukuroi Christianity can be defined this way: Whenever I am weak, then I am strong. Whenever I invite Christ to fill my breaks and cracks, then he works powerfully through me. When I am broken, Christ makes me whole.
Paul might express it in different words: When I am weak, I find strength in the presence of Christ. I know that he is making me stronger and more beautiful through his ongoing work of golden repair.
Several decades ago, just ten days after his son was killed in a car accident, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin delivered a sermon to his congregation at Riverside Church in New York City. He said, “As almost all of you know, a week ago last Monday night, driving in a terrible storm ... my 24-year-old son Alexander, who enjoyed beating his old man at every game and in every race, beat his father to the grave.
“Among the healing flood of letters that followed his death was one carrying this wonderful quote from the end of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: ‘The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.’ ”(2)
Friends, this font around which we gather every week, into which we pour simple water, over which we say the words, “In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven,” is the place where God affects the golden repair, kintsukuroi Christianity. It is here that the gaps between the pieces of our lives are filled with Holy Spirit, with hope, with illuminating radiance. Our brokenness is mended by God and our enhanced beauty is made visible.
Paul wrote the following to the Corinthian believers:
“God said that light should shine out of the darkness. He is the same one who shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay pots so that the awesome power belongs to God and doesn’t come from us. We are experiencing all kinds of trouble, but we aren’t crushed. We are confused, but we aren’t depressed. We are harassed, but we aren’t abandoned. We are knocked down, but we aren’t knocked out.” (2 Corinthians 4:6-9)Friends, all who yearn for their brokenness to be mended, all who long for the gaps between the pieces of their lives to be filled with God’s golden repair, all who desire the power of the Holy Spirit to fill their weakness, all who thirst for the life which Christ offers, come to the water.
General Resource: “Kintsukuroi Christianity,” Homiletics, January 2015
(1) Bartlett, Christy, “A tearoom full of mended ceramics.” Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, 2008, bachmaneckenstein.com.
(2) Coffin, William Sloane, “Eulogy for Alex.” NOW, pbs.org.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Incarnated Disruption
John1:1-4, 10-18; Psalm 14712-20; Ephesians 1:9-14
Lots of people make New Year’s resolutions. Most lists of resolutions are more like wish lists than bucket lists. That is, they are hopes and dreams rather than things that will actually get accomplished. Most of us would be more honest if we were to say, for example, I hope to lose weight, or I hope to exercise more. A vast majority of those who make those wishes never accomplish them, for a variety of reasons.
In the vein of wishing, we often wish a lot for the new year. We wish for quiet, for strength, for peace, for goodwill. After all, that was a significant part of the message that the celestial chorus sang to the shepherds. Unfortunately, wishing won’t make it so.
An editorial cartoon this past week showed the traditional aged 2014 and the newborn 2015. 2014 says to 2015, “You’ll need a hazmat suit, riot gear, a gas mask, a bulletproof vest, Valium, antacid, aspirin....” As much as we hate to spoil all the promise of Christmas, the cartoon speaks the reality of living.
The gospel writer Matthew saw this reality, at least in the community he was associated with. Only his gospel records Jesus being openly provocative about his mission in the world. In the midst of a chapter-long disciple commissioning speech in Matthew 10, Jesus says to the disciples, “Don’t think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I haven’t come to bring peace but a sword” (vs. 34). That sword will force believers to choose between the comforts of the status quo, represented by family, and the challenge of untethered life in Christ. Will believers choose between a smooth life or a disrupted life?
In his own way, the gospel writer John, who eschewed angels, shepherds, mangers, and magi, sees the incarnation – the birth – of Jesus Christ in much the same way as Matthew. Everything that Jesus did wields a disruptive sword. The gospel of John, chapter by chapter, documents the disruption incarnated in Christ. This incarnated disruption is complete and it is contemporary.
“The word became flesh” (John 1:14). All creation is disrupted by the presence of Jesus. There had always been a safe divide between the divine and the human. The only intersection had been the annual entry into the holy of holies by the high priest with the blood sacrifice for the sins of the people committed in ignorance (Hebrews 9:3-7). God was always at a distance from the people behind a veil. Jesus disrupted the order of creation, bringing God into the midst of humanity.
After the wedding at Cana, Jesus went to Jerusalem for the Passover. There he “found in the temple those who were selling cattle, sheep, and doves, as well as those involved in exchanging currency” (v. 2:14). Jesus chased them all out of the temple, scattered the coins and overturned the tables. He disrupted the salvation economy by chastising those who, in the guise of convenience, took excessive advantage of those already burdened with travel, with occupation troops and laws, with fear of government and fear of God. Jesus wanted people to worship God, not the sacrifices which held God at arms’s length. Jesus disrupted the economy of the kingdom of God.
Nicodemus (ch. 3) came to Jesus in the dead of night seeking truth only to have his faith disrupted because he could not understand the difference between natural birth and spiritual birth – being born anew, from above. Faith had been grounded in what could be seen. God’s kingdom could only be seen by faith eyes, not human eyes.
