Jeremiah 18:1-17; Philemon 4-16; Luke 14:25-33
Do any of you know what “vitreous china” is? That’s a technical description of a material which is made into products we used every day. The dictionary defines vitreous this way: “of the nature of or resembling glass, as in transparency, brittleness, hardness, glossiness, etc.” Perhaps you will better know it if I use the word porcelain. I am referring particularly to toilet fixtures. The main part of a toilet is actually more complex than it appears. A variety of parts are molded into shape and put together like a puzzle. Then the completed unit is fired in a large kiln until the material turns into a single unit. An enamel coating is applied and the piece is fired again to create the glassy-finished product we all take for granted until it stops up. The end product is strong and durable under normal use. The ceramic finish makes vitreous china the perfect material for use in bathroom fixtures, as it is impervious to water or harsh chemicals and is easily cleansed of germs.
I suspect that nearly everyone is familiar with Silly Putty. It was originally created by accident during research into potential rubber substitutes for use by the United States in World War II. Silly Putty is a toy based on silicone polymers which display unusual physical properties. It bounces, but breaks when given a sharp blow and can also flow like a liquid. It will act as an elastic solid over a short time period but as a viscous liquid over a long time period. You can shape it into something, but if left alone, it will eventually conform to the shape of the container it is in. Hence the egg-shaped packaging.
These two substances, vitreous china and Silly Putty, are very different in their nature and in their uses. The image that God gives to the prophet Jeremiah is a whole lot closer to Silly Putty than it is to vitreous china.
Clay is not the easiest medium to work in. There are many different kinds of clay based on the minerals in the compound. Depending on the intended use and the potter’s desired technique, one clay will perform better than another. Clays of different kinds are found in specific places.
The potter that Jeremiah visited evidently was having some difficulty with the clay he was working. “The piece he was making was flawed while still in his hands, so the potter started on another, as seemed best to him.” What God tells Jeremiah is, it is my prerogative to do the same thing with the House of Israel. If the clay, the people, won’t form right, probably because of impurities in it, then God will reform it, perhaps even use a different lump of clay. That’s what God says, “I am a potter preparing a disaster for you.” The inadequate, unworkable lump of clay which Israel has been, will be tossed aside in favor of a lump of clay which can be formed into a useful vessel.
God says, “Turn from your evil ways; reform your ways and your actions.” But the reaction that God got was, “What’s the use! We will follow our own plans and act according to our own willful, evil hearts.”
The House of Israel, like people in general, resented being formed, or worse, re-formed. People don’t want to be molded, pushed or prodded into a particular shape or purpose. We are very happy, thank you very much, being just the way we are. In other words, we want to be vitreous china rather than Silly Putty. We want to be in a fixed shape. We don’t want to be elastic, we don’t want to shaped, crushed, reshaped. We want to choose our form, our shape, our purpose.
And where does that get us? Consider God’s accusations against Israel:
The LORD proclaims:
Ask among the nations:
Have you ever heard anything like this?
Virgin Israel has done the most horrible thing.
Does the snow on the mountains of Lebanon ever melt entirely off their rocky cliffs?
Do the cool mountain streams ever dry up?
(Those are rhetorical questions with the expected answer, “Of course not. We would remember if the snow ever melted or the streams dried up. The prophet continues:)
Yet my people have forgotten me;
they have offered sacrifices to a lie.
And so they have stumbled along the way,
even along the ancient paths.
They have taken side roads,
not the main roads.
They have ruined their country
and brought utter shame on it.
Even though God created them, the people of Israel refused to be the clay that God could form into a reverently worshiping, compassionately serving, justice rendering people.
It was role reversal. The people were trying form God into what they wanted God to be. They wanted a God who would let them do whatever they wanted to do. They wanted a God who would allow them to put their thumbs on the scale, to short the change, to bait and switch the goods, so that they could get ahead of everyone else, even their own kinfolk.
Plain and simple, they wanted to be the potter, not the clay. And it wasn’t just God that they wanted to form and reform, but everyone else as well.
