O Foolish Cross

1 Corinthians 1:18-25; Exodus 20:1-17; John 2:13-22

Dictionary.com provides the following definition for the world “foolish”:
Adjective:
1. resulting from or showing a lack of sense; ill-considered; unwise: a foolish action, a foolish speech.
2. lacking forethought or caution.
3. trifling, insignificant, or paltry.
Our British friends would add several additional definitions: “silly; resulting from folly or stupidity; ridiculous or absurd; not worthy of consideration; weak-minded; simple.”

Was Paul foolish to use the word “foolish” in the same sentence as the word “cross”? Not in the least. It was no slip of the tongue. He used it five times:

• “Foolishness to those who are being destroyed,”
• “God made the wisdom of the world foolish,” 
• “the foolishness of preaching,”
• “foolishness to Gentiles”, and 
• “the foolishness of God.”

There can be no doubt whatsoever that Paul used the word on purpose. If we run those back through with the various words used in the definition of “foolish,” that is quite a litany.

The church in Corinth was divided by factions and partisanship. In addition to this, the city of Corinth was a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city of its day. These factors worked together to make ministry in the Corinthian church quite challenging.

Even though the scene is different, the diversity of today’s community population makes for a very similar kind of challenge. Those of you born in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940's grew up with an understanding of the world that is very different from those of us born in the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called Baby Boomers. And if those two sets of views are divergent, the views of the next generation, the “Gen-Xers,” born in the 1970s and 1980s, differ even more sharply. Curiously enough, as the years wind on, the thoughts of the “Millennials,” born in the 1990s and 2000s, while based a still different view of the world, may not be so different from the folk sixty or more years their elders. Because there are now five different generations involved in today’s civic community as well as the church, ministry is truly challenging.

Paul realized that the major truth of the gospel, the major theme of the redemptive story, must not get lost in all the social and cultural clutter of Corinth. So he determined to preach Christ and to preach Christ crucified. This was a message that scandalized the Jews and seemed improbable to the Greeks; but it was in fact the Christian message, and Paul would not water it down, avoid it, or depart from it.

Many people today want to find a way to eliminate the need for a “crucified Christ.” Yet, if we face reality, we must understand that we will never fully appreciate the truth of the gospel until we appreciate the reality of sin. That’s why this passage is so appropriate during Lent. We need a long view of what the Christ event is all about. Too often we slice and dice the Gospel into manageable and innocuous segments and form them to fit our own biases about God. It is important for us to step back and take in the whole breadth of the passion narratives on Palm/Passion Sunday and Good Friday.

But even the complete passion story may not be enough. How often we are consumed by the details of the state-sanctioned execution or by the inevitable question of why jubilant “Hosannas” of Sunday turn into jeering judgment on Friday. There wasn’t a sudden turn around in the space of five days. The “foolishness of the cross” didn’t happen overnight. It at least started when Jesus rose out of the water of John’s baptism, and if truth be told, it probably started long before the holy messenger Gabriel showed up in Mary’s garden.

In the gospel reading, John 2:13-22, we are confronted with the anger of Jesus. Again, the picture of Jesus doing something other than being nice and placid ruins the image of Jesus we have worked so hard to cultivate in our thinking and in the thinking of the church. We don’t get angry, we turn the other cheek, we roll up into balls and play dead like opossums. What angered Jesus was that the Pharisees he encountered thought they could turn God's anger aside simply by adhering to their rituals and paying their sacrifices.

When the temple cleansing is paired with the Exodus passage citing the Ten Commandments, we can’t help but note the way in which those ten almighty, all-worshiped statements have been developed into a complex set of rules by which one might win salvation, whereas Jesus simplified them into the law of love: “Love God – love neighbor.”

John is perhaps very prescient in placing the temple cleansing at the beginning of the accounts of Jesus’ ministry, for it was not the last straw that caused Jesus’ execution, but the first. His whole ministry was repugnant to those who clung to power within the religious and cultural system. And to anyone with the slightest sense larger socio-political trends, what Jesus was about was silly, foolish, nonsensical, ridiculous, weak-minded, absurd, simple, not worthy of consideration. Sure he touched the lives of a number of people in very precious ways – returning life, healing long-term physical maladies, restoring psychological and spiritual wholeness. But for the average person, Jesus was a spectacle, a ludicrous mockery of the status quo, a nut-case just waiting to be cracked.

Human beings get so wrapped up in the ideas they take as their own, that they somehow get inoculated against anything outside of themselves. We are quick to label as fools anyone who thinks differently from us and to label as foolish any ideas that don’t agree with our own ideas. We can get all haughty and say that we would never have called for Jesus’ crucifixion. And maybe we wouldn’t have. But then again, we might have just kept our mouths closed and not said anything against those who were bound and determined to do away with Jesus.

Perhaps we don’t know what to think. Perhaps we can’t believe that an actual crucifixion was necessary to pay the price for our sin. We say, “After all, I’m not that bad. Sure, I make a few mistakes, but nothing calling for a death sentence, for me or for Jesus. There are those who I have my suspicions, I bet they are guilty.”

That’s like trying to be our own spiritual optometrist. We can’t see our way out of a fully glassed-in room. The gospel, that foolish preaching, tells us that we need to come to the point where we view our sin in the same way that the Holy God views it. We are powerless to do the right thing; but God intervened and sent his Son into the world to be crucified and on our account to suffer the pain of separation from God for a time. This is the message of the cross. It may not make any sense to us. It is the foolishness of God; but truly, it is the only thing that does make any sense.

The Good News of Jesus Christ still sounds foolish to many and offensive to others. It is foolishness to any who have chosen another way to face their unavoidable appointment with death and what comes after. It is offensive to those who attempt to maintain a facade of self-righteousness or self-confidence in the face of life’s persistent questions. Those who cannot consider their own sinfulness will find that the gospel offers a solution they insist they do not need.

