Covenant Presbyterian Church

New Website!

2008-12-16T09:55:00.005-06:00

Covenant's got a new Website!

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Click here to go there!

(www.covenanttuscaloosa.com)

Sermon, October 5, 2008, World Communion Sunday

2008-10-05T10:13:00.002-05:00

“Below or Above” (World Communion Sunday)
Rick Olson, October 5, 2008

The parable of the tenants, which Frank read a few minutes ago, is pretty harsh. In its normal interpretation, it’s taken as a warning to the religious authorities of the day. The tenants represent religious authorities of the state of Israel, who are pictured as stewards of God’s good creation, represented by a vineyard. When the time for harvest came, the landowner God sends slaves to collect the produce, minus the cut the tenant-farmers get for their labor Israel. The slaves represent the prophets, and the Israelite religious authorities—who are the ones listening to Jesus preach the parables—the religious authorities are depicted killing the prophets God has sent to collect the harvest. They beat one, kill another, and stone a third. The God-slash-landowner sends some more slaves-slash-prophets, and the religious-authorities-slash-tenants kill those as well. Then God-slash-landowner sends his son, saying “They’ll respect my son,” and you only get one guess as to who the son might represent, and when the landowner sends his son, the tenant-slash-religious-authorities kill him too, which upsets the landowner, and when Jesus asks the religious authorities what the landowner does, the religious-authorities to whom he is speaking say: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

And you’d think it would be like “Oh! Snap!” Gotcha! But no: the chief priests and scribes don’t tumble immediately that he’s talking about them, not until he spells it out: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” They finally figure out that Jesus is talking to them, according to Matthew, and so plot to kill him.

But look at how we’ve been talking about this parable: we’ve been calling the overlord both God and landowner, the chief priests and scribes both religious-authorities and tenants and etc. And this indicates that there are at least a couple of ways to read this story . . . and to see what they might be, consider: what if this parable were to be preached to real, live tenant farmers? How would they interpret the parable? And tenant farming being as widespread even today, you can bet that it happens a lot. How might an Apartheid-era sharecropper in South Africa hear this? Or a campesino in Latin America, or a migrant worker on the Great Plains? Who would they identify with and, more importantly, who would they identify God as? Remember: these folks know about being sharecroppers, they know about having to come up with the required amount for the landowners whether the harvest is plentiful or not.

And in fact, that’s the way a lot of them become tenants on their own land … it happened in Apartheid-era South Africa, as foreign came in and began charging the native landowners for goods and services, and in a good year, they could pay for their seed and implements but in a bad year—and there are a lot in South Africa—in a bad year, they couldn’t pay their bills, and so they’d put up their land for collateral, but there’d come along another bad year, and pretty soon they couldn’t make the nut on their loan and the lender owned the land . . . that happened in the American mid-West, and it’s why theirs so few independent family farmers left, they are tenants or workers on the land they once owned, and corporate farming is the rule . . .

And so any tenant farmers listening to Jesus would know about the rich land owner—who left the tenants in charge and went to another country, the classic absentee land-owner—they were the ones who drove their grand-fathers and great-grandfathers off their land, they were the people who made their ancestors tenants on their own land . . .

And so there are at least two ways to read any scripture passage: from the above and from below, from the vantage point of the landowner and from that of the tenants, the point of view of the haves and the have nots. And—hold your cards and letters, I’m not advocating tenants murdering their landlords or anything but you can surely see that depending on where you sat you might have more sympathy with one side or another in this parable. And Matthew—writing for a upper-class Jewish crowd—most naturally slanted this story so that we’d think of God as the landowner, so it was quite a shock when the religious leaders realized that far from being identified with the landowner, far from being identified with God, they’re just tenants in the story . . . but any tenant farmers in Matthew’s readership wouldn’t think of it that way, they’d know exactly who they were in the parable, and exactly what the absentee landowner was . . .