Isn’t that the usual human attitude. “There is nothing wrong with me, but you are all messed up. And I can fix you. I know what is right for you. I can tell you what you need.”
And conversely, “Don’t you tell me what to do. Keep you hands off of me. You don’t know a thing about me. Just leave me alone.”
We are forever attempting to usurp God’s potter role. We are going to remold everyone else. It would be bad enough if there were only a few people who were trying to reshape, reform the rest of us. But we are all guilty of it some extent. So it is like a chain reaction pile up on an Interstate highway. One big mess.
Through the experience of being with the Apostle Paul the runaway slave Onesimus was reformed by the working of the Holy Spirit. He was now a brother in Christ, to Paul, to the other believers in Paul’s traveling group, and to Philemon, who also had come to know Christ through Paul’s ministry. Paul is very clear to Philemon that he shouldn’t undo what God had done in Onesimus’ coming into a relationship with Christ. Philemon was not Onesimus’ potter, God was.
Jesus said to the crowd, “Whoever comes to me and doesn’t hate father and mother, spouse and children, and brothers and sisters — yes, even one’s own life — cannot be my disciple.” A relationship with Christ reshapes each of us. We can no longer be in the fixed vitreous china relationships with others that we once were. God remolds us into a disciple shape. God reforms us into new attitudes and understandings about God, others, and ourselves. “Whoever doesn’t carry their own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
God desires to reshape us into a cross-carrying disciple. And God is willing to do it however many times it takes. God would rather reform us as if we were Silly Putty rather than have to take us in the form of vitreous china, smash us to smithereens, and cast the useless pieces aside. Will you be formable in God’s hands?
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.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Better a Debtor
Better a Debtor?
Luke 14:1, 7-14; Jeremiah 2:4-13; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Last week, one of our neighboring Presbyterian churches, the McArthur Church, celebrated the commissioning of ruling elder Christine Burns to pastoral service for the congregation. Christine is a member of the nearby Wilkesville Church. The McArthur Church is half of the Vinton Area Ministry. The other half is the McArthur Trinity Episcopal Church. For many years my dear friend and colleague, Kay Puckett, pastored both churches and she had permission from the Episcopal bishop to celebrate communion. After she retired about a dozen years ago, two Episcopalian deacons served the church and the presbytery granted them permission to celebrate communion.
During that time the bishop visited the Trinity Church and a couple of retired Presbyterian colleagues were there. As a courtesy, they were invited to join the procession. In fact, they got to be the first ones to go down the aisle. One of the them thought that was really something. Sometime later it was revealed to them that in an Episcopal procession, the least important people lead the procession and the most important person comes last, namely the bishop. There’s a twist on the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Unfortunately this passage has been over-used, if not abused, in trying to put people in their place. Lots of inferiority complexes and undue humility have roots from here. That said, it is true that there are people who need to be lowered a peg or two in their self-estimation. There are people for whom the world is not big enough for their egos. Jesus was addressing his remarks to them. His hearers likely agreed with him and began to name some candidates, all the while missing his true inference.
I knew a colleague who got a letter from Who’s Who, and was all thrilled and honored. Then he found out the price of the book and the plaque. He had second thoughts about the price of fame.
When Jesus says, “Those who make themselves low will be lifted up,” I can’t help but think of Jesus’ own example. Paul’s Christological hymn in his Letter to the Philippians (2:7) says:
. . . he emptied himself
by taking the form of a slave.
That self-emptying is important. Jesus was able to do what the rich young man could not, what many others could not. He didn’t have wealth to give away, but he gave up grandiose thoughts about himself. He gave up the notion that he was the center of the universe and that the world owed him. He gave up the idea that he mattered more than anyone else. He let go of any potential claims he might have had upon anyone. He emptied himself of everything that kept him away from God.