Our society worships power, influence, and wealth. Jesus came as a humble, poor servant, and he offers his kingdom to those who have faith, not to those who work hard or improve themselves. This may look ridiculous to the world, but Christ is our power, the only way we can be saved. When we know Christ personally, then we’ll have the greatest wisdom anyone could desire.

God does not seek out the people whom the world admires; instead, God reveals the divine to humble and searching hearts, regardless of their worldly position. God can use us no matter what our position or status. To the worldly wise, it would have made more sense for God to call the leaders and the influencers. But God does what seems foolish to the world—God calls those who do not have those characteristics and achievements. The 19th century English preacher Charles H. Spurgeon famously wrote, “I expect to be amazed by three things when I first arrive in heaven. I will be delighted by those I find are actually there. I will be shocked to note who isn’t there whom I assumed I would see. And then I will be speechless with wonder as I realize that by God’s grace I am there!”

O foolish cross! Thanks be to God for it.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Blinded by Preconceptions

Mark 8:31-38

John Newton, once a captain of a British slave ship, after his conversion went on to become an evangelical Anglican clergyman. He wrote several hymns, the best known of which begins:

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind, but now I see.”

When a sinner is convicted by the Holy Spirit, the eyes of that person’s spirit are opened. It is as if flakes fall away from his eyes, as when Ananias prayed over the blinded Saul following his Christ-vision on the Damascus road (Acts 9:18). The man born blind, whom Jesus healed with mud and sent to wash in the Pool of Siloam, told the religious authorities, “I don’t know whether he’s a sinner. Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see” (John 9:25).

Physical blindness may be a detached retina, macular degeneration, severe cataracts, or some other disease of the eye. Spiritual blindness may not limit physical eyesight, but it can be an even worse malady. Spiritual blindness is often entwined with a severe case of preconceived notions. These preconceptions make it very difficult to experience the life-changing power of the grace of Christ. In Jesus’ day all the religious authorities had preconceptions about God, about religious reality, about life and death, about the messiah, and they could not see beyond those preconceptions to the truth embodied in Jesus. Even the friendly Pharisee Nicodemus was locked into a set of preconceived ideas and had trouble grasping the import of the “born anew” imagery which Jesus used in trying to explain eternal life to him.

The disciples also were prisoners of the preconceptions of their culture about the Messiah. Jesus explained the program to the disciples, “The Human One must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and the legal experts, and be killed, and then, after three days, rise from the dead.” Mark adds, “He said this plainly.” Peter grabbed Jesus by the shoulders and shook him strongly. “No!” he shouted as he set about to correct Jesus. Preconceived ideas have that strong a hold on people. Just moments before Peter had proclaimed with astounding insight that Jesus was “the Christ.” How quickly he lapsed into his old thinking: the Messiah doesn’t die.

Even Jesus had to deal with preconceptions. Frederick Buechner suggests that after his baptism, Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness asking himself the question of what it meant to be Jesus. In the season of Lent, we who call ourselves followers of Christ, are invited, even compelled to ask, “What does it mean to be a faithful follower of Christ? What does it mean to be a Christian?”(1) We are called annually to examine ourselves to the very core of our faith and root out the preconceptions which will invoke Jesus’ stern correction, “Get behind me, Satan. You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.”

We all have preconceptions. Certain things are supposed to be a certain way and don’t anyone try to change our minds. Not even Christ. Except changing our minds about life in general and especially life as a creation of God in relation to other creatures of God is what Jesus is about.

We all have preconceptions about Jesus. Even most of us who have had it taught to us from when we were very small, have trouble with the idea of a Messiah who dies. Untimely, unnecessary death is such a waste. To die is to lose. We use that imagery for teams when are doing well and then all of a sudden fade away into a loss, either in a single game or through the last month of the season. Or we use that imagery in individual competition on the tennis court, the golf course, the ski slope, the gymnastics venue. To die is to lose. To lose is to have no value.

Everything in life is competition. Even retirement. We compete to have the best possible retirement and then we compete to do everything we can possibly do during whatever time is allotted to us. People even compete to lose. A popular television program has been “The Biggest Loser.” Yesterday’s paper had a report about two high school coaches who were suspended because they were competing to lose a game in order to get a better seeding in the tournament.

We have a preconception that with Christ everything is going to be all right, that nothing will go against us. We forget about all the psalms in which the psalmist prays to God about the lousy rotten deal he is getting either at no fault of his own or because he clings faithfully to his belief in God.

Believing in Christ is not a talisman to ward off the evil of the world. Too many times in the two millennia since Christ, belief in our Lord has actually been a lightning rod for drawing persecution and evil towards us rather than deflecting it.

Peter was blinded by his own preconceptions. His cherished convictions about what the Messiah’s agenda should be would not allow him to see what the Messiah’s agenda must be. How often are we guilty of this very same malady? We arrogantly assume that we know what must be done, so much so that a word from Jesus himself would not dissuade us.

Of course, we are better than Peter. We would never rebuke Jesus. Our rebuking would be kinder, gentler. We would respond with benign neglect and insipid indifference. We will never touch a hair of his. We will merely let him die. George Studdert Kennedy was an Anglican priest who served with distinction as a military chaplain in World War I. He wrote the following lines about indifference:

When Jesus came to Golgotha they hanged Him on a tree,
They drave great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.
When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed Him by,
They never hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.
Still Jesus cried, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do,"
And still it rained the wintry rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall and cried for Calvary.(2)

Do our preconceptions prevent us from hearing Jesus’ words to us today? Do our misconceptions about Christ lead us to neglectful and indifferent behaviors when it comes to following our Lord?