Everybody hears the scripture from their own social location, according to their own context. Each of the people here in this sanctuary does, but so do all who hear it around the world. And each culture that hears it draws different lessons from the scripture than another would. That’s the nature of hearing, the nature of stories, the nature of context. And that’s the nature of World Communion Sunday . . . it was illustrated beautifully by the poly-lingual reading of the Ten Commandments . . . each of those languages represents a different way of hearing the scripture . . . a Mexican camposino will not hear it the same as a Parisian dressmaker who won’t hear it the same as a Korean postman. A Nigerian bricklayer will draw different lessons from a Greek bookseller who will look at it differently from a baby-boomer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

We all have different perspectives, different needs, different expectations, and yet . . . we are united in Christ. We are one in the spirit, as the song goes, and as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a few minutes we should remember this, and think about all our brothers and sisters around the globe who are doing the same. Amen.

Sermon, September 28, 2008, Philippians 2:1-13

2008-09-28T10:03:00.000-05:00

"Fear and Trembling" (Philippians 2:1-13)
Rick Olson, September 28, 2008

I like the central core of this morning's passage so much that we often use it as an affirmation of faith: "Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited . . ." It's called the "Christ hymn" – using the term "hymn" loosely – because scholars think that it originally it was some kind of poetic faith recitation, some kind of creedal statement that perhaps got repeated by fledgling, first-century congregations . . . maybe the house-church preacher would get all wild and off-the-wall with some sermon or another, and he'd look out on the congregation and some of them are asleep but some of them have this skeptical look about them, or – worse – a look like they're gonna lynch him because of something he's just said that got to them where they lived, and after the sermon the preacher would stand there in the lamp-light and say "Now let's all stand and say what we believe by reading Theophilus' Christ hymn from the bulletin . . . We believe that Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God . . ." And it would have the effect that affirmations of faith have today, of diverting attention from a lousy sermon, true, but more importantly, grounding the fellowship of believers in some foundational truths, of reminding them of why they're huddled in a dimly-lit room in the first place, listening to the Word of God, struggling to discern it's meaning for their lives, or – perhaps especially true in our century – whether it has any meaning whatsoever.

And the Philippians Christ hymn encapsulates the core of Christian belief in beautifully poetic language – though he was in the form of God – other translations, perhaps more precisely, say "though he had the nature of God . . ." – he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited . . . although he had – in some undefined sense – God's nature, God's form, Christ did not regard this equality – again in some undefined sense – something to be – as our translation has it, exploited, but others read grasped, with almost violent intent, think perhaps of a relative who grasps at an inheritance greedily for his own gain, or a robber who grabs at your purse, Christ did not consider this equality as something to be clutched at, taken advantage of, exploited . . . but emptied himself, poured out of himself the features of his God-hood, or perhaps emptied himself of himself, of his thoughts of himself, of his self-regard . . . a remarkable image, one so unique that the Greek word for it has entered the theological vocabulary – kenosis, self-emptying . . . Christ's love was a kenotic love, a self-emptying love, a love that gives up it's own self, its own claim to god-hood, its own claim to greatness . . .

And what was left after this self-emptying? The form of a slave, human likeness, human nature . . . three times there's a synonym for form, and each time it's a different word in Greek . . . this phrase is overloaded with likeness, over-burdened with form . . . form, likeness, appearance of a human being . . . we are pounded with it so that it's point is unmistakable . . . it's the incarnation we're talking about here, the taking on of humanity by the divine . . . and being found in this form/likeness/nature, Christ humbled himself, and became obedient, obedient to the point of death, the ultimate humiliation for a being whose nature is that of a God.

And we can see that the first half of the Christ hymn is a downward spiral, an earth-ward slide . . . from the nature of God, to the nature of humanity, from the form of creator to the form of creature . . . from pre-existent equality with his Abba – who is immortal, invincible, God-only-wise – to . . . worm-food, coffin bait, death . . . even a death so ignominious, so lowly, so bone-crushingly horrible, as a death on the cross.

