The Ear Bone Is Connected to the Hand Bone

James 1:17-27; Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

For all our Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Trinitarian apologia, we Christians are mostly Christocentric. That is, in our theology it is Jesus this and Jesus that, with perfunctory nods to the Father and the Spirit when the occasion necessitates it. We use the term “God” a lot, but somehow it is either a footnote to Christ, or if we could use a printing image, it is in “Christ font.” 

When we think about the scripture readings that are used every Sunday, it is usually the Gospel lesson which takes that lead. And while we often say that the New Testament does not supplant the Old Testament but fulfills it, we don’t pay a lot of attention to the two-thirds of the Bible that precedes the newer testament.

The Bible is in some ways a strange book. It is a library. There are books of history and prophecy, poetry and wisdom literature, that peculiar literary genre called gospel, correspondence, and fantasy. There are love stories and war stories, ceremonies and legal codes, travel narratives and stream of consciousness pondering. I am sure that you remember the bit of Bible trivia that God is never mentioned in the book of Esther. Another bit of trivia is that the letter of James, which will provide readings for the next several weeks, uses the name of God very sparingly.

So it a great joy to begin our reading in James with a doxology, an outpouring of praise to God. It reminds us, that even when we are mired in our “Jesus this and Jesus that” faith, everything comes from God.

"Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from the Father, the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. He chose to give us birth by his true word, and here is the result: we are like the first crop from the harvest of everything he created."

It is a reminder of the truth that shows up in numerous scripture locations:

• When God began to create.... (Genesis 1:1).
• I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. (Deuteronomy 5:6).
• Israel, listen! Our God is the Lord! Only the Lord! (Deuteronomy 6:4).

We come back to the succinct and memorable first statement of the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “The chief end of human beings is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.”

So, if we are so richly blessed, blessed through birth “like the first crop from the harvest of everything God created,” then we have a special responsibility. We like to think of blessings as things we receive hand over fist.. We grab them up as fast as we can, almost as if we are looters in an urban riot. Somehow what we grab with our hands hardly ever registers with our heads, our hearts, our souls, however we define the spark of God’s image within us. 

James is quick to chide that kind of attitude: 

“Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to grow angry. This is because an angry person doesn’t produce God’s righteousness.”

When we are busy getting and grabbing, we are in competition with everyone else and not producing righteousness. We only think of ourselves. More, more, more. It doesn’t matter if we don’t need more. Our egos are involved. My worth is measured by what I have, not what someone else has. Our higher mental faculties shut down. We work out of our carnivore mode. Eat or be eaten. There is a disconnect between our hands and our brains, between the visceral and the spiritual.

Harry Emerson Fosdick, one time pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, observed that in his experience those who reflect on their lives and conclude that they have received far less than they deserved tend to be those from whom no great living comes. However, those who readily reckon they have received far more than they deserved are among those who do indulge in great living.(1) 

What a wonderful phrase – “Indulge in great living.” Indulge means, “to allow (oneself) to follow one’s will (it’s usually followed by ‘in’). When we recognize how undeservedly blessed we are we allow ourselves to engage in great living. This is very likely a non-monetary kind of indulgence. We are not talking about three-star Michelin cuisine or first-class airfare jet-setting. We are talking about a magnanimity and a graciousness that doesn’t abuse, belittle, patronize, or marginalize anyone. As James counsels, “welcome the word planted deep inside you—the very word that is able to save you.”

“Indulging in great living” doesn’t just happen of its own accord. “You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves,” James writes. Once we have recognized how greatly and undeservedly we have received from the bounty of God, including our very salvation, that same recognition needs to turn around through our senses and our psyche to come back out our hands. The three smallest bones of the human body, the bones of the ear must connect with all the bones of hand in reaching out to the world, engaging with the world, laboring with the world, cooperating with the world in not only the sharing of the Good News but living that Good News out for others to catch the sense of the undeserved but real blessing of life that God offers. 

I saw an image on the internet which very pointedly said: “Stop acting like a Christian. Be One.” So often we think that following Jesus means we have stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things. Maybe we have got that backwards. We spend such an inordinate time worrying about doing the wrong things that we sap ourselves of the spiritual energy needed to do the right things.  Perhaps we need engage in doing the right things in such a way that the wrong things slowly but surely get edged out by our activity. 

It often seems that those who make the most noise about doing things the Christian way, are those who have the most to hide. The recent release of names of the Ashley Madison website clients have outed a number of people who should never have been there in the first place and who also were vocal about that kind of activity in others.

None of us gets away without sinning. All of us are in need of grace. This is the table of grace. Here is where the love and the grace of Christ is empowered by the Spirit. Here is where sinners are invited to partake of forgiveness. The invitation is open-ended. We can come as often as we need to. Jesus will not turn us away. He speaks the words of hope and peace and invites us to hear those words and to extend our hands first to receive the bread of life and the cup of salvation, and second to pass the life-giving bread and saving cup to the one beside us. “You received without having to pay. Therefore give without demanding payment” (Matthew 10:8). 

Christ gave freely that we may freely give to those around us and to those who will come after us. The integrity of faith embraces self and neighbor. The ear bone is connected to the hand bone. And that’s the word of the Lord. Amen.

(1) Harry Emerson Fosdick, Riverside Sermons (New York: Harper, 1958), 174.

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.

You Are Well-Suited

Ephesians 6:10-20; Psalm 34:15-22; John 6:56-69

Much of what we experience in our world is driven by advertising which creates brand recognition. Some of it is intended for the ears, such as theme songs and advertising jingles. Other kinds of branding appeal to the eyes, such as catchy logos, color combinations, catchwords, and acronyms. We learned a lot of these when we were young children when everything we didn’t need to know stuck to our memories like velcro. Would that the times table had worked that way. 

