Surprise!
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52; Genesis 29:15-28; Romans 8:26-39
This city boy learned a lot during the years in the rich farm country of northwestern Ohio. I learned why crops are rotated. Corn depletes the soil of nutrients, especially nitrogen. Soybeans fix nitrogen in the soil through the roots, so they are usually planted in fields the year following a corn planting.
To preserve topsoil and nutrients and to reduce fuel costs farmers don’t plow their fields every year. This is low- or no-till farming. Herbicides are used to keep down the weeds and they are very plant specific so that they can be applied without effecting the intended crop. That is why you can look out over a field and see just the crop.
There are times however when you can see stray corn stalks growing in a field of beans. These have gotten a pass from the herbicides and perhaps the cultivator as well. The culprit is not the evil one as was reported in last week’s telling of the parable of the weeds and wheat. Most likely corn stalks in a soybean field come from seed spilled by the combine during the previous fall harvest. A poorly maintained combine can lose a bit of the harvest as it passes through a field. The corn waits through the winter and begins to grow when the soybeans are planted. As beans are harvested, the errant corn will be shook out from the shelled beans in the harvesting process.
The corn stalks are a surprise in the midst of the bean fields, just as the weeds were a surprise last week’s wheat field. Our parables today are also filled with surprise. The someone who planted the mustard seed in the field was not the farmer. Mustard was not an intended crop. While it is not a weed that will impersonate wheat, its presence in a field, like any other weed, is a nuisance.
Weeds create problems. Soybean farmers can deal with corn. But there are other plants which produce seeds that combines can’t always sift out. A weedy load of beans will get a lower price per bushel.
Unwanted plants do surprise and cause problems. If you had come in the office end of the building several weeks ago, you might have noticed a large branch growing out of the holly bush at the end of the row. It wasn’t holly. It was something else that was growing close to the main stem of the holly and had to be cut out.
At the other end of the building, I noticed just the other day that it appeared that the dogwood tree had suddenly gotten taller. When I went to look, I was surprised to discover that there was a very rapidly growing plant just behind the dogwood which had only recently come out of hiding behind the tree. It is still there and you can see it for yourself. It will have to be removed.
Last year was very prolific year for maple seeds and they were growing everywhere this spring. I was weeding the front bed at the manse a couple of weeks ago and there must have been hidden among the young maples I was pulling out some poison ivy, which looks very similar. I was surprised a week later to discover that the poison ivy had ambushed me. That’s not a surprise I like!
Yeast hidden in flour will also surprise a person if they didn’t know it was there. We are used to the instant dry yeast. But before dry yeast or commercial yeast cakes, yeast had to be kept, fed, and taken care of. Something like sourdough bread starter. The baker would keep the yeast in a container and take a bit of the yeast every time she wanted to bake some bread. Yeast was hard to work with so no wonder much of the bread they talk about in the Bible was unleavened. If some yeast mixture unknowingly got dropped into a pot of flour and if it had enough moisture to live on, the whole pot of flour could be converted to a yeasty blob. Surprise!
The manse back yard has gotten shadier over the years. This year I opened up a couple of new beds where there is more sun during the day. As I was digging, I found horseshoe. It was slightly bent and worn, so I am guessing that it was discarded many years ago. The horseshoe is not a treasure, but it was a surprise.
Imagine the surprise of the farmer who found real buried treasure in the field that he was tending. In today’s legal climate there would have been suits and counter-suits about the ownership of the treasure. When we were kids a simple rule applied: finders keepers, losers weepers. The farmer acted somewhere in between. He went and bought the field before claiming ownership of the treasure. It cost a lot to buy, but the treasure that came with the field was worth a whole lot more.
The pearl merchant must have been very surprised to find the precious pearl hidden in the midst of lots of other pearls. I can remember as a kid looking through bags of marbles for one that appealed to me. I can identify with the merchant finding the pearl. What was it about the pearl? Its size, its color, its perfect shape? I wonder if he wasn’t more of a collector than a merchant. The pearl must have had a high price, because the merchant wanted it so much that he gladly sold what he owned in order to buy it. What a glad surprise!
Similarly, when the net of fish was hauled out of the water there were some delicious fish that were hidden in the whole catch. The people sorted through the fish, threw the small ones and the unwanted ones back into the water, and delighted in the great fish they found.
There is something invasive, unpredictable, and surprising about the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps we think of the kingdom as something ordered, like rows of soybeans or wheat. The kingdom shows up like the unexpected stalk of corn.
You and I often want to draw clear boundaries around God’s kingdom. We want the kingdom to have clear borders and official checkpoints. We want king-dom members to be fully credentialed. We envision the pearly gates with St. Peter wearing a TSA uniform and scanning the incomers. We want to be able to define what fits within the church and what must stay out. That’s why we have scripture and creeds and liturgy and tradition. They are the nice, straight rows of carefully tended doctrine and practice.
Then, just when we least expect it, a mustard tree shows up, or the pot of flour is yeast-infected or an unexpected treasure is dug up in a field, or a perfect pearl is found in a mess of mediocre pearls, or a salmon is found in the midst of channel catfish. God insists on invading our orderly world.
God insists on popping out of our well-tended self-ordered creation with a heaven-sent creation of God’s own. That pesky mustard seed that hides in the sack of regular seed, that bit of yeast hiding in the flour, that treasure buried in a field, that one pearl in the whole display case, that fish in the whole netful, that unexpected saint in the midst of the congregation. Hidden, waiting to surprise, ready to celebrate God.