Jesus left Judea (ch. 4) and wandered through Galilee and the surrounding countryside, some of it Gentile or Samaritan. He encountered a woman ostracized for a variety of reasons. He spoke with her, healed her downtrodden spirit, and disrupted the matter-of-fact norms of gender and race. She was a child of God on equal footing with every other child of God, regardless of origin, geography, or other form of social segregation and censure.
John spends chapter 5 recounting Jesus at the Bethsaida pool healing the man who had been chronically ill for thirty-eight years. This healing incensed the religious leaders because it was done on the Sabbath. The man had been ill for so long, why couldn’t the healing have waited for a weekday. Jesus disrupted the prevailing sense of justice, for justice delayed was justice denied. And to further disrupt justice, Jesus declared that it was his father, God, who was working through him. “As the Father raises the dead and gives life, so too does the Son give life to whomever he chooses” (v. 5:21). Justice is defined by God not human beings. “I assure you that whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life” (v. 24).
Back in the country again, Jesus disrupted the traditional forms of planning and preparation when he told his disciples to sit the 5,000 person crowd down and feed them with the five barley loaves and two fish supplied by a youth (v. 6:9). When the disciples later asked what they had to do to accomplish what God required, Jesus responded, “Believe in him whom God sent” (v. 29). Belief cannot be planned or prepared for. Belief either is or isn’t.
On his next festival trip to Jerusalem (ch. 7), Jesus spent time teaching in the temple, astonishing the religious leaders who wondered how he had mastered the Law. Jesus did not claim the teaching as his own, but said it came from the one who sent him – God. “Those who speak in their own seek glory for themselves. Those who seek the glory of him who sent me are people of truth” (v. 18). Jesus disrupted the understood ways of education.
When the religious leaders sought to discredit Jesus by presenting an adulterous woman to him for judgment (v. 8:3), he disrupted the received morality of the time by directing that only those without sin could pass judgment on her. As that sank in, the crowd slithered away, guilty publicly and privately.
In chapter 9, Jesus encountered a man blind from birth. Jesus healed the man. Neighbors, strangers, and religious leaders all disputed the healing. Challenged by the religious leaders, the man declared, “I don’t know whether he [Jesus] is a sinner. Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see” (9:25). By healing the man Jesus disrupted an entire understanding of health care. Disease and disability did not come from sin, and healing did come from God: “If this man wasn’t from God, he couldn’t do this” (v. 33).
Jesus met the man following his expulsion from the faith community and the man declared his belief. Jesus said that he came “to exercise judgment so that those who don’t see can see and those who see will become blind” (v.39). Jesus then preached to the scoffing religious leaders about his being the sheepgate (v. 10:7) and the good shepherd (v. 11) who puts his own health on the line for the health of all of God’s children. Jesus disrupted their understanding of leadership.
Jesus then disrupted death by raising Lazarus from death. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die” (v. 11:25). Death will not have the last word, for the word made flesh will destroy death, disrupting not only notions of death, but also of life itself.
John records a lengthy, five chapter, departure discourse of Jesus, much of it in the form of a prayer. In some ways it is a lot like the lengthy speech that Moses gave before his death. But unlike Moses’ final words, which were history, commission and encouragement, Jesus words and images disrupted the whole notion of identity. He was not some itinerant teacher. He was in the Father and the Father was in him (v. 14:11). Identity is community. “Whoever loves me will keep my word” (v. 23). “The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I told you” (v. 26). “I am the true vine; you are the branches....Without me you can’t do anything” (v. 15:5). Jesus disrupted the longstanding idea of community, connection, responsibility, authority, and identity as children of God.
Finally, through his trial, crucifixion, and resurrection, Jesus disrupted all the expectations which generations had gathered about the role, the function, the activity of the Messiah. Even after seeing the empty tomb, the disciples “didn’t yet understand the scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead” (v. 20:9). Only when confronted with disbelief could Thomas give utterance to belief: “My Lord and my God!” (v. 28). Then Jesus welcomed Peter back into ministry and commissioned him to service. To the last Jesus disrupted expectations.
Christmas is the birth of disruption. And I don’t mean rearranging the house for the tree and gifts and guests. Jesus’ birth ushers in cosmic disruption, changing the perceived course of eternity, changing the interaction of divine and human, changing every life.
The season of Christmas ends with Epiphany on Tuesday. The last of the seasonal decorations will be gone. But Jesus’ disruption will continue. Thank God for that. Life in Christ is not business as usual. How will Christ disrupt you life this year? Will it be your understanding of creation, economy, gender/race/ethnicity, justice, planning, education, morality, healing, leadership, death, life, identity, expectations, eternal life? Will you be able to cope with Jesus’ disruptions and say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”?