We live in a violent world. Violence isn’t just military. It comes in all kinds of guises: physical, mental, psychological, economic, educational, oratorical, discriminatory, and in indifferent, neglectful, and well-meaning dependence-creating relationships.

Peter’s rebuke of Jesus reflects the way we humans think. That’s what Jesus says. The world says the way to victory is the way of power an might. The world says that violence is to be met by greater violence, in a never-ending escalation of force and strategy. If that is allowed to continue unabated, everything will be destroyed and everyone put to death.

Jesus offers another way. Jesus breaks down the preconceptions. He allows violence to have its way. But he responds with life, not death. He responds with resurrection, not oblivion. He responds with heaven, not hell.

As long as our selves reign in our lives, we will be forever seeking shortcuts to the kingdom, we will try to substitute some easier way for the way of the cross. As we look to the remainder of Lent, as we look to our collective ministry as a portion of the body of Christ in Waverly, as we wrestle with our preconceived ideas of believer, of disciple, of church, of Christ, may the blindness of our preconceptions be healed and may we help Jesus to carry the cross of life into the world we inhabit, laying down our lives, probably not literally but certainly figuratively, for the people we encounter.

May it be so. Amen.

(1) Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 74
(2) Geoffrey A. Studdert Kennedy. Online text copyright © 2003, Ian Lancashire for the Department of English, University of Toronto.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

The Prophet's Tears

2 Kings 2:1-12; Mark 9:2-9; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6

There are some passages of scripture that become indelibly etched in one’s memory. I can’t remember the when, but I do remember the how of my first encounter with Elijah and Elisha and the chariots of fire. It was back in the time when religious programs were easily found on popular radios stations. I can’t remember the name of the program but it came on every Sunday afternoon and was a kind of radio theater of Bible stories. If I recall there was an adult character or two and a couple of children who interacted with them around the details of the story as it was told. It was a kind of mini church school class. I don’t remember all the stories which were told, but this one has stuck with me all these years.

There are a variety of levels in this story. There is the near-heart-wrenching break up of the teacher-student relationship of Elijah and Elisha. And if you think about the whole of the Elijah saga, you realize that at this point Elijah has his spunk back. He was pretty demoralized after the contest on Mt. Carmel when he caused the thrice-drenched sacrifice and stone altar to be incinerated which made a mockery of the 450 prophets of Baal attached to Queen Jezebel’s court. Elijah had the failed prophets put to death. The queen then put a bounty on Elijah. He fled to the desert, was nourished by an angel from God for forty days until he encountered God in the stillness of silence. God told him to stop feeling sorry for himself because he wasn’t the last of God’s prophets or followers. God told Elijah to get up, go anoint kings over Aram and Israel, and train Elisha as his successor.

In this reading, this transfer of prophetic authority from Elijah to Elisha is seen to be more than just the transfer of power, as we do every quadrennial Inauguration Day when one elected President hands over the government to the next elected President. To be Elijah’s heir entails a great deal more than simply doing miracles similar to those of the master. To go in the footsteps of Elijah, Elisha must go wherever Elijah went – Bethel, Jericho, Jordan – bear the same burdens, risk the same dangers, experience the same hardships, and venture into times of both solitariness and solidarity in order to receive and ultimately bear the word of the Lord.

Prophetic work is not something that is taken up lightly. It is not fair weather work. It is not an “easy A” course at the rabbinical university. In fact the exchange of the prophet’s mantle between Elijah and Elisha manages to crumple up all the romantic notions we have of prophet’s peering into the mists of the future and announcing what will one day come to pass, or calling down God’s wrath on divine enemies and miscreants.

To be a prophet is not to be the solitary future-gazer or the herald of God’s impending judgment. To be a prophet is to enter deeply into the realities and relationships of the people to whom the prophet is sent. To be a prophet is not to be anonymous or dispassionate. Nor does a prophet stand impersonally outside of or apart from the community. The prophetic word is potent because it comes from the community to which it is addressed. The word is driven by the anguish of witnessing the disparity between the grand desire of God for God’s people and the extreme poverty of the reality God’s people have been forced to accept. To be a prophet is, in the words of David Lose, to love God’s people enough to tell them the truth about their condition.

This potent God-blessed, God-sparked love is the basis for the Confession of Belhar which the Sunday morning class finished studying last week. South African people of color like Allan Boesak, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and countless others dared to say to the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, once spawned for blacks and coloreds by the white Dutch Reformed Church, and say to the world at-large, that the reality of apartheid was not the reality that God desired for South Africans or for anyone else.

To be a prophet in this tradition is to step out into the open, to refuse the institutional armor as David refused Saul’s armor for the combat with Goliath. To be a prophet like Elijah and Elisha is to take up vulnerability, to lay aside all the human-made physical, ideological, and theological armaments and to live totally dependent on God’s word and God’s mercy. This is what Jesus spoke to when he swept aside the idea of Peter to build shrines for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus on the mountain of transfiguration. Nothing must stand between the prophet and God or between the prophet and God’s people to whom the prophet is sent and with whom the prophet stands against the anti-divine reality the people have been forced to accept.

That is why the need for two helpings of Elijah’s spirit which Elisha requests as the elder prophet’s parting gift to his successor. Only Elijah doesn’t have the power to make that gift. Elisha’s prophetic ministry will depend ultimately on God and on Elisha’s willingness to commit the totality of his life to God, to make himself without obstruction vulnerable to God’s will for his life and to the antagonism and antipathy of the world in desperate need of God’s saving grace.

Even though the parting of Elijah and Elisha and the transfiguration of Jesus are epic moments of God’s presence breaking into human existence, this attitude of vulnerability is the key link between fiery chariot and horses and the mist-enshrouded mountaintop voice reiterating the divinely spoken message from Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, whom I dearly love.” The message at the baptism was addressed to Jesus, “With you I find happiness.” On the mountain the message was addressed to the two disciples and eventually the entire community: “Listen to him!”