Ted Wardlaw, president of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, writes that sometime in the early 1980s he was watching an interview with Arch-bishop Desmond Tutu. Apartheid was the ordered and entrenched system of South Africa. The archbishop said, “When the white people arrived, we had the land and they had the Bible. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ When we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible. And we got the better of the deal.”(1)
God’s Word – the Word that God gives us, not the words organized around our ritual of God – is the mustard seed that surprises, the yeast that raises the flour, the treasure that pops up, the perfect pearl that appears, the great fish in the whole catch.
Jesus Christ was the mustard seed that upset the neatness of Judaism of his day. Jesus Christ was the yeast that reacted in the flour of lost and maligned humanity. Jesus Christ was the treasure that simple, unaffected people discovered and gave up livelihoods and families and even their lives for. Jesus Christ was the pearl of great hidden value that put every other religious pearl into perspective. Jesus Christ was the fish that turned ordinary people into evangelists who changed peoples lives.
The kingdom of heaven invades the cultivated soil of our certainties and our boundaries. And out of that invasion it creates something new – “the better of the deal” to use Archbishop Tutu’s words. Hidden within what we think we seek so clearly, the realm of God’s rule is subversive and grows in unexpected and surprising ways until what we thought we knew is transformed and redeemed by our surprising, invasive God.
And through it all, nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus.
So, where is God’s rule hidden in your life? Where in the mundane and mediocre will you be surprised by God’s presence this week? You don’t know now, but will you know it when it happens? Will you rejoice at the treasure in the field? The surprise mustard tree? The unexpected pearl? The good fish? The saint?
Be surprised by God!
Let us pray.
Glorious God, you present yourself in ways both open and hidden. Send your Spirit to us that we may meet Christ this week in surprising ways, unexpected places, and unlikely people. Grow us into kingdom disciples, eager to learn, eager to share, eager to live faithfully. Amen.
(1) Greg Jones, “Africa and the Bible,” www.episcopalcafe.com, July 28, 2007. Cited by Theodore J. Wardlaw, “Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 – Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 2011) Year A, vol. 3, p. 289.
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, July 27, 2014
Sunday, July 20, 2014
House Hunting
House Hunting
Genesis 28:10-19a; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
One of the televison shows I watch with some regularity is “House Hunters.” In the show, a couple is looking for a house, perhaps their first, perhaps for a growing family, perhaps in a new city. They sit down with a realtor and tell their budget and their desires. It is fascinating to note that frequently there are competing desires. One will want something urban and close to shops and transit, while the other will want something more suburban. One will want something contemporary and the other will want something with traditional character. One will want a fixer-upper and the other wants a place that is move-in ready. One will want something rustic and the other something classic.
The couple gets to see three homes that meet some of the criteria – it’s rarely possible to hit them all. None of the three choices are absolutely perfect. The couple has to choose one. Sometimes the choice is obvious to the viewer and sometimes the couple surprises with the choice they make. The last couple of minutes shows the couple in their new home and how well it is working out for them.
When Paula and I met with the committee that had determined that God wanted us here, we were shown the manse. In those days it needed a fair amount of work and the trustees were willing to see that it got done. Paula’s comment after the house viewing was that “It had potential.” Several of the committee members got a kick out of that. We like the house very much and have done a lot to keep its Victorian historicity. It is a very different house from the large prairie style house we had lived in for eleven years previously.
Having lived in church-owned housing all our lives, the “House Hunters” show is appealing in that it lets us dream about what we might like in a house when we reach the point of finding one on our own without a church attached to it. And what we will look for a number of years from now won’t be anything like what we might have looked for twenty or thirty years ago. Our needs have changed, and will continue to change.
Jacob wasn’t house hunting. He was hunting safety. A few years earlier he had conned his older brother Esau out of his birthright. The first born male human being or animal was thought to belong to God. You will remember that Hannah and Elkanah gave Samuel to God by placing him in priesthood training with Eli (1Samuel 1:21-28). By tradition first born sons were redeemed through a special sacrifice. Joseph and Mary made the appropriate sacrifice when they presented Jesus at the Temple on the eighth day after his birth. That’s when they encountered Simeon and Anna (Luke 2:21-38).
Apparently Esau thought so little of his inheritance as first born (even if only minutes before Jacob) that he sold it for a meal. As the Hebrews letter writer said, “When he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected because he couldn’t find a way to change his heart and life, though he looked for it with tears” (Hebrews 12:17). It was then that Jacob finished him off by stealing the family blessing.
Isaac had grown blind in old age (cataracts or macular degeneration perhaps). With the help of his mother, Rachel, Jacob covered his arms with fur pelts and musk scent and presented a special stew to Isaac, after which Isaac gave him the paternal blessing reserved for the firstborn son. When Esau arrived with his stew, it was too late and all he got was a good word. Esau vowed to kill Jacob once Isaac died.
Rachel assisted Jacob to flee the home place. She sent him off to her brother Laban. Isaac had previously told Jacob to find a wife in that family. Several days out on the long journey Jacob camped overnight and slept with a rock for a night stand.
It’s a wonder he didn’t have a nightmare instead of a dream. But dream he did. He saw “a raised staircase, its foundation on earth and its top touching the sky, and God’s messengers were ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:12). I suspect his initial reaction was something like Scrooge’s when the ghost of Jacob Marley appeared to him: a bit of undigested meat causing heartburn. Then God appeared on the staircase, saying, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will become like the dust of the earth” (vv. 13-14). The fleeing, homeless Jacob all of a sudden became a landowner of sorts. God gave him the first option on that land and God would one day exercise that option on Jacob’s behalf.
God left Jacob with a blessing: “I am with you now, I will protect you everywhere you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done everything that I have promised you” (v. 15).
