Rooted, Forgiven, Freed

Rooted, Forgiven, Freed
Colossians 2:6-19; Psalm 138; Luke 11:1-13

Paul’s experience of Christ communities wasn’t any different than the experience that nearly every pastor I have known has admitted to. There are days when a pastor feels like tearing out his or her hair over some activity or lack of activity, over some thick-as-a-brick mind set, some head-in-the-sand perspective, some mulish refusal to engage in kingdom thinking. And lest you allow your heads to swell thinking that sort of thing never happens here, I will burst your bubble. After all, as long as I have been here, the law of averages says it had to have happened sometime. Back to Paul.

Paul rejoiced in the steadfast faith of the Colossians. But they were under pressure from the culture. Few of us really have an inkling about what it is like to in a minority, to be an outsider with views that run counter to the prevailing ideas and norms. We have always been the majority. The things we have always based our lives on, especially in matters of faith, have been the often unseen girders and beams that have given our lives form and structure. There have always been non-Christians, but they were few and they kept their non-belief to themselves.

Even the so-called “Christian” ethic had a way be being throttled. I don’t know about your upbringing, but mine was decidedly more anti-Catholic than pro-Protestant. Jews sometimes were slightly better. Jehovah’s Witnesses were more prevalent than Mormons. Pentecostal and Charismatic sects were just odd. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism were mentioned only in grade school geography books. Ethnicity was solidly pro northern and western Europe and particularly skeptical towards eastern and southern Europeans with multi-syllabic names. Then there was racism, even in northern cities and towns.

According to the Pew Center for Religion report published in 2012, nearly every branch of North American Christianity is taking a hit. The old line Protestant denominations are dwindling. Traditional African-American congregations are barely holding their own, as are Pentecost faith expressions. The evangelical portion of American Christianity which soared in the last quarter of the 20th century has leveled off and started to decline. The Roman Catholic Church is holding its own, but only because many of its newest members are immigrants from Latin America. Euro-American Roman Catholics are declining at similar rates to their Protestant sisters and brothers.

As we move further into the 21st century, Christians in North America may well learn a lot more about being in the kind of minority that believers in Colossae and other first century places were. Paul wanted to insure that the Colossian faithful wouldn’t give in to the old religious systems some of them had followed. But more importantly Paul was concerned that they not believe the lies of the false teachers which were roaming the territory distorting the teachings that Paul and the other apostles brought. His Colossian correspondence is a full-scale rebuttal of the false teachings that were bombarding the early faithful. That’s why, as we saw in last week’s Colossian reading, Paul dove right in with the hymn about the pre-eminence of Christ and declared that his mission was to present believers mature in Christ.

Paul continues, in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase:

My counsel for you is simple and straightforward: Just go ahead with what you’ve been given. You received Christ Jesus, the Master; now live him. You’re deeply rooted in him. You’re well constructed upon him. You know your way around the faith. Now do what you’ve been taught. School’s out; quit studying the subject and start living it! And let your living spill over into thanksgiving.

What the Colossians have been given is more than a simple gift or a free pass. They received Christ, and that entailed some responsibility. The Colossians are not a bottomless pit into which Christ has been stashed, like a prisoner locked in a dungeon and the key thrown away. The Colossians are to be like an information kiosk where people may find out more about Jesus. They are to transmit the gospel from one person and generation to another.

Paul didn’t just remind the Colossians of when they received Christ Jesus, he also reminded them of their receiving the proclamation and teaching, and their response to it through confession of faith, baptism, and their living as members of Christ’s body. Because Christ dwells within all believers through the Holy Spirit, they are committed to walking (conducting their lives) in union with the indwelling Christ. The past event of receiving Christ should be a present reality in the believers’ daily lives.

That’s why Paul says that believers are “rooted and built up in him and established in the faith.” Christ is more than just a tether. Christ is the foundation, just as pilings driven deep to bedrock and massive concrete bases are the rooting foundation for a skyscraper. Faithful life takes more than a little bit of religious soil around our feet.

I have a couple of tomato plants living in pots on the patio. The plants look good and fill the wire cages that support them. But they aren’t really rooted. A couple of weeks ago they blew over in a storm. The pots aren’t fastened to the patio. The plants are top heavy. They suffer from the whims of the weather. A lot of Christians are top heavy with their religious piety, but their roots in Christ are very shallow, not really embedded. They sit on the surface, like my patio pots. Disciples are rooted in Christ.