May Christ gloriously disrupt your life for his sake this year. Amen.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Lots of people make New Year’s resolutions. Most lists of resolutions are more like wish lists than bucket lists. That is, they are hopes and dreams rather than things that will actually get accomplished. Most of us would be more honest if we were to say, for example, I hope to lose weight, or I hope to exercise more. A vast majority of those who make those wishes never accomplish them, for a variety of reasons.
In the vein of wishing, we often wish a lot for the new year. We wish for quiet, for strength, for peace, for goodwill. After all, that was a significant part of the message that the celestial chorus sang to the shepherds. Unfortunately, wishing won’t make it so.
An editorial cartoon this past week showed the traditional aged 2014 and the newborn 2015. 2014 says to 2015, “You’ll need a hazmat suit, riot gear, a gas mask, a bulletproof vest, Valium, antacid, aspirin....” As much as we hate to spoil all the promise of Christmas, the cartoon speaks the reality of living.
The gospel writer Matthew saw this reality, at least in the community he was associated with. Only his gospel records Jesus being openly provocative about his mission in the world. In the midst of a chapter-long disciple commissioning speech in Matthew 10, Jesus says to the disciples, “Don’t think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I haven’t come to bring peace but a sword” (vs. 34). That sword will force believers to choose between the comforts of the status quo, represented by family, and the challenge of untethered life in Christ. Will believers choose between a smooth life or a disrupted life?
In his own way, the gospel writer John, who eschewed angels, shepherds, mangers, and magi, sees the incarnation – the birth – of Jesus Christ in much the same way as Matthew. Everything that Jesus did wields a disruptive sword. The gospel of John, chapter by chapter, documents the disruption incarnated in Christ. This incarnated disruption is complete and it is contemporary.
“The word became flesh” (John 1:14). All creation is disrupted by the presence of Jesus. There had always been a safe divide between the divine and the human. The only intersection had been the annual entry into the holy of holies by the high priest with the blood sacrifice for the sins of the people committed in ignorance (Hebrews 9:3-7). God was always at a distance from the people behind a veil. Jesus disrupted the order of creation, bringing God into the midst of humanity.
After the wedding at Cana, Jesus went to Jerusalem for the Passover. There he “found in the temple those who were selling cattle, sheep, and doves, as well as those involved in exchanging currency” (v. 2:14). Jesus chased them all out of the temple, scattered the coins and overturned the tables. He disrupted the salvation economy by chastising those who, in the guise of convenience, took excessive advantage of those already burdened with travel, with occupation troops and laws, with fear of government and fear of God. Jesus wanted people to worship God, not the sacrifices which held God at arms’s length. Jesus disrupted the economy of the kingdom of God.
Nicodemus (ch. 3) came to Jesus in the dead of night seeking truth only to have his faith disrupted because he could not understand the difference between natural birth and spiritual birth – being born anew, from above. Faith had been grounded in what could be seen. God’s kingdom could only be seen by faith eyes, not human eyes.
Jesus left Judea (ch. 4) and wandered through Galilee and the surrounding countryside, some of it Gentile or Samaritan. He encountered a woman ostracized for a variety of reasons. He spoke with her, healed her downtrodden spirit, and disrupted the matter-of-fact norms of gender and race. She was a child of God on equal footing with every other child of God, regardless of origin, geography, or other form of social segregation and censure.
John spends chapter 5 recounting Jesus at the Bethsaida pool healing the man who had been chronically ill for thirty-eight years. This healing incensed the religious leaders because it was done on the Sabbath. The man had been ill for so long, why couldn’t the healing have waited for a weekday. Jesus disrupted the prevailing sense of justice, for justice delayed was justice denied. And to further disrupt justice, Jesus declared that it was his father, God, who was working through him. “As the Father raises the dead and gives life, so too does the Son give life to whomever he chooses” (v. 5:21). Justice is defined by God not human beings. “I assure you that whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life” (v. 24).
Back in the country again, Jesus disrupted the traditional forms of planning and preparation when he told his disciples to sit the 5,000 person crowd down and feed them with the five barley loaves and two fish supplied by a youth (v. 6:9). When the disciples later asked what they had to do to accomplish what God required, Jesus responded, “Believe in him whom God sent” (v. 29). Belief cannot be planned or prepared for. Belief either is or isn’t.
On his next festival trip to Jerusalem (ch. 7), Jesus spent time teaching in the temple, astonishing the religious leaders who wondered how he had mastered the Law. Jesus did not claim the teaching as his own, but said it came from the one who sent him – God. “Those who speak in their own seek glory for themselves. Those who seek the glory of him who sent me are people of truth” (v. 18). Jesus disrupted the understood ways of education.
When the religious leaders sought to discredit Jesus by presenting an adulterous woman to him for judgment (v. 8:3), he disrupted the received morality of the time by directing that only those without sin could pass judgment on her. As that sank in, the crowd slithered away, guilty publicly and privately.
