From SAD to GLAD

1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13; Jeremiah 8:18-9:1


About coffee break time on Thursday morning this week will be the autumnal equinox when the orbit of the earth results in the sun crossing the equator. Day and night will be equal length for one day. We will be halfway between the first day of summer (15 hours of daylight) and the first day of winter (with 9 hours and 21 minutes of daylight). You have probably noticed that the sun has been rising later each morning and setting earlier in the evening.

At 39̊ 20' N latitude Waverly is neither in the tropics or the arctic zone. Nevertheless we do get depressed feelings when the winter days are short and grey. If we lived above the Arctic Circle, we would notice both the never-ending light of mid-summer and the never-ending night of mid-winter.

Psychologists have defined seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, as a depression from the lack of sunlight and the effect that sunlight has the chemistry of the body.

In Finland, March and April are “birthday months.” It is an amusing fact, that far and away, more babies are born in those two months than during any other time of the year. The reason is that people really enjoy themselves during the long, golden days of high summer, which given Finland’s high northern latitudes, lasts for more than 20 hours every day.

The curious thing is that the lowest birth months are July, August and September. Recreation during the bleak weeks of near total darkness in November and December occurs inside but not in the bedroom. It seems that the Finns are particularly susceptible to SAD. For Americans, the highest concentration of SAD people is not in Alaska but in Seattle. So that’s why so much coffee is brewed there! Add to that the near constant drizzle and we would be SAD too.

There is a reason so many northerners go to Florida and Arizona every winter. And it’s not just arthritis.

An acronym is a word made up of the first letters of several words. Any good acronym can stand for a number of things. Before I came to Waverly, the only thing NCR stood for was National Cash Register Company. I had to forget that quickly. Because I live in several levels of the church, I sometimes have to stop and think where I am in order to flesh out an acronym.

SAD, the acronym for Seasonal Affective Disorder, can have a meaning in church language: Spiritual Affective Disorder. SAD churches display all the classic symptoms associated with individuals struggling with the seasonal disorder. SAD churches are lethargic, slow to react to events either within their faith community or in the world around them. This is layered with an underlying sense of anxiety running through everything these churches try to do.

Like individuals, SAD churches have a notoriously low reproduction rate. Every year the number gathered in their pews grows fewer, grayer, frailer. New members aren’t attracted to a SAD congregation, and current members who haven’t been completely spiritually debilitated often flee in order to keep their flickering flame of faith from being snuffed out by the spiritual vacuum around them. SAD is no longer a mainline church malady. It is effecting evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as well. Big congregations and urban ones are as prone to SAD as are small or rural congregations.

Just as the cause of Season Affective Disorder is a lack of light in a specific spectrum, so, too, churches that suffer Spiritual Affective Disorder do so because they lack a certain type of light in their lives. That light, of course, is the “Light of the World,” Jesus Christ.

Today’s reading from 1 Timothy celebrates the universality of God’s love and God’s redeeming intentions. That divine urge may be universal, but it can be possible only by one thing: the “one mediator between God and humanity, the human Jesus Christ, who gave himself as a payment to set all people free” (vv. 5-6).

What that means is that the church is called to stand out in a darkened world as a life-saving beacon of light, a blazing torch of hope. The church needs to be lit from within by a single source of power – the redemptive love and spirit of Christ.

Academic theology has fixated its thinking on God, has dissected Christ like a chef mincing vegetables, and has shied away from even thinking about where the Spirit comes in. Much of our theological talk keeps God at arms length through abstract words and concepts. Because Paul’s theology is dense, we miss out on the core of his consistent message, which is “Jesus.” Jesus is our all in all.

An African-American Gen-Xer in Chicago started coming to church because he got excited about somebody named Jesus. He told his pastor, “If it weren’t for Jesus, I wouldn’t be a Christian.” Think about that. Sometimes the obvious is in plain sight and we still miss it. The man said that he had encountered numerous followers of Jesus, but all of them were afflicted with SAD. That might explain the T-shirt which proclaims, “Jesus save us ... from some of your followers.”

Dr. Paul says that we don’t have to SAD Christians or SAD churches. We can be transformed into GLAD Christians and GLAD congregations. What does GLAD stand for? God’s Love Always Delights. God’s Love Always Delights. Say that with me, please. God’s Love Always Delights. Again. God’s Love Always Delights.

Don’t take Paul’s word for it. The psalms give ample opportunity to be delighted by God’s love. Here’s a portion of Psalm 113:

God’s glory is higher than the skies!
Who could possibly compare to the Lord our God?
God rules from on high;
he has to come down to even see heaven and earth!
God lifts up the poor from the dirt
and raises up the needy from the garbage pile
to seat them with leaders —
with the leaders of his own people! (113:4-8)

Paul doesn’t tell us to go the Florida. He gives us a prescription in the opening verse of today’s reading: “First of all, then, I ask that requests, prayers, petitions, and thanksgiving be made for all people.” If we are praying, and if we are giving thanks, there is no way we can suffer from SAD!

• Feeling overwhelmed by your problems? Pray for someone else whose burdens are equal to or greater than your own.
• Feeling resentment toward an individual? Give thanks to God for that person, asking God to let him or her be an instrument of growth in your life.
• Feeling alone and in the dark, uncertain where to go next? Pray, asking God to shed the light of divine wisdom in your soul.
• Feeling critical of others? Thank God for the objects of your criticism, and ask God to make them a blessing wherever they go.
• Feeling bitterness toward others who have succeeded where you have failed? Pray for their continued success.
• Feeling impatient with the pace of your spiritual growth? Thank God for your progress so far.
• Feeling unforgiving toward others? 

There’s the rub, isn’t it? How can we be GLAD Christians, praying and thanking God, unless we have an attitude of forgiveness? Not just toward others, but towards ourselves. And towards God. Doctors have shown that being unwilling to forgive or being unwilling to be forgiven is more detrimental to health than many physical ailments.

The inability to be forgiven or to forgive someone is like a room darkening shade that prevents the light of Christ from penetrating our lives. If we can roll that shade all the way up we can bathe in the delighting which God’s love always brings. That sounds easy, but we all know how contrary window shades can be. They sometimes need to be nudged and coddled, and dealt with carefully. They can’t be forced. Forgiveness can’t be forced. It must be genuine. But the more there is, the GLADer you can be.