Ron Byars notes that the Apostles’ Creed leaps from “born of the Virgin Mary” to “suffered under Pontius Pilate.”(1) The earliest creed makes no mention of anything that Jesus did in the three years that he roamed Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem. Everything Jesus did was displayed for all the world to see through the cross and the resurrection. He humbled himself. He was exalted, not by his own effort, but by the grace, the will, the pleasure of God. The lowest shall become the highest. The least born shall become the first born.
We all have highborn ideas, attitudes, and expectations that drive us to the places of honor. We have desires, yearnings, misconceptions, and misinformation that lead us to claim honor out of proportion to the ranking that God has determined is ours. This doesn’t negate who we are. We are who God has created us to be through a unique collection of skills, talents, and gifts. We are who we are, but not more. God wants us to rise to our full potential. But God will be upset with us if we get above our raising, as Appalachian folk describe it.
All that talk about not getting above ourselves is followed by an admonition about giving parties in order to get invited to parties. That saying may be equally difficult for us to wrap our thinking around. Hospitality is a key Biblical tenet. We have the word from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Don’t neglect to open up your homes to guests, because by doing this some have been hosts to angels without knowing it.” That may be a direct reference to Abraham’s entertaining the angels that announced the promised birth of Isaac. But there are numerous other passages where messengers of God — human or angelic — were entertained to the blessing of the household.
We all enjoy the company of family and friends. Some not often enough, others too often. Sharing meals together is a way of spreading out the expense for those of us who are households of one. This week you cook, I’ll cook next week. That makes good sense. It’s an equal exchange. No one gains or loses.
Jesus is talking about people who were social climbers, people who wanted an opportunity to see the inside of the fancy new house on the hill, or to taste the haute cuisine of someone’s new chef, or to rub shoulders with somebody important who is an acquaintance of the brother-in-law of your wife’s stepmother’s cousin twice removed. Remember the flap several years ago when a socialite couple crashed a party at the White House? Most people don’t crash parties, but they will try to finagle an invitation.
If we play turn about with dinner invitations, it becomes a competitive sport. We get caught up in making sure that we did as much as you did, and we will check to see that you did as much as we did. Someone is going to fall short. Someone’s feelings are going to get hurt. The game will escalate. I have to do better than you, because you did better than I did the last time around.
Jesus did not talk about manners. He was not concerned with what “RSVP” means or which fork is for salad and which is for dessert. Those things have their place, but not in the realm of God’s rule. Jesus wants to reorient the focus of hospitality. Jesus shares his table with people who are not normally invited by hosts with conventional values — “the poor, crippled, lame, and blind.”
Every age has its outcasts. Jesus challenges us to reach across the boundaries of place and time, of class and culture, of race and gender, of education and economics. Jesus calls us to be more aware of those from whom we are more inclined look away or not even see.
The Pharisees were often depicted as people who only ate with their kind. Generally, their relationships with Jesus were antagonistic. They complained because he ate with “tax collectors and sinners”(2). Jesus may be quoting their complaint about him (7:34) when he says: “The Human One came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunk, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ ”
Yet, Luke (and only Luke) tells us that Jesus ate with Pharisees(3). Maybe he was practicing in reverse what he was preaching. Each time he ate with them there were controversies: about the “sinful” woman who anoints Jesus; about proper ritual washings before eating; and the healing and teachings of today’s reading. Apparently Jesus (the glutton that he was) would eat (and probably drink) with anybody — perhaps even with you and me!(4)
While that thought may evoke a grin, it is absolutely true. Jesus does associate with us. And there is no way that we can ever pay him back. We are forever debtors to God for the life we have had, and the life we will have. Not just the biological life that evokes daily complaints about aches and pains. But also the spiritual life fortified by the Holy Spirit. Unlikely guests that we are, Jesus has invited us to the reign of God — the heavenly banquet. Let us not take the invitation for granted. Let us not wonder about why some are there (they’ll be wondering about us as well). It is better to be debtor to God than have everyone trying to repay us because they want a favor in return.
God invites us. Let us extend the invitation wherever we go. Amen.