In chapter 9, Jesus encountered a man blind from birth. Jesus healed the man. Neighbors, strangers, and religious leaders all disputed the healing. Challenged by the religious leaders, the man declared, “I don’t know whether he [Jesus] is a sinner. Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see” (9:25). By healing the man Jesus disrupted an entire understanding of health care. Disease and disability did not come from sin, and healing did come from God: “If this man wasn’t from God, he couldn’t do this” (v. 33).
Jesus met the man following his expulsion from the faith community and the man declared his belief. Jesus said that he came “to exercise judgment so that those who don’t see can see and those who see will become blind” (v.39). Jesus then preached to the scoffing religious leaders about his being the sheepgate (v. 10:7) and the good shepherd (v. 11) who puts his own health on the line for the health of all of God’s children. Jesus disrupted their understanding of leadership.
Jesus then disrupted death by raising Lazarus from death. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die” (v. 11:25). Death will not have the last word, for the word made flesh will destroy death, disrupting not only notions of death, but also of life itself.
John records a lengthy, five chapter, departure discourse of Jesus, much of it in the form of a prayer. In some ways it is a lot like the lengthy speech that Moses gave before his death. But unlike Moses’ final words, which were history, commission and encouragement, Jesus words and images disrupted the whole notion of identity. He was not some itinerant teacher. He was in the Father and the Father was in him (v. 14:11). Identity is community. “Whoever loves me will keep my word” (v. 23). “The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I told you” (v. 26). “I am the true vine; you are the branches....Without me you can’t do anything” (v. 15:5). Jesus disrupted the longstanding idea of community, connection, responsibility, authority, and identity as children of God.
Finally, through his trial, crucifixion, and resurrection, Jesus disrupted all the expectations which generations had gathered about the role, the function, the activity of the Messiah. Even after seeing the empty tomb, the disciples “didn’t yet understand the scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead” (v. 20:9). Only when confronted with disbelief could Thomas give utterance to belief: “My Lord and my God!” (v. 28). Then Jesus welcomed Peter back into ministry and commissioned him to service. To the last Jesus disrupted expectations.
Christmas is the birth of disruption. And I don’t mean rearranging the house for the tree and gifts and guests. Jesus’ birth ushers in cosmic disruption, changing the perceived course of eternity, changing the interaction of divine and human, changing every life.
The season of Christmas ends with Epiphany on Tuesday. The last of the seasonal decorations will be gone. But Jesus’ disruption will continue. Thank God for that. Life in Christ is not business as usual. How will Christ disrupt you life this year? Will it be your understanding of creation, economy, gender/race/ethnicity, justice, planning, education, morality, healing, leadership, death, life, identity, expectations, eternal life? Will you be able to cope with Jesus’ disruptions and say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”?
May Christ gloriously disrupt your life for his sake this year. Amen.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Sunday, December 28, 2014
I Won't Keep Silent
Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:22-40
A carol of Christmas originating in France begins:
“Sing we now of Christmas,
Noel, sing we here!
Hear our grateful praises
to the babe so dear.
Sing we Noel, the King is born, Noel!
Sing we now of Christmas, sing we now Noel!”
There is a lot of singing and telling going on in the Christmas story:
And if we step back from the individual stories, the reason that the gospels were written was that the good news of Jesus could be told. The apostle John notes in the opening of his first letter, “What we have seen and heard, we also announce it to you....We are writing these things so that our joy can be complete” (1 John 1:3, 4).
What is John’s joy? Simeon says it so well:
“...my eyes have seen your salvation.
You prepared this salvation in the presence of all peoples.
It’s a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and a glory for your people Israel.”
There is one theme throughout all the series pf “Christmas” tellings. That theme is hope. What John, Anna, Simeon, Zechariah, Mary proclaim is not wishful thinking. It is not rose-tinged optimism. It is pure unadulterated hope.
German theologian Jürgen Moltmann published his Theology of Hope nearly fifty years ago. For Moltmann, the hope of the Christian faith is hope in the resurrection of Christ crucified. When following the Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, a Christian should find hope in the future. Yet at the same time the believer will experience much discontentment with the way the world is now, corrupt and full of sin. The hope of Simeon, Anna, and others, is for the divine reordering of creation; not just the cancelling out of sin, but its complete removal. For Simeon and Anna, this is not a question of when in the future, but a present reality. Simeon declares, “Let your servant go in peace according to your word, because my eyes have seen your salvation.” As the gospel writer Mark says in the opening of his account, Jesus declares, “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom” (Mark 1:15).
This is not optimism. It is hope. Miroslav Volf, in reflecting on Moltmann’s theology writes, “Optimism is based on the possibilities of things as they have come to be; hope is based on the possibilities of God irrespective of how things are....Hope is grounded in the faithfulness of God and therefore on the effectiveness of God’s promise.”(1)
For Isaiah, for Simeon and Anna, for Paul as he encourages the Galatian believers, hope is more present tense than future. God is indeed effective. There is a whole biblical record that supports that. God has worked through the underdog. And at times God has deliberately guided the situation so that the odds for a hopeful outcome were increased to the point of being incredible longshots. And that is when God came through with stunning results in favor of God’s people Israel. Of course there were times, too many times, when the people threw out hope in God and the reality of God’s effectiveness and blundered on in their own independence, ineffectiveness, and sinfulness, They rued the consequences.