Remember: God’s Love Always Delights. Say it with me again. God’s Love Always Delights.



General Resource:
Homiletics, September 20, 1998.

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

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Hit the Faith 'Share' Button

1 Timothy 1:12-17; Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Luke 15:1-10


Timothy enjoyed a special relationship with the apostle Paul. Of all of Paul’s correspondence, the Timothy letters are the only personal ones. I am sure that Paul wrote more letters than we have. He didn’t keep carbon copies or PDF files of his letters. And most of the people who received letters from him didn’t file them away. A couple of reads and into the trash basket. Perhaps Timothy valued Paul’s words so much that he hung onto everything he ever received from the apostle. We are fortunate to have these letters. While they were written to Timothy, the letters contain much that any disciple of Christ could benefit from.

Paul and Timothy were close, like father and son, not unlike the spiritual relationships that Paul had with Philemon and Onesimus whom we talked about last week. While Paul had collegial relationships with Barnabas, Epaphras, Silas, Priscilla, Aquila, and others, there is a sense that Paul had raised Timothy into the ministry. 

The call to gospel ministry often has been extended through the wisdom and counsel of a pastor who perceived gifts for ministry and the working of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. Perhaps some of my retired colleagues have had the experience of being an agent of God to direct a person towards ministry. Several people were directly and indirectly key in my own call to ministry.

Paul sensed the deep work of the Spirit in Timothy and prodded him to do more than attend church services. Today many young people who were raised in the church’s teaching head off after college into careers full of a sense that faith is expressed through social action and intellectual curiosity. They have learned to think for themselves and to tease out their beliefs in personal reflection. 

That’s one of the reasons there are increasing numbers of “nones” – the people who are spiritual but not religious, who have a strong belief in God but aren’t interested in the institutional church. As a popular motto floating around the internet says, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” They believe deeply in acceptance and inclusion of all people in the social, economic, and political spheres of life, regardless of ages, genders, races, sexual orientations, and abilities. They are caught in a tension of being both passionate about changing their world and paralyzed with anger and fear about the world they are inheriting from their parents and grandparents.

I don’t know if Timothy’s thinking two millennia ago resonates with any of today’s hopes and angst. What I do know is that Paul took him under his spiritual wing and coached and counseled him about faith and life. Nearly thirty years ago theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William Willamon wrote their landmark work, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Hauerwas and Willamon unapologetically called for the church to be “a colony of heaven” comprised of Christians who are resident aliens in a strange land. With the disenfranchisement of Protestant Christianity in particular, the church has a rare opportunity for a new, truer Christian faithfulness.

About the same time Alban Institute director Loren Meade said that Christendom was no longer a viable model for the church. Christendom – where church and world were the same thing – had been the church model ever since Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official state religion over 1,500 years ago. The empire devolved into feudal fiefdoms and tribal societies, which in turn gave way to nation states, to superpowers, and to political and economic blocs of nations. Travel and mass communication, now nearly instantaneous, have brought the reality home to every population that religions are no longer regional but global. That means that regions are no longer all one kind of religion. The world has returned to the dynamics of the apostolic age where Christianity is one among many completing religions and faith expressions.

While Waverly may be something of a cultural backwater, the increasingly urbanized world is full of people who rub shoulders and who are searching for living relationships with a deity. They may recognize that god through the eyes and faith of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism,  Mormonism, Wicca, or New Age, not to mention the huge variety of Christian expressions ranging from ancient Orthodoxy, to Catholicism, to Protestantism which runs from high-church Anglican to traditional mainline to evangelical to charismatic and pentecostal. The reality of our 2016 world is that it is much more similar to Timothy’s world than it is different.

Paul self-discloses intimate revelations and confessions about his faith. We wonder how Timothy received them and how he responded in his own faith and his day to day living. 

There are Pauls and Timothys in today’s church world. Can the Pauls of our time be as open as the first Paul was? Can those people who are fathers and mothers in faith to younger believers share intimately with the Timothys of today, who may be female, non-Caucasian, and for whom English may not be their first language? Can today’s Pauls be vulnerable enough to share their confessions of faith, their personal relationships with God, their questions and doubts, as well as affirmations and celebrations? Leaders need to communicate the gospel to today’s future church through honest, raw sharing. Warmed-over platitudes and stale theological language will never bridge the generations. Today’s Timothys want to know if there is substance behind the ancient language of the church.

Friends, we are the Pauls of this day. Our Timothys may be fifty- and sixty-somethings rather than twenty-somethings. That doesn’t matter. Each of us is being invited to reexamine our language of Christian faith. We aren’t being asked to get rid of it. Rather we are being asked to make it alive and to frame it for twenty-first-century ears. If you think that is hard for you, imagine how hard it is for those of us trained to use traditional theological language.

For example, after a discussion of the parables of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast in Matthew, a young man asked his pastor to explain the kingdom/realm of God in “plain language” and not in “church words.” Pausing and catching her breath, the pastor began describing the organic unfolding of creation and all that is in it, including human beings, as a part of the Divine, as a revelation of the Divine, as the continuing work of the Divine. “Oh,” he replied, “The Oneness of all things. The way we are all connected energetically. I get it.” We all know that the subject is really a lot more complicated than that, but she had opened a door and gained his attention. Pushing the door open further will be the work of many more discussions and a lot of faithful imagining. 

 Colleague Thom Shuman writes that he heard the account of how a pastor in Indonesia (where there are no sheep) read Jesus’ parable as “Which of you, having a hundred ducks, if one is lost, does not leave the 99 in the rice fields and go searching for the one which is lost.”  The pastor put the ancient parable into words that the people would relate to, just as Jesus did.(1)

Twenty-first-century Timothys won’t take the logic that was handed to us when we were their age. I’m sure you remember it: “Because I said so, that’s why.” Today’s Timothys don’t want to be treated like toddlers. They long for personal experiences of the mystery of life and the animating force that they hope lies behind the workings of the creation. They want us to set aside our stony facades of impassiveness and to share with them the joys and the agonies of our faith journeys. They want to hear our doubts as well as our affirmations. 