(1) Ronald P. Byars, “Luke 14:1, 7-14: Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, volume 4, 23.
(2) Luke 5:30, 33; 15:2.
(3) Luke 7:36; 11:37; 14:1.
(4) Brian Stoffregen, “Gospel Notes for Next Sunday,” Proper 17 // Lectionary 22 C: Exegetical Notes on Luke 14:1, 7-14, Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 11:49 AM.
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.
Luke 14:1, 7-14; Jeremiah 2:4-13; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Last week, one of our neighboring Presbyterian churches, the McArthur Church, celebrated the commissioning of ruling elder Christine Burns to pastoral service for the congregation. Christine is a member of the nearby Wilkesville Church. The McArthur Church is half of the Vinton Area Ministry. The other half is the McArthur Trinity Episcopal Church. For many years my dear friend and colleague, Kay Puckett, pastored both churches and she had permission from the Episcopal bishop to celebrate communion. After she retired about a dozen years ago, two Episcopalian deacons served the church and the presbytery granted them permission to celebrate communion.
During that time the bishop visited the Trinity Church and a couple of retired Presbyterian colleagues were there. As a courtesy, they were invited to join the procession. In fact, they got to be the first ones to go down the aisle. One of the them thought that was really something. Sometime later it was revealed to them that in an Episcopal procession, the least important people lead the procession and the most important person comes last, namely the bishop. There’s a twist on the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Unfortunately this passage has been over-used, if not abused, in trying to put people in their place. Lots of inferiority complexes and undue humility have roots from here. That said, it is true that there are people who need to be lowered a peg or two in their self-estimation. There are people for whom the world is not big enough for their egos. Jesus was addressing his remarks to them. His hearers likely agreed with him and began to name some candidates, all the while missing his true inference.
I knew a colleague who got a letter from Who’s Who, and was all thrilled and honored. Then he found out the price of the book and the plaque. He had second thoughts about the price of fame.
When Jesus says, “Those who make themselves low will be lifted up,” I can’t help but think of Jesus’ own example. Paul’s Christological hymn in his Letter to the Philippians (2:7) says:
. . . he emptied himself
by taking the form of a slave.
That self-emptying is important. Jesus was able to do what the rich young man could not, what many others could not. He didn’t have wealth to give away, but he gave up grandiose thoughts about himself. He gave up the notion that he was the center of the universe and that the world owed him. He gave up the idea that he mattered more than anyone else. He let go of any potential claims he might have had upon anyone. He emptied himself of everything that kept him away from God.
Ron Byars notes that the Apostles’ Creed leaps from “born of the Virgin Mary” to “suffered under Pontius Pilate.”(1) The earliest creed makes no mention of anything that Jesus did in the three years that he roamed Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem. Everything Jesus did was displayed for all the world to see through the cross and the resurrection. He humbled himself. He was exalted, not by his own effort, but by the grace, the will, the pleasure of God. The lowest shall become the highest. The least born shall become the first born.
We all have highborn ideas, attitudes, and expectations that drive us to the places of honor. We have desires, yearnings, misconceptions, and misinformation that lead us to claim honor out of proportion to the ranking that God has determined is ours. This doesn’t negate who we are. We are who God has created us to be through a unique collection of skills, talents, and gifts. We are who we are, but not more. God wants us to rise to our full potential. But God will be upset with us if we get above our raising, as Appalachian folk describe it.
All that talk about not getting above ourselves is followed by an admonition about giving parties in order to get invited to parties. That saying may be equally difficult for us to wrap our thinking around. Hospitality is a key Biblical tenet. We have the word from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Don’t neglect to open up your homes to guests, because by doing this some have been hosts to angels without knowing it.” That may be a direct reference to Abraham’s entertaining the angels that announced the promised birth of Isaac. But there are numerous other passages where messengers of God — human or angelic — were entertained to the blessing of the household.