Branding is all around us. We pay an extra $5 to have the little LaCoste lizard on our polo shirts. Politicians of particular persuasions often indicate their party affiliation by the color of the tie they wear. Recognition is everything. Whenever we see a person in a brown dress shirt and shorts we automatically know that the person works for UPS. Every fast food restaurant has its particular apron or shirt or cap to help cement the brand firmly in our memory.

We live in a world filled with people wearing uniforms. Doctors have their white coats for making rounds and their scrubs if they are in surgical specialties. Nurses used to have starched caps. Now, depending if they are state tested nurse assistants, licensed practical nurses, or registered nurses, they may have a variety of different uniform offerings such as colorful smocks which help to designate their position.

The military has always had a variety of uniforms and insignia to denote branch of service and rank, as well as skill set and responsibility. Sports teams have uniforms to distinguish one team from another and to rally supporters. I wonder how much money the NFL makes on team branded clothing. 

If clothes make the man or woman, then a uniform makes the position. Judges wear robes. British judges add the wig. Tutus define a ballerina. Firefighters wear water and heat resistant clothing. Traditional corporate executives wear suits. In fact a slang term for bosses is “suits.” They are often well-suited: Brooks Brothers, Armani, Savile Row, Gucci. They don’t come off the rack at J. C. Penney or Kohl’s.

As we hear today’s reading from the Ephesian Letter, we can imagine the apostle Paul himself in prison guarded by a well-suited Roman soldier. We know that Paul did time in a number of prisons. Since Paul was a high-profile prisoner, he may have been shackled to the guard night and day. After having spent such quality time with Caesar’s finest, Paul was intimately acquainted with the uniform of the Roman military man. Without much else to do each day, Paul allowed his curiosity to engage the soldier in conversation about the different pieces of the uniform. And Paul the wordsmith quickly translated each piece of the guard’s equipment into a spiritual armor which every Christian needed for his or her daily conflict with the evil forces seeking to dominate life. We can wonder if Paul then used these metaphors in his attempt to convert his guard. Given Paul’s persuasiveness, I wouldn’t be surprised that the guard had to be changed regularly to keep Paul’s evangelism to a minimum. On the other hand that may only have increased it.

On a larger scale, the passage epitomizes the tension in which every life must be lived. Beyond the immediate image we can see the ongoing tension between what is and what we wait for. In faith we have accepted Jesus as Lord and subjected ourselves to his sovereignty. But this is an incomplete goal and a future hope. For all of us, there is a moral and existential tension between “being” Christian and “becoming Christian.” This is as true for the individual believer and it is also true for the whole church, the aggregated community of believers, whether we talk about a congregation, a denomination, or the church universal. We have not yet achieved the fullness of Christ who is all in all. So there remains a constant tension between being incorporated into Christ and our earthly existence in a world that is not yet subject to his dominion. While believing and fervently desiring to belong wholly to Christ, we still live in the “old age” which has not yet fully burst the gravitational bonds that keep us from becoming what faith tells us we shall become.

Not all uniforms are solely for identification purposes. Some uniforms enable the wearer to better function in his or her appointed work. Gymnasts wear form fitting clothing to enable them to physically do the routines. Loose-fitting clothes would get in the way and perhaps endanger some of their moves. Or some parts of uniforms are for protection. An apron may be handsome, but its primary function is to keep kitchen spills from getting on our everyday clothes. Steel-toed work shoes with metatarsal guards may look clunky, but they help protect feet from a variety of dangers. 

Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians is directed to a much wider audience than simply the initial readers/hearers. And the “you” in today’s gospel reading, which concludes and sums up the “Bread of Life” discourse, includes more than the disciples who were within earshot. 

The Spirit directs these words to a company of readers, ancient and modern, who, at the end of the narrative, are actual participants in the story.  Every reader, every listener – you, I – are witnesses, and none of us is allowed to put the book down like a good novel or turn off the audio book and return to business as usual. This is a story, which grabs us by the heart, by the throat. This is a story, which hits us in the stomach. We are convicted by its truths and conscripted by its hope into the service of the Master Jesus Christ.

We are commanded to proclaim this story.  We are compelled to call for repentance, we are required to declare divine forgiveness.  We are called to proclaim just how far God goes to save a people who constantly choose sin and death. We, like the original hearers, are recipients of the power, love, and protection that God promises.  God does not leave us defenseless. God continues the work of salvation according to the plans laid out for the completion of creation long before it was begun. 

At the same time God does not promise that life in this world will be easy. In his asking as in his teaching, Jesus does not compromise. He does not water down his message so that it will be easier for us. He does not go chasing after the people who walk away from him as did the crowd at Capernaum. He does not change the truth so that his disciples will not leave him.

All that means that we have been equipped with a suit of armor. Or perhaps the better image in today’s world would be a uniform. 

God in Jesus Christ has clothed us in a uniform of righteousness that is stain resistant and as strong as kevlar, the stuff bullet-proof vests are made of, so that the verbal slurs and snide remarks will slide off us like water off a duck’s back. And we will be safe from the barbs, lies, and other calumny that are hurled at us like so much rotten fruit at a poor vaudeville act.

Our footwear is cleated and waterproof to provide protection from the muck that non-believers and disparaging critics strew around us. The Spirit fits us with night-vision goggles to see through the dimness of the collective ignorance of all who reject the possibility of God’s gracious sovereignty. 

