By Faith . . .

By Faith . . .
Hebrews 11:29-12:2;
Isaiah 5:1-7; Luke 12:14-56

“By faith....” That’s the watchword that the writer of the Hebrews letter has been stressing since the beginning of chapter 11. The writer’s understanding of faith is different from what most of us think on first hearing.

How many times have we heard someone say to us, “If you only had enough faith”? Perhaps we have said that ourselves. Faith is a gift from God. It is not something that we ourselves create. It is not something that can be added to by our own effort. It is not like a store brand reward card that guarantees us so many cents off a gallon of gas or $10 off our next purchase for every $100 we buy today. That understanding of faith is all about us. It backs God into a corner if we don’t get what we think we should be getting.

Faith is more like the air we breathe, it can’t be quantified. It just is. The writer of the letter has taken pains to introduce the idea that faith has to do with the courage to endure. This letter was written to a band of Christians struggling with hostility, ridicule, and shame laid heavily on them by the surrounding society. Yes, the community is thinking about themselves, but the writer suggests that they need to step back and see the larger picture. Faith can be understood only in terms of the larger story of promise that stretches all the way back to Abraham and Sarah — and more importantly, forever into the future.

One of the themes of the tradition is that God’s people have always been immigrants, aliens, strangers, pilgrims. The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness struggling with trust or distrust of God. Even in the promised land the struggle went on. When things were going well, there still a gnawing doubt that God might not keep God’s end of the bargain, that God might not keep faith with the beloved community, that God might not be trustworthy.

The Hebrews writer is not naive about faith. But he is not going to be nailed down to a narrow definition. What he has outlined might be seen as very broad. Or it might be perceived as ambiguous. Some of the names listed are well-known. And some are not. If your Bible has the center column of scripture references, you are going to have to follow them back to the books of Joshua and Judges to refresh your memory about them. Some of the examples which are included led to amazing results. Some did not. These point simply to courageous endurance, even to the point of torture, persecution, and death. If we were to read the stories of the early church in the preserved writings from just beyond the time frame the New Testament, we would find that faith often led believers to martyrdom instead of earthly success.

Faith is not what happens. Faith is the act of perceiving the activity of God, whether it is in miraculous escape as the Israelites crossing through the Red Sea or whether it is in the courageous witness and endurance of martyrs. Faith is an against all odds kind of relationship with God, a no matter what attitude, such as Joshua asserted at the end of his ministry, “My family and I will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15); such as Jesus’ own comment, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24). We can’t serve faith and unfaith, trust and distrust, at the same time. Faith is the relationship with God when things seem to be totally messed up as well as when everything seems to be going well.

Remember that even though Sarah laughed at the thought of having a child in her old age, it was credited to Abraham and her as faith that they waited for the promise to be fulfilled. John Shelley writes that

“the promise is not simply an extension of the present, based on what seems possible at the moment. It is a new creation that invades our present reality and makes the impossible possible.”(1)

By faith...the impossible is possible. Shelley goes on to say that the problems in our lives of faith today are not because of a deficit of good will and good intentions. We are all well-meaning people. We were raised that way. But we were also raised to use our heads, our rational minds. We are children of the age of science, the age of the scientific proof which will conclusively determine what is and what will be.

Today’s problems are not from a success of thinking but rather from a failure of imagination. Think about some of the people in the Hebrews’ roll call of the saints. They were able to imagine God’s activity in the world. They could imagine and believe that God kept the promises that God had made over the course of divine history.

Lack of imagination leads to all kinds of things. People resort to violence because they cannot imagine a better way of dealing with conflict or with addressing issues of power or justice. People resort to greed because they cannot imagine that there is enough to go around to benefit everyone. They are ready to throw everyone off the island in favor of keeping themselves going. People resort to arrogance because they cannot imagine that knowledge is something to be shared for everyone’s good.

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ call to be imaginative. “You have heard that it was said..., but I say to you....” Believers are called to imagine the reality of the kingdom of heaven and live it even though they may never see its reality in their earthly life. Courageous endurance is the product of faith, probably more so than miraculous, catastrophic interventions by God in the lives of believers.

This “by faith” power of imagination is what will set family member against family member. Those who are stuck in the present moment and cannot see, dream, imagine beyond this moment in time will be divided off from those who can. These are the not divisions between red state and blue state, between progressives and conservatives, between visionaries and historians. The division is between those who truly and thoroughly believe that God can do anything that God desires, even if people are unfamiliar with it, and those who cannot imagine doing anything different from what they have previously experienced. No matter how many times God says that God will do a new thing, they will decry the possibility, dispute the need for anything new, and even actively block it — all out of ignorance, fear, arrogance, sinfulness.