A story – true or not – is making its way around the Internet. A pastor, taking up a new call in a large church, began in a different way. On the Sunday he was to be introduced, he showed up early outside the church dressed as a street person. He did all the usual street person things and got the usual responses from people going into the church. He went inside the church and sat in the sanctuary and the ushers asked him to move. He was stared at and avoided. As the service began and the leadership called forth the new pastor, the congregation was shocked into silence to see the street person come down the aisle. The pastor broke the silence by reciting Jesus’ parable of the sheep and goats from Matthew 25. After he finished, he looked towards the congregation and told them all that he had experienced that morning. Many began to cry and many heads were bowed in shame. He then said, “Today I see a gathering of people, not a church of Jesus Christ. The world has enough people, but not enough disciples. When will YOU decide to become disciples?”

Disciples are rooted in Christ. They are also forgiven. The faithful participate in this mystery of redemption by way of their baptism. They are buried with Christ as they descend into the waters, as the waters rush over them, and they are raised with Christ by the same power of God that raised Jesus from the dead. The fourth century bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, said that “nothing is more blessed than this burial.”

The philosophy of the world says that we are worthless and unforgiven. The world is full of people who, in order to make themselves feel valued, have a habit of making others into scapegoats by telling them that they are bad people. Baptism and the forgiveness that it symbolizes tells us that we are beautiful children of God. We bear God’s image. We are created good.

Rooted and forgiven, we are freed from obsessive compulsive enslavement to rituals and formulas which become superstition. Our relationship with God in Christ through the Spirit is personal. No one can dictate it to us. We can spend our lives modeling other people’s methods and means of faith, but ultimately we have to work out with fear and trembling our own reconciled relationship with God and couch it in the words and ways that fit God and our individual self.

We all say the Lord’s Prayer from memory, probably with little thought to the words which automatically roll of our tongues. The reading of it in Luke’s Gospel often catches us off guard because the one we know is from Matthew. So it is good to think about the words, the phrases, the pauses, the silences. Sister Joan Chittister has written about prayer,

“There is only one thing wrong with the traditional definition of prayer: it misrepresents God. ‘Prayer,’ the old teaching said, was ‘the raising of our hearts and minds to God.’ As if God were some regal, distant judge outside ourselves. But science — with its new perception that matter and spirit are of a piece, sometimes particles, sometimes energy — suggests that God is not on a cloud somewhere, imperious and suspecting. God is the very Energy that animates us. God is not male humanity writ large. God is the Spirit that leads us and drives us on. God is the voice within us calling us to Life. God is the Reality trying to come to fullness within us, both individually and together. It is to that cosmic God, that personal, inner, enkindling God, that we pray.”(1)

When we are rooted in Christ, redeemed by Christ, and freed with Christ, our prayers — and our lives — will be truly blessed as disciples faithful no matter what the world tries to tell us.

Thanks be to God.

(1) Sr. Joan Chittister, cited by Brian D. McLaren, Facebook, July 26, 2013.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.

Stages of Christ

Stages of Christ
Colossians 1:15-28;
Psalm 52; Luke 10:38-42

I have an important task for you today. I am giving you fair warning rather than springing it on you sixteen minutes from now. So, if you don’t want a task, a churchy task, you may allow your brain to drift aimlessly and pay no mind to anything I will be saying in the next few minutes. Or you may raise the level of your attention a notch or two so that you don’t miss anything.

To start, let’s pretend you have been given the task of selecting a small group of people to represent Waverly at an intimate gathering with an important person. For fun, let say that the person is the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon. What kind of delegation might you send? Would you choose a 7-year old boy who thrives in making bodily noises? Would you choose a girl who seems on the way to be to become an Olympic whiner? Would you take a 15-year old boy whose low-hanging jeans expose a lot of his boxers? Would you choose a teen girl whose fingers are perpetually texting on her phone? Would you choose the working mom or dad who is so caught up in work that she or he never gets to the child’s softball game or soccer match and is never there to tuck them in at night?

Whoever you would choose, the ones I’ve highlighted are only a sample of the people available. You would have work with them on proper etiquette and deportment, history and context, dos and don’ts.