We all enjoy the company of family and friends. Some not often enough, others too often. Sharing meals together is a way of spreading out the expense for those of us who are households of one. This week you cook, I’ll cook next week. That makes good sense. It’s an equal exchange. No one gains or loses.
Jesus is talking about people who were social climbers, people who wanted an opportunity to see the inside of the fancy new house on the hill, or to taste the haute cuisine of someone’s new chef, or to rub shoulders with somebody important who is an acquaintance of the brother-in-law of your wife’s stepmother’s cousin twice removed. Remember the flap several years ago when a socialite couple crashed a party at the White House? Most people don’t crash parties, but they will try to finagle an invitation.
If we play turn about with dinner invitations, it becomes a competitive sport. We get caught up in making sure that we did as much as you did, and we will check to see that you did as much as we did. Someone is going to fall short. Someone’s feelings are going to get hurt. The game will escalate. I have to do better than you, because you did better than I did the last time around.
Jesus did not talk about manners. He was not concerned with what “RSVP” means or which fork is for salad and which is for dessert. Those things have their place, but not in the realm of God’s rule. Jesus wants to reorient the focus of hospitality. Jesus shares his table with people who are not normally invited by hosts with conventional values — “the poor, crippled, lame, and blind.”
Every age has its outcasts. Jesus challenges us to reach across the boundaries of place and time, of class and culture, of race and gender, of education and economics. Jesus calls us to be more aware of those from whom we are more inclined look away or not even see.
The Pharisees were often depicted as people who only ate with their kind. Generally, their relationships with Jesus were antagonistic. They complained because he ate with “tax collectors and sinners”(2). Jesus may be quoting their complaint about him (7:34) when he says: “The Human One came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunk, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ ”
Yet, Luke (and only Luke) tells us that Jesus ate with Pharisees(3). Maybe he was practicing in reverse what he was preaching. Each time he ate with them there were controversies: about the “sinful” woman who anoints Jesus; about proper ritual washings before eating; and the healing and teachings of today’s reading. Apparently Jesus (the glutton that he was) would eat (and probably drink) with anybody — perhaps even with you and me!(4)
While that thought may evoke a grin, it is absolutely true. Jesus does associate with us. And there is no way that we can ever pay him back. We are forever debtors to God for the life we have had, and the life we will have. Not just the biological life that evokes daily complaints about aches and pains. But also the spiritual life fortified by the Holy Spirit. Unlikely guests that we are, Jesus has invited us to the reign of God — the heavenly banquet. Let us not take the invitation for granted. Let us not wonder about why some are there (they’ll be wondering about us as well). It is better to be debtor to God than have everyone trying to repay us because they want a favor in return.
God invites us. Let us extend the invitation wherever we go. Amen.
(1) Ronald P. Byars, “Luke 14:1, 7-14: Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, volume 4, 23.
(2) Luke 5:30, 33; 15:2.
(3) Luke 7:36; 11:37; 14:1.
(4) Brian Stoffregen, “Gospel Notes for Next Sunday,” Proper 17 // Lectionary 22 C: Exegetical Notes on Luke 14:1, 7-14, Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 11:49 AM.
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.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Travails of the Faith Pilgrimage
Travails of the Faith Pilgrimage
Hebrews 12:18-29; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17
Lanny Peters, a Baptist pastor from Georgia, tells the story about a class of youth exploring believer’s baptism. The class is similar to what Presbyterians and others do for confirmation. The class members were asked at the informal initial meeting to share their reasons for seeking to be baptized. Each of the members shared in their own way their desire to know God better, to be a disciple of Christ, and to be a member of the church.
One class member, Tim, said that he was looking forward to the experience because he had lots of questions. The first one, he said, was, “Why does God in the Bible act as if God had a split personality?” Sometimes God is really kind and loving and forgiving, but then God gets angry and wants to punish and even hurt people.(1)
Sometimes we get that impression of God when the scriptures are interpreted. The passage from Hebrews today is a case in point. The author talks about two very different mountain experiences with God: Mount Sinai and Mount Zion. The Israelites in Exodus were told not to touch the mountain, even to stone any animal that stepped on it. God was terrifying, someone you wouldn’t want to run into in broad daylight, let alone in a dark alley. Even Moses trembled in fear.