If you and I can offer them this openness, if you and I can welcome them into our faith experiences, today’s Timothys may decide that “church” is the right institution for their world and not a relic from Christianity’s bygone glory days. These Timothys search for wholeness of body, mind, and soul and wholeness of creation which they equate with real salvation. They understand sin as disconnection from wholeness, from the Oneness of the universe, for it means disconnection from their very selves. They have been raised to understand the web of life as it is seen in family systems, ecological systems, and quantum physics. Sin is tearing the web and denying its existence. While they reverence the connectivity of the universe in all its forms, they get caught up in and are wounded by its brokenness just as easily as older generations. They seek ways to be part of the healing process. 

You and I are twenty-first-century Pauls. The first Paul challenges us to mentor our Timothys rather than complain about them. Our charge is to listen carefully to them so that together we can participate in experiencing God in Christ Jesus. Our Timothys invite us onto unknown paths of faithful, worshipful living, allowing the Spirit to help us change our “churchy” language into idioms that are recognizable today.

We live in a connected world. Every Facebook post, every web-blog, every social media post, has a “Share” button. Pre-internet Paul would nevertheless have known what to do with a “Share” button. Use it. That’s what he did, long before it became fashionable. He shared Jesus Christ gladly, honestly, lovingly with everyone he met. And he especially did it with Timothy. That’s our calling as well. As today’s Pauls we are called to hit the “Share” button on our faith.


General Sources: 
Jane Anne Ferguson, “1 Timothy 1:12-17 - Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, vol. 4, 62-66.
Robert P. Jones, The Death of White Christian America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016).
Loren B. Meade, The Once and Future Church (Washington DC: The Alban Institute, 1991).
Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willamon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition (Nashville: Abindgon Press, 2014)

(1) Thom Shuman, “Re: [Midrash] Opening Comments for Sunday September 11 2016 which is the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 19. Year C,” Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 12:00 PM.

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

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

The Gospel Makes for Strange Companions

Philemon 1-21; Jeremiah 18:1-11; Luke 14:25-33


What a delightful letter. With cosmopolitan sensitivity the author combines the Greek concept of “grace” with the Hebrew idea of “shalom/peace” and uses the result to underlie the entire correspondence. The letter is different from Paul’s deep and often polemical writing. These 21 verses bring a human and practical reality to ideas and images that are heady by nature and made more so by our human attempts to understand them.

We don’t know if Paul ever visited Colossae. It was near Laodicea which would have been on his route from Psidia to Ephesus during his third missionary journey. Since Jews in neighboring towns often came to hear Paul, that was likely how Paul and Philemon first met. Philemon was a wealthy man. He owned at least one slave and was the master of a house large enough to accommodate a church. He, his wife Apphia, and Archippus were the leaders of this congregation, and the entire community got to overhear the apostle’s request when the letter was read aloud.

A young man named Onesimus had run away from Colossae and had come to Paul during Paul’s house arrest, possibly in Ephesus but more likely in Rome, although Rome would have been a long way for a slave to travel. Did he know that Paul was there? We don’t know. Onesimus’ name means “useful” or “beneficial” and he apparently lived up to it assisting Paul during the imprisonment. Paul brought Onesimus to Christ and made the young believer’s faith strong. A close bond—like that of a father to a son—grew between them.

We don’t know what Onesimus did. Did he run away from Philemon’s household? Did they have a falling out that possibly ended with an assault? Did he steal something from Philemon? We simply don’t know. Paul says only that Onesimus had found his way to the imprisoned Paul and became a Christian through his close contact with the apostle.

Over the course of their relationship Onesimus had confessed to Paul about the rift which existed between himself and Philemon. Paul must have felt caught in the middle of a poor situation. On the one hand Onesimus was quite useful to him. And it was a joy for Paul to teach him about Jesus and to watch the young man eagerly grow in the faith. And on the other hand, Paul had had much the same kind of experience a number of years earlier as Philemon eagerly received Paul’s teaching about Christ and took it to heart.

There are three main actors in this vignette: a slave, Onesimus, who has very little to his name other than the clothes on his back (and now, thanks to Paul, the good news of salvation); a gentile (Greek) Philemon (who also has come to know Christ through the agency of Paul), a man with a good deal of means including a great house and the need and ability to own a slave; and Paul, a Pharisaically trained, diaspora Jew, tentmaking itinerant, converted by Christ into an apostle of Christ for the gentile world. What strange companions. They are from radically different backgrounds and cultures. The only thing in common is Jesus Christ, who makes them equal.

Paul lived and practiced a very deep ethical principle that he shared with Christ: the principle of non-dominance. By their backgrounds Jesus, a Palestinian, Aramaic-speaking, Jewish carpenter with a rudimentary synagogue education and Paul, a Hellenistic, Greek-speaking, highly trained Pharisee were very different men. What they shared through their teaching and living was a refusal to dominate other people, even when they could easily do so. Jesus had a quick mind to perceive the hypocrisy of other people’s words and actions. Paul had a caring yet sharp tongue to put people in their place.

In his letter to Philemon, Paul openly declined to tell Philemon what to do although, as he said, he could have done so. Rather, Paul stated that any economic, class, or cultural differences that had existed among the three of them have been eliminated through Christ Jesus working in each of their lives. Paul dared to contemplate a wealthy Hellenistic Christian receiving another Christian, who had been his disobedient slave, as a spiritual equal, as a brother. He trusted Philemon not to fall back into the reigning patterns of prestige, discrimination, and violence that were the customary framework for everyday life in those days.

Paul’s letter reminds us on this Labor Day weekend that regardless of our day-filling work, be it a highly trained profession, a skilled trade, customer service work, social service work, or the career of retirement, the chief work of the Christian is to live a Christ-like life for the world each of us interacts with minute by minute and day by day.

Much of the church through the ages, including today’‘s church, has not caught the drift of this radical understanding of the community of Christ. We routinely regard power structures in the church as normal. We worry about matters of authority as if they were the chief concern of God. The Church shies away from deep discussions of theology. And the conversations that are had are thinly disguised arguments over issues that have little relevance to what people think about the nature of God or how to contemplate the Exodus or the Resurrection.