We are in covenant relationship with the living God, who has tailored it perfectly for us. It’s the finest suit that grace can buy. Wearing it well, gracefully, humbly, is challenging. Nonetheless, we are committed to stick with the God who sticks with us. Just as it was in Jesus’ and Paul’s day, the world today doesn’t always welcome that covenant-keeping, steadfast love. For many the offense is too great – so great it must be crucified. That means we need the strength of our Lord’s power. Paul’s words to the Ephesians make it clear that we will need to commit to following Jesus Christ over and over again. And that’s why we have been well-suited. It fits like a glove and makes us witnesses to be taken seriously, no matter how the world treats us. 

We are well-suited because we have his words of eternal life. We believe and know that he is God’s holy one.

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.

Time

Ephesians 5:15-20; Proverbs 9:1-6; John 6:51-58

A leap second was added to the clock the end of June. I hope you didn’t waste it. I suspect that every one of us, excepting night owls, got an extra wink of sleep out of our leap second. Oh well.

We human beings are obsessed with time. We can’t live with it and we can’t live without it. Who of us doesn’t have at least one watch and if we aren’t wearing it, feel lost. Although with the near omnipresence of cell phones a lot of people check their phones when they want to know what time it is. When I was growing up a stop watch was a wondrous thing. My first digital watch had it built in and every smartphone has one. On our phones, our tablets, our computers we have a number of apps to keep track of time, signal deadlines, keep appointments, and remember birthdays and anniversaries. 

We have clocks everywhere: In our cars, on our coffee makers and televisions, on the thermostats, on the microwaves and ranges. We have so many that it is a chore to reset them. When our power glitches or the time changes, I try very hard to set the range clock and the microwave clock so that the digital readout is the same and changes at the same time.

In some places, telling time is literally a big deal. If you’re in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for example, you can’t help but see the Abraj Al Bait Towers clock just about anywhere you go. Its clock face is 43 meters in diameter. That’s roughly three times the distance from where I’m standing to the sanctuary doors. Plus, the clock is on a tower that’s 601 meters tall. (That’s almost 200 feet taller than the new One World Trade Center building.) By comparison, Big Ben, the most famous clock in the world, is about 20 feet in diameter on a 300-foot-high tower on the bank of the Thames.

We are so dependent on external means of measuring time that we have lost our internal clocks. A character in a novel I’m reading noted that if he worried about how much time had elapsed, thinking about it every five minutes or so, he invariably was wrong. But if he refused to worry, he nearly always got the time right. 

We may grow up as children learning how to tell time but we spend the rest of our lives with time telling us.

All our clocks don’t make us better at managing our time. That’s one of the biggest stressors in our culture. We work too many hours, we have too many distractions, we fritter away too much time, and we trying to squeeze more things in less time. 

The relentless passage of time is what the ancient Greeks referred to as chronos time, from which we get “chronological” time. To paraphrase an ancient Timex commercial, we take a licking, but the clock keeps ticking. 

The apostle Paul didn’t wear a watch or carry a cell phone, but he was nonetheless always aware of time. It was a different sort of time, however, than you get by glancing at your watch. Paul actually kept a running clock in his head. Instead of tracking the chronos, Paul was far more interested in redeeming the kairos. 

Kairos is the time most often mentioned in the New Testament. You won’t find it on a dial or digital readout. Kairos is decisive time – the right time, the appropriate time. The New Testament writers associate kairos time with the activity of God intervening in human history. It can also be the ultimate time, the coming of the final age. That’s why Paul admonishes the Ephesians to “Take advantage of every opportunity,” [make] the most of the time [kairos], redeem the time, “because the days are evil.” 

The kairos expectation is the fuel for the management of our chronos. A little earlier in the letter Paul issued a wake-up call. The darkness of evil was about to be exposed by the bright dawn of God’s coming kingdom, thus Paul tells the Ephesian church not to “participate in the unfruitful actions of darkness. Instead, ... reveal the truth about them” because “everything exposed to the light is revealed by the light” (5:11, 13).

That’s why Paul urges the Ephesians – and us – “be careful to live your life wisely, not foolishly.” Use your time wisely, order your lives according to the new reality that is breaking in. That’s how you can make the most of the God’s kairos time. That’s how to prepare for the coming day of the Lord. It is a choice that we have to make. Either we align ourselves with what God is doing or we follow the mob mentality of the present evil that governs the daily calendar of much of the world. To “understand the Lord’s will,” and to do it, is the best time management strategy in light of the coming of the Lord.

Paul gives us one simple direction: “be filled with the Spirit.” That will be far more effective than all the time-wasting activities that fill the lives of so many people. He calls that depravity or debauchery. Alcohol may cause drunkenness in the body, but there are many things that cause drunkenness in the mind. People can get drunk on exaggerated self-importance, on pride, on unthought-out religious, philosophical, or political ideas, on flattery, on fear, on the idea that they can run their own lives and be masters of all that they do, the center of the universe. 

Be filled with the Spirit instead, says Paul, and you will be able to face the present world not with songs of drunken parties, ideologies, or emotions, but the “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” of worship. That’s what happened on the day of Pentecost. The Spirit rushed upon the gathered church. As the tongues of fire and mighty wind of the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples, some of the bystanders looked at their ecstatic behavior and their speaking in new languages and said, “They are full of new wine” (Acts 2:13). Peter told the crowd to check their watches, since it was only 9:00 a.m. Then he said that their behavior was a sign that the last days, the kairos of God, was at hand. Quoting the prophet Joel, Peter preached, “In the last days, God said, I will pour out my Spirit on all people” (Acts 2:17).

Life in the Spirit is life in kairos time, and the people of God set their watches and calendars by that standard. The atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, may accurately measure out the chronos time of our lives, including that leap second most of us slept through, but kairos time is measured by the Spirit, which calibrates us toward being right with God’s time and accurate in our faith and practice.