And along the way, it's like his entire life and work are described . . . self-emptying . . . feeding the poor and homeless, accepting and embracing the outcast and marginal, refusing to use power and might to save even his own life, humbling himself in the ultimate manner, submitting to power inferior to his own, to die spiked onto a rough-hewn tree.

And now we come to a big transition-word . . . "there-fore" . . . therefore . . . meaning because of this, God also exalted him, raised him to the highest position, to the loftiest height and gave him the name that is above every name . . . remember that in the ancient word names have power, they are containers of reality, status . . . and the voice of God name-drops power and might and . . . exaltation, and the name is powerful enough that every knee should bend, in heaven and earth and under the earth . . . and that's all over, that's everywhere, all there is folks . . . so that every knee and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of God. And our hymn spins from the nadir of death on a cross, from the maggot-filled earth of crucifixion, to the heights of exaltation, of power and glory and might.

Thus the Christ hymn can be viewed as a curve, in mathematical parlance a parabola where the higher you get the more exalted you are, and it begins with equality to God on one side then plunges down as and it bottoms out in humility and death, and then God takes over and it swoops back up as Christ is exalted above everything under heaven and upon earth . . . and on one side of the curve it's Christ's doing, the self-emptying, the humbling of himself, and on the other it's God's actions, the exalting and glorification . . . and to us, here on the other side of the doctrine of the Trinity, there's a tension between our belief that Jesus and God are one and the same and the hymn's assumption that Christ . . . though pre-existent . . . was not himself God, but Paul was writing 350 years before the Trinity, and probably did not believe Christ and God were unity, but merely equal . . .

And speaking of Paul, whatever he thought of the person of Christ versus that of God, he embedded this creed, this hymn into his letter to the church at Philippi for a reason, in order to tell them – the congregation, that is – something, and if we look at his words that surround the hymn, we can perhaps figure out what it is. First, he tells this congregation, this group of Christians to be of the same mind . . . and here I'm emphasizing that he's telling it to a group, because it's vital to understand that he's not talking primarily to individuals, but to a group of them, to the church at Philippi . . . and he tells them to be of the same mind, and in the Greek it's literally to think the same thing. He's telling them to be unified in their thinking, have the same love, be in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing, he says, from selfish ambition but in humility – and here's that concept again! – in humility regard others as better than yourselves. And now he specifies that he's talking to individuals here, he says "let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others" and it's clear that one of the keys to the group being of one mind is individuals within it being humble, and looking to the interests of others, not themselves . . . and he makes the important link from the thinking or the mind of the group to that of Christ . . . "Let the same mind be in you" – again it's you plural, you the congregation – let the same mind be in you the congregation as in Christ . . . so they are to be of one mind, and the mind they are to be is that of Christ, the thought they're to have is the thought of Christ who though he was in the form of God . . .

And so, the Christ hymn is embedded in exhortation, in moral instruction about how to be Christ's community, Christ's body . . . the thought of this body, it's behavior, it's function is to be that of Christ. Makes sense, if you think about it . . . Paul's dominant image of the church is as the body of Christ on earth, and this is consistent with it . . . the thinking of Christ's body on earth certainly should be the same as it is in heaven . . . and just what that thinking should be is revealed in his life of self-emptying abnegation, his humbling – and in English humility comes from humus, Latin for soil – his earthiness in taking human form, obedient even to the point of death.

Humility is a quality promoted over and over again in the New Testament, but one that's often not exhibited by the church . . . the child-abuse problem in the Roman Catholic Church is a prime example . . . the Catholic hierarchy itself is hardly humble, it hardly embodies the mind of Christ, willing to empty itself of power in the service of all . . . instead, it did just the opposite . . . the hierarchy protected its own power, its own status by not admitting there was a systemic problem, by shuffling off offending members – that is, abusive priests – to where their crimes were not known, to where they inevitably re-offend – as such individuals are known to do. The Catholic Church protected it's own integrity rather than that of it's vulnerable members . . . and what would have happened if it had truly been of the same mind of Christ, who was obedient even unto his own death? How many lives would it have saved from ruination, from being mired in swamps of addiction and shame?