If all we had was optimism, then school bombings in Pakistan, targeted killings in Ottawa and New York, house fires in Washington Court House, auto fatalities here and there, Ebola in West Africa, priest killings in Mexico, confrontations with law enforcement officers in countless cities, gridlock in Congress — they would all limit our ability to think that anything significant and good could happen ever again. Optimism is based on the best we can realistically envision. Hope is based on what God will ultimately bring about.
Because we are followers of the one who was born in Bethlehem, because we stake our lives—spiritual and physical—on the God of creation, salvation, redemption and eternal life, we know that God will not be mocked by the cruelty, the arrogance, the greed, the self-centeredness that rules the world and holds truth and righteousness prisoner.
As Isaiah of the exile wrote the final poems, he did so out of hope, out of the sure and certain knowledge that God was about to do a new thing, about to upend the tables of power, about to change the course of Israel’s life.
Israel's release from exile, her “righteousness shines out like a light, and her salvation blazes like a torch” (62:1b). The nations will witness Israel’s newly acquired “glory” (vs.2a); and Israel shall receive a new name (vs. 2b) revealing her new character. Finally, Israel shall be seen as a “splendid garland” and “a royal turban” in the hand of God. These metaphors emphasize once again that what is happening in freeing Israel from exile is God’s doing. Sovereignty over these historic events belongs to God alone, but yet they also exalt the place that Israel has in the divine plan of salvation for the world.
As Simeon said,
“You prepared this salvation in the presence of all peoples.
It’s a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and a glory for your people Israel.”
Christmas is more than bright lights, carols, gift cards, tinsel, eggnog, cookies, Santa and reindeer. Christmas is God’s affirmation that what God has intended from before creation is being carried out and will be accomplished. “The zeal of the Lord of heavenly forces will do this” (Isaiah 9:7).
Because what will be is already so—not only in the mind of God but also the minds of believers—we cannot keep silent. We have to gush forth the “Glorias” and “Alleluias” of the heavenly choir. We have to tell all that we have seen and heard like the shepherds. We have to declare,
“Joy to the world the Savior reigns!
Let all their songs employ,
while fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
repeat the sounding joy.”
(1) Miroslav Volf, “Not Optimistic,” Christian Century, December 28, 2004, 31.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
“Sing we now of Christmas,
Noel, sing we here!
Hear our grateful praises
to the babe so dear.
Sing we Noel, the King is born, Noel!
Sing we now of Christmas, sing we now Noel!”
There is a lot of singing and telling going on in the Christmas story:
- An angel announces to Zechariah what’s going to happen.
- The angel later appears to Mary and tells her what will happen to her.
- Mary, in the presence of Elizabeth, tells out her song of glory and praise to God for what God is preparing for her.
- John is born to Elizabeth and when he is to be named, Zechariah’s divinely imposed silence is broken by telling the promise the child bears.
- An angel then appears in a dream to an anxious Joseph to tell him know to worry about the social issues he and Mary are living with; it’s all according to God’s plan.
- An angel, backed-up by the heavenly choral society, tells the rural Bethlehem shepherds about a special birth just happened in the village.
- The shepherds race off to Bethlehem, find the new born Jesus and tell the astonished parents all that they have seen and heard. Then back in their fields and homes, they tell everything to anyone who would listen.
- Then on the day of naming Jesus, first Simeon and then Anna proclaim the future of Jesus as the hope and salvation of his people Israel.
And if we step back from the individual stories, the reason that the gospels were written was that the good news of Jesus could be told. The apostle John notes in the opening of his first letter, “What we have seen and heard, we also announce it to you....We are writing these things so that our joy can be complete” (1 John 1:3, 4).
What is John’s joy? Simeon says it so well:
“...my eyes have seen your salvation.
You prepared this salvation in the presence of all peoples.
It’s a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and a glory for your people Israel.”
There is one theme throughout all the series pf “Christmas” tellings. That theme is hope. What John, Anna, Simeon, Zechariah, Mary proclaim is not wishful thinking. It is not rose-tinged optimism. It is pure unadulterated hope.
German theologian Jürgen Moltmann published his Theology of Hope nearly fifty years ago. For Moltmann, the hope of the Christian faith is hope in the resurrection of Christ crucified. When following the Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, a Christian should find hope in the future. Yet at the same time the believer will experience much discontentment with the way the world is now, corrupt and full of sin. The hope of Simeon, Anna, and others, is for the divine reordering of creation; not just the cancelling out of sin, but its complete removal. For Simeon and Anna, this is not a question of when in the future, but a present reality. Simeon declares, “Let your servant go in peace according to your word, because my eyes have seen your salvation.” As the gospel writer Mark says in the opening of his account, Jesus declares, “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom” (Mark 1:15).