Columnist E. J. Dionne says that “We go straight to hot-button issues.”(1) He calls that politicizing the Gospel. In that sense what passes for discussion is theological domination – who is right and who is wrong. Neither Paul nor our Lord take that approach. They are braver than we are because they did not seek to dominate fellow believers. After all, Jesus got down on his hands and knees and washed the feet of his disciples, saying, “I have given you an example: Just as I have done, you also must do” (John 13:15). Paul said “God forbid that I should boast about anything except for the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14).

In a recent blog post Marshal Segal said that we cannot serve both God and theology. He wrote,

“Be committed to having a right theology, but be as committed to having a relational theology—a growing, humble and heartfelt intimacy with God. Do not simply search the Scriptures for soteriology [how Christ saves us], but search for salvation—the eternal life—that is only found in the flesh, blood and person of Jesus Christ (John 5:39).”(2)

In his request to Philemon, Paul sought neither to dominate him or to be dominated by him. Philemon, Onesimus, and Paul were equals in the sight of Christ. Further, Paul’s trust in God was so deep that he was able to discover the love of God in every situation, no matter how difficult or strange. He wrote while he was imprisoned and it sounded more like a vacation postcard, “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.” Would we be able to discover a loving gift if we were to revisit the catalog of our past ills and misfortunes? That’s not as easy as it might sound, but saints across the ages courageously have done just that.

Paul also challenged Philemon to allow the Holy Spirit to take up residence within him and start moving the furniture. Paul trusted his friend to quit worrying about respectability and to act in favor of what is just and right, not traditional and expected. Christ’s Spirit heightens our native abilities in ways that feel at once both natural and beyond natural. The Spirit of Christ working in us will always direct us to behave generously on behalf of others. When God’s people are “in the Lord” or “in Christ” (a favorite expression of Paul’s) there is no longer any special status—neither up or down, older or younger, slave or free, male or female (Gal. 3:28). All are beloved brothers and sisters in the love of God in the Lord Christ Jesus.

That takes great courage which only the Holy Spirit can provide. Living the Christ-life is not for sissies.

We don’t know how the story ends. In Jesus’ parable of the father and two sons, we don’t know the elder son finally joined the party. Did Philemon receive Onesimus as a brother rather than as chattel?

In Huckleberry Finn, Huck was ready to post a letter to Miss Watson about her runaway slave Jim. Then he got thinking about all he has been through with Jim, how Jim has cared for him and become a friend, and treated him like the kindly father Huck never had. Huck then tears the letter up.

Imagine an illegal immigrant today. Say that it is Rosa, now the single mother of children born in this country, but who herself entered the country illegally. There are reasons for laws dealing with illegal immigrants, and Christians are meant to be law-abiding citizens. Yet, before all else, the immigrant is a sister or brother in the love of God. Gospel teaching and baptismal vows call Christians to respect the dignity of every human being. Imagine receiving a letter—one Christian community to another—commending reconciliation and care for Rosa.(3)

We don’t know how Philemon responded to Paul’s request. When the gospel brings strange companions together in our lives, we can respond as Paul believes we should. We can live out the answer that Christ looks for.

Paul’s closing words still have power: “May the grace of Christ be with your Spirit.”


General Resource: Gray Temple, “Philemon 1-21: Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 38-42.Christ).

(1) E. J. Dionne, “Theology gets lost when religion is politicized,” Columbus Dispatch, August 25, 2016, B-11.
(2) Marshall Segal, ChurchLeaders.com, August 25, 2016, http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/247944-cannot-serve-god-theology.html
(3) Frederick Borsch, “Philemon 1-21: Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 43.

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

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Moving from Inertness to Contentiousness

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Psalm 81:1, 10-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14


Gray Temple writes that there is nothing on earth quite like North American religious congregations. They are centers of worship and the arts related to worship, such as music and drama. They are community centers. They serve as extended families for people. For many, they are the first priority for free time apart from family or work. The churches of childhood show up in our fondest dreams.(1)


But there is a lot of change going on in congregations. According to research recently published by Robert P. Jones, the median age of white Protestant as well as white evangelical congregations has risen in the last decade to 53 years while the median age of Americans has held steady at 46 years old. And the percentage of people in the youngest age cohort has decreased by nearly half.(2) If you look around you, you already know that our median age (the midpoint between the youngest and the oldest) is probably 20 years higher, with the average of all our ages adding another ten years.

We are a homogeneous bunch according to the demographics. In spite of all the backgrounds that each of us brings, we are a bland bunch. We are thankful for Sharon for adding a little spice to our mix. The few growing edges of the church in America are of the spicy kind. America is no longer a white bread society with some pumpernickel thrown in. The present trends predict that not only is white Christian America becoming a smaller piece of the pie of churched people, but the same is true for the makeup of the whole population.

That creates a lot of contention. Listen to the rhetoric of this year’s presidential campaign. Reflect on the increasing visibility of frayed relations between African-American and Euro-American communities. The presidential election eighty-eight years ago battled over Roman Catholic Al Smith running for President. That was less of an issue in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was elected. Four years ago evangelical Christians were tied in knots about voting for a Mormon. Today there still are people trying to claim that President Obama is a Muslim, even though he’s not, and he has preached very competently overtly Christian memorial service sermons that rival the best of Christian preaching.

We like to think that we are family. And we are. Like any blood family, there are folks who always do right as well as those who are the black sheep. There are conciliators as well as whiners. There are optimists as well as pessimists. There are people on opposing sides of every imaginable issue. As a rule we get along in a bite-the-tongue-and-don’t-talk-about-it way. There is tacit respect for differing opinions, even when someone else’s opinion is obviously wrong and mine is right. A recent Facebook post noted that if a person is 100% certain of what they believe, it’s not that they are right, they simply have stopped searching for the truth.

A radio preacher was once heard to cry, “When the devil fell out of Heaven, he landed in the choir loft!” Other landing locations could be committees and leadership teams. The natural tendency to think of church as “family” risks importing into the sanctuary or committee room all the strife we flea from when we leave home. We would like to keep everything bland and inert. Don’t make waves.