And lest we get big-headed thinking “you know those corrupt Catholics . . .” look at churches in our own denomination, going down the tubes because they are too arrogant to change. Because they look to their own interests, their own comfort – they hate that contemporary worship, or liturgy, it doesn’t feed them – instead of looking to the interests of others, to those who need to hear the Gospel. Paul exhorts congregations to have the same mind – to be unified – and that it be the mind of Christ, who did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but humbled himself, becoming obedient . . . likewise churches are not to regard their special status – their status as Christ's body – as something to be exploited, but they are to humble themselves, becoming obedient, even if it is to the death. Refusing to change to reach out to others is just the opposite, it's disobedience to the command that church communities proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth.

Note once again that Paul is not primarily talking to individuals here, although he certainly is sophisticated enough to know how individual behaviors – i.e., "each of you" looking to your own interests – effect group behavior as a whole. Power-groups coalesce around individuals or programs in the church, they keep others out and prevent them from participating in a meaningful way . . . the excluded often just leave . . . the blame-game is played very well in churches, so well that people who get tired of being scape-goated—and that can include pastors—simply up and leave. And though all of these behaviors can trickle up to effect overall church behavior, they are not what Paul is addressing in this passage. After all, the mission of God doesn’t reside in individuals, but in the individual bodies of Christ called congregations.

But how do address this level, how do you modify the way a group like a church works? By finding new ways of working out problems, of analyzing, of doing the business of the church. And, I’m happy to say, that we are beginning to do this. The Seeker process, as I’m sure you are all aware, has been occupying the leadership of this congregation for almost two years. And in that time, we have learned a different way to behave as a congregation, a different way to analyze and approach our work as Christ’s body. And now that the formal part is over, the real work will begin, as we begin to teach everybody what we have learned, as we apply these methods at every level of the church.

As Paul put it in the closing lines of our passage, we are will be working out our own salvation with fear and trembling, with humility and joy . . . he's not talking about personal salvation here. He's talking about the preservation, the deliverance, the persistence of the church. . . he's talking about the salvation of the fellowship, of the congregation . . . work out your salvation, he says to the congregation at Philippi, with fear and trembling, with reverence and obedience and awe. In the past few years, your Session and the rest of the Seekers have been learning to do just that. And, as I just said but will say again, now the real work begins. Amen.

Sermon, September 21, 2008, Matthew 14:20:1-15

2008-09-21T09:59:00.001-05:00

"An Offensive Arrangement" (Matthew 20:1-15)
Rick Olson, September 21, 2008

Parables are often best served cold, with not a lot of prior heating up by interpretation or explanation's warm embrace, and so I invite you to listen to this parable again, with the knowledge that Jesus is speaking to his disciples here, the folks who've been with him since the beginning, who've sweated with him, watched him sparring the religious authorities and casting out demons . . . they may even have done a little of that work themselves, and so they consider themselves insiders, and rightly so! They've earned it, they've listened to all his teachings and helped him feed the multitudes, and now they've settled down to listen to some parables and he begins this one with "The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard." And they're thinking . . . uh, oh . . . a kingdom parable, this might not be too easy to understand . . . those others we've heard haven't been . . . but this one starts easily enough, the landowner agrees that he'll pay the laborers the usual daily wage, and they go to it . . . they enter the vineyard and begin work.

So far so good. The landowner has hired day laborers, he's gonna get his vines dressed or his grapes picked and they're gonna get a fair days wage . . . the disciples can understand that, they're all hard workers, and the early bird gets the worm, those at that early hour get the reward of getting up so early in the morning . . . a full days pay. And then the owner goes out into the marketplace again, about nine in the morning, and the disciples begin to wonder . . . why didn't he hire enough the first time, but the disciples like that he hires them, idleness is the devil’s plaything, and they undoubtedly had families to feed . . . and the owner says to them "You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right." And he goes out into the marketplace at noon and at three, and the same thing happens, he hires more men, and the disciples are beginning to think "is he nuts? Can't he forecast his labor needs a little bit better?" But the kicker is when he goes out into the marketplace at five in the afternoon, only an hour before closing time, and does the same thing . . . and it seems to the disciples that it's hardly worth the trouble, either the landowner's or that of the laborers themselves.