Sin: that’s a significant part of it according to the Hebrews’ writer. “Let us throw off any extra baggage, get rid of the sin that trips us up, and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter.” We don’t like that word “sin” in the singular. We much prefer it as a plural. We can make up a list and add and subtract items from it. This is a sin, and this isn’t. Sin – singular – is a basic orientation of the self. It deals with presumption, pride, greed. All these are wrapped with an egoism that cannot allow other individuals to have the same status, value, and uniqueness that “I” do. That is active sin.

But sin can be passive, as well. It could be seen in despair, apathy, or a tendency to become mired in dealing with symptoms of injustice rather than working to remove the root causes. Passive sin could be the refusal to accept individual responsibility to neighbor, to God, or to God’s future.

Which was the bigger, more problematic sin for the readers of the Hebrews letter? Had they become lured away from the faith by worldliness and the sinful activities that so often go along with it? Or had they given up on God? Had they decided not to care any more? Perhaps. That kind of attitude was tempting. John of Patmos, perhaps a contemporary of the Hebrews writer, was dealing with fear and apathy as well as with hope and faith among the believers he knew. Had the readers of the Hebrews’ letter given up on ever seeing some big activity of God? Were they edging away from faithful and courageous endurance?

Often scripture uses growing images. Scattered seed, grain and weeds, and careful pruning. For grapes to be produced in abundance, the vines have to be carefully pruned each winter to encourage new growth which will bring the clusters of rich fruit. To the person who is unfamiliar with viticulture, the seasonal pruning looks severe and fatal. Yet a new growing season’s bounty will be great. God loves the vineyard. Pruning is God’s way of saying that by perseverance, by imagination, by faith the kingdom and all God’s plans for it will happen.

The cloud of witnesses are beneficiaries of all that has gone on and their witness benefits us so that we may dare to break out of the present and imagine with Spirit-filled fervor the future God will absolutely create. Ron McCreary puts it this way: “The church is not a walled fortress against change. The church is a launching pad into God’s future.”(2) At this table, the countdown begins. Bread and blood, loaves and life, grapes and grace.

Thanks be to God!

(1) John C. Shelley, “Hebrews 11:29-12:2, Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, Volume 3, 354.
(2) Ron McCreary, http://tinyurl.com/kcr73w3, Monday, August 12, 2013

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 

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

Cultivating Surprise

Cultivating Surprise
Luke 12:32-40
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Just when you think you know what the Bible is saying, it trips you up. We don’t get tripped up by some enemy that gives us something better than God’s word. God’s word gets us. No wonder the writer of Hebrews says that God’s word is sharper than any two-edged sword. I would suggest that working with scripture is like working with a roll of barbed wire without benefit of gloves.

If you take on its own the passage from Luke I just read, each of us would have to be constantly at the ready, day and night, week in and week out, for the Human One, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, to come knocking at our door. Can you count how many sermons you have heard in your lifetime that preached that point? I know, I’ve waited for that same repairman, too.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that kind of stress in my life. In fact, Jesus doesn’t think I – or you – need that kind of stress either. In the passage that Luke placed immediately before the one I read earlier, Jesus says so. We usually encounter it in Matthew as part of the “Sermon on the Mount”:

“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. There is more to life than food and more to the body than clothing’ ” (Luke 12:22-23). Jesus said that in response to the request of someone who asked Jesus to tell that person’s brother to divide the family inheritance with him. In case you’re having a senior moment, that was the passage that Pastor Bob preached on last week. I didn’t hear his message, but he called it, “Reliable Investment.” And what was the gist of that passage? The problem of being rich – storing up treasure – for one’s self and not being rich toward God. Storing up riches for me and not storing up riches for God says that I don’t trust God and that God needs all the help that God can get.

That my friends, is not where Jesus starts in today’s passage. He says, “Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom.” God doesn’t want us down and out, God doesn’t want us standing at the intersection holding up a sign begging for food. God doesn’t want us living under a bridge. God doesn’t want us to be ignorant about grace, forgiveness, or eternal fellowship. Just the opposite. When “he arrives, he will dress himself to serve, seat them at the table as honored guests, and wait on them.” That is as delightful for us as it is for God.