This is not optimism. It is hope. Miroslav Volf, in reflecting on Moltmann’s theology writes, “Optimism is based on the possibilities of things as they have come to be; hope is based on the possibilities of God irrespective of how things are....Hope is grounded in the faithfulness of God and therefore on the effectiveness of God’s promise.”(1)
For Isaiah, for Simeon and Anna, for Paul as he encourages the Galatian believers, hope is more present tense than future. God is indeed effective. There is a whole biblical record that supports that. God has worked through the underdog. And at times God has deliberately guided the situation so that the odds for a hopeful outcome were increased to the point of being incredible longshots. And that is when God came through with stunning results in favor of God’s people Israel. Of course there were times, too many times, when the people threw out hope in God and the reality of God’s effectiveness and blundered on in their own independence, ineffectiveness, and sinfulness, They rued the consequences.
If all we had was optimism, then school bombings in Pakistan, targeted killings in Ottawa and New York, house fires in Washington Court House, auto fatalities here and there, Ebola in West Africa, priest killings in Mexico, confrontations with law enforcement officers in countless cities, gridlock in Congress — they would all limit our ability to think that anything significant and good could happen ever again. Optimism is based on the best we can realistically envision. Hope is based on what God will ultimately bring about.
Because we are followers of the one who was born in Bethlehem, because we stake our lives—spiritual and physical—on the God of creation, salvation, redemption and eternal life, we know that God will not be mocked by the cruelty, the arrogance, the greed, the self-centeredness that rules the world and holds truth and righteousness prisoner.
As Isaiah of the exile wrote the final poems, he did so out of hope, out of the sure and certain knowledge that God was about to do a new thing, about to upend the tables of power, about to change the course of Israel’s life.
Israel's release from exile, her “righteousness shines out like a light, and her salvation blazes like a torch” (62:1b). The nations will witness Israel’s newly acquired “glory” (vs.2a); and Israel shall receive a new name (vs. 2b) revealing her new character. Finally, Israel shall be seen as a “splendid garland” and “a royal turban” in the hand of God. These metaphors emphasize once again that what is happening in freeing Israel from exile is God’s doing. Sovereignty over these historic events belongs to God alone, but yet they also exalt the place that Israel has in the divine plan of salvation for the world.
As Simeon said,
“You prepared this salvation in the presence of all peoples.
It’s a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and a glory for your people Israel.”
Christmas is more than bright lights, carols, gift cards, tinsel, eggnog, cookies, Santa and reindeer. Christmas is God’s affirmation that what God has intended from before creation is being carried out and will be accomplished. “The zeal of the Lord of heavenly forces will do this” (Isaiah 9:7).
Because what will be is already so—not only in the mind of God but also the minds of believers—we cannot keep silent. We have to gush forth the “Glorias” and “Alleluias” of the heavenly choir. We have to tell all that we have seen and heard like the shepherds. We have to declare,
“Joy to the world the Savior reigns!
Let all their songs employ,
while fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
repeat the sounding joy.”
(1) Miroslav Volf, “Not Optimistic,” Christian Century, December 28, 2004, 31.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Make a List, Check It Twice
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; Isaiah 61:1-4. 8-11; John 1:6-8.19-28
We have probably heard the lyric for a month now in store background music:
The cardinal rule for carpenters is measure twice and cut once. You can shorten a board cut too long, but you can’t lengthen a board cut too short. An extended family in my previous congregation ran a printing shop. They would hire a teenager after school to clean up and do odd jobs. Frequently the new hire would be initiated by being sent down the street to the hardware store to get a paper stretcher. The rule remains, measure twice, cut once.
Lots of us make lists. Lists are useful. A management tip I saw recently said that the last thing a person ought to do before leaving work at the end of the day is to make a to do list for the next day while the thoughts of unfinished work or new projects are fresh in the mind. Years ago a New Yorker cartoon showed an executive conversing with an employee. He said, “Let me make a little list of those things.” The huge executive desk was covered with little pieces of paper bearing lists.
Paul is famous for his lists. They are scattered throughout his letters. There is the list of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, the list of situations which he has survived in 2 Corinthians 11, the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, and the equipment list of the armor of God in Ephesians 6, just to name a few. Some readers think that Paul’s lists are closed, when in fact most are open-ended. They are not exhaustive but illustrative. There ought to be an “e.g.” at the beginning, or an “etc.” after the last entry.
All this points out is that Paul’s lists are made according to the particular context. We have one of Paul’s lists in today’s reading from the first Thessalonian letter. Paul is addressing the new community or assembly meeting in Thessalonica. The Greek word he uses eventually becomes the word we associate with church – ekklesia.
Lee Bowman points out the important aspect of that context. The significance of the community, assembly, or church is not derived from its location in a particular piece of geography, but “from its ‘location’ in a particular god, namely the one God of Jews and Christians—known to both traditions as the Creator and Father of all.”(1) The community of faith is not the Thessalonians’ church of God, but God’s church in Thessalonica. That’s the context for which Paul makes his list.