So how does the sweep hand or blinking digital readout measure out God’s kairos time in our lives? How do we take advantage of every opportunity to use God’s kairos time wisely? One way would be to consult scripture as frequently as we look at our wrist or phone. Another way would be to count our time by the prayers we offer to God and the silent times for receiving God’s communication to us.

Rather than just letting time tick away, put it to the Spirit’s use. If you regularly carry a timepiece of some sort, be it analog or digital, consider the practice of saying a short prayer every time you check the time. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, pray for whatever is happening or whomever you’re with at that moment. Coupled with a disciplined and regular spiritual life, it’s a practice that makes the most of the time in a way that allows the Spirit to work in us and through us.

Time is a gift from God. We may revere or rue the past, we may dream of the future. But the here and now is God’s present, in terms of a gift and in terms of where and when God is actively at work in the life of the world and in your life. Take advantage of every opportunity and always give thanks to God for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

General Resource: “Big Time,” Homiletics, August 16, 2015 (http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=93040909). 

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.

Religious But Not Spiritual

John 6:35, 41-51; Psalm 34:1-8; 1 Kings 19:4-8

Bread, bread, and more bread. The entire sixth chapter of John is fueled by carbs. This is the third week in John 6 and we still have three more weeks to go. There is a short interlude of Jesus walking on water. That reminds us of the water discussion with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in chapter 4, so I guess we are on a bread and water diet, which for John has far more to do with theology than nutrition.

For those of us who have brains that thrive on trivia, we will quickly call up recollections of Exodus. Moses struck the rock in the weary wilderness and water gushed forth and manna miraculously appeared day after day, excepting Sabbaths, for forty years. The Israelites couldn’t figure the manna out and called it “What’s this?” The disciples and the crowd can’t figure Jesus out.

Both the collective memory reference to the Exodus tradition as well the present time conversation with Jesus are based on the same theme: God’s desire and power to sustain us. That may sound simplistic but our human tendency – dare I call it an aspect of that nagging reality named original sin – is to deconstruct the image in such ways that it becomes meaningless. Is the bread white or whole grain? Is it gluten-free? Is it sourdough or yeast bread? Is the flour from genetically modified grain?

Then we take this to the next level. Rather than partake of the bread we become purveyors of bread. We set up shops for selling bread. We have all manner of bread: pita, boules, pumpernickels, naan, challah, baguettes, peasant, sandwich, soda, rye, herbed – you name it we offer it at the “Church Bakery.”

“We’re running a bakery?” you ask. “That isn’t what we do as the church.” Yes, it is. We package  and give out the bread of life. We package it in all manner of programs for young and old, for newbies and veterans, for cradle Christians and converts. We put the bread of life into classes for this or that. We slice it, we cube it, we toast it, we dry it to make bread crumbs. We coat it with butter and honey and jelly. We get so wrapped up in the presentation that we lose sight of the bread – THE bread, Jesus our Savior.

Recent polls have shown that the fastest growing portion of the American religious scene is the category “None.” A lot of analysis and follow up research has been done. A significant number of the “Nones” would define themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” They believe in a higher power. They believe in God. The trappings of traditional religion, be it Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, or Evangelical, drive them away from the church. They see the church as “religious but not spiritual.” They see the church missing the whole point about the bread.

When Jesus points his hearers back to the Exodus, he turns the discussion into another of his “how much more” analogies.

“This could be read as a ‘You have heard it said’ text. You have heard about the manna in the wilderness, but I tell you about the bread from heaven. You have heard about the rescue from Pharaoh, but I tell you about rescue from death. In other words: ‘You think the miracle of the manna was something? Well, you ain't seen nothing yet.’ ”(1)

The disciples, the crowd, you and I, are called to go the distance to the “how-much-more” that Jesus places in front of us. The history of the relationship of God has been one of God’s drawing men and women to God and enabling them to trust God enough so that they would reach farther, step farther, believe more deeply, love more intently, worship more sincerely.

At the beginning of the Gospel of John the first disciples had to stop following John the Baptist in order to follow Jesus. In this portion of the “Bread of Life” discourse, Jesus’ contemporaries – practicing Jews – are being asked to leave their religion centered on the Torah and synagogue in order to become part of the Jesus community, to give up being religious an become spiritual. To follow Jesus means giving up one’s old religion – even Judaism! In the accounts of the other three gospels the first disciples gave up their vocation of fishing. It’s likely that the fishermen were not the most pious or religious individuals to start with. Jesus spoke and they were drawn to him. They gave up net and boat, family and business. Such courage and determination presents us with a question: What are we giving up in order to follow Jesus? What do we need to give up to better follow Jesus?

“No one can come to me unless they are drawn to me by the Father who sent me.” So what draws us to Jesus? The crowd wanted bread. They wanted Jesus to give them bread. They looked to him as a bakery. After all, “Isn’t this Jesus, Joseph’s son, whose mother and father we know?”

Being drawn by God is like a fish being hauled in a net to shore. That’s uncomfortable, because we don’t want to be dragged to where we don’t want to go. We would rather pick and choose, to bite the hook or not. There is no choice about the net. Fishermen in Jesus’ day used nets, not hooks.

So there is no choice in being drawn. Without it we go nowhere. A semi-trailer needs the Kenworth truck dragging it, a farm implement needs the John Deere tractor pulling it. God hooks up to us and pulls us to Jesus, where Jesus promises to raise us up on the last day. Without the power of the semi, the trailer goes nowhere. Without the power of God, we are helpless to come to Jesus.