You can relax. That is not your task. I’m going to turn it around. You are one of the people selected for an event like that one. The team leader is a guy name Paul. And the person you are going to meet has an amazing pedigree and story. His name is Jesus.

Paul lays out the task in a very straightforward manner: “So that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” Your task – if you choose to accept it – is to become mature in Christ.
This is not something that we are responsible for on our own. It is a shared responsibility. Pastor Bob and I have some responsibility for this. Session has some responsibility. And each of us has some responsibility for this, not just for ourselves, but for each other.

In fact we have several teams working of a variety of aspects of this growth in maturity. There is a team that is working to develop an alternative praise and fellowship experience. We have a team dreaming of even more engaging and Spirit-filled traditional worship experiences. We have a team thinking deeply about gratitude as a core value for faith community’s being. And we have a team working to stretch and strengthen our cognitive understanding of faith and living.

Maturity is not something that happens overnight, although there are times when a sudden burst of maturation may occur. Some of us still aren’t sure what we want to be when we grow up. Some of us grew up a long time ago and haven’t had any growth since who knows when. Most of us are works in progress, moving slowly and surely towards the goal of being whole in Christ.

It’s a lofty goal, nigh unto impossible to attain. Paul did not water it down. He started out with the New Testament’s most densely packed, high-pedestal idea about Christ: the cosmic Christ who is firstborn of all creation, who holds all things together, who contains within his being all the fullness of God, and through whom God reconciles all creation to God’s self  through the blood of the cross. That, my friends, is a goal beyond reach by any human standard. It puts us in our place.

Maturity in faith, however, is not a quantum leap. It is one foot in front another, some steps tottering, some steps aided by canes, walkers and rehab therapists, some steps strong and determined. Growth in faith maturity yard by yard is hard, but inch by inch is a cinch.

Thirty years ago James Fowler published a significant work about faith maturation. Simply called, Stages of Faith,(1) the book looks at ways faith develops in people. The stages are sequential. Some are more tied to chronological age then others. Yet whether we are 9, 19, 39 or 89, we are somewhere along the continuum of the six stages that Fowler laid out.

We all begin in a pre-stage called Undifferentiated faith in which the seeds of trust, courage, hope and love are fused in an undifferentiated way and contend with sensed threats of abandonment, inconsistencies and deprivation in the environment. The emergent faith is basic trust and relational experience of mutuality with care givers.

Fowler calls Stage 1 an Intuitive-Projective faith. It is fantasy filled, often imitative in which the child can be powerfully and permanently influenced by examples, moods, actions and stories of the visible faith of the closest adults. Here is the first self-awareness and the child often believes that he or she is the center of the world.

Then comes Stage 2, Mythic-Literal faith, when the child begins to take on for her- or himself the stories, beliefs, observances that symbolize belonging to the community. Beliefs are appropriated with literal interpretations. Symbols are one dimensional. Imagination begins to get reined in. Perceptions become more accurate, and the world is based on reciprocal fairness and justice is based on reciprocity, “an eye for an eye.” The actors in the cosmic stories are seen as human. And stories become a means finding a coherent narrative to experience.

As the limitations of literalness and an excessive reliance reciprocal justice are buffeted by reality, Stage 3, Synthetic-Conventional faith, begins. A person’s experience now extends beyond family. Abilities expand as well as circles of influence. These are often the teenage years, but for many adults this stage is their permanent place of equilibrium. Faith provides a coherent orientation in the midst of the complex and diverse context. Faith becomes a basis for identity and outlook. This is a conformist stage in the sense that other people’s opinions overly matter. The person may develop a personal myth about one’s own identity, incorporating one’s past and anticipated future. Perhaps this is Martha’s faith.

As personal identity and story develop, clashes arise with the world and with those who bear authority in the world. One often leaves home figuratively and literally in search of self, meaning, future, and stability. That brings on Stage 4, Individuative-Reflective faith. The self’s identity and world view, once defined by significant others, now seek to define themselves. The myths of previous stages are now demythologized and symbols are translated into concepts. This is a very rational stage. The mind often overrules intuition and feeling. Whatever doesn’t make rational sense can’t be. Maybe this stage represents Mary’s faith

Fowler’s Stage 5, Conjunctive faith, is complex. There is a reintegration of self and outlook, a kind of second naivete in which symbols and rituals reclaim meaning. This stage often accompanies the “mid-life crisis.” The stage is divided, living and acting between an untransformed world and a transforming vision. Stage 5 faith sees injustice in sharply etched terms because it has been apprehended by an enlarged awareness of the demands of justice and their implications. It recognizes partial truths and their limitations. Paradoxes abound. Loyalties are conflicted. Paul must have gone through this in his conversion.