So we have these three passages, back to back: Do not worry; lay up kingdom treasure instead of worldly treasure; and wait for the Lord.

Don’t worry. (There’s that admonition again.) I am not going to turn this into a sermon about selling everything you have and putting it into the offering plate. Being rich toward God doesn’t mean that. In fact, Luke records further on in the Gospel Jesus saying that he’d rather have the widow’s two cents than the rich person’s spare change (Luke 21:1-3). (A word of warning: If you don’t like God meddling with your money, don’t read Luke’s gospel. In fact, the Bible says a whole lot more about money than it does about war and peace, etiquette, or sexuality.)

Making moth-proof wallets and rust-resistant purses is a far better business plan than building bigger barns, bigger closets, or more diversified 401K accounts. What Jesus wants you and me to do is to realize that the gift of life is whole lot more than monthly retirement checks, deeds to developer-sought-after land, commissions on sales, or royalties on mineral rights. All of life is a generous gift from God. God desires to lavish life upon us. We are so trained to expect strangers to cheat us and deprive us of what is rightfully ours, that we treat God the same way. It’s like one person’s stewardship plan: “I’ll throw everything up in the air, God, and anything you can catch you can keep.” Like that’s going to happen, and we know it.

On the human side of the equation, none of us can receive or give with clenched fists. On the God side of the equation, Jesus asks us – commands us – to be so oriented to life that we see it, know it, understand it through and through as an abundant gift from a generous God. And that means that having received it, we can give it away with gleeful abandon.

Being “rich toward God” involves a “generosity of spirit” that makes our minds and hearts more sensitive toward the ways in which God’s generosity manifests itself. Those ways are always present, but are often at the edges of our awareness, blurs at the periphery of our spiritual vision. And because we are busy trying to focus our sight on hoped-for large-scale God activities, we miss, overlook, or ignore the seemingly insignificant, small-scale God activities that are going on constantly around us.

What this means is that we have to cultivate the art of being surprised. That doesn’t mean being on a state of high alert nor its opposite which is being zonked out of it. We don’t have to be fixated or fuzzy. There is a difference, as David Schlafer says(1), between being the “lookout” and being “on the lookout.” We have been long conditioned to looking out. We have had it drummed into us until suspicion is the natural filter through which we sense everything. Remember the Sunday school song: “Be careful little eye what you see, be careful little ear what you hear,” and so on. We are to “position ourselves to be surprised.”(2) The surprise in the imagery that Jesus uses isn’t that the master comes at an odd hour. It is that when he comes and finds the servants, he prepares himself, sits them down, and serves them.

When humanity least expected it Jesus came, “matured in wisdom and years and in favor with God and with people” (Luke 2:52). Before that, Simeon and Anna had oriented their lives in such a way that when Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus into the temple area, they were immediately surprised – pleasantly – by the Lord’s Christ. He came to serve those who served him. “Desire God’s kingdom” (Luke 12:31) is what Jesus told people. That’s the perspective that will enable disciples to be surprised at all that God has done, is doing, and will yet do. The kingdom for which we are instructed to strive is presented to us just like the feast for the master’s servants. It is not compensation. It is not reward. It is a gift.

I challenge you to be surprised by God’s gifts this week. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if God might surprise you with a gift before you leave the building today. No you won’t find God’s gifts wrapped in colorful paper with neatly tied bows. The gift of God that might surprise you could be a smile, or the beautiful curve of a flower blossom. God’s surprise might be a steadying arm or a breath of peace interrupting anxiousness. God might surprise you with a phone call from a friend or pleasant aroma of fresh brewed herbal tea. Don’t spend the week looking for these things and thinking that you deserved them if they came. Don’t say, “It’s about time.” But rather let your responses be filled with “Oohs” and “Aahs” and “Wows.”

We are disciples of an awesome God who loves to surprise us with grace and love, with mercy and with blessings, with joy and with peace. How surprising is that?

Cultivate surprise and God will surprise you right into the kingdom. Wow!


(1) David J. Schlafer, “Luke 12:32-40, Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, Volume 3, 339.
(2) Eugene L. Lowry, The Sermon: Dancing the Edge of Mystery (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 95-100.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

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.

Where Are You Going?