Brian Stoffregen tells of hearing a former Muslim speak about his conversion to Christianity. One of the major things that attracted him to Christianity was that it is so absurd. A God who is born and then dies. Salvation that begins by declaring that you can do nothing to save yourself. It either had to be true or the people proclaiming and believing it were crazy. Why does anyone believe this stuff? It’s a miracle from God that any of us believe it.(2)

There are many reasons why people don’t believe in Jesus Christ, why people are not involved in a Christian church, why members don’t regularly attend their church. Instead of wringing our hands, why not be amazed that there are so many people who continue to believe and are regular in their church attendance and involvement in spite of all the forces that work against an active faith and church participation. That’s the real miracle! Why are people in church in the middle of August? Can we bold enough to say that God has drawn them to that place of worship, to that place where they can be taught, and hear and learn from God’s Word? They are religious and spiritual. They have been drawn beyond where they would go on their own. God has drawn them to that place so that they might die, so that they might provide life for others. Could that be a parable of our Christian faith and life?

On one hand, the image being a trailer attached to God’s Kenworth can rub us independent, free-willed people the wrong way. On the other hand, there can be great confidence in that picture. It means that God is in charge of taking us down the road of life. It means that God is in charge of our eternal existence. It means that we can be confident that where God is going, we will certainly follow.

“Having eternal life” is mentioned four times in chapter 6, including once in today’s reading. In every case, the verb is in the present tense.

Simply defined, “eternal life” is living in relationship with God. If we define “eternal” as “never ending,” it is a relationship which begins now through seeing and believing, through eating and drinking (all present tense verbs), and it is a relationship that never ends. Death does not end our relationship with God. The relationship begins now and continues forever. It is our eternal life.

Jesus calls – draws – us out of mere religion and places us in a relationship with himself, with the Father, and with the Spirit. That relationship is true spirituality. Jesus offers himself as something much better and more powerful than the manna the ancestors received in the wilderness. We don’t rely on what God did for our faith ancestors (or even what our ancestors might have done for God) in the past. We need to be aware of what God is doing in the present:

“This is the bread that comes down from heaven.” (v. 50)
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” (v. 51)

These verses proclaim that for us who believe we have to give God all the credit. God brought us to Jesus. God gave us our faith in Jesus. God gives us eternal life now. Jesus will raise us up on the last day. In Jesus we can be more than religious, we can be spiritual.

May it be so. Amen.

(1) Jill Duffield, “Looking into the Lectionary: 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time (August 9),” The Presbyterian Outlook  info@pres-outlook.org, downloaded August 4, 2015.
(2) Brian Stoffregen, “Gospel Notes for Next Sunday,” Proper 14 B / Lectionary 19 B: John 6:35, 41-51. http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=51bd49db6caae596e13e44534&id=f2f89e7110&e=e9babc8d38

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.

Beyond Our Expectation

2 Kings 4:42-44; Ephesians 3:14-21; John 6:1-21

What did you expect when you came today? I’m guessing that you expected the usual. Three hymns, some musical responses, some sort of special music, offering and prayers, fantastic organ music, and another stellar sermon. Right? I hope the sermon is stellar. We’ll know in 18 minutes.

Did you expect to be spiritually fed? Did you expect to be blessed by what transpires here? Did you pray last night or this morning that God might use the words spoken, the songs sung, the prayers offered, the people present to do something blessed for someone in these seats or outside of these walls? Did you expect the Spirit to be present powerfully?

I’m sure each of us expected something. Did we expect enough? The account in John’s gospel about the feeding of the 5,000 and the brief account in 2 Kings both deal with low expectations. Neither the disciples with their five loaves and two fish nor Elisha’s servant with the donated 20 barley loaves expect enough.

Why is it that we think God is stingy? Our God is not a parsimonious God. We are the children of a generous God. God fed the Israelites in the wilderness with manna for 40 years. No one had too little and no one had too much. Elisha’s mentor, Elijah, stayed with a non-Israelite woman in Zarephath. She had enough flour and oil to make one dinner’s worth of bread. Neither the flour nor the oil ran out and the widow, her son, and Elijah ate for many days (1 Kings 17:8-16). God delivers what is necessary when it is needed.

I think that we are afraid of plenty. That is, afraid of the plenty that God wants to give us. The plenty that God wants to hand us isn’t a free handout. It’s a burden. That’s how we feel. The love, the mercy, the grace, the redemption that God wants to give us is a burden because we have to act responsibly with it. We have to receive it. We have to respond to it. All that God lavishes on us can’t be stored up, set aside for a rainy day.

We say the words quickly and absent-mindedly, but every time we say the Lord’s Prayer we are hit square in the gut with one aspect of the burden of God’s generosity: “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” This responsibility gets to us in other ways. Be merciful as you have received mercy. Do to others as you would have them do to you. You have received without having to pay, therefore, give without demanding payment.

Our three verses about Elisha and bread don’t deny the presence of suffering. God does not ignore suffering. God may not always address it in the ways we humans being think that it needs to be addressed. Suffering does exist. And it is not just attacks in movie theaters or car bombings or Christian pastors accused of sedition by the non-Christian majority elite. Suffering isn’t only 20 hours a week at $7.35 an hour or having to buy school uniforms or choosing between food and medication.

Suffering is acute loneliness. Suffering is the inability to find a way to fit in with others. Suffering is ethnic or racial or gender discrimination. Suffering is fear of one’s own shadow. Suffering is having to hide one’s opinions, ideas, identity. Suffering is feeling so burdened by guilt and remorse that there is no hope. Suffering is not knowing that there is a God, and that God is truly gracious, desiring to give salvation to all who are moved by the Spirit to recognize and accept God’s redeeming work in Christ.

There is no scarcity of suffering. There is also no scarcity in God’s blessings.