As Jacob thought about this experience in the wee hours of the morning, he realized that he had been part of something very special. Biblical dreams do not witness to the dreamer’s psychological state. This wasn’t a mental projection by Jacob wishing for stability and rootedness. Biblical dreams are external forms of divine communication in which actual encounters with God take place. Jacob recognized that he didn’t dream; God had encountered him in the midst of sleep. What is interesting is that Jacob doesn’t speak of God’s presence in the dream. He speaks of God’s presence in that place. Terrence Fretheim, The New Interpreter’s Bible, says that “The dream reflects not simply a mental world, but an actual world that can be slept on, touched, and built on.”(1)
Jacob didn’t conjure up this encounter with God. It was all God’s doing. Jacob was enveloped by God and he recognized that God was in that place. So he called it Beth-el, house of God. Jacob wasn’t house hunting. The house found him. Out in the open of the wilderness, shelter found Jacob — God’s shelter. The words of the psalmist come to mind:
But more than that, God chooses to meet us. Jacob was a trickster, a con artist. His life was filled with conflict and deceit, and it would continue that way. This clever liar did not exhibit the virtues of a great hero. Sometimes he deserved to be forsaken and left to fend for himself in whatever danger befell him. Yet God’s meeting him at Bethel showed that despite his many character flaws, God could still work through him to accomplish a greater purpose than the selfish interests which guided Jacob. Jacob’s own up and down life foreshadowed the nature of the people who would descend from him: contentious, conflicted, conceited, self-serving. Nevertheless, God’s guiding hand still governed the nation’s history through him.
Just as Jacob represented a whole tribe from which Israel later developed a national identity, his life represented a much larger canvass on which the Lord of history revealed a redemptive purpose which was greater than any hero, tribe or nation. We see this when Jacob woke up – physically and spiritually – and realized that God was with him. He set his stone up as an altar and renamed the place Beth-el, “house of God.” Not hunting a house, the house of God found him. Just as the Word was made flesh and moved into the neighborhood. Just as the New Jerusalem will come down of out heaven. All of creation is God’s dwelling. All of creation is sacred. All of creation — even you and me — maybe used by God to advance God’s purposes for countless generations to come.
Thanks be to God for this amazing grace.
(1) Terrence Fretheim, “Genesis,” New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville; Abingdon Press, 1994) vol. I, p. 542.
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.
Genesis 28:10-19a; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
One of the televison shows I watch with some regularity is “House Hunters.” In the show, a couple is looking for a house, perhaps their first, perhaps for a growing family, perhaps in a new city. They sit down with a realtor and tell their budget and their desires. It is fascinating to note that frequently there are competing desires. One will want something urban and close to shops and transit, while the other will want something more suburban. One will want something contemporary and the other will want something with traditional character. One will want a fixer-upper and the other wants a place that is move-in ready. One will want something rustic and the other something classic.
The couple gets to see three homes that meet some of the criteria – it’s rarely possible to hit them all. None of the three choices are absolutely perfect. The couple has to choose one. Sometimes the choice is obvious to the viewer and sometimes the couple surprises with the choice they make. The last couple of minutes shows the couple in their new home and how well it is working out for them.
When Paula and I met with the committee that had determined that God wanted us here, we were shown the manse. In those days it needed a fair amount of work and the trustees were willing to see that it got done. Paula’s comment after the house viewing was that “It had potential.” Several of the committee members got a kick out of that. We like the house very much and have done a lot to keep its Victorian historicity. It is a very different house from the large prairie style house we had lived in for eleven years previously.
Having lived in church-owned housing all our lives, the “House Hunters” show is appealing in that it lets us dream about what we might like in a house when we reach the point of finding one on our own without a church attached to it. And what we will look for a number of years from now won’t be anything like what we might have looked for twenty or thirty years ago. Our needs have changed, and will continue to change.
Jacob wasn’t house hunting. He was hunting safety. A few years earlier he had conned his older brother Esau out of his birthright. The first born male human being or animal was thought to belong to God. You will remember that Hannah and Elkanah gave Samuel to God by placing him in priesthood training with Eli (1Samuel 1:21-28). By tradition first born sons were redeemed through a special sacrifice. Joseph and Mary made the appropriate sacrifice when they presented Jesus at the Temple on the eighth day after his birth. That’s when they encountered Simeon and Anna (Luke 2:21-38).
Apparently Esau thought so little of his inheritance as first born (even if only minutes before Jacob) that he sold it for a meal. As the Hebrews letter writer said, “When he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected because he couldn’t find a way to change his heart and life, though he looked for it with tears” (Hebrews 12:17). It was then that Jacob finished him off by stealing the family blessing.
Isaac had grown blind in old age (cataracts or macular degeneration perhaps). With the help of his mother, Rachel, Jacob covered his arms with fur pelts and musk scent and presented a special stew to Isaac, after which Isaac gave him the paternal blessing reserved for the firstborn son. When Esau arrived with his stew, it was too late and all he got was a good word. Esau vowed to kill Jacob once Isaac died.
Rachel assisted Jacob to flee the home place. She sent him off to her brother Laban. Isaac had previously told Jacob to find a wife in that family. Several days out on the long journey Jacob camped overnight and slept with a rock for a night stand.
It’s a wonder he didn’t have a nightmare instead of a dream. But dream he did. He saw “a raised staircase, its foundation on earth and its top touching the sky, and God’s messengers were ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:12). I suspect his initial reaction was something like Scrooge’s when the ghost of Jacob Marley appeared to him: a bit of undigested meat causing heartburn. Then God appeared on the staircase, saying, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will become like the dust of the earth” (vv. 13-14). The fleeing, homeless Jacob all of a sudden became a landowner of sorts. God gave him the first option on that land and God would one day exercise that option on Jacob’s behalf.
God left Jacob with a blessing: “I am with you now, I will protect you everywhere you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done everything that I have promised you” (v. 15).