The Thessalonian context includes a tension between ardor and order, between members who are sparked by the Spirit which results in a free-wheeling, prophetic, and messy church life and members who are trying to keep everything in order which results in a buttoned-down, constricted, institutional church life. Already in the earliest years of the church the clash of evolutionary and emerging versus settled and atrophied has begun. They didn’t use those terms, but that is the gist of the tension between the faction which threw caution to the wind with the expectation that Jesus would return any day and the faction which thought that the church might be in it for the long haul.
Advent is like the San Andreas Fault, where the North American and the Pacific tectonic plates rub against each other, causing a major earthquake every so often. Advent is like that because the first and the second coming a Jesus rub against each other in ways that create theology-quakes. Is Christ here manifested in the body of Christ called Church or isn’t he? Will he come again? Does he really need to return? Why hasn’t he returned?
Paul lists one of the gifts of the Spirit as prophetic utterance. Sermons as we know them hadn’t developed yet. And most of the scriptures which we read today from the New Testament hadn’t yet been written. So often the focus of a gathering of the Christ followers was around a Spirit inspired, impromptu, unrehearsed utterance by someone whose spiritual gift was prophecy. Now just because these folks weren’t seminary-trained and didn’t have bound commentaries and internet Bible websites, didn’t mean that they had nothing to offer their hearers. Their words could give guidance, reveal teachings, or deepen the faith of people who were having trouble living their newly-gained faith in the culture of the community or who were beset with persecution.
In some ways, the early church may have functioned something like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in that every one pitched in to help each other live the new life, the clean life, the life built on Christ and free from the addiction of false gods and idols.
Of course the prophecies could not be taken untested. The dynamic of “I saw it on the Internet, so it has to be true” operated the same when everything came by word of mouth. Fact-checkers and truthers are needed in every age. Yet without the manifestations of the Spirit the church becomes dull, ingrown, and atrophied.
The church – including you and me in the church today – has this tension of the Spirit pushing us to see beyond touch and sight and good solid people saying, “Not so fast.” Urgency is one thing, rushing headlong, leaping before looking is another. The tension is between knowing that Christ could come at any time, and yet living as if our Lord is depending on the church indefinitely. Culturally we live this out with children asking if Christmas is here yet and adults advising patience. The Spirit will not be patient and the staid institution will not get excited.
How do we allow the Spirit of God to be active in our midst without quenching it? If we quench the Spirit in worship, it becomes mere ritual, rote words devoid of feeling. If we quench the Spirit in teaching, then thinking becomes as occluded as blood vessels clogged by cholesterol. If we quench the Spirit in mission, the church becomes a destination rather than embarkation place. If we quench the Spirit in relating to the world around us, we further demean and devalue the very individuals and classes of people who desperately need highways in the deserts of life, filled-in valleys and smoothed-out rough places, who have broken hearts yearning for binding up, who are imprisoned by bars not just made with iron, but also with penniless dollars and untrained learning, who mourn not only their own mistakes but also the negligence and disdain of others.
John the Baptist, channeling Elijah, prepared the way for the Messiah’s coming. He turned hearts with prophetic fire and ordered words so that the curse might be lifted from the land. When John’s father, Zechariah, learned that his elderly wife Elizabeth would bear a son, he was stricken with dumbness for not believing. Only when he wrote the child’s angel-given name on the tablet, was his tongue loosed and his proclamation heard.
Hear again Paul’s list, this time transcribed by Eugene Peterson in The Message:
With assured hope expect the future but live faithfully as if the future were already here. That’s the list. For Advent, Christmas, every day. Check it twice.
(1) Lee Bowman, “1 Thessalonians 5:15-24; Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, p. 64.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
We have probably heard the lyric for a month now in store background music:
“He’s making a list and checking it twice,Lists need to be checked twice (or more). Even after I have checked the shopping list twice, I will forget something on it. And those of you who read the bulletin closely will know how frequently some wrong word or misspelling gets into print. Don’t blame Barbara, blame me.
Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice,
Santa Claus is comin’ to town.”
The cardinal rule for carpenters is measure twice and cut once. You can shorten a board cut too long, but you can’t lengthen a board cut too short. An extended family in my previous congregation ran a printing shop. They would hire a teenager after school to clean up and do odd jobs. Frequently the new hire would be initiated by being sent down the street to the hardware store to get a paper stretcher. The rule remains, measure twice, cut once.
Lots of us make lists. Lists are useful. A management tip I saw recently said that the last thing a person ought to do before leaving work at the end of the day is to make a to do list for the next day while the thoughts of unfinished work or new projects are fresh in the mind. Years ago a New Yorker cartoon showed an executive conversing with an employee. He said, “Let me make a little list of those things.” The huge executive desk was covered with little pieces of paper bearing lists.