Where are You Going?
Luke 9:51-62;
2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Galatians 5:1, 13-25

In Luke’s reporting, today’s encounters at the Samaritan town and with possible disciples follow on Jesus’ transfiguration. Either side of that he declared that the Son of Man must undergo suffering, rejection, death and resurrection, noting that “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

Jesus knew where he is going. He set his face to go to Jerusalem. Ten chapters and nearly 50 episodes later Jesus arrives in Jerusalem. These two passages set the stage for what will follow.

Jesus is rejected by the Samaritan town because he has decided to go to Jerusalem. The Samaritan/ Jew divide went back to the time of Elijah. The Elijah stories take place in relation to the Northern Kingdom. Ahab was the fifth king of the Northern Kingdom, based in Samaria. Ahab’s fecklessness and his wife’s idolatry and overbearingness furthered the divide between Jews and Samaritans.

Yet, according to Luke, Jesus had some cordial encounters with Samaritans. The ‘Sermon on the Plain’ was attended by people from Tyre and Sidon as well as Judea and Jerusalem. Jesus featured a Samaritan in a parable. He was later impressed with the faith of one of the ten lepers he healed. That one was a Samaritan.

Rejection was not new to Jesus. He had been rejected by Nazareth, at the beginning of his ministry. These two rejections came soon after similar events – Nazareth after Jesus’ baptism (3:21-22) and the Samaritan town after his transfiguration (9:28-36). Neither community could accept his understanding and embodiment of the purpose which God had laid on him. He was heading towards Jerusalem. We know (and so did Luke’s readers) what will happen to him there.

Lest we be too hard on the Samaritans, this episode is at a point when Jesus had to make a choice. Jesus won’t let being liked or disliked determine his actions. His call from God is to journey to Jerusalem. Neither rejection (nor acceptance) by the Samaritans will change his resolve to go to Jerusalem and face what will happen to him there. It is more important to follow the call of God than to seek to please other people. The disciples want to protect Jesus and he refuses. He turns the other cheek and does not lose sight of his primary purpose.

Jesus does not ask anyone who wants to follow him to do anything more Jesus himself is willing to do. If Jesus is willing to set his face for Jerusalem, he is willing to ask followers to join him on that journey and to deal with the rejection (or acceptance) that will given out. Jesus is not a cloistered, protected, spoiled rotten Son of God. As human flesh and blood he is intimately acquainted with all the good, the bad, and the ugly that human beings dish out to each other. Jesus is not an MBA running a company without the slightest idea of how the product is manufactured from raw material to finished product. Jesus started in the mail room and worked his way up. He knows life.

Sometimes people see me up a ladder or taking out the trash or doing some other non-ministerial chore. They are often right that I shouldn’t be doing those things. It’s either an emergency, or there is no one able to do it, or, frankly, it’s easier to do a ten minute task than to take thirty minutes trying to find someone else to do it.

We are in this thing called ministry together. You and I. Those of us in leadership functions have expectations placed on us as well as having the responsibility of placing expectations on others. We cannot expect others to do what we are not willing to do ourselves.

If the leadership team members aren’t attending worship every week, why should they expect members to be regular attenders? If the leaders aren’t generous in their stewardship, why should they expect members to be generous? If the pastor and leaders are not willing to live disciplined lives, why should they expect the members to live such lives? Christ redefines the discipline and obedience systems with which the temple leaders had oppressed the people. The renewal of a religious community begins with those set apart for leadership being renewed in their faith and lives.

Jesus says that “foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head.” We have holes and nests and pillows. Have we become too used to personal comforts that we might find it difficult to follow Jesus? Is it too difficult to pray frequently, study scriptures diligently, worship regularly, invite others often, pass on the faith, serve for the sake of others, and give freely of time, talents, and resources? Only as we grow into being disciples can we disciple others. The great commission at the end of Matthew’s gospel doesn’t send us out to make members. We are commissioned to make disciples.

We disrespect God, we sell Christ short, we belittle the power of the Spirit, we thumb our noses at the Gospel when we tell people that it’s easy to be a church member. Yes, it is easy to be a member. It is difficult to be a disciple. There are no privileges, no room for empty spirituality, no time for entanglements. Today’s texts indicate that neither family nor religious nor social nor business obligations, no matter how good or mandatory they are, not even patriotism on a Fourth of July weekend, can stand in the way of following Jesus.