And then evening comes, and the owner of the vineyard says to his manager – and just why, the disciples wonder, didn't he send his manager to hire the workers in the first place? – the owner says to the manager "Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first." And the disciples say, oh . . . maybe that's what he means by the last shall be first and the first last, they remember Jesus saying stuff like that, in fact he said it just before this parable, the last get their pay first, and so the ones hired at about five come along, and they're paid the usual daily wage, the pay the landowner had agreed upon with the first workers hired, and the anticipation of the disciples listening rises, just as that of the first-hired laborers . . . they're amazed at the landowner's generosity and what's more, they're thinking "If he paid those one-hour-lay-abouts so much, what must he have in store for those who worked all day?" What is he going to give those hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, get-up-early-in-the-A-M folks, who really deserve it?

But when the first-hired come, each one of them receives the usual daily wage, and they grumble, they’re very angry, and they complain to him, saying "These last worked only one hour, and you've made 'em equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat." And the disciples can certainly identify with what they're saying, because they've stood around in the scorching heat, listening to this incomprehensible story – see the sweat dripped from their noses! – and what's more, they've tramped all around Galilee with Jesus, and they are certainly long-suffering. they'd been busy little beavers, working with Jesus . . . and they’d hate to see some Johnny-come-lately disciples get the same as them . . . but the landowner in the story answers the workers saying "Fiends, I am doing you no wrong . . . did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go."

Now. How does this story make you feel? Does it make you uncomfortable, does it make you mad? Do you think that the laborers who worked a full day for the same amount as those who worked an hour got the short end of the stick? Me too. This story goes against every grain that a lifetime of upbringing in this old world can get . . . like a lot of you, I have a keen sense of what's fair and what's not. And we live in a debt-keeping world, one where balances must be kept even. If a pipe-fitter or an electrical engineer or a horse-trainer works 3 hours, we expect her to be paid for three hours, not one, and certainly not for a full day.

As a matter of fact, I think it’s downright fortunate our labor system operates the way it does . . . getting paid proportionate to how long a person works ensures that the system does work . . . if everybody knew they were going to get paid the same amount no matter how long they worked, everybody'd just sleep in until the last minute, then go work for an hour or so and collect a check. Not a lot of work would get done. You might say that the whole social order relies on this principle of "equal pay for equal work," and so the actions of the landowner are deeply subversive, they have the power to overturn the social order . . . maybe that’s why this story creates as great a sense of distress in me as it must have in the disciples, who were after all, insiders in the kingdom. Jesus called to them, of course, they were chosen first.

Back in the ‘70s, equal pay for equal work became a rallying cry of the feminist movement. This was, of course, the idea that women who were hired to do a job ought to be paid the same thing as men who do the same job. It sounds simple, right? Simple and fair . . . but you remember all the griping and moaning and complaining coming from the employers and other pundits who were – just coincidentally, I'm sure – men. They couldn't attack it directly, because it's really such a no-brainer – what man wouldn't gripe to high heaven if – all other things being equal – he didn't get paid the same as the guy next to him? They couldn't attack it directly, so they had to get creative. My favorite was "well, men are the family breadwinners, they need the living wage, women are just dilettantes, working for a little extra income." Such touching concern for families . . . too bad it didn’t carry over to today, when 40 million people are in families below the poverty line . . . And anyway, what skin off of male noses would it have been if women were paid the same as they were? They’d have still get their fair day’s pay . . . and it’s the same with those who were grumbling in our story . . . “Friend,” the landowner says, “I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?” What skin is it off of your nose if I choose to pay them the same as you? You’re getting what we agreed upon . . . and then he puts his finger on it: Or are you envious because I am generous? The problem isn’t the landowner, it’s not what the landowner has done that’s caused them to grumble and complain . . . it comes from within the laborers themselves. They’re envious.