Paul is famous for his lists. They are scattered throughout his letters. There is the list of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, the list of situations which he has survived in 2 Corinthians 11, the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, and the equipment list of the armor of God in Ephesians 6, just to name a few. Some readers think that Paul’s lists are closed, when in fact most are open-ended. They are not exhaustive but illustrative. There ought to be an “e.g.” at the beginning, or an “etc.” after the last entry.
All this points out is that Paul’s lists are made according to the particular context. We have one of Paul’s lists in today’s reading from the first Thessalonian letter. Paul is addressing the new community or assembly meeting in Thessalonica. The Greek word he uses eventually becomes the word we associate with church – ekklesia.
Lee Bowman points out the important aspect of that context. The significance of the community, assembly, or church is not derived from its location in a particular piece of geography, but “from its ‘location’ in a particular god, namely the one God of Jews and Christians—known to both traditions as the Creator and Father of all.”(1) The community of faith is not the Thessalonians’ church of God, but God’s church in Thessalonica. That’s the context for which Paul makes his list.
The Thessalonian context includes a tension between ardor and order, between members who are sparked by the Spirit which results in a free-wheeling, prophetic, and messy church life and members who are trying to keep everything in order which results in a buttoned-down, constricted, institutional church life. Already in the earliest years of the church the clash of evolutionary and emerging versus settled and atrophied has begun. They didn’t use those terms, but that is the gist of the tension between the faction which threw caution to the wind with the expectation that Jesus would return any day and the faction which thought that the church might be in it for the long haul.
Advent is like the San Andreas Fault, where the North American and the Pacific tectonic plates rub against each other, causing a major earthquake every so often. Advent is like that because the first and the second coming a Jesus rub against each other in ways that create theology-quakes. Is Christ here manifested in the body of Christ called Church or isn’t he? Will he come again? Does he really need to return? Why hasn’t he returned?
Paul lists one of the gifts of the Spirit as prophetic utterance. Sermons as we know them hadn’t developed yet. And most of the scriptures which we read today from the New Testament hadn’t yet been written. So often the focus of a gathering of the Christ followers was around a Spirit inspired, impromptu, unrehearsed utterance by someone whose spiritual gift was prophecy. Now just because these folks weren’t seminary-trained and didn’t have bound commentaries and internet Bible websites, didn’t mean that they had nothing to offer their hearers. Their words could give guidance, reveal teachings, or deepen the faith of people who were having trouble living their newly-gained faith in the culture of the community or who were beset with persecution.
In some ways, the early church may have functioned something like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in that every one pitched in to help each other live the new life, the clean life, the life built on Christ and free from the addiction of false gods and idols.
Of course the prophecies could not be taken untested. The dynamic of “I saw it on the Internet, so it has to be true” operated the same when everything came by word of mouth. Fact-checkers and truthers are needed in every age. Yet without the manifestations of the Spirit the church becomes dull, ingrown, and atrophied.
The church – including you and me in the church today – has this tension of the Spirit pushing us to see beyond touch and sight and good solid people saying, “Not so fast.” Urgency is one thing, rushing headlong, leaping before looking is another. The tension is between knowing that Christ could come at any time, and yet living as if our Lord is depending on the church indefinitely. Culturally we live this out with children asking if Christmas is here yet and adults advising patience. The Spirit will not be patient and the staid institution will not get excited.
How do we allow the Spirit of God to be active in our midst without quenching it? If we quench the Spirit in worship, it becomes mere ritual, rote words devoid of feeling. If we quench the Spirit in teaching, then thinking becomes as occluded as blood vessels clogged by cholesterol. If we quench the Spirit in mission, the church becomes a destination rather than embarkation place. If we quench the Spirit in relating to the world around us, we further demean and devalue the very individuals and classes of people who desperately need highways in the deserts of life, filled-in valleys and smoothed-out rough places, who have broken hearts yearning for binding up, who are imprisoned by bars not just made with iron, but also with penniless dollars and untrained learning, who mourn not only their own mistakes but also the negligence and disdain of others.
John the Baptist, channeling Elijah, prepared the way for the Messiah’s coming. He turned hearts with prophetic fire and ordered words so that the curse might be lifted from the land. When John’s father, Zechariah, learned that his elderly wife Elizabeth would bear a son, he was stricken with dumbness for not believing. Only when he wrote the child’s angel-given name on the tablet, was his tongue loosed and his proclamation heard.
Hear again Paul’s list, this time transcribed by Eugene Peterson in The Message:
- Be cheerful no matter what;
- Pray all the time;
- Thank God no matter what happens. (This is the way God wants you who belong to Christ Jesus to live. )
- Don’t suppress the Spirit,
- Don’t stifle those who have a word from the Master.
- On the other hand, don’t be gullible.
- Check out everything, and keep only what’s good.
- Throw out anything tainted with
With assured hope expect the future but live faithfully as if the future were already here. That’s the list. For Advent, Christmas, every day. Check it twice.
(1) Lee Bowman, “1 Thessalonians 5:15-24; Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, p. 64.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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