Contentiousness, however, is energy. As you know, energy is what makes things happen. It turns on the lights, it runs our cars, it comes from the food we eat to fuel our bodies. Centuries ago, Isaac Newton determined that a body at rest tends to stay at rest while a body in motion tends to stay in motion. More recent physics has shown that things aren’t quite as simple as that. But for our church purposes, Newton’s law works.

When there is inertness, nothing happens. A body at rest tends to remain at rest. An inactive congregation will remain an inactive congregation. A congregation that keeps its differences well-behaved and under control, not to mention under the surface, rarely achieves greatness. A congregation that struggles with its differences openly, a congregation that is in motion, tends to remain in motion. The energy of contentiousness, if properly used, can be transformed into adoration of God, loving respect for one another, and service to the needy world.

Far better to be contentious than to be inert. The energies that make our churches sometimes painful to occupy are actually signs of life.

Our reading from Hebrews 13 offers much that is essential for making our transition from inertness to contentiousness for the sake of God’s work in the world.

It all begins with worship: “So let’s continually offer up a sacrifice of praise through him, which is the fruit from our lips that confess his name.” When the New Testament churches thought of worship, they didn’t talk about making quick dash from page 48 to page 78 of the Book of Common Worship, while religiously hitting all the topics laid out in chapter 3, section 3 of the “Directory for Worship” in the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and doing it in under 60 minutes. That approach offers worshipers all the spiritual scenery of a subway ride. That isn’t early church worship. They described it as “a sacrifice of praise to God.” Worshiping God is a happy occupation. The work of actually praising God – and meaning it – is transformative; it changes us.(3)

Gray Temple says that we come to resemble what we admire. People who admire money get green and crinkly (a polite way of saying obsessive). People who admire computers become user-unfriendly. People who actively and deliberately admire Jesus Christ come to resemble him as he actually was and remains today, unchanged from age to age: generous, merry, tender, fierce, courageous, somewhat mischievous, fully open to others after his self is sorted out. Real worship is the engine of personal transformation. When we create and participate whole-heartedly in worship out of love for our Lord more than out of love of respectability we move from inertness to vitality.(4)

The next thing about vitality as God’s people is where the author started this series of thoughts – fellowship. “Keep loving each other like family.” When we leave a worship service where everyone has actively admired and praised God, it is like coming out of a spa or a soak in a hot tub. We are relaxed, amiable, pliable like clay. The issue is, how will we set up? Will we revert to our normal routine and let ourselves be pushed once again into the world’s mold? Will we meekly accept as gospel what the next person tells us, as if it were pablum which we need because we can’t chew on the meat of the gospel for ourselves? That isn’t growth in faith. Far better to spend the fellowship time with someone who has the same wide-eyed wonder for God and share in a mutual transformation. “By doing this some have been hosts to angels without knowing it.”

And that moves us to ministry. Not church work, not paper shuffling and phone calling, not boring committee meetings or columns of mind-numbing budget numbers. You don’t have to have prayer to do that, even if the pastor does it. The Hebrews author uses the word “remember.” Just try to remember prisoners and people who are mistreated without an act of prayer. Just try to honor marriage, avoid relationship cheating, sexual immorality, and adultery without active prayer. Just try to avoid the black hole of greed without prayer to focus gratitude on the grace that you have.

Our Hebrews author says that all three of these things are essential. Not two out of three, not one, but all three.

Worship that does not melt the soul and lead to deepened relationships with fellow servants of our Lord becomes a museum of moribund customs, causing strife rather than a fresh way of directing our love to God. Fellowship that does not grow out of spirited worship and point into courageous ministry becomes boozy, gossipy, and incestuous, draining energy from a life with God. That is little more than circling the wagons on the congregation’s arid prairie. Ministry that does not grow out of friendship forged in worship becomes stale and sour, something to fight with others about, rather than something to invite them into.

Trevor Huddleston was an Anglican Bishop in apartheid South Africa. He was forced out of the country because he was an early opponent of apartheid. He said in a sermon: “The Christian, if he is true to his calling, is always an agitator....At the heart of our religion there lies a principle in absolute contradiction to the principles by which the world speaks and thinks and acts.”(5)

The Spirit of Christ always calls us from inertness to contentiousness. It began at the table which Jesus hosted and it is reaffirmed every time we break his bread and drink from his cup.

May it indeed be so.


(1) Gray Temple, “Hebrews 13:1-8, 16-16 – Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 14.

(2) Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 55.

(3) Temple, op. cit., 16.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Piers McGrandle, Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest (London: Continuum, 2004), 123; cited in A. N. Wilson, The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible, (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 79.

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

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Truth in Advertising

Luke 13:10-17; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Hebrews 12:18-29


God spent six days in the work of creating and then took a day off on the seventh. God rested. The scribe of the Genesis account doesn’t use the word “Sabbath,” but all the scripture editors after that time assumed that “Sabbath” was meant. The word “Sabbath” doesn’t show up until the work of a later editor who wrote down in Exodus 20 the laws we know as the Ten Commandments:

Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. Six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Do not do any work on it . . . . because the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day. That is why the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-10a, 11-12)

As the Exodus account unfolds, God tells Moses:

Tell the Israelites: “Be sure to keep my sabbaths, because the Sabbath is a sign between me and you in every generation so you will know that I am the Lord who makes you holy. Keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you. Everyone who violates the Sabbath will be put to death.... Do your work for six days. But the seventh day is a Sabbath of complete rest that is holy to the Lord....The Israelites ... observe the Sabbath in every generation as a covenant for all time. It is a sign forever between me and the Israelites that in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day the Lord rested and was refreshed.” (Exodus 31:13-17)

The curious thing is that there is no mention of sabbaths in all the accounts of events from the creation until Israel’s arrival at Mt. Sinai. Apparently none of descendants of Adam and Eve or the patriarchs knew anything about Sabbath-keeping. 

The first mention of Sabbath was in reference to the gift of manna. Collect it every day for six days (it won’t keep overnight), but on the sixth day collect two days worth which will keep the second day. The seventh day is “a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord” (Exodus 16:23). That is when the weekly Sabbath apparently becomes as a day of rest from ordinary secular labor. Ever since then the Sabbath has been a problem.