The command often has an exclamation point. It is not likely a “pretty please” kind of request. It is the kind of command that a parent gives a child. Yet there is still some possible variation there. Does it mean, “Do as I say! Now! Or Else!” or does it mean, “Pay attention! Watch what I am doing so you can do it too.” I think it is more of the latter. While Jesus did preach from time to time, he was much more of an educator. He once said to a group of listeners, “Put on my yoke, and learn from me” (Matthew 11:29).

Jesus led his companions down the mountain and back to the reality of the people to whom and for whom he was called. He told the two to keep the details of what they had experienced to themselves until the time after the Human One – the Son of Man – Jesus – had risen from the dead. He knew that only then would they be able to process what had happened and what the message was for them and for all God’s people.

Jesus went down the mountain to be vulnerable: to love God and love the people, to be betrayed, and to be made to suffer and die on the cross. He anticipated and accepted this reality only by trusting completely in God’s mercy.

Jesus calls us to be vulnerable. This is not the “Keep calm and have stiff upper lip” mentality that is so often doled out. We have received it, and we have given it. “Buck up.” “Stop being a cry baby.” “Get a grip.” Jesus was not impassive. Jesus was not a stoic. In taking on human life – your and my life – he allowed himself to be open to and to experience to the fullest every human emotion, every human pain and elation, every human reality.

If a person believes that life is against them, that everyone is out to get them, life will be bleak. But if a person believes the overwhelming mercy of God, then no matter what life throws at us, we will not be overcome. The prophet’s tears pour out of his vulnerability. Jesus wept for Jerusalem. Jesus invites us to weep for the world.

Our strength does not come through stiff upper lips but through broken hearts and helping hands. Our strength does not come from hate but from love. Our strength does not come from ourselves but from God. To be prophetic in our community is to be immersed in the challenges confronting God’s people and, amid those difficulties, to throw ourselves to the mercy of the God of Elijah and Elisha, the God we know most fully in the dearly loved Son, and to give voice to God’s vision for wholeness and life, both for us and through us for the world.

May it be so. Amen.

General Resource: David J. Lose, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, pp. 435-439.

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

Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Awe, Not Terror

Psalm 111; Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Mark 1:21-28

Our calendar year has seasons. Can you believe it? We are already halfway through the season of winter. It’s less than three weeks until baseball spring training starts, and six weeks to the first day of spring.

The church year has seasons, too. We have come through the season of Advent, which started the fourth Sunday before Christmas. It is a season of expectation, of watchfulness, of waiting. Then Christmas came and lasted twelve days until the day of Epiphany, which traditionally celebrates the arrival of the magi to worship the Christ child. Epiphany means manifestation or revelation. God’s activity in Christ is revealed to the world, represented by the worldly magi who were not of Jesus’ own people. Jesus is revealed, in the words of Simeon, as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory for [God’s] people Israel” (Luke 2:32).

Epiphany is a season of the church year which bridges the time between Christmas and Lent. The gospel readings almost always point to the character and mission of Jesus as displayed early on in his ministry, whether or not people recognized him or not.

The reading three weeks ago was about his baptism, when Jesus was baptized by John, anointed with the descending dove/Spirit and confirmed by God’s affirmation, “my beloved.” Last week the reading was the beginning of his ministry following John’s arrest and Jesus’ first call of disciples.

So with the beginning core of his leadership team, Jesus began to circulate. When the next Sabbath arrived, they were in Capernaum and they went to the local synagogue, just as people today may drop in to a church in a town they are visiting on vacation.

I don’t know if the local rabbi embarrassed Jesus by asking who he was. Perhaps he was known as the carpenter Joseph’s son. Instead of being given a loaf of guest bread, he was invited to join the adult class and he jumped into the discussion. He apparently didn’t do a word by word, verse by verse discussion of the text. He brought an in depth understanding of the reading and amazed everyone. It was evident that he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t just beating his gums with the same passe explanations which had been repeated for the last fifty or one hundred years.

Jesus was not just revealing something about himself, he was revealing something about his father, something about the God for whom he was the flesh and bone representative living in the midst of God’s creation. Jesus may have been coming into his own as a teacher and healer, but more importantly his revelation was of God. He wasn’t just a representation of God, he was a window through which people could see God, a portal through which people could experience the depth and breadth of God’s never-failing love and grace.

The God that Jesus enabled people to see was both personal, operating within a domain of reality, and distant, lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience. God is complex, so complex that we can only know a tiny fraction of God’s reality at any one time. God operates both within and beyond our reality. God is a close as the next breath we take and as distant as the farthest reaches of the universe, a distance which seems to grow in both time and distance the more we discover about the universe.

This paradox of closeness and distance, of cozy companionship and icy aloofness, of never-failing love and unremitting justice is the God whom Jesus brought close to anyone he encountered. Some welcomed this presence while others refused to welcome it. Some were awe-struck and other were angry. Some people who had no reason to know him knew who he was, and some who should have known him, never caught on to his identity or refused to know him.

The posthumous writings of the 17th century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal included what has come to be known as “Pascal’s Wager.” Pascal posited that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually exists and assuming an infinite gain or loss associated with belief or unbelief in God (as represented by an eternity in heaven or hell), a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God exists, the person gains everything, and if God does not actually exist, the person loses little or nothing.

Believers tend to respond to God in one of two ways: awe or terror. Today’s psalm captures some of this bipolar response to God. The psalmist tries to lay out a balanced view of God. The same God who is both above (distant) and within (near) is also named as a God whose presence and involvement within the faith community can be intimately felt.