Think about testimonies you have heard. How often does the convert talk about all the evil things that were left behind in order to follow Jesus? Jesus also demands that we give up the very best things in our lives to follow him. Fred Craddock says it this way:

The radicality of Jesus’ words lies in his claim to priority over the best, not the worst, of human relationships. Jesus never said to choose him over the devil but to choose him over the family. And the remarkable thing is that those who have done so have been freed from possession and worship of family and have found the distance necessary to love them.(1)

Today’s readings are filled with call choices:

• Jesus: the call of God to go to Jerusalem vs. the call of the Samaritans to stay and take care of them.
• James and John: the call for revenge against the Samaritans vs. Jesus’ call to leave the unreceptive people and move on.
• There is the call of self-pleasures vs. the call to follow Jesus. 
• There is the call of family obligations vs. the call to follow Jesus. 
• There is the call of socially accepted actions vs. the call to follow Jesus. 
• There is the call of being good citizens which may conflict with the call to follow Jesus. 
• If burying one’s parents was considered obeying the commandment to honor them, then we also have the call of the Law vs. the call to follow Jesus.

None of us are going to make the cut to follow Jesus. Our desires for soft pillows and comfortable beds, our fulfilling family and social obligations, our patriotism will frequently have higher priorities than following Jesus – especially following Jesus all the way to Jerusalem and the cross. We might be willing to give up some evils in our lives to follow Jesus, but not be willing to give up all these good things – to put them as a lower priority than Jesus. That is radical discipleship.

Jesus does not ask us to look back at the good things and the left behind sins of our lives. We can’t wallow in our past sins or boast of our past successes if we are to be fit for God’s kingdom.

The opposite of looking back is to look ahead. It is exceedingly difficult for congregations to “look ahead.” We are locked into looking at where we are (the bills that have arrived this month, the unplanned repairs that have to be made) or where we used to be (“the good old days”). Jesus calls us to look ahead to where we might be, to grasp a vision of where God would have us go and then head towards that goal.

When any of us come into a congregation and exercise discipleship through it, we can never be part of the past. We can listen to the stories the members tell about the past, but those stories are not our stories. We weren’t part of those stories and we can never be part of those past events. They no longer exist. We can only join what is and what will be. Jesus has gone on ahead. To follow after him means to look forward.

The greatest threat to the gospel is “the good” not “the evil.” When we recognize “the evil” in our lives, we usually want to get rid of it. When things don’t work, we stop doing them. But when we become content with “the good”—the good in our lives and in our congregations—we may fail to follow Jesus and seek what is “the best.” Are you on the discipleship journey with Jesus? Are you looking forward? Do you know where you are going?

(1) Fred Craddock, Luke, Interpretation Commentaries, (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990), p. 144.
General Resource: Brian Stoffregen, Gospel Notes for Next Sunday, “Gospel Notes - Luke 9:51-62,” Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 2:55 PM

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

Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass
Amos 8:1-12;
Luke 10:38-42
(Bristol Village Vespers)

A minister once told his congregation, “There is a sermon in every blade of grass.” Later that week the minister was out mowing her lawn when a church member rode by, stopped and rolled down the window and yelled out to her, “That’s right, Preacher. Cut those sermons short!”

I have plenty of grass to mow, not counting the weeds. The ways God comes to us and seeks to speak to us are a numerous as the blades of grass. God is not just out there somewhere – the transcendent, distant, Holy Other. God is also here – immanent! God is around us. God is in us. I like what Acts says about God being the one in which “we live, and move and have our being.”

But we like to put our lives into neat, labeled compartments. We divide them up into times and places for certain things. Sunday for many of us, is that time we give some attention to the Divine in our lives. This is well and good, but what this time really should do is help us realized and know that God is related to our lives every day. We tend to see other times and places as ordinary. All ground is holy ground, ll time is holy time, filled with the presence and voice of God.

The incarnation itself teaches us this. God chose to come to us in flesh and blood, in a child born to a peasant man and woman. God comes to us in the ordinary. Jesus taught us to look for God in the ordinary. Just read his teachings. He saw and heard God everywhere – in a coin, a fish net, a lamp, fruit trees, children, salt, a cup, a loaf of bread – in all things he saw some lesson God would teach us.

The fingerprints of God are all around us, if we know how to look.

The voice of God constantly fills the air, if we know how to listen.

Maltbie Babcock, the hymn writer, knew this well and expressed it in a hymn many of us know and love:

“This is my Father’s world,
The birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white,
Declare their Maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world:
He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear him pass,
He speaks to me everywhere” (verse 2). 

Malcolm Muggeridge, a British Christian journalist, said it this way: “Every happening great or small is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.”