As Jacob thought about this experience in the wee hours of the morning, he realized that he had been part of something very special. Biblical dreams do not witness to the dreamer’s psychological state. This wasn’t a mental projection by Jacob wishing for stability and rootedness. Biblical dreams are external forms of divine communication in which actual encounters with God take place. Jacob recognized that he didn’t dream; God had encountered him in the midst of sleep. What is interesting is that Jacob doesn’t speak of God’s presence in the dream. He speaks of God’s presence in that place. Terrence Fretheim, The New Interpreter’s Bible, says that “The dream reflects not simply a mental world, but an actual world that can be slept on, touched, and built on.”(1)
Jacob didn’t conjure up this encounter with God. It was all God’s doing. Jacob was enveloped by God and he recognized that God was in that place. So he called it Beth-el, house of God. Jacob wasn’t house hunting. The house found him. Out in the open of the wilderness, shelter found Jacob — God’s shelter. The words of the psalmist come to mind:
Because he will shelter me in his own dwelling during troubling times; he will hide me in a secret place in his own tent; he will set me up high, safe on a rock. (Psalm 27:5)or
Living in the Most High’s shelter, camping in the Almighty’s shade, I say to the Lord “You are my refuge, my stronghold! You are my God — the one I trust!” (Psalm 91:1)Jacob’s experience tell us that encounters with God don’t happen in faraway places with strange sounding names. Meetings with God are not like imagined encounters with aliens who whisk people away to strange planets and fill them with stranger ideas. God meets us where we are, in our times and our places. But God does it on God’s terms. God can’t be conjured up with rituals and hocus-pocus. God chooses to meet us, just as he chose to meet Jacob.
But more than that, God chooses to meet us. Jacob was a trickster, a con artist. His life was filled with conflict and deceit, and it would continue that way. This clever liar did not exhibit the virtues of a great hero. Sometimes he deserved to be forsaken and left to fend for himself in whatever danger befell him. Yet God’s meeting him at Bethel showed that despite his many character flaws, God could still work through him to accomplish a greater purpose than the selfish interests which guided Jacob. Jacob’s own up and down life foreshadowed the nature of the people who would descend from him: contentious, conflicted, conceited, self-serving. Nevertheless, God’s guiding hand still governed the nation’s history through him.
Just as Jacob represented a whole tribe from which Israel later developed a national identity, his life represented a much larger canvass on which the Lord of history revealed a redemptive purpose which was greater than any hero, tribe or nation. We see this when Jacob woke up – physically and spiritually – and realized that God was with him. He set his stone up as an altar and renamed the place Beth-el, “house of God.” Not hunting a house, the house of God found him. Just as the Word was made flesh and moved into the neighborhood. Just as the New Jerusalem will come down of out heaven. All of creation is God’s dwelling. All of creation is sacred. All of creation — even you and me — maybe used by God to advance God’s purposes for countless generations to come.
Thanks be to God for this amazing grace.
(1) Terrence Fretheim, “Genesis,” New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville; Abingdon Press, 1994) vol. I, p. 542.
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, July 13, 2014
Coloring Outside the Lines
Coloring Outside the Lines
Romans 8:1-11; Genesis 25:19-34; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Did you learn to color inside the lines? My mother probably taught me that. I’m sure I had to know that before I went to school. It was hard with those big fat crayons I had at first. Then I graduated to the regular-sized crayons, which made it easier, but they got blunted so quickly. Finally I got the big Crayola box of 64 which also had a sharpener in the box. That was great. Later on I had colored pencils – not as many colors but easier to keep the points sharp. And with the pencils I really worked hard to have the strokes all going the same direction.
Coloring inside the lines is probably one of the most important things we learn as children. It is far more than just crayons. Life is filled with lines and we have got to learn to stay within them. That’s the gist of so much of what parents teach us: Keep your nose clean, don’t wet your pants, clean your plate, don’t make waves.
You can speak for yourselves, but I know that I learned to be very adept at following the lines. The engineer in me knows that close doesn’t cut it if you are building a house or a bridge. The bookkeeper in me says, find that penny; it’s in there somewhere. And the stated clerk part of me says that this is what the book says.
When it comes to lines, one of my best friends is the trim brush. I love painting trim. It is an exact and exacting skill to cut a crisp, straight line. Anyone can paint a wall. Doing trim is an art form. A member of the first church I served was a car dealer and in the days before factory appliques he used to paint by hand the pin-striping that was popular on cars. That takes a steady hand as well as a good brush.
I wonder if Mary taught Jesus about coloring inside the lines. Joseph the carpenter may have taught him about precision. He had to deal with close measurements.
I have a feeling that much of what Jesus learned he learned from his other Father. Apparently he didn’t learn much about lines, for he was always blurring them or ignoring them. He talked with an unchaperoned Gentile woman sinner. By way of story he blessed the landowner who paid the 5:00 pm workers as much as the 7:00 am workers. He ate meals with Pharisees and tax collectors. He associated with fishermen and herders. He fed his disciples and healed people on the Sabbath. He saluted the faith of the Roman centurion who sought long-distance healing for his servant. He told the young ruler to go against the economics of the time and sell his riches if he wanted to get right with God. He suggested that the scheming, book-cooking manager had skills and nerve that should be emulated. He commended the Samaritan cured of a leprous disease for taking time to thank him and the man who had been blind from birth for seeing that Jesus’ giving him sight was an act of God. He told a story about a father who welcomed back a repentant profligate younger son and was snubbed by an ungrateful proper older son. And Jesus backed the keepers of the Law into corners by discussing the Baptizer’s authority and the right of sinful people to stone the woman caught in adultery.