God’s transcendent qualities, the ones that define God as very different from human beings are readily evident in the psalmist’s words:

The works of the Lord are magnificent. ...
God’s deeds are majestic and glorious.
God’s righteousness stands forever.
God is famous for his wondrous works.
The Lord is full of mercy and compassion. ...
God sent redemption for his people;
God commanded that his covenant last forever.

The God described here is so powerful and present that we are enticed to study, to meditate on, and celebrate God in a community of the faithful. The presence of the Divine is so plain that there really is no option but to give witness to it.

Of course, many of us have some trouble with that. We are very rational. We were bottle-fed on cause and effect, and if God is cause, then we don’t like a lot of the effect that we see or experience. Too often we know just enough science to think that there is no connection between it and God. We doubt the power of God’s works or God’s involvement in things we think we can clearly and unabashedly define as solely human causation.

Being awe-struck by God is not something to be gotten over like recovering from an illness or a bad employment experience. If God is awesome, that awesomeness doesn’t diminish with time or experience. The psalmist says that “fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” That suggests that the awesomeness of God is something that actually grows over time, something that deepens as our relationship with God develops. The “fear of the Lord” is not terror. It is respect, it is wonderment, it is wide-eyed amazement. It is awe.

We see a shift in the middle of the psalm. “God gives food to those who honor him.” This links the faraway-ness God with God’s closeness. Not only does the believer have an experience of awe in the presence of God, that very experience is what leads us into the relationship that intimately nourishes us.

If we are terrified of God, afraid of God, fearful of God, we will work to keep God at arm’s length, pushing God away from us. We will deny God’s intimacy with us and echo what the person imprisoned by an evil spirit screamed at Jesus in the Capernaum synagogue, “What have you to do with us?” That approach wants nothing to do with God nor God’s doing anything with us. On the other hand, awe is an invitation for a more fulfilling relationship, a deeper intimacy from both sides, we with God and God with us.

Jesus – divine and human – Word made flesh – bridges the chasm between terror and awe, between fear and joy, between icy resentment and warm welcome.

“Fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” And wisdom is the knowledge that, in the words of Paul to believers in Rome,

“If God is for us, who is against us? He didn’t spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. ... Who will bring a charge against God’s elect people? It is God who acquits them. Who is going to convict them? It is Christ Jesus who died, even more, who was raised, and who also is at God’s right side. It is Christ Jesus who also pleads our case for us” (Romans 8:31-34).

Friends, fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins. It is awe, not terror, it is joy, not fear, it is life, not death.

May God’s praise last forever!

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

Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Cosmic Career Change

Mark 1:14-20; Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31

Mark begins like an alarm clock, persistently declaring the time and demanding a response.(1) “The beginning of the good news,” Mark declares: Jesus fulfills the prophecy. Then there is the new Elijah – John the Baptist – announcing not himself but the one who was coming. Like Elijah castigating Ahab, Jezebel, and their minions, John calls out everyone in Judea and Jerusalem to confess their sins and be baptized, not just into repentance but also into the hope of the one who was coming.

Then there is the time when heaven is split open and the Spirit descends on Jesus, who hears the voice of divine affirmation: “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.” That is followed with the forty-day time in the wilderness as the Spirit and the Adversary spar over Jesus.

We are thrust forward to a time after John had been arrested. The preparation he announced was over before it was scarcely understood. The Spirit-anointed, Adversary-tested Jesus comes out of the shadows: “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom!” Jesus doesn’t just announce the time, he fulfills it in person, in word, in deed.

It’s no wonder that as the days passed neighbors, family members, and religious professionals were transfixed and aghast that so common a man, so ordinary an individual whom many of them had known since toddlerhood, could speak truth with a story-teller’s skillful use of familiar images, and do it with mind-stretching authority.

His announcement wasn’t a question of going somewhere and doing something, an exercise which could be fended off with excuses galore, like the neighbors did when invited to the banquet in one of Jesus’ parables. Jesus was literally “in your face,” demanding an immediate response. When I was a child we used to suddenly snap our fingers or clap our hands in someone’s face, while saying, “Think fast.” Jesus’ encountering of anyone was a “think fast” moment.

“Repent,” “believe,” “follow,” “fish” – these aren’t timeless ethical imperatives. Repenting, believing, following, fishing are “think fast” responses to the fullness of God’s time intersecting the emptiness of human time.

There is a set order to what Jesus announces. Yet so often congregations and individuals reverse the order. Congregations are often more interested in filling the empty seats, so they blindly and erratically fish. Too often the baited hooks come back empty.

Then when they actually get someone to follow, they lay out the method: We’ve always done it this way so don’t rock the boat. And they so drum that ideology into their catch that finally the newbies believe it and repent of having had any wild and crazy ideas that church could be done in any other way. It doesn’t make much sense, but then again, we’ve always done it that way.

But that’s not the way that Jesus laid out ministry. He said: Repent, believe, follow, fish. We can’t fish unless we know the one we are following. We can’t follow unless we believe the purpose for which he was sent and the one who sent him. We can’t believe unless we repent of every belief, every system, every self-deluding idea that we are the centers of our universes.

We do not repent in order to usher in the time of redemption, because that time is already here. We do not become fishers in order to meet some monthly quota as if we were salespeople on commission, as if meeting that quota will unlock the reign of God. The reign of God is already here. We do not follow Jesus in hopes that one day we might find him, because he has already come and found us. God takes the initiative. The reign of God is not the product of discipleship, it’s the precondition for it.(2)

Repent, believe, follow, fish. That’s the sequence. Whether you realized it or not, that’s the sequence we follow every week. When the prelude starts, when the call to worship is spoken, that is the announcement that God’s reign has already arrived, that it is in our midst and that we are in the middle of it in this time and space.