Then the Hebrews’ writer contrasts the fearsome encounter of Mount Sinai with a “party-hearty” festival on Mount Zion. There are all the heirs of the kingdom, the firstborn, the registry of all the folks whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life, to borrow an image from John of Patmos. All these folks have been made perfect. It’s like going to an Academy Awards after-party. God is there and so is Jesus, whose shed blood is a whole lot more beneficial than that of Abel, the first human being who died.
The Hebrews’ writer hasn’t gone all Wolfgang Puck. Just when we are ready to nosh, the tone changes. If you thought the God of Sinai was terrifying, pay attention to the God of Zion, because if you don’t, heaven as well as earth will be shook for all they’re worth. Worship God rightly, for God is a consuming fire.
We’ve heard “hellfire and brimstone” sermons and rants from preachers across the Christian spectrum. Fire means punishment. That’s what we want it mean or that’s what we have been told that it means. But is that what it means? When Moses encountered God the first time at Sinai, the bush was not burned up. More often than not, on both sides of the Testamental divide, fire means refining. Metals are refined. The impure ore is heated up to such a temperature that impurities burn off or separate from the pure metal and are skimmed off the top or allowed to settle to the bottom. The smelter melts the gold or silver ore until it is liquid and then skims off the dross until he can see his own face reflected in the molten metal.(2) What a wonderful and appropriate image that is. When God refines us, God wants to see God’s own image reflected in us. When John of Patmos reports that the devil was thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10) it was refining and not punishment going on. Perhaps the lake of fire was like an autoclave sterilizing the devil so that the devil wouldn’t pollute the earth.
What is that pollution? What could it be other than sin? Grey Temple asks, “How can God’s fire purify anyone from sin without frying them to a crisp?”(3) Think of some of the behaviors which we normally call sin: drunkenness, embezzling, lying, cheating, adultery. Think of the some of the human attitudes that are really offensive: greed, arrogance, uncontrolled anger, lack of compassion. How would God’s fire make the person different who did those things or presented herself or himself in one of those ways? As Temple says that you would simply be the same old rascal with third degree burns.
To be an image that carries meaning, the fire of God must consume something in each of us that goes deeper than our sins. Temple says that God’s fire must purge away the “false self” which is the fertile ground for our worst sins. The self that God created can emerge only as the self that each of us constructs to retail to others is consumed.
That’s an interesting concept. By building up an unreal self to present to the world, we are polluting the image of God that was imprinted on us at our birth. We take fig leaves and hide our natural self, the self that God gave us, the self that is supposed to reflect God when God looks at us.
Perhaps that was what God was getting at when Jeremiah tried to beg off from doing the ministry God was calling him to. “I don’t know how to speak because I’m only a child.” Isn’t that the unreal self that Jeremiah is trying to present. We might accept that from him, but God knows better. “Don’t say, ‘I’m only a child.’ ... Before I created you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I set you apart.” Or how about Moses and his first meeting with God. He had a litany of excuses and fears — lack of confidence, limited skill, insecurities about personal identity, and fear of rejection (Exodus 3–4). Isaiah’s excuse was a profound sense of personal sin (Isaiah 6).
We all have excuses. We all rationalize why we don’t do things or do things we know we shouldn’t. We all create fictions about ourselves, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes by default. For a long time my internal image of myself was somewhere in my thirties. I haven’t been thirty something in a long time, and there is no way that I can live up to that self-image. I’m moving it forward slowly, and maybe someday it will be close to my chronological age.
It’s a self-deception. We do it all the time. Physically it is Botox, nips and tucks, “Just for Men Touch of Gray,” and erectile dysfunction medicine. Mentally it is believing we are someone other than who we are, believing that we are self-made, that it doesn’t matter who we really are, just who we get the world to believe that we are.