Some of you may remember when the only places open on Sundays were churches. No grocery stores, no gas stations, no restaurants. Sometime in the early 20th century one of the controversial issues before a Presbyterian General Assembly had to do with Sunday newspapers. They shouldn’t be printed on Sunday or delivered on Sunday. It wouldn’t surprise me if a few diehards said they shouldn’t be read on Sunday.

Let’s get practical. Every farmer knew that they couldn’t take a day off from milking cows or feeding and watering livestock. The circadian rhythms of biology don’t take every seventh day off. Life goes on.

There as a time, however, when strict practitioners of Judaism prepared the food for the Sabbath the day before. And ultra-strict observers of the Sabbath Law hired non-Jews to do necessary work on the Sabbath, including turning lights on and off and tearing toilet tissue.

That kind of overly-slavish approach to the observance of the Law was picayune in the eyes of Jesus. It was right up there with counting out the tithe of dill seed, lest one too few or one too many seeds be set aside for God. Observing the Law to that minute a degree wholly loses the intent of the Law, which was to glorify God.

The religious leaders had evolved a code of many actions that were forbidden on the Sabbath, including any type of work. They regarded healing as part of a doctor's profession and thus was work. Practicing one’s profession on the Sabbath was prohibited. The synagogue leader spoke to the people rather than to Jesus. He could not see beyond the law to compassion which Jesus had shown in healing this disabled woman.

The leader had concluded that if Jesus wanted to heal people, he should reserve his healing work for one of the other six days, any day but the Sabbath. If Jesus had stopped healing on the Sabbath he would have been endorsing the many petty, human-derived laws that had grown up around God’s basic laws regarding Sabbath observance. Jesus could not abide by those laws because they did not fulfill God’s intention for the Sabbath and were burdensome on the people.

What “work” had Jesus done? All he had done was to reach out and touch her. That wasn’t even as much work as was required to lead an ox or donkey to the water trough. Yet the synagogue leader and others like him – “hypocrites” to Jesus’ way of thinking – could not see past their laws. They hid behind their sets of complex and confusing laws and avoided the obligations which love entailed. As Paul reminded the Corinthian church people in his second letter, “He has qualified us as ministers of a new covenant, not based on what is written but on the Spirit, because what is written kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

On another occasion Jesus addressed a deputation of Pharisees, saying,

“You ignore God’s commandment while holding on to rules created by humans and handed down to you. . . . Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and ‘The person who speaks against father or mother will certainly be put to death.’ But you say, ‘If you tell your father or mother, “Everything I’m expected to contribute to you is corban (that is, a gift I’m giving to God),” then you are no longer required to care for your father or mother.’ In this way you do away with God’s word in favor of the rules handed down to you, which you pass on to others.” (Mark 7:8-13)

People today can use the letter of the law to rationalize away their obligation to care for others (for example, by tithing regularly and then refusing to help a needy neighbor because that would take them beyond their tithe). Jesus declares that people’s needs are more important than rules and regulations. Our Lord commissions us to take time to help others, even if doing so might compromise our public images.

So we get caught between who we want others to think that we are and what we are under the facade of our public images. We proclaim grace but cling to law. Jesus called that sin. The personas of all of us together as the church make up a ragout of mixed messages when we try to say what we are about as the church. The church is not the community of the sinless. Rather we are the community of recovering sinners. We aren’t perfect. Often it’s one step forward and two steps backwards.

When the church gets all huffy about the minute intricacies of law and ritual rather than being hot and bothered about injustice and wholeness, the image is off-putting to the very people who desperately need the message of healing which Jesus was always proclaiming in word and action.

Eugene Peterson once said, 

“There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church. There’s sin in the local bank. There’s sin in the grocery stores. . . .Frederick von Hügel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There’s no life in the bark. It’s dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it’s prone to disease, dehydration, death. So, yes, the church is dead, but it protects something alive.” (1)

Yes, we are sinners. Individually and collectively. No, we will never make ourselves perfect by our own efforts. Thanks, be to God that Jesus Christ makes us perfect in the final accounting. The ultimate truth to be advertised is not our adherence to the subsections and subclauses of law made up by sinful human beings. Our truth in advertising is that through God’s grace in Jesus Christ is that we are set free from the spiritual sicknesses that disable us. That makes every day a holy Sabbath to God!

Thanks be to God!


(1) Homiletics, August 22, 2010.


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

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Holy Arson

Luke 12:49-56; Isaiah 5:1-7; Hebrews 11:29-12:2


Good literature, drama, or cinema draws the reader or watcher into the action. We have all read a book which we couldn’t put down, or seen a play or movie that had us glued to our seat until the last climactic action took place. The very best actors, authors, dramatists, screen writers, cinematographers, and directors can make it happen for us. We may be able to see what the characters cannot see and know what is going to happen long before it actually happens. We can feel the tingle in our nerves, we can cut the tension with a knife.

Luke records that same kind of tension in today’s gospel reading. Jesus knows that he’s on a road that leads to conflict and to death. Now that he’s chosen his path, he just wants to get there. He can feel the pot simmering; he wants it to boil. It is agony for him to know that his message has not been accepted by the religious authorities. He wonders, when will they’ll come to get him, who will turn him in, how many days has he left to work. He doesn’t want a few warning sparks, he wants a blazing fire. In the midst of this tension, Jesus talks to his followers about conflict and about the price of the way they’ve chosen.

He starts by talking about peace.“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, I have come instead to bring division.” Now, peace was what Jesus most wanted to bring to the earth. At his birth, angels had announced, “Glory to God in heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors” (Luke 2:14). As Jesus taught and healed, his followers began to catch a vision of what that peace might be.

The prophets had spoken of a life that was full, of a peace that included enough for everyone and an end to exploitation. Jesus spoke the same message. Peace was more than a political absence of war. It was more than feeling good or being nice. Living by a vision of peace meant you had to choose where you would place your trust, how you would spend your money and time.