Someone there is who doesn’t love a line. And that someone is Jesus.
He comes by it naturally. Or should I say unnaturally, since I mean his heavenly Father. God has a way of ignoring lines, coloring outside the prescribed area. If we strung together most of the Old Testament stories we have heard or will hear this summer, we would have much of the story of Abraham and his clan. God used an elderly woman – wife Sarah – to produce an offspring for the childless couple. Abraham flirts with killing his son on Moriah. Isaac’s wife Rebekah also is childless until she prepares to bear twins, one apparently a fool and the other definitely a trickster. And the prophecy was that the younger will rule the older, which is not the usual way of things. The trickster, Jacob, will be temporarily out-tricked by his father-in-law, but will eventually come out far ahead. His brood of sons from two wives and two mistresses are filled with their own conceits and deceits, yet out of them will come a nation of bickerers, believers, and bearers of the Law, the lineage of Jesus and our ancestors in faith.
The Law was both blessing and bane. And if you listen deeply to Paul, it was mostly bane. For the good at which it aimed, increasingly made it impossible to achieve the desired good. The Law was the line within which life was to be colored and it was impossible to keep control of the coloring. The life coloring erratically leapt outside the line or never got close on the inside. In a sense, the line became more important than the paper on which it was found, or the picture which the line described.
The line is all about itself. Or as Paul said, the Law was weak because of selfishness, often described as flesh – meaning human sinful reality – in truth, selfishness. “The attitude that comes from selfishness leads to death,” says Paul (Romans 8:6). That selfishness is obsession with the line. Eugene Peterson [The Message] expresses Paul’s thought this way: “Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life” (v. 5).
This is the heritage of the church as we know it. Beginning in the fourth century, about the time when Christianity received the emperor’s blessing, the experience of believers shifted from trying to emulate Christ’s lived-out love to trying to codify doctrine. The theological question moved from “Who is the focus of your belief? (faith in Jesus Christ)” to “What is content of your belief? What is your religion?” (belief about Christ). Religion creates lines defining correct belief from incorrect belief, while faith is trusting, setting my heart upon, giving my loyalty to, throwing my lot in with. Faith is not in a system of belief but in the person of Jesus Christ.
Theologian and sociologist Harvey Cox writes:
This suggests that the obsessive discipline of the lines of religion have separated people from God. People are hankering to get rid of the lists of beliefs about God and get to know God on a personal level, on an experiential rather than intellectual plane. Back to our coloring metaphor: forget the lines, let’s get involved with the paper. God is the paper and is as much outside the lines as inside. Maybe more.
Religion of lines asks the what question. What is inside the lines and what is outside the lines? What is a data question. People today are experiencing these what questions very negatively. Faith seeks to ask the how question. How is the interrogator of direction, of doing, of curiosity, of process, of learning, of living, Butler Bass says. “When we ask how, we are not asking for a fact, conclusion, or opinion. Rather we are seeking a hands-on deeper knowledge of the thing....How weaves our lives with the information as we receive review, reflect, and act upon what we sought....How is a question of meaning and purpose.(4)
Paul says it in his own way:
Lines separate people from Christ. Christ’s people color outside the lines, for Christ Jesus has set us free from the lines of sin and death.
(1) Harvey Cox, cited by Diana Butler Bass, Christianity after Religion (New York: Harper One, 2012), p. 110.
(2) Diana Butler Bass, ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid., p. 113.
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.
Romans 8:1-11; Genesis 25:19-34; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Did you learn to color inside the lines? My mother probably taught me that. I’m sure I had to know that before I went to school. It was hard with those big fat crayons I had at first. Then I graduated to the regular-sized crayons, which made it easier, but they got blunted so quickly. Finally I got the big Crayola box of 64 which also had a sharpener in the box. That was great. Later on I had colored pencils – not as many colors but easier to keep the points sharp. And with the pencils I really worked hard to have the strokes all going the same direction.
Coloring inside the lines is probably one of the most important things we learn as children. It is far more than just crayons. Life is filled with lines and we have got to learn to stay within them. That’s the gist of so much of what parents teach us: Keep your nose clean, don’t wet your pants, clean your plate, don’t make waves.
You can speak for yourselves, but I know that I learned to be very adept at following the lines. The engineer in me knows that close doesn’t cut it if you are building a house or a bridge. The bookkeeper in me says, find that penny; it’s in there somewhere. And the stated clerk part of me says that this is what the book says.
When it comes to lines, one of my best friends is the trim brush. I love painting trim. It is an exact and exacting skill to cut a crisp, straight line. Anyone can paint a wall. Doing trim is an art form. A member of the first church I served was a car dealer and in the days before factory appliques he used to paint by hand the pin-striping that was popular on cars. That takes a steady hand as well as a good brush.
I wonder if Mary taught Jesus about coloring inside the lines. Joseph the carpenter may have taught him about precision. He had to deal with close measurements.
I have a feeling that much of what Jesus learned he learned from his other Father. Apparently he didn’t learn much about lines, for he was always blurring them or ignoring them. He talked with an unchaperoned Gentile woman sinner. By way of story he blessed the landowner who paid the 5:00 pm workers as much as the 7:00 am workers. He ate meals with Pharisees and tax collectors. He associated with fishermen and herders. He fed his disciples and healed people on the Sabbath. He saluted the faith of the Roman centurion who sought long-distance healing for his servant. He told the young ruler to go against the economics of the time and sell his riches if he wanted to get right with God. He suggested that the scheming, book-cooking manager had skills and nerve that should be emulated. He commended the Samaritan cured of a leprous disease for taking time to thank him and the man who had been blind from birth for seeing that Jesus’ giving him sight was an act of God. He told a story about a father who welcomed back a repentant profligate younger son and was snubbed by an ungrateful proper older son. And Jesus backed the keepers of the Law into corners by discussing the Baptizer’s authority and the right of sinful people to stone the woman caught in adultery.