People felt pretty low in the time that Elisha lived in Gilgal. The land was beset by a series of wars between Israel and Syria, and a famine as well. Suffering reigned. But the divine message is clear. It is signed in the name of the prophet: Elisha, which means, “God has granted salvation.”

Scarcity was the only game in town. The man from Baal-shalishah was tremendously generous. Elisha chooses not to receive the gift for himself but to offer it to God’s people in need. Elisha’s servant sees the 20 loaves as an impossibly small amount to meet the needs of a hundred people, the “sons of the prophets.” Elisha tells him to do it anyway. The people will eat and there will be leftovers. And it was so.

The disciples acted the same way with their trove of five loaves and two fish. The crowd was 5,000, as if everyone in Waverly had gathered at the high school football stadium.

We don’t know if Elisha’s servant was convicted by the prophet’s invocation of God’s word or if he simply acquiesced to the prophet’s command. The same wondering could be made about Jesus’ disciples. Did they believe or did they pout?

In both cases the word of the Lord is true. To try and figure out the mechanics of the miracles is to miss the whole point of either event. What is clear is that in the midst of human need an individual is generous in offering the best that is available and the gift is given to God’s people. The result is beyond human expectation. That is the point. God always works beyond our expectations.

So why don’t we raise our expectations? Who do we doubt? Why do we short-change God’s intent and ability to be generous, merciful, and gracious to us? In the words of British theologian N. T. Wright, “We have seen the future in the resurrection of Jesus and it is real.”

We are very good at budgeting our resources and our time with a careful eye to the limitations that we perceive. There are only so many hours in a day. There are only so many pennies in a dollar. There are only so many people. There is only so much energy and physical capacity. We go overboard counting the cost of doing anything and so we budget shortfall, and believing shortfall we lower our vision and reduce our passion.

We need to be honest about our needs – as individuals, as God’s people in this place. But we also need to break out of our self-imposed prison of poverty (in heart, soul, mind, and strength) and trust the unlimited God we serve.

God has called us to holy work of proclaiming the gospel for the salvation of humankind; sheltering, nurturing, and fostering the fellowship of the children of God; maintaining divine worship; preserving the truth; promoting social righteousness; and exhibiting the Kingdom of Heaven to the world. Yet we are afraid to ask God for the basic necessities that God provides.

When we are totting up our resources for any activity, we fail to include God’s contribution. How many times have we been contacted by a college, a charity, even a political party with the message that our gift will be matched two for one or three for one? God is the original match giver. Only we don’t know the ratio. We don’t know the threshold at which the match kicks in. We only know that we don’t have enough by ourselves. And we forget that God wants to use what we have and make it go farther than we can imagine.

You probably think that I mean money. Money is only one resource. God wants us to offer the best of everything we are as well as what we have. God wants our best faith. It is not too small that God can’t use it if we give it over to God. God wants our best praying, however humble and tongue-tied it might be. God wants our best attempt to grapple with the words we call the Bible and believe that the Spirit will take our scripture wrestling and use them to open our hearts and minds to new vistas of God’s activity in the world. God wants our best attentiveness to God so that God can make visible in small ways through us the grand and glorious love that God lavishes all around.

Elisha and Jesus may seem to be cavalier with the way they nonchalantly tell the folks around them to distribute the goods. The truth of the matter is that they are being very prudent. Elisha and Jesus are able to recognize the presence and will of God. Elisha and Jesus challenge us to put on prophetic eyes to see beyond worldly estimations of resources to God’s abundant blessings at work in the world. We can raise our expectations as well as discover how we can participate with God in holy work.

Who knows what will happen? And that’s all right when God is in charge. Let it be so! 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.

Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56; Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:11-22

No matter where Jesus and his disciples went, they could not escape the multitudes who ran after them. That only gave Jesus more opportunities to teach the people and be compassionate toward those in need. The compassion of Jesus stands out as the most remarkable feature in these two brief summaries of the Galilean ministry.

The second part of the reading is the conclusion to the first major section of Mark’s gospel. The emphasis has been on the declaration that Mark made near the gospel’s beginning, as Jesus came up out of the baptizing waters of Jordan: the Spirit was on him (Mark 1:10). And that’s the same message which Peter gave Cornelius the centurion following Peter’s revelation that the good news embodied in Christ was for Gentiles as well as Jews: “Jesus of Nazareth, whom God anointed with the Holy Spirit and endowed with power,...traveled around doing good and healing everyone oppressed by the devil because God was with him” (Acts 10:38).

In the first part of the gospel reading, Jesus has compassion on the twelve whom he had sent out, his apostles as he calls them. He called them away for a debriefing, but they were soon recognized and the respite was over. In the second part of the reading it is the crowd which received Jesus’ compassion. The verses skipped between the two readings recount the feeding of the five thousand, so we know that Jesus wasn’t just found by a few nosy people. He was sought out by many through word of mouth. As he and the twelve tried to escape once more the sharp-eyed folks in the crowd noticed that he must have slipped away by boat. The word spread once more and the crowds were waiting for him when he was ready to put aground further along the lake shore.

Wherever Jesus went, people had needs. At times it seemed that their needs outdistanced his capacity to meet them. Yet Jesus always embraced the people and their needs. He dealt with pressing crowds, with random hands reaching out to touch his garments, with people who didn’t even feel good enough or connected enough to ask for his help.

You and I are a pretty self-sufficient lot. We don’t fend completely for ourselves like our ancestors did several generations ago. As the character in the decades old commercial said, “Mother, please, I can do it myself.”