After recognizing the kingdom’s presence, we repent. Our confession sweeps over a wide variety of sins – corporate and personal, deeds committed and words spoken, deeds and words omitted. We recognize that when we assuage our consciences with some minuscule response to another’s overt or ignorant sin, we affirm and enlarge, not mitigate, our complicity in such wrongful personal and societal behavior. Repentance is something that needs constant renewal. We do it every week.

Repentance is like spring cleaning. It is moving out the old and worthless (no matter how much worth we have accorded it) and making room for the new. Repentance is jettisoning unbelief and mis-directed belief to make room for true belief. Following repentance, pardon, and thanksgiving for God’s grace lavished on us, we turn to belief as it is nurtured in scripture and exposition.

The purpose of sermons is not to confirm narrow belief and to comfort us in small belief. The Word is read and proclaimed to stretch and expand and enlarge belief, to inspire us in our following, to fit us for the hard work of being God’s people in a culture for which God is either a under-inflated concept or a “four-letter” word.

Repenting, believing, following. We follow in prayer, in serving each other, in providing for the needs of Christ in the world far away, the world near at hand – our community, and the world of God’s people gathered in this place. We follow Jesus as he roamed through neighborhoods of immigrants and foreigners, as he walked the back alleys of his own native settlements, as he ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, people in broken relationships, people neglected, ostracized, segregated, and debased by supposedly God-fearing people. We follow Jesus by walking where Jesus walked.

And finally we fish. “Go out into the world in peace; be courageous; hold on to what is good; return no one evil for evil; strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak, and help the suffering; honor all people; love and serve the Lord, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.”

When Jesus called the first disciples, when he called any disciples, the call came out of the announcement of the in-breaking of God’s reign. Discipleship was not another task to burden already overworked people. Jesus called them to new ways of being.

When Simon and Andrew left their nets, they left a way of life. James and John not only left their nets, but also their father. These four, and the ones who would come after them, left behind a whole complex matrix of work, family, and place into order to take up a new identity.(3)

The words seem simple: “I will show you how to fish for people.” Notice the subtlety of the language. Not “make you fish for people” – another activity to enter into the date book (“How about the every third Thursday? Does that fit everyone’s schedule?”) Jesus will show us how to fish for people. It is a new identity, a new career, a whole new life a cosmic career change.

The irony is that Jesus doesn’t ask us to bait hooks in order to catch unsuspecting people and reel them into the church. The new identity, the new career is really one of being the bait. By living a life in the here and now of God’s reign, of repenting any and every aspect of our thinking and living that denies God, by believing the good news of salvation made alive in the flesh and blood of Christ and confirmed in his resurrection, and by going into the same kinds of neighborhoods, life situations, and relationships that Jesus did, we become living examples of life that people are hungering for. “Tell me about what makes you tick.” “Why do you respond to all that life throws at you the way you do?” “Why are you so hope-filled when there is nothing around you to support it?” These kinds of questions open us ways of speaking from the heart about Christ’s presence and power in our lives.

The disciples experienced a cosmic career change. They could no longer fish for fish. They had forgotten how. In one post-resurrection appearance, Jesus had to tell the disciples which side of the boat to fish out of (John 21:5-6).

Friends, Now is the time. The reign of God is here. Repent, believe, follow, fish. It’s a cosmic career change that will change your life forever.

(1) Ted A. Smith “Mark 1:14-20 – Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, p. 285.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Our Brokenness Is Mended

Acts 19:1-7; Genesis 1:1-5; Mark 1:4-11

Your remember the nursery rhyme:

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s men and all the king’s horses
couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

Things get broken in life and they can’t be repaired.

My mother loved decorative porcelain pieces, especially flowers. When I studied in Scotland I found a wonderful Royal Crown Staffordshire bouquet of bright flowers in a small bowl. The sales assistant packed it securely and I personally carried the box on the flight home. It got home safely and Mom enjoyed it. After her death, I took it back and we had it for a number of years. One day it was sitting – safely we thought – on top of the filing cabinet. One of our cats got on the cabinet, misstepped, and the flowers hit the floor. Several of the flower stems broke and while some of the petals were irreparable, I thought I could glue the stems back together to make the more or less arrangement whole again. I tried one thing and another, but nothing worked. It couldn’t be mended, not by me anyway. I put it in the closet for years. It was not longer beautiful and the memory was too painful. I finally threw it out.

Lives get broken. We can’t mend ourselves. As counselors tell us, we are never cured but always in recovery, whether from an addiction that eats away at our body or mind or from a trauma which causes what is now diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Only a few chapters after the Genesis creation story the wholeness of life was broken by envy, disobedience, lying, blaming, betraying, and murder. Life was broken and it would never be the same. The rest of the Bible is about trying to mend the brokenness of human life.

The Japanese have an art form that not only repairs shattered pottery, it also enhances and illuminates the cracks with a lacquer laced with gold. The artists do this when a precious piece of pottery has been broken. After mixing lacquer resin with powdered gold, they use the resin to put the broken pieces together. What they end up with is a pot with cracks in it, but the cracks are filled with gold.

They call it kintsukuroi (keen-tsoo-koo-roy). Golden repair.

Such restoration creates a gorgeous piece of art and makes a philosophical statement as well. Kintsukuroi asserts that breakage and repair is part of the unique history of an object, rather than something to deny or disguise.

Each of us needs more golden repair in our lives, because we so often hide our brokenness. A friend hurts us deeply, and we retreat inside ourselves. We lose a job or suffer a pay cut, and pretend like everything is really okay. A spouse abuses us, but we never speak up. We sense that we have a drinking problem, but feel too embarrassed to ask for help. A marriage begins with intimacy and anticipation, and ends with alienation and anger. Add your own life breakages to the list.