About Stage 6, Universalizing faith, Fowler says:

Heedless of the threats to self, to primary groups and to the institutional arrangements of the persistent order that are involved, Stage 6 becomes a disciplined, activist incarnation — making real and tangible — of the imperatives of absolute love and justice of which Stage 5 has partial apprehensions.(2)

Fowler says that very few people reach Stage 6. The ones that do, are contagious in the sense that they create zones of liberation from all the shackles we human in society place on each other and endure from each other. It is ironic that both the saintliest and the most demonic fall under that description. Maybe you and I have been blessed to experience someone who epitomized this stage of faith. World class folks like Dag Hammarskjold, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Abraham Heschel, Henri Nouwen, come to mind. They have wrestled with ambiguity, with paradox. They have gone away from and returned at a deeper level to the basic trust of the earliest faith stage. They have appropriated, dismantled, and reconstructed symbols and concepts. Their faith is not the rote faith of their young years, nor is their faith the anything-goes faith that overtook the rotes and rituals of their formative years. Their faith is personal, crafted in fire and ice, in storm and stillness, in community and in cloistered solitude. Like Jacob, they have wrestled with God and not given up, exacting a blessing, which they incarnate in their lives comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. They truly share with Christ the joy of bearing a significant portion of the fullness of God.

Your task is to become mature in Christ. Pray and reflect deeply on Paul’s words. Look at your faith. Where are the growing edges, the places that need to be nurtured? Where are the faith edges that no longer work or make sense, and perhaps haven’t for some time? How can they be coaxed, stimulated, jump-started into growing faith?

Faith is not something that we hold, as if we could contain it. Faith is something that by the grace of Christ, the love of God, the persistence of the Spirit holds us, from cradle to Kingdom. This earthly life is not the be all to end all, but the womb which develops us into faithful, mature, blessed citizens of God’s eternal realm. That’s all part of the economy of redemption which Paul so eloquently stated. His most earnest desire was to present each of us mature in Christ. May that be our desire as well.

(1) James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Development and the Quest for Meaning, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981). See particularly pages 119-211.
(2) Ibid., p. 200.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.

Reflections on Ministry

Reflections on Ministry
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20;
2 Kings 5:1-14; Galatians 6:1-10

I know that Luke was said to be a physician, but I think he might be more suited to be a community organizer. When you read his gospel, there is a clear development and expansion of Jesus’ mission. At first on Jesus is the main actor. He does everything. He preaches, he heals, he teaches, he exorcizes. Then he started to call people to follow him. He ended up with twelve who had a variety of family and career backgrounds. Jesus went about the region making stops at towns and villages proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. He was accompanied by the twelve and by a number of women, who apparently helped support his traveling ministry out of their own resources.

When the once demon-possessed and then-restored-to-his-senses Gerasene wanted to go along with Jesus’ entourage, Jesus told him to go to his own home and community and declare how much God had done for him. And that is what he did.

At the beginning of chapter nine Jesus sent out the twelve empowered over demons and diseases to proclaim the kingdom. They were to do it with little baggage, pomp or expectation. If they were rebuffed, they were to move on. I suppose it was like a ministry in context education experience in seminary, an opportunity to experience the church in its native setting.

At the end of chapter nine, the reading we had last Sunday, some of the twelve had already been to the Samaritan town and they had not been received, so Jesus bypassed that place. Along the way, people asked to follow him and he asked others to follow. Jesus made it clear that this was no Sunday School picnic that was passing through the region. He had announced the probable outcome of the journey previously – Jerusalem and death. A great many excuses were given by potential followers.

But now, at the beginning of chapter ten, Jesus sends seventy others to go ahead of him to the places he intended to go, advance teams to get the word out about Jesus. If this were a political campaign, they would be knocking on doors and handing out fliers or staffing phone banks and robo-calling the locals to get them to come to the rally which was scheduled the day after tomorrow.