The reality is that there are a lot of things we can’t do for ourselves. And a deeper reality is that there are a lot of people who can’t do as much as we can. I don’t mean physical things. I’m talking about mental, psychological, and spiritual things. Every newscast, every front page, every Internet news feed is filled with the reality of deeply seated pain, anger, anguish, fear, guilt, uncertainty, helplessness. It’s not only in the victims, but also in those who do unbelievable things like shooting up an armed forces recruiting station or a movie theater. It is also in the arrogance of demagogic politicians speaking without thinking through their thoughts as well as the knee-jerk acceptance of such political pablum without parsing it for truth and falsehood.

Human pain is as omnipresent as human beings. And most of it can’t be touched by acetaminophen or ibuprofen or stronger drugs. That’s because a lot of human pain is societal, institutional, systemic. It is because we human beings build walls. It goes back nearly as far back as people go. Abel was a shepherd. Cain was farmer. Rodgers and Hammerstein alluded to that in a song from the musical, Oklahoma, “The farmer and the cowman should be friends.” We divide. Me versus the world. Us and them. Democrats and republicans, owners and employees, government and people, slaves and free people, gay and straight, immigrants and native-born citizens, Protestants and Catholics, Israelis and Palestinians, creationists and evolutionists, Sunnis and Shiites, whites and blacks, jingoists and pacifists.

Walls divide, and that’s what Paul was trying to tell the Ephesians. Robert Frost’s great poem says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” For Paul that something was Jesus and his gospel. Jesus does away with the us-them understanding of the world. There will be no walls when Jesus gets through with us. That’s our pain because it is hard to live without walls dividing us from other people. We want to be set apart, special, secure, pain-free. The trouble is that we can’t live in isolation, no matter how much we want to.

I love to drive down roads when there is little or no traffic. But that rarely happens. I dislike having to stop at intersections. It’s slow, it’s cumbersome. As the number of vehicles increases, engineers have developed new ways to keep traffic flowing smoothly. The criss-crossing levels of ramps ease the flow of traffic. Rotary intersections may slow traffic but by taking turns and cooperating, drivers don’t have to wait for light changes.

Paul strove in his Ephesian letter to create a sense of unity among the several classes of converts  in the early church, particularly Gentiles and Jews, who had very significant differences. The crucial element is their common faith in what Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross did in giving everyone access to God. The Jews needed to get beyond the issue of “circumcision,” the symbol of belonging to Israel’s sacred covenant. Because of that exclusiveness, they were “without Christ.”

In a similar manner, many Gentiles excluded from God’s favor people of other religious traditions because they did not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, Son of the living God. The church has clung to that exclusiveness and still wrestles with what Peter wrestled with about letting in outsiders who are different.

The gift of God’s Spirit to create a new humanity through faith was universal. That is plain in the events of Pentecost. You and I have to keep thinking about the walls we keep trying to repair as fast as Christ is trying to remove them. This letter proclaims this message while at the same time making it abundantly clear that such unity can only be through faith in Jesus Christ, a faith that we keep trying to wall off to protect God while the world on the other side of our walls cries out in pain for justice, integrity, righteousness, humility.

There can be no closed doors in the fellowship of faith. The letter writer reiterates that while the doors of faith are wide open to everyone, the building to which we are moving in faith from many directions has Jesus Christ as its cornerstone. As so often in depicting theological concepts, the metaphor creates the situation of truth being found not in a conflicting state of either/or but of both/and.

Christ did not live an either/or gospel. He did not separate himself from the world. He stepped into the midst of it, whether it was a crowd on a hillside that needed fed with both teaching and with bread, a throng following him seeking healing, a crowd hugging the lanes of Jerusalem, or even hanging from a cross with arms spread wide saying, “Father, forgive.”

A number of years ago there were a growing number of homeless people in Evanston, Illinois. A Baptist church in that wealthy Chicago suburb decided to open its doors as a shelter and other Evanston church leaders were considering doing the same. When the Evanston city council heard about this, it attempted to pass a new zoning ordinance to wall the city off from homeless people by forbidding the use of churches as shelters for the homeless. The organizer of one shelter project had no complaint. Rather than opening up a shelter for the homeless, they hosted an all-night prayer vigil to which all were welcomed with pillows and blankets besides bulletins and hymnals. Christ tears down the walls we keep trying to put up.

Both parts of the gospel reading and the Ephesian passage challenge the church to live in the world, a world which is suffering and in need of healing reconciliation. To withhold the wholeness that Christ gives is to practice the religious malpractice that Jeremiah decried in his writing read earlier.

Let us begin by recognizing for ourselves that Jesus is the healer and reconciler that each of us needs. When we are healed and reconciled ourselves, Christ then can be a healer and reconciler through our activity in our community. The ways of life are crowded. And they cross every which way in an unorderly fashion. That did not stop Jesus. It should not stop us, either.

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.

The Idolatry of Human Power

Amos 7:1-17; Ephesians 1:3-14

Human beings idolize power. We look up to people in high elected office. We envy bank presidents. We admire university chancellors. We hang on the words of great orators. We celebrate the accomplishments of surgeons and architects. We are awestruck by the creativity of artists, musicians and writers. We cheer great athletes.

For all our love of power – intellectual, physical, creative, inspirational – we hate power. We think that many politicians are more interested in themselves than in the country. We see bank presidents greedily perpetuating unjust economic mechanisms that feather the nests of the 1% to the detriment everyone else. University officials appear to be more interested in rankings and endowments than in individual students. Oratory is too often empty. Doctors and engineers are unapproachable. Much of creativity is beyond our understanding. Athletes too often are overpaid, immature brats.