Every moment we are bombarded with thousands of sound waves of all kinds. We don’t recognize it until we get out a radio. You turn it on, adjust the antenna, tune it, and you open yourself to a world of information, music, news. All that enriching information and enjoyment, but only if you turn the radio on and listen for it. We exist by our cell phones and bluetooth devices. No wires, just radio waves.

The voice of God, like radio waves, surrounds us and permeates our world. And each of us has a radio, a kind of spiritual receiver inside us that we can pick up those messages, that enables us to hear God. This spiritual radio inside of us is a kind of sixth sense. We have five senses: taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch. This sixth sense uses all of those other senses in seeking to open ourselves to the presence of God which is as close to us as our breath.

The people who were in these parts before European Americans arrived could follow the trail of animals and find their ways through wilderness by “reading signs.” They could see things all around them that I’m sure I don’t see because I don’t know how to look.

This sixth sense is the one we develop to help us look for God-signs, those events, great and small, in our daily lives that reveal the presence of God. I’m talking about being able to read the world spiritually, of expecting to hear God. We watch and listen, expecting to catch God doing something in our lives and in our world. So we are constantly wide-eyed with anticipation.

The problem is that this sixth sense is often underused. We need to hone, sharpen, and develop it.  We need to learn how to turn on our inner radio and adjust the spiritual tuner so that we begin to hear the ever-present voice of God. Our scripture lessons speak to this tonight. They tell us about Amos and Mary, two persons who knew something about this sixth sense, who knew how to listen to the rustling grass and hear God pass.

Wherever Amos turned, he saw God and heard God speaking to him. On one occasion he saw God in a plumb line, on other occasions, in a swarm of locusts and in a fire. In tonight’s lesson he even gets a message from God in a basket of ripening fruit.

Mary, in the Gospel lesson, became a model for us all in her desire to sit, to be quiet and listen for God’s voice at the feet of Jesus. Martha was into to activity, and she chides Mary for not helping her. Jesus gently chides Martha back, saying that she’s too distracted and is missing something that Mary has found, that one needful, essential thing.  The dishes will wait a few moments.

A lot of people think that Jesus is saying that Martha needed to stop doing unimportant stuff and sit down like her sister at his feet. Maybe what he was really saying is that Martha needed to take a deep breath and make some quiet time. I don’t think Jesus feels what she is doing is unimportant. Hospitality, cooking, taking care of the basic needs of family and guests is significant, and Jesus celebrated that. Jesus’ concern is that Martha seemed obsessed, distracted by all the things she had to do (we can identify with that). Martha was driven to distraction.

We live such hectic, distracted lives that we are not able to be fully present and to listen for God wherever we are, whatever we are doing. God is present in baking bread, washing dishes, setting a table, sweeping the floor. In Martha’s kitchen; in our kitchen. If Mary had complained to Jesus about Martha, “Lord do you not care that Martha has left me to sit here by myself? Tell her to sit here with me,” what would Jesus have said to Mary?  “Mary, you are distracted, you had chosen the better part, but now you are worried. You are not paying attention.” There are times and places for focused activity and focused reflection. Both are necessary. Some people major in one or the other. Few can evenly balance both. But both are required in the total working of God’s kingdom.

When Paula and I hike on park trails, I often get wrapped up in moving along the trails that I forget to pause and see what is around me. On the other hand, she likes to look at everything and forgets about moving along. My body is surrounded by the trees, the wonder of God’s creation everywhere, but my mind is distracted, filled with what I’ve got to do when I get back, and I have to force myself to slow down, to listen, to be present where I am. Only then can the distractions begin to fade and I can be where I am and hear God pass in the rustling grass.

Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon warns, “We spend a long time wishing we were elsewhere and otherwise.”

The main character in the book, Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher, sends a postcard home from vacation in which she writes, “Having a wonderful time. Wish I were here.”

The key to hearing and experiencing God in our daily lives is to be fully present in all we do. To give our whole selves to whatever duties or responsibilities each moment brings, knowing that in them and through them God is present and speaking. It is being attentive to the present, not obsessed with the past or the future, not driven from one distraction to another. Sometimes the present brings a moment to sit quietly at the feet of Jesus and other moments to mop the floor; one moment we walk in the forest, another we sit at a desk piled high with work. Yet, whatever the present brings, God is there, God is speaking, if we give ourselves to each moment, if we look and listen with that sixth sense that enables us to find that one needful thing – that wondrous sense of God’s pass even in leaves of grass.

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