Someone there is who doesn’t love a line. And that someone is Jesus.
He comes by it naturally. Or should I say unnaturally, since I mean his heavenly Father. God has a way of ignoring lines, coloring outside the prescribed area. If we strung together most of the Old Testament stories we have heard or will hear this summer, we would have much of the story of Abraham and his clan. God used an elderly woman – wife Sarah – to produce an offspring for the childless couple. Abraham flirts with killing his son on Moriah. Isaac’s wife Rebekah also is childless until she prepares to bear twins, one apparently a fool and the other definitely a trickster. And the prophecy was that the younger will rule the older, which is not the usual way of things. The trickster, Jacob, will be temporarily out-tricked by his father-in-law, but will eventually come out far ahead. His brood of sons from two wives and two mistresses are filled with their own conceits and deceits, yet out of them will come a nation of bickerers, believers, and bearers of the Law, the lineage of Jesus and our ancestors in faith.
The Law was both blessing and bane. And if you listen deeply to Paul, it was mostly bane. For the good at which it aimed, increasingly made it impossible to achieve the desired good. The Law was the line within which life was to be colored and it was impossible to keep control of the coloring. The life coloring erratically leapt outside the line or never got close on the inside. In a sense, the line became more important than the paper on which it was found, or the picture which the line described.
The line is all about itself. Or as Paul said, the Law was weak because of selfishness, often described as flesh – meaning human sinful reality – in truth, selfishness. “The attitude that comes from selfishness leads to death,” says Paul (Romans 8:6). That selfishness is obsession with the line. Eugene Peterson [The Message] expresses Paul’s thought this way: “Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life” (v. 5).
This is the heritage of the church as we know it. Beginning in the fourth century, about the time when Christianity received the emperor’s blessing, the experience of believers shifted from trying to emulate Christ’s lived-out love to trying to codify doctrine. The theological question moved from “Who is the focus of your belief? (faith in Jesus Christ)” to “What is content of your belief? What is your religion?” (belief about Christ). Religion creates lines defining correct belief from incorrect belief, while faith is trusting, setting my heart upon, giving my loyalty to, throwing my lot in with. Faith is not in a system of belief but in the person of Jesus Christ.
Theologian and sociologist Harvey Cox writes:
“What I see, and what lot of others see too, is that people frequently want to refer to themselves now as not really “religious,” but “spiritual.”...What I think it really means is that people want to have access to the sacred without going through institutional and doctrinal scaffolding. They want a more direct experience of God and Spirit. And I don’t think it’s really going to go away.”(1)According to Diana Butler Bass, “Christianity is moving away from being a religion about God to being an experience of God.”(2) The world of belief about God is being eroded. People who cling to the lines, who insist on a system of intellectual faith argue that what is old is better and they defend narrow understandings of belief and piety. Butler Bass says, “If one believes that Christianity is about belief, taking refuge in fundamentalism is logical.”(3)
This suggests that the obsessive discipline of the lines of religion have separated people from God. People are hankering to get rid of the lists of beliefs about God and get to know God on a personal level, on an experiential rather than intellectual plane. Back to our coloring metaphor: forget the lines, let’s get involved with the paper. God is the paper and is as much outside the lines as inside. Maybe more.
Religion of lines asks the what question. What is inside the lines and what is outside the lines? What is a data question. People today are experiencing these what questions very negatively. Faith seeks to ask the how question. How is the interrogator of direction, of doing, of curiosity, of process, of learning, of living, Butler Bass says. “When we ask how, we are not asking for a fact, conclusion, or opinion. Rather we are seeking a hands-on deeper knowledge of the thing....How weaves our lives with the information as we receive review, reflect, and act upon what we sought....How is a question of meaning and purpose.(4)
Paul says it in his own way:
“The attitude that comes from the Spirit leads to life and peace....If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your human bodies also, through his Spirit that lives in you” (v. 11).The Spirit wants Christ to be resident in you. The Spirit wants you to experience Christ. Human selfishness wants you to be able to name 100 things Christ did for others. The Spirit wants you to know and enjoy what Christ has done for you. Human selfishness wants to you give a “just the facts” police description of Christ. The Spirit wants you to feel Christ’s touch and the warmth of his breath in your life. Human selfishness wants to make the lines big and bold and to stay inside of them. The Spirit wants to find Christ on either side of the lines, because Christ has refused to make lines.
Lines separate people from Christ. Christ’s people color outside the lines, for Christ Jesus has set us free from the lines of sin and death.
(1) Harvey Cox, cited by Diana Butler Bass, Christianity after Religion (New York: Harper One, 2012), p. 110.
(2) Diana Butler Bass, ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid., p. 113.
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, July 6, 2014
Who's Your Jailer?
Who’s Your Jailer?
Zechariah 9:9-12; Romans 7:14-25; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-27
Is it Palm Sunday already? you ask. That’s when we traditionally hear this reading from Zechariah. There’s a reason beyond the image of a king coming into Jerusalem “riding on an ass, on a colt, the offspring of a donkey” that this reading gets used for Palm Sunday. This king will speak peace to the nations. Peace – shalom – is not just the absence of war; it is the equilibrium of relationship with God and with humanity that is characterized by justice, integrity, humility, compassion, empathy, and worship and praise of God.
To put this into perspective, we need to know that Zechariah’s prophetic work belongs to the post-exilic period, when the remaining Jews were back in Judah, having been released from captivity in Babylon. Their captivity was traded for being subjects of the Persian Empire. Yet even Persia’s might was no guarantee of security, and the Jews lived under the possibility of being scattered once again due to the threat of attack by other nations. Most of the Jews were not well-off, and many still had dreams of someday living in a kingdom of their own under a messianic leader. But, for the present, that seemed impossible.