Life breaks us, in a variety of painful ways. And unfortunately we often deny it. We would rather disguise our cracks than undergo golden repair. We would rather put ourselves in a closet, like I did with the broken porcelain flowers. Only our closet is constructed of denial, fear or shame. We would rather do that than admit our helplessness and our need for golden repair, God’s repair. God practices “kintsukuroi Christianity.”

In Acts, the apostle Paul traveled to Ephesus in Asia Minor – modern-day Turkey. He found twelve disciples there, and asked them if they had received the Holy Spirit when they became believers. They replied, “We’ve not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

These disciples might not be broken, but they clearly have some cracks. Not only had they not received the Holy Spirit, they didn't even know that it existed!

Paul was perplexed. He asked, “What baptism did you receive, then?” They answered, “John’s baptism.” Paul then understood that they needed some golden repair, some “kintsukuroi Christianity.”

Paul told them that John’s baptism was for repentance to get ready for the one who was to come after him, that is, Jesus. Paul knew that John baptized with water, while Jesus baptized “with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16).

The disciples were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, and when Paul laid hands on them the Holy Spirit entered them. Immediately, they spoke in tongues and prophesied, just like the first Christians on the day of Pentecost.

The gift of the Holy Spirit – that’s pure gold! Suddenly, the gaps in the lives of these disciples were filled, and they were made whole as disciples of Jesus. But notice that there was no attempt to deny or disguise their deficiencies. Instead, God filled their cracks with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, making them stronger and more beautiful in the broken places. That's golden repair. Kintsukuroi Christianity.

In the book Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, Christy Bartlett writes that “not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated.”(1) Not hidden. Not disguised. Illuminated.

Everyone has gaps and breaks in their lives – everyone has been shattered by some destructive experience, whether we brought it on ourselves or it happened to us while we were minding our own business. Mended Japanese ceramics inspire us to show compassionate sensitivity to the broken people around us, and compassionate sensitivity to ourselves as well.

Kintsukuroi Christianity can be defined this way: Whenever I am weak, then I am strong. Whenever I invite Christ to fill my breaks and cracks, then he works powerfully through me. When I am broken, Christ makes me whole.

Paul might express it in different words: When I am weak, I find strength in the presence of Christ. I know that he is making me stronger and more beautiful through his ongoing work of golden repair.

Several decades ago, just ten days after his son was killed in a car accident, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin delivered a sermon to his congregation at Riverside Church in New York City. He said, “As almost all of you know, a week ago last Monday night, driving in a terrible storm ... my 24-year-old son Alexander, who enjoyed beating his old man at every game and in every race, beat his father to the grave.

“Among the healing flood of letters that followed his death was one carrying this wonderful quote from the end of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: ‘The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.’ ”(2)

Friends, this font around which we gather every week, into which we pour simple water, over which we say the words, “In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven,” is the place where God affects the golden repair, kintsukuroi Christianity. It is here that the gaps between the pieces of our lives are filled with Holy Spirit, with hope, with illuminating radiance. Our brokenness is mended by God and our enhanced beauty is made visible.

Paul wrote the following to the Corinthian believers:

“God said that light should shine out of the darkness. He is the same one who shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay pots so that the awesome power belongs to God and doesn’t come from us. We are experiencing all kinds of trouble, but we aren’t crushed. We are confused, but we aren’t depressed. We are harassed, but we aren’t abandoned. We are knocked down, but we aren’t knocked out.” (2 Corinthians 4:6-9)

Friends, all who yearn for their brokenness to be mended, all who long for the gaps between the pieces of their lives to be filled with God’s golden repair, all who desire the power of the Holy Spirit to fill their weakness, all who thirst for the life which Christ offers, come to the water.

General Resource: “Kintsukuroi Christianity,” Homiletics, January 2015
(1) Bartlett, Christy, “A tearoom full of mended ceramics.” Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, 2008, bachmaneckenstein.com.
(2) Coffin, William Sloane, “Eulogy for Alex.” NOW, pbs.org.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Incarnated Disruption

John1:1-4, 10-18; Psalm 14712-20; Ephesians 1:9-14

Lots of people make New Year’s resolutions. Most lists of resolutions are more like wish lists than bucket lists. That is, they are hopes and dreams rather than things that will actually get accomplished. Most of us would be more honest if we were to say, for example, I hope to lose weight, or I hope to exercise more. A vast majority of those who make those wishes never accomplish them, for a variety of reasons.

In the vein of wishing, we often wish a lot for the new year. We wish for quiet, for strength, for peace, for goodwill. After all, that was a significant part of the message that the celestial chorus sang to the shepherds. Unfortunately, wishing won’t make it so.

An editorial cartoon this past week showed the traditional aged 2014 and the newborn 2015. 2014 says to 2015, “You’ll need a hazmat suit, riot gear, a gas mask, a bulletproof vest, Valium, antacid, aspirin....” As much as we hate to spoil all the promise of Christmas, the cartoon speaks the reality of living.

The gospel writer Matthew saw this reality, at least in the community he was associated with. Only his gospel records Jesus being openly provocative about his mission in the world. In the midst of a chapter-long disciple commissioning speech in Matthew 10, Jesus says to the disciples, “Don’t think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I haven’t come to bring peace but a sword” (vs. 34). That sword will force believers to choose between the comforts of the status quo, represented by family, and the challenge of untethered life in Christ. Will believers choose between a smooth life or a disrupted life?

In his own way, the gospel writer John, who eschewed angels, shepherds, mangers, and magi, sees the incarnation – the birth – of Jesus Christ in much the same way as Matthew. Everything that Jesus did wields a disruptive sword. The gospel of John, chapter by chapter, documents the disruption incarnated in Christ. This incarnated disruption is complete and it is contemporary.