Sometimes religiousness is part of the false front we present the world. People conform to a particular religious group – its dress, vocabulary, belief, even political opinions . They don’t ask questions about why certain things are the way they are, they accept them, and as a result they become objects of loyalty, gods in the place of God.
It’s a DIY – Do It Yourself – world, except when it comes to salvation. God’s purifying fire will consume all the false, fictitious, pretentious, puffed up impurities that we hide behind and that we allow to pollute, dilute, and destroy the God-given person we are.
All that falsehood increases rather than decreases the burden we carry around during our lives. Like the woman with the 18 year affliction that Jesus encountered, we are stooped over and cannot stand up straight. And the religious leaders were more concerned with the sanctity of the Sabbath than they were with the sanctity of the holy image of God that was supposed to be in that woman. Jesus said, “[I]sn’t it necessary that this woman, a daughter of Abraham, bound by Satan for eighteen long years, be set free from her bondage on the Sabbath day?”
That was a precursor to a very special Sabbath not all that far in the future from the encounter with the woman. It was the Sabbath that Jesus inaugurated by his resurrection from the dead. He threw off the falsehood of death and its fear, terror, and penalties. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
We come through the travails of pilgrimage to faith, not be smacked down, but to be refined, purified, made glowing so that God can see God’s own self in us.
May your life be a reflection of God.
(1) Lanny Peters, “Hebrews 12:18-29, Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 376, 378.
(2) Grey Temple, “Hebrews 12:18-29, Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 378.
(3) Ibid.
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.
Hebrews 12:18-29; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17
Lanny Peters, a Baptist pastor from Georgia, tells the story about a class of youth exploring believer’s baptism. The class is similar to what Presbyterians and others do for confirmation. The class members were asked at the informal initial meeting to share their reasons for seeking to be baptized. Each of the members shared in their own way their desire to know God better, to be a disciple of Christ, and to be a member of the church.
One class member, Tim, said that he was looking forward to the experience because he had lots of questions. The first one, he said, was, “Why does God in the Bible act as if God had a split personality?” Sometimes God is really kind and loving and forgiving, but then God gets angry and wants to punish and even hurt people.(1)
Sometimes we get that impression of God when the scriptures are interpreted. The passage from Hebrews today is a case in point. The author talks about two very different mountain experiences with God: Mount Sinai and Mount Zion. The Israelites in Exodus were told not to touch the mountain, even to stone any animal that stepped on it. God was terrifying, someone you wouldn’t want to run into in broad daylight, let alone in a dark alley. Even Moses trembled in fear.
Then the Hebrews’ writer contrasts the fearsome encounter of Mount Sinai with a “party-hearty” festival on Mount Zion. There are all the heirs of the kingdom, the firstborn, the registry of all the folks whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life, to borrow an image from John of Patmos. All these folks have been made perfect. It’s like going to an Academy Awards after-party. God is there and so is Jesus, whose shed blood is a whole lot more beneficial than that of Abel, the first human being who died.
The Hebrews’ writer hasn’t gone all Wolfgang Puck. Just when we are ready to nosh, the tone changes. If you thought the God of Sinai was terrifying, pay attention to the God of Zion, because if you don’t, heaven as well as earth will be shook for all they’re worth. Worship God rightly, for God is a consuming fire.
We’ve heard “hellfire and brimstone” sermons and rants from preachers across the Christian spectrum. Fire means punishment. That’s what we want it mean or that’s what we have been told that it means. But is that what it means? When Moses encountered God the first time at Sinai, the bush was not burned up. More often than not, on both sides of the Testamental divide, fire means refining. Metals are refined. The impure ore is heated up to such a temperature that impurities burn off or separate from the pure metal and are skimmed off the top or allowed to settle to the bottom. The smelter melts the gold or silver ore until it is liquid and then skims off the dross until he can see his own face reflected in the molten metal.(2) What a wonderful and appropriate image that is. When God refines us, God wants to see God’s own image reflected in us. When John of Patmos reports that the devil was thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10) it was refining and not punishment going on. Perhaps the lake of fire was like an autoclave sterilizing the devil so that the devil wouldn’t pollute the earth.