I imagine that somewhere along the way, it became apparent that the general public wasn’t buying the message. People weren’t eager to stop storing up their wealth in barns and start sharing it with those who have less. “After all,” they said, “we might need it someday. And, why should we trust someone else to share with us?” It’s the age-old human propensity to live out of fear of scarcity rather than gratitude for abundance. Whatever we have, we always want more, whether it’s paper money or paper clips.

Jesus’ hearers weren’t ready to trust the community over their own ambition. People might have been tired of the old ways, but they weren’t about to change the power structures even when they saw how destructive they were. In the end, Jesus would stand over Jerusalem and weep, “If only you knew on this of all days the things that lead to peace” (Luke 19:41). They had heard the message from the prophets and from Jesus himself, but they didn’t know how to live by peace, or how badly they needed it.

The people who did try to live by his vision found that their lives weren’t very peaceful. Many of them had experienced healing, and many had changed their priorities. Maybe they expected their private lives to improve, even if the outside world was being torn apart. But conflict in their families increased when they started on this new way. The older generation felt rejected when the younger folks turned away from their traditions. And we thought that was a problem new to our own times. The established people felt criticized and insulted by Jesus’ sermons. In other families, the younger ones felt abandoned when the elders went off with Jesus, or maybe they just resented their inheritance being squandered by people who always had seemed so responsible before.

Life with Jesus was anything but peaceful. Maybe the new disciples had accepted that they weren’t going to convince the whole Roman empire of Jesus’ way, but they probably thought their own families would understand what they were talking about. It must have been painful that the people closest to them didn’t share enthusiasm for this new preaching, this radically different view of God, of life, of responsibility.

When the tension was ready to explode, Jesus said some new things about peace. Jesus said he had not come to bring peace, rather he had come to start the process of peace — to show a new way. He said that his way involves making choices — choices about priorities and money and loyalties. Division always results from making those kinds of choices. Division was the only way to peace. When they decided to follow Jesus, they had to expect conflict. They didn’t have to be ashamed of it. They weren’t bad disciples because of it. Conflict happened. Peace would come, but only through walking a hard road and enduring hard conflicts on the way.

These words remind me of the wonderfully bucolic painting style of Thomas Kincade. His pictures are filled with heaps of flowering plants and everything is well-manicured. Nothing is out of place. The life Jesus lived and the lives his followers lived would never have fitted into a Thomas Kincade picture.

What do Jesus’ hard words say to us? They acknowledge that Jesus and his disciples had family conflict, as we all do. Having a perfect family life was not a required trait for disciples in the early church. You could be a good disciple or even a leader of disciples, even if it was all torn up at home.

Most of our conflicts at home are not about the lofty things Jesus was talking about. We don’t argue about basic life choices, like security and values and ultimate loyalties. Yet those values and choices underlie a lot of what we do argue about. Core values can make for wonderful common ground within which we can hassle out the less lofty points. The distance can also be terrifying when the values themselves don’t meet. Jesus’ disciples must have experienced the terrifying distances when they chose to follow him. They left their livelihoods, their tools of the trade, and their families, too.

What Jesus says is not just about families of kinship. The hard choices that we sometimes have to make are also part of those larger families of church and community. Too often we gloss over our differences and try to keep everything under control. That kind of peace is a lie. Or we go out of our way to accentuate the differences, always bringing them up and highlighting them so that they never get worked out in an acceptable way. We dig at old wounds and keep them festering. That is far from the peace of Christ and farther from the dividing that is the beginning point for the process of making of peace.

More than talking about families, blood-related or not, Jesus seems to be telling us again that the choices we make about what we believe and what we value and how we spend our time are important. They have consequences in our relationships at home, at work, in the community, in the clubs and organizations we join, in our cultural and political lives, and in the church. Jesus invites us to risk choosing what brings peace in the end, even though it may bring division in the present. Following his way, we may feel the heat and experience the tension which builds to an explosion.

What do we do in the mean time? We do what Jesus talks about over and over again. We take heart from those who walk the path with us and who have gone before us; we support one another in trying to live by values that will bring wholeness to this world. We trust that peace will come. We put the process of Christ’s peacemaking in his hands. We keep walking the paths of righteousness, justice, and compassion, even as the tension keeps on building. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. Michelangelo had to chip stone off the marble block in order to create the Pieta. The woodcarver has to whittle bits of wood away to make a carving. The etcher uses acid to eat away a bit of metal to make plate which will print an etching.

The peace that Jesus seeks to bring is when you and she, and he and you, and you and I whittle, chip, eat away at the things that separate us from God and from each other. God started all this by sending Jesus as flesh and blood to be flesh and blood alongside us, to suffer as we suffer, to dream as we dream, to struggle as we struggle. God knew that it was an incendiary mix. Something was going to happen. And God chose to do it together with our ancestors, with us, and with the generations which will come after us. There is an African proverb that says it all: “If we want to go fast, go alone. If we want to go far, go together.” God wants to go far with us. And if it takes a fire to make it happen, then God will send the Holy Spirit to light the kindling.


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

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Is God Ashamed of You?

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

“Faith is the reality of what we hope for, the proof of what we don’t see.” Who of us hasn’t heard and heard that verse from Hebrews 11. It is so cliched that it doesn’t get caught by our brains as it speeds between our ears.

Scottish New Testament scholar William Barclay begins his study of this passage this way:

“To the writer to the Hebrews faith is a hope that is absolutely certain that what it believes is true, and that what it expects will come. It is not hope which looks forward with wistful longing; it is hope which looks forward with utter certainty. It is not hope which takes refuge in a perhaps; it is hope which is founded on a conviction.” (1)

Frances Taylor Gench, professor of biblical interpretation at Union Presbyterian Seminary, notes that the word faith is found twenty-four times in Hebrews 11 alone, and more than in any other book in the New Testament. She contends that what the word means for this unknown author is best described as faithfulness. 