In that dark mood, chapter 9 begins with a prophetic word against various foreign nations, telling of God’s coming judgment passing through those lands, moving from north to south. Some of the cities named in these verses have great wealth and military might, yet they are all powerless when God’s judgment comes. Finally, having crushed these traditional enemies of Judah, God camps at the temple “as a guard, against anyone departing or returning. A slave driver will no longer pass through against them” (v. 8).
It’s in that context of “battle over ... mission accomplished” that the reading for today calls Jerusalem to “rejoice greatly” because of the messianic king’s entry into the city. This messiah arrives “triumphant and victorious,” yet also “"humble,” for he’s the proclaimer not of his own accomplishment, but of peace to the nations, a peace that God’s judgment has made possible.
Why is this message from Zechariah important for us today, when it isn’t Palm Sunday? Let me begin with a poem by colleague Thom Shuman, whose gift of words is so often a blessing. He calls it “internee (Zechariah 9:9-12).”
from the shadowed corner,
I used to stare
up at the small
window set high
up in the wall,
waiting for the moon
to appear (even if
only a sliver,
imagining you were
keeping an eye on me;
for hours on end,
I would stand
at the door, holding
onto the bars
worn smooth by
all the hands before me,
waiting for you
to come by with
your cart full of books,
handing me the
words you knew
I needed, brushing
the back of my hand
with fingers as light
as Emily’s feathers;
in the early morning,
when even the guard
is too bored to notice,
you tunnel in,
taking me by the hand
and leading me out to
where your muster
of misfits waits,
and you swing me
onto the bowed back
of that borrowed
farm animal,
and we follow
that route marked
Hope.(1)
What Zechariah tells us is that we have a choice between being a prisoner of despair or of hope. In fact, the phrase “prisoners of hope” is right out of the Zechariah text, with the prophet speaking for God, who says, “...by the blood of your covenant, I will release your prisoners from the waterless pit. Return to the stronghold, prisoners of hope; moreover, declare today that I will return double to you” (v. 12).
Zechariah was not speaking about literal prisoners. The people of Judah had been released from exile in Babylon and had returned to their homeland. But they had become prisoners in another sense. The destruction to which they had returned was overwhelming, and it required great energy just to cobble together the things needed for a subsistence-level existence. As a result, many had become prisoners of despair.
If Paul were here today, he would likely tell you that despair is sin. And sin is the Law, since Law enables sin because there is no way that any one of their own might or effort can obey every aspect of the law. “I don’t know what I’m doing, because I don’t do what I want to do....it’s sin that lives in me.... The desire to do good is inside of me, but I can’t do it.”
We are burdened by the guilt of doing the things we don’t want to do and not doing the things we know we want to do or should do. That is the despair of which we are prisoners, or as Paul calls, slavery.
None of us are going to claim that we even try to follow the Law which Moses mediated between God and the Israelites. After all, we eat shellfish, we poach veal in milk, we wear clothing of mixed fibers, we do work on the Sabbath, we pay or exact interest, and we don’t give up borrowed possessions every seventh year.
What we are enslaved to are traditions, expectations, norms. Citing the work of sociologist Will Herberg, Diana Butler Bass says that some fifty years ago, Americans were unwaveringly and overwhelming religious. Herberg’s figures indicate that in 1960 three different surveys pegged belief in God at 95, 96, or 97% of the population. Church membership was 75%. Those who prayed occasionally were 90%. They believed in life after death, heaven, hell, the Bible as an inspired book, and the importance of giving religious instruction to children. They held religion to be of very great importance. However, Herberg noted that there were discrepancies in the data. When pushed, more then half of Americans admitted that these views had no impact on their political or business practices. He concluded that belief in God might well have been a social convention, more norms than committed beliefs.(2)
If religious practices were more social norms than committed beliefs, then they were a slavery which polls show that two generations later typical people have shed, as those who call themselves spiritual but not religious have grown to nearly a third of all people.
When Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest; put on my yoke, and learn from me,” he was not calling people into a slavery of norms and rituals and behaviors. He was not offering to exchange one imprisonment to despair with another. He called people to hope. Each of us lives with despair and hope. If you feed despair, eventually it will grow and devour hope. If you feed hope, it will starve despair of its reason for being.
Jesus’ “easy to bear” yoke and “light” burden is hope. He offers to exchange our despair for his hope. He offers himself physically as sign and seal of the reality that he is the donkey-riding messiah who humbly takes upon himself all despair and replaces it with hope. This table of bread and wine is our ever-present remembrance that redemption, hope, and freedom are all grace-filled acts of God which God alone, through the power of the Spirit and the compassionate obedient life of the Word made flesh, has accomplished. This is the table of life, of pardon, of freedom. We are no longer prisoners of a jailer called despair. We are free to choose to become bond servants of the one who gives life.
Let us respond to Jesus’ gracious invitation.
(1) Thom M. Shuman, http://www.prayersfortoday.blogspot.com/, July 2, 2014.
(2) Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p.44f.
General Resource on Zechariah: “Prisoners of Hope,” Homiletics, July-August 2014, pp. 8-12.
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.
Zechariah 9:9-12; Romans 7:14-25; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-27
Is it Palm Sunday already? you ask. That’s when we traditionally hear this reading from Zechariah. There’s a reason beyond the image of a king coming into Jerusalem “riding on an ass, on a colt, the offspring of a donkey” that this reading gets used for Palm Sunday. This king will speak peace to the nations. Peace – shalom – is not just the absence of war; it is the equilibrium of relationship with God and with humanity that is characterized by justice, integrity, humility, compassion, empathy, and worship and praise of God.