What is that pollution? What could it be other than sin? Grey Temple asks, “How can God’s fire purify anyone from sin without frying them to a crisp?”(3) Think of some of the behaviors which we normally call sin: drunkenness, embezzling, lying, cheating, adultery. Think of the some of the human attitudes that are really offensive: greed, arrogance, uncontrolled anger, lack of compassion. How would God’s fire make the person different who did those things or presented herself or himself in one of those ways? As Temple says that you would simply be the same old rascal with third degree burns.
To be an image that carries meaning, the fire of God must consume something in each of us that goes deeper than our sins. Temple says that God’s fire must purge away the “false self” which is the fertile ground for our worst sins. The self that God created can emerge only as the self that each of us constructs to retail to others is consumed.
That’s an interesting concept. By building up an unreal self to present to the world, we are polluting the image of God that was imprinted on us at our birth. We take fig leaves and hide our natural self, the self that God gave us, the self that is supposed to reflect God when God looks at us.
Perhaps that was what God was getting at when Jeremiah tried to beg off from doing the ministry God was calling him to. “I don’t know how to speak because I’m only a child.” Isn’t that the unreal self that Jeremiah is trying to present. We might accept that from him, but God knows better. “Don’t say, ‘I’m only a child.’ ... Before I created you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I set you apart.” Or how about Moses and his first meeting with God. He had a litany of excuses and fears — lack of confidence, limited skill, insecurities about personal identity, and fear of rejection (Exodus 3–4). Isaiah’s excuse was a profound sense of personal sin (Isaiah 6).
We all have excuses. We all rationalize why we don’t do things or do things we know we shouldn’t. We all create fictions about ourselves, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes by default. For a long time my internal image of myself was somewhere in my thirties. I haven’t been thirty something in a long time, and there is no way that I can live up to that self-image. I’m moving it forward slowly, and maybe someday it will be close to my chronological age.
It’s a self-deception. We do it all the time. Physically it is Botox, nips and tucks, “Just for Men Touch of Gray,” and erectile dysfunction medicine. Mentally it is believing we are someone other than who we are, believing that we are self-made, that it doesn’t matter who we really are, just who we get the world to believe that we are.
Sometimes religiousness is part of the false front we present the world. People conform to a particular religious group – its dress, vocabulary, belief, even political opinions . They don’t ask questions about why certain things are the way they are, they accept them, and as a result they become objects of loyalty, gods in the place of God.
It’s a DIY – Do It Yourself – world, except when it comes to salvation. God’s purifying fire will consume all the false, fictitious, pretentious, puffed up impurities that we hide behind and that we allow to pollute, dilute, and destroy the God-given person we are.
All that falsehood increases rather than decreases the burden we carry around during our lives. Like the woman with the 18 year affliction that Jesus encountered, we are stooped over and cannot stand up straight. And the religious leaders were more concerned with the sanctity of the Sabbath than they were with the sanctity of the holy image of God that was supposed to be in that woman. Jesus said, “[I]sn’t it necessary that this woman, a daughter of Abraham, bound by Satan for eighteen long years, be set free from her bondage on the Sabbath day?”
That was a precursor to a very special Sabbath not all that far in the future from the encounter with the woman. It was the Sabbath that Jesus inaugurated by his resurrection from the dead. He threw off the falsehood of death and its fear, terror, and penalties. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
We come through the travails of pilgrimage to faith, not be smacked down, but to be refined, purified, made glowing so that God can see God’s own self in us.
May your life be a reflection of God.
(1) Lanny Peters, “Hebrews 12:18-29, Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 376, 378.
(2) Grey Temple, “Hebrews 12:18-29, Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 378.
(3) Ibid.
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.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
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
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.
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.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
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.
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.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
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:
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,
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.
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.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
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:
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.
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.
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