These love and hates are generalizations over-limned for emphasis. Yet the kernel of truth underneath the extremes is that power is the object of both love and hate. Anyone wielding power may have very necessary skills, including vision, wisdom, and charisma, nevertheless they become lightning rods for all our dissatisfaction, anger, gullibility, frustration, and disillusionment.

Yet for all that we idolize human power.

The prophetic work of Amos takes place during the time following the dissolution of Israel following the end of the reign of Solomon, David’s son. The charismatic bonds of the house of David no longer held and the twelve tribes, experiencing uneven leadership, broke apart. While Judah was a viable nation, the remaining tribes loosely formed the Northern Kingdom, commonly called Israel. Both nations drifted from the spiritual roots of the Exodus, the nation building wilderness sojourn, and the kingdom building under Saul, David, and Solomon. In fact, the moral level of the people, following the example of most of the kings, reached the level of everyone doing what was right in their own thinking.

In the reading from the prophet Amos, we have three visions and two meetings. The visions from God which Amos saw were visions of judgment. Following the first two visions, the locusts and the fire, the prophet pleaded for Israel, asking, “How can Jacob survive” He is so small?” The Lord God relented.

Then comes the vision of the plumb line. While the judging of the previous visions have been general and unquantified, the plumb line of the vision shows how off the mark the nation has gone. King Jereboam and the people have deviated too far. His kingship will be annulled and his royal line destroyed.

The plumb line is a very accessible image showing that the people are not measuring up to God’s expectations. So God’s judgment will be brought down upon the proudest accomplishments of the kingdom. “The shrines of Isaac will be made desolate and the holy places of Israel will be laid waste.”

The word of the Lord which Amos delivers is that all our greatest achievements, all the things that we hold up as our crowning human glory, the things that we puff ourselves up about, the signs and symbols of how great we are in our own eyes – all these things are temporary. If God were to choose to do so, they all could be swept away in the blink of an eye. To use an image that Jesus used, they are grass that blooms at dawn and withers at dusk.

Amaziah, the head priest, heard about the words that Amos was speaking. He reported to King Jereboam that Amos was plotting against the king, that the king will die by the sword, and that Israel will be forced out of its land.

We can understand where Amaziah was coming from. He and the king were the two most powerful people in the nation. The priest’s response is both personal and public. Imagine how each of us might respond if someone came to Waverly declaring that God was going to tear down this church, the museum, the municipal building, the court house, and the country building, and then would go on to kill the mayor, the village council, the county commissioners, and other office holders. We would respond as Amaziah did.

Amaziah works from his power base. He immediately tells the king, and then, whether on orders of the king, or on his own authority, he confronts Amos. After all, he didn’t get to be the head priest by being a wallflower. He knows how to use his position. Coming on with full bravado, he shows just how big he is. He tries to banish Amos by sending him packing back across the border with Judah to speak his treasonous words there.

Were you paying close attention to Amaziah’s two conversations? Never once does he mention God. When threatened by Amos’ words he runs not to the sanctuary to pray but to the king to tattle. When he talks about the sanctuary at Bethel he calls it the king’s holy place.

Do you remember how Bethel got it’s name? Way back in Genesis, Jacob named the place where he slept and dreamed of God’s messengers ascending and descending a raised staircase. Then he saw the Lord standing on it promising to give the land on which Jacob was lying to his descendants who will be come as innumerable as the dust of the earth. Jacob awoke and knew that the place here he lay was an awesome, sacred place. “It’s none other than God’s house and the entrance to heaven” (Genesis 28:17), which is what the name “Bethel” means.

The descendants of Jacob were indeed living on the land that Jacob was promised, a land flowing with milk and honey as Moses had been promised. All that abundance had led God’s people to the point that they failed to recognize the presence of God. God’s house had become the king’s house, a human being’s house. The abundance of blessings had distracted the people from the God who provided them.

Amos refuses to be labeled as a professional prophet. He is a shepherd and a trimmer of sycamore trees. Amaziah’s order for him to leave Bethel is countermanded by God’s order to Amos to go to Bethel. As Amos stands before Amaziah and all his supposed power and might, Amos may well be realizing just how small the priest really is in the eyes of God.

We are small. We huff and puff, we billow our egos, but we are small. We allow the perceptions of our power and privilege to cripple our relationship with God. We look at what we have earned and bought and built and we fairly break our arms patting ourselves on our backs. We believe that it all belongs to us. We forget that the blessings that we have are “according to [God’s] goodwill and plan and to honor his glorious grace that he has given to us freely through the Son whom he loves” (Ephesians 1:7-8).

When we deny our smallness, we make ourselves into our own creator. When we take on that role, we cannot hear God’s word of judgment, repentance, and forgiveness for our lives. We cannot hear the words of Jesus, just as the Pharisees, Sadducees, teachers of the law and elders could not see God’s grace in the actions of Jesus or hear God’s words of grace in Jesus’ words.

When we carelessly or intentionally accord ultimate authority and power to human institutions we have broken relationship with God and have entered into idolatry. We live a falsehood. When we believe that we can control the activity of God, indeed God’s very will, through the institution of the church or through the auspices of positions within the church set aside for particular ministries and service, we deny the abundance of God’s grace and mercy lavished so greatly in Christ. God will do what God wills to do, through us or in spite of us.

We cannot save ourselves. That is why we again and again come to this table which is hosted by Christ, the Lord, the giver of mercy, who though he was rich, though he was the Son of the Father, gave up all that in order to become powerless and small that we might receive the greatness, the power, and the glory of God’s love in our lives. This table reminds us that God will be active in ways that do not match human ways. God’s power and glory are nothing like the power and glory we human beings we conceive. And for that we may be eternally grateful.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

General Resource: Douglas T. King, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), Year B, vol. 3, pp. 219-223. 
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.