To put this into perspective, we need to know that Zechariah’s prophetic work belongs to the post-exilic period, when the remaining Jews were back in Judah, having been released from captivity in Babylon. Their captivity was traded for being subjects of the Persian Empire. Yet even Persia’s might was no guarantee of security, and the Jews lived under the possibility of being scattered once again due to the threat of attack by other nations. Most of the Jews were not well-off, and many still had dreams of someday living in a kingdom of their own under a messianic leader. But, for the present, that seemed impossible.
In that dark mood, chapter 9 begins with a prophetic word against various foreign nations, telling of God’s coming judgment passing through those lands, moving from north to south. Some of the cities named in these verses have great wealth and military might, yet they are all powerless when God’s judgment comes. Finally, having crushed these traditional enemies of Judah, God camps at the temple “as a guard, against anyone departing or returning. A slave driver will no longer pass through against them” (v. 8).
It’s in that context of “battle over ... mission accomplished” that the reading for today calls Jerusalem to “rejoice greatly” because of the messianic king’s entry into the city. This messiah arrives “triumphant and victorious,” yet also “"humble,” for he’s the proclaimer not of his own accomplishment, but of peace to the nations, a peace that God’s judgment has made possible.
Why is this message from Zechariah important for us today, when it isn’t Palm Sunday? Let me begin with a poem by colleague Thom Shuman, whose gift of words is so often a blessing. He calls it “internee (Zechariah 9:9-12).”
from the shadowed corner,
I used to stare
up at the small
window set high
up in the wall,
waiting for the moon
to appear (even if
only a sliver,
imagining you were
keeping an eye on me;
for hours on end,
I would stand
at the door, holding
onto the bars
worn smooth by
all the hands before me,
waiting for you
to come by with
your cart full of books,
handing me the
words you knew
I needed, brushing
the back of my hand
with fingers as light
as Emily’s feathers;
in the early morning,
when even the guard
is too bored to notice,
you tunnel in,
taking me by the hand
and leading me out to
where your muster
of misfits waits,
and you swing me
onto the bowed back
of that borrowed
farm animal,
and we follow
that route marked
Hope.(1)
What Zechariah tells us is that we have a choice between being a prisoner of despair or of hope. In fact, the phrase “prisoners of hope” is right out of the Zechariah text, with the prophet speaking for God, who says, “...by the blood of your covenant, I will release your prisoners from the waterless pit. Return to the stronghold, prisoners of hope; moreover, declare today that I will return double to you” (v. 12).
Zechariah was not speaking about literal prisoners. The people of Judah had been released from exile in Babylon and had returned to their homeland. But they had become prisoners in another sense. The destruction to which they had returned was overwhelming, and it required great energy just to cobble together the things needed for a subsistence-level existence. As a result, many had become prisoners of despair.
If Paul were here today, he would likely tell you that despair is sin. And sin is the Law, since Law enables sin because there is no way that any one of their own might or effort can obey every aspect of the law. “I don’t know what I’m doing, because I don’t do what I want to do....it’s sin that lives in me.... The desire to do good is inside of me, but I can’t do it.”
We are burdened by the guilt of doing the things we don’t want to do and not doing the things we know we want to do or should do. That is the despair of which we are prisoners, or as Paul calls, slavery.
None of us are going to claim that we even try to follow the Law which Moses mediated between God and the Israelites. After all, we eat shellfish, we poach veal in milk, we wear clothing of mixed fibers, we do work on the Sabbath, we pay or exact interest, and we don’t give up borrowed possessions every seventh year.
What we are enslaved to are traditions, expectations, norms. Citing the work of sociologist Will Herberg, Diana Butler Bass says that some fifty years ago, Americans were unwaveringly and overwhelming religious. Herberg’s figures indicate that in 1960 three different surveys pegged belief in God at 95, 96, or 97% of the population. Church membership was 75%. Those who prayed occasionally were 90%. They believed in life after death, heaven, hell, the Bible as an inspired book, and the importance of giving religious instruction to children. They held religion to be of very great importance. However, Herberg noted that there were discrepancies in the data. When pushed, more then half of Americans admitted that these views had no impact on their political or business practices. He concluded that belief in God might well have been a social convention, more norms than committed beliefs.(2)
If religious practices were more social norms than committed beliefs, then they were a slavery which polls show that two generations later typical people have shed, as those who call themselves spiritual but not religious have grown to nearly a third of all people.
When Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest; put on my yoke, and learn from me,” he was not calling people into a slavery of norms and rituals and behaviors. He was not offering to exchange one imprisonment to despair with another. He called people to hope. Each of us lives with despair and hope. If you feed despair, eventually it will grow and devour hope. If you feed hope, it will starve despair of its reason for being.
Jesus’ “easy to bear” yoke and “light” burden is hope. He offers to exchange our despair for his hope. He offers himself physically as sign and seal of the reality that he is the donkey-riding messiah who humbly takes upon himself all despair and replaces it with hope. This table of bread and wine is our ever-present remembrance that redemption, hope, and freedom are all grace-filled acts of God which God alone, through the power of the Spirit and the compassionate obedient life of the Word made flesh, has accomplished. This is the table of life, of pardon, of freedom. We are no longer prisoners of a jailer called despair. We are free to choose to become bond servants of the one who gives life.
Let us respond to Jesus’ gracious invitation.
(1) Thom M. Shuman, http://www.prayersfortoday.blogspot.com/, July 2, 2014.
(2) Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p.44f.
General Resource on Zechariah: “Prisoners of Hope,” Homiletics, July-August 2014, pp. 8-12.
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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