“The word became flesh” (John 1:14). All creation is disrupted by the presence of Jesus. There had always been a safe divide between the divine and the human. The only intersection had been the annual entry into the holy of holies by the high priest with the blood sacrifice for the sins of the people committed in ignorance (Hebrews 9:3-7). God was always at a distance from the people behind a veil. Jesus disrupted the order of creation, bringing God into the midst of humanity.

After the wedding at Cana, Jesus went to Jerusalem for the Passover. There he “found in the temple those who were selling cattle, sheep, and doves, as well as those involved in exchanging currency” (v. 2:14). Jesus chased them all out of the temple, scattered the coins and overturned the tables. He disrupted the salvation economy by chastising those who, in the guise of convenience, took excessive advantage of those already burdened with travel, with occupation troops and laws, with fear of government and fear of God. Jesus wanted people to worship God, not the sacrifices which held God at arms’s length. Jesus disrupted the economy of the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus (ch. 3) came to Jesus in the dead of night seeking truth only to have his faith disrupted because he could not understand the difference between natural birth and spiritual birth – being born anew, from above. Faith had been grounded in what could be seen. God’s kingdom could only be seen by faith eyes, not human eyes.

Jesus left Judea (ch. 4) and wandered through Galilee and the surrounding countryside, some of it Gentile or Samaritan. He encountered a woman ostracized for a variety of reasons. He spoke with her, healed her downtrodden spirit, and disrupted the matter-of-fact norms of gender and race. She was a child of God on equal footing with every other child of God, regardless of origin, geography, or other form of social segregation and censure.

John spends chapter 5 recounting Jesus at the Bethsaida pool healing the man who had been chronically ill for thirty-eight years. This healing incensed the religious leaders because it was done on the Sabbath. The man had been ill for so long, why couldn’t the healing have waited for a weekday. Jesus disrupted the prevailing sense of justice, for justice delayed was justice denied. And to further disrupt justice, Jesus declared that it was his father, God, who was working through him. “As the Father raises the dead and gives life, so too does the Son give life to whomever he chooses” (v. 5:21). Justice is defined by God not human beings. “I assure you that whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life” (v. 24).

Back in the country again, Jesus disrupted the traditional forms of planning and preparation when he told his disciples to sit the 5,000 person crowd down and feed them with the five barley loaves and two fish supplied by a youth (v. 6:9). When the disciples later asked what they had to do to accomplish what God required, Jesus responded, “Believe in him whom God sent” (v. 29). Belief cannot be planned or prepared for. Belief either is or isn’t.

On his next festival trip to Jerusalem (ch. 7), Jesus spent time teaching in the temple, astonishing the religious leaders who wondered how he had mastered the Law. Jesus did not claim the teaching as his own, but said it came from the one who sent him – God. “Those who speak in their own seek glory for themselves. Those who seek the glory of him who sent me are people of truth” (v. 18). Jesus disrupted the understood ways of education.

When the religious leaders sought to discredit Jesus by presenting an adulterous woman to him for judgment (v. 8:3), he disrupted the received morality of the time by directing that only those without sin could pass judgment on her. As that sank in, the crowd slithered away, guilty publicly and privately.

In chapter 9, Jesus encountered a man blind from birth. Jesus healed the man. Neighbors, strangers, and religious leaders all disputed the healing. Challenged by the religious leaders, the man declared, “I don’t know whether he [Jesus] is a sinner. Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see” (9:25). By healing the man Jesus disrupted an entire understanding of health care. Disease and disability did not come from sin, and healing did come from God: “If this man wasn’t from God, he couldn’t do this” (v. 33).

Jesus met the man following his expulsion from the faith community and the man declared his belief. Jesus said that he came “to exercise judgment so that those who don’t see can see and those who see will become blind” (v.39). Jesus then preached to the scoffing religious leaders about his being the sheepgate (v. 10:7) and the good shepherd (v. 11) who puts his own health on the line for the health of all of God’s children. Jesus disrupted their understanding of leadership.

Jesus then disrupted death by raising Lazarus from death. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die” (v. 11:25). Death will not have the last word, for the word made flesh will destroy death, disrupting not only notions of death, but also of life itself.

John records a lengthy, five chapter, departure discourse of Jesus, much of it in the form of a prayer. In some ways it is a lot like the lengthy speech that Moses gave before his death. But unlike Moses’ final words, which were history, commission and encouragement, Jesus words and images disrupted the whole notion of identity. He was not some itinerant teacher. He was in the Father and the Father was in him (v. 14:11). Identity is community. “Whoever loves me will keep my word” (v. 23). “The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I told you” (v. 26). “I am the true vine; you are the branches....Without me you can’t do anything” (v. 15:5). Jesus disrupted the longstanding idea of community, connection, responsibility, authority, and identity as children of God.

Finally, through his trial, crucifixion, and resurrection, Jesus disrupted all the expectations which generations had gathered about the role, the function, the activity of the Messiah. Even after seeing the empty tomb, the disciples “didn’t yet understand the scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead” (v. 20:9). Only when confronted with disbelief could Thomas give utterance to belief: “My Lord and my God!” (v. 28). Then Jesus welcomed Peter back into ministry and commissioned him to service. To the last Jesus disrupted expectations.

Christmas is the birth of disruption. And I don’t mean rearranging the house for the tree and gifts and guests. Jesus’ birth ushers in cosmic disruption, changing the perceived course of eternity, changing the interaction of divine and human, changing every life.

The season of Christmas ends with Epiphany on Tuesday. The last of the seasonal decorations will be gone. But Jesus’ disruption will continue. Thank God for that. Life in Christ is not business as usual. How will Christ disrupt you life this year? Will it be your understanding of creation, economy, gender/race/ethnicity, justice, planning, education, morality, healing, leadership, death, life, identity, expectations, eternal life? Will you be able to cope with Jesus’ disruptions and say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”?

May Christ gloriously disrupt your life for his sake this year. Amen.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.