“It speaks of faith as active obedience. It is that characteristic of the Christian life that enables one both to persevere even in the midst of difficult circumstances and to step out into the unknown with the courage to live in a risky and vigorous way.... It enables believers to live by a vision of the realities of God and God’s purposes for the earth, a vision that is not yet present or visible to the eye. It empowers believers to move into the future with trust and confidence, knowing that the future belongs to God.”(2)

We are often caught up with the Hebrews author in calling people of faith sojourners through this life. That’s a nice thought, but isn’t it a rather pessimistic escapist approach to living faithfully in the world? If we take it at face value, then it seems to deny the view that God intends to redeem the whole of creation, a creation that is groaning in the drudgery and hopelessness of it all. Does our Hebrews author mean that God intends to save only those who are faithful and to effect this salvation by removing them from the wickedness and destruction of the world? Does this theological version of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk’s command to his engineer, “Beam me up, Scotty,” aid and abet the millennialist notion that some will be raptured and the rest left behind? Does God really intend simply to transfer those spiritual ones who have faith from this “vale of tears” to a “sweet and blessed country,” a “sweet by and by,” the home of God’s elect”? 

Scriptures can be used to go either way with this. And to do so is really to miss the mark. We have a variety of viewpoints represented by the writers of the scripture, all trying to be true to what they know of God in their time and situation. I’m not belittling them, but on the surface, scripture could almost seem like the English composition class project of tag-team writing a novel, with each successive student adding another chapter until a conclusion is reached, often in a most roundabout way.

So we have to step back and broaden the viewpoint. The author of Hebrews does this to some extent. In our reading today, some verses and people were omitted. And more follow where we left off until we get to the end of the section where the author celebrates the great cloud of witnesses.

The Hebrews writer starts with the classic case of Abraham and Sarah. In the biblical narrative, those two people carry a lot of weight. Abraham and Sarah this and Abraham and Sarah that. They sojourned. They waited. They never got what they were promised, barely a whiff of it. Over the course of it all they stayed fairly true to God. But they didn’t really have any notion of what God was doing with them and for them, where God was leading them. 

It’s difficult to follow God when we aren’t sure where God is leading. It’s all right for a while, but we get antsy, impatient, chomping at the bit to be in control, to do it on our own. It’s a lot like the focus of a cartoon I saw recently. A sales clerk was talking up a new GPS unit designed particularly for men. It gives a few directions, then turns itself off so the man can be comfortable wandering around without a clue.

In some ways that’s exactly what the church has been doing more and more for the last fifty years or so. The good news is that it won’t last forever. The bad news is that we are only about half way through this cultural, social, technological, theological upheaval. The good news is that God will meet us on the other side. The bad news is we are going to have to ride it out, and in order to do so, are going to have to jettison a lot of the cargo we’ve always thought we couldn’t do without. The good news is that despite appearances to the contrary, God really is in the midst of it all. 

This is not new to the church. According to Phyllis Tickle, this is at least the third time the church has gone through this. It happened in the sixth century as the collapse of the Roman empire was complete and the church took refuge in the monasticism that carried it for the next five hundred years. 

Then in the eleventh century, Islamic political supremacy threatened much of Mediterranean Europe and the response was the Crusades which helped usher in a whole new era for the church as a political and military power and all the trappings that went with that. 

That era became the fertile ground for the Renaissance which paved the way for the 16th century, the rise of feudal lords and nation states, and the Reformation guided by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and countless others who used the burgeoning resources of movable type to move a world. 

Now the democratizing information explosion of the 21st century is the hotbed of what Tickle has called “the Great Emergence,” the next great era of the church. 

Tickle, in her book of that title, doesn’t do much to work farther backwards in time, but I think that the case can be made that the ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ, and the following apostolic age, was the previous point in time when heaven was busting out all over (or as it usually appears to anyone in the midst of it, all hell is breaking loose).

That’s the situation that the Hebrews author was describing. The writer was trying to keep the people focused on God and their Christ-gift of salvation. They had been living thinking that Jesus would return any day, that everything would be all right and that it was just around the corner, on the sunny side of the street. But patience was running out, keeping a stiff upper lip and a raised chin was wearing thin. It was getting harder and harder to perceive God’s activity in all the stuff that looked like inactivity. Sound familiar?

The Hebrews writer is telling the people not to blink all at the same time. That’s when something will happen and they will miss it. Isn’t that the gist of what Jesus was trying to say to the people to whom he was speaking. Be alert. Be watchful. Be vigilant. Don’t be weighted down. Nancy Price tells of a Dr. Wise, a retired Methodist pastor, who spoke gently, but with peaceful conviction of the reality in his life: “The farther up the hill you get, the less you want to carry.”(3)

Faith matters. Our faith gives assurance that God has our best interests at heart, knows what we hope for, and holds our future — a collective future as God’s people. John Calvin certainly believed in God’s ability to deal with the hopes, the dreams, the untried and untested realities of what we know nothing about. There are more words dedicated to faith in his Institutes than any other subject. Calvin thought of faith as “the firm knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us,” the conviction, the certainty, that God cares about us all.

We think often of home as somewhere we come from, and where often, after time, we cannot go back to. The Hebrews writer turns that around. Home is where we are all headed, circuitously, at varying paces, and through so much stuff that it makes John Bunyan’s pilgrim, Christian, look like a whiny wimp as he progresses.

The Hebrews writer throws in a curious thought as this section closes out, the idea of God not being ashamed to be called the God of those who live by faith. The only other time shame is used in this way is in Luke and Mark, where Jesus says, 

“All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me. All who want to save their lives will lose them. But all who lose their lives because of me will save them. What advantage do people have if they gain the whole world for themselves yet perish or lose their lives? Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Human One will be ashamed of that person when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.” (Luke 9:23-26; // Mark 8:34-38). 

Is God ashamed of you? Is God ashamed of your life of faith or your journey of discipleship? Is God ashamed of your wrestling with the reality of what you hope for and the proof of what you don’t see? God is bigger than everything we face. Surely our lives are in excellent care, though the seas roar and the mountains quake, physically, socially, culturally, even theologically. God has prepared a homeland for us and wants to be proud to be our God.

And through Christ, God will be proud of us.

(1) William Barclay, Daily Bible Study: The Letter to the Hebrews. (Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, 1955), 144-145.
(2) Hebrews and James [Westminster Bible Companion Series]. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 63.
(3) Nancy Price, www.midrash.joinhands.com, Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 11:31 AM. 

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.