This continual growth in the numbers of those drawn into Jesus’ mission sets the scene for Luke’s second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, and the handing off of the responsibility for mission from Jesus to those who received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and beyond. Jesus did not do everything for the disciples when he was with them in the flesh. Nor does he do everything for followers in the succeeding generations. Rather, he does what they, what we, cannot do. Christ empowered the first laborers for the harvest for the work which he set before them, just as Christ empowers today’s mission workers – you and me – to accomplish the work which he still sets before us.

Jesus does not give us a step-by-step flow chart of how to do mission. But he does point us to areas which will hold benefit for us to reflect on.

Right from the start, Jesus tell us that the harvest is plentiful. He does not say that the harvest will magically march up to us and drop at our feet. We will have to work at it. We will have to alter the way we see the world in order to see the harvest. This is because Jesus sees abundance where most of us see scarcity. Jesus does not have a Pollyanna outlook on the world. He is not an optimist. Jesus knows the world inside out. He is a realist. And the reality that Jesus deals with is an all-encompassing faith in the “Lord of the harvest.”

Too often we think that we have to prepare the harvest. That is not the case. Preparation is God’s responsibility. Jesus commissions us to gather the harvest in and pray that other laborers will join us in this important work. God is responsible for the growth that results in the harvest. As laborers for the harvest we have to be ready for that growth. We have to plan for it, whether it is planning to have a new disciple class when there are no new disciples yet visible, or whether it is making sure there are enough bulletins and chairs, and someone to sit with a guest and explain how we do worship and maybe something about why we do certain things in worship. Everything we do has to anticipate rather than impede the growth that God is doing. And we have to pray and invite others to join us in gathering the harvest that God provides.

Another area of reflection on ministry deals with a different reality. That reality is that we live in an unfriendly, perhaps even hostile world. The world as a whole no longer eagerly wants what the church has to offer. When we say that the church offers fellowship or community or learning, the world will say, “I can get that elsewhere. Why should I bother with the church?” Yes, the world may be able to offer bits and pieces of what the church offers, but only the church, when it is faithful to its Lord, can offer the whole package.

Jesus did not arm the seventy for battle. They go out as lambs, somewhat naively and certainly very vulnerable. They are to bless being received, but are not to curse being rejected. God’s peace will rest naturally upon any household or individual that values and cultivates peace, but will not remain with those that do not. The vulnerability of disciples is seen in the fact that they are to depend on the hospitality of those that receive them and to whom they are ministering. We are so used to offering aid and at times giving aid, that we forget what it is to receive it. Ministering to the world is not done in strength and largess, but in weakness and in need.

So the harvest is not something that we do so much as we prepare to receive it, and we are more recipients than givers of the grace of God’s peace. That’s very humbling. We always thought we had to do something more than just show up. What that tells us is that the responsibility does not rest on any one pair of shoulders. We will have successes. They may seem puny, but when taken in aggregate, they amount to a lot. Jesus declares that they portend the downfall of Satan and the inauguration of a new age. The net effect of what we do as harvest laborers for God’s kingdom far exceeds what we can see. When we attend faithfully to our Lord’s mission and accomplish acts of mercy in Jesus’ name, we are announcing the coming of God’s kingdom and God’s promise and offering a challenge to the reign of evil. The kingdom of God has come near and our privilege in ministry is like that of the Gerasene: declare how much God has done for us.

An ultimate reflection on ministry is that regardless of the little triumphs we might experience, what is more significant is that our names are written in heaven. The eternal relationship with God that we enjoy far outweighs the spiritual successes we might participate in. No matter what, we can experience the fullness of grace lavished by God’s Spirit. We are at one and the same time recipients of and heralds to the grace and mercy embodied in Christ.

The disciples physically with Christ as he traveled to Jerusalem and death, and after death resurrection, were afterwards called on to witness what that meant to them, why it changed their lives. Our lives have been changed, some slowly and steadily, some suddenly and significantly. Because of Christ we are not who we might have been. This table is a reminder of what we have experienced in our own lives. It refuels our witness that Christ is the bread of life and the cup of blessing. We have been gathered, welcomed in hospitable peace, connected to an ongoing vision far greater than any we could dream up, and embedded in the realm of God’s eternal glory through Christ’s grace and mercy.

May we become more fully prepared to for God’s successful harvest. Amen.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.