But . . . just who and what are they envying? It can’t be the folks who came late . . . they all got the same amount, which was – significantly – just enough. The only person to envy is the landowner, who they know has enough to pay them more . . . they know that he could give them more if he’d so desired . . . what they envy is the wealth of the landowner, who is giving from his abundance . . . and perhaps their envy is understandable. After all, in the economics of the First Century, “generous landowners” were products of a system that allowed them to accrue great tracts of land at the expense of the original owners, who – through a process of increasing indebtedness – making less than a living wage in bad years and just enough in good years – lost their land and became tenant farmers to these “generous landowners” who thereby accrued larger and larger tracts of land. But when we read this parables “from above,” that is, when we go immediately to the assumption that the landowner is obviously God, then we tend to blame those who were first hired, to act as if it’s all their fault. Refraining from seeing the landowner as God – and neither Jesus nor Matthew tells us that the landowner is supposed to be God – allows us to see some of this parable’s richness.

OK . . . but what does this say about the kingdom of heaven? After all, the first line of the parable is “the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner . . .” If we aren’t supposed to jump the conclusion immediately that the landowner is God, what can we infer about the kingdom from this story of a – typical – landowner and laborers who are – again, typically – envious? Well, let’s see . . . we have a landowner who’s giving from his abundance, who could give more, but doesn’t choose to . . . but what if he can’t give more? What if the riches he controls are not sub-dividable, what if he’s giving all he has? What is there that’s like that? Well, let’s see . . . what’s something you either give or don’t . . . what about . . . forgiveness? Forgiveness – God’s ridiculously bountiful grace – is nonetheless un-dividable . . . forgiving somebody is unitary, you either forgive them or not . . . and in this light, the parable becomes about the ridiculous nature of forgiveness in the Kingdom of heaven . . . it is not dependent upon how much work you do. Those who were there first – like the first-hired, or the disciples who’d been with Jesus since the beginning – don’t get any more grace than those Johnny-come-latelies who’d only worked an hour.

That’s the problem with grace, folks, the problem with the kingdom of heaven . . . unlike the world, where what you get is proportional to what you do – and as in the many cases – way too often, I’m afraid – who you are, what the color of your skin is, or where you live – in God’s kingdom, none of that matters, everything will be reversed, the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And of course, that often feels scandalous to those of us raised up in the world . . . and it is. Like the landowner who paid the same no matter how long they worked, un-earned forgiveness overturns the social fabric of our world, it undermines the very basis of how our society works. We live in a debt-keeping world, a world that expects tit-for-tat, that expects all the books to add up . . . and grace just isn’t like that. Forgiveness isn’t like that . . . and like those who were hired first, like the disciples who heard Jesus’ tale, we insiders are prone to grumble about it. It’s natural, it’s the way we were brought up . . .

But . . . that’s the way grace is, and I thank God for it . . . God’s grace – and it’s kinda sneaky how we got back around to equating the landowner with God, isn’t it? – God’s grace is undividable, it’s the same for you and me and everyone, no matter what we’ve done, no matter who we are, it doesn’t matter how long we’ve been with the program, how many times we’ve gone to church, or anything else, God’s grace is ours, it’s free, period, that’s the end of it, amen.

Sermon, September 14, 2008, Romans 14:1-12

2008-09-14T15:48:00.002-05:00

“Here Comes the Judge” (Romans 14:1-12)
Rick Olson, September 14, 2008

I’m going to back up just a teensy little bit to set the stage for this week’s passage . . . last week we talked about a passage right before this one, though we stopped short of the verses just before. Let’s go back and pick them up by way of segueing into today’s lection: “You know what time it is,” Paul says, “how now is the moment for you to wake from sleep . . . the night is far gone, the day is near” and of course what he’s talking about is the return of Christ, which he believed was right around the corner . . . he believed that it would come before his generation was finished on earth. After all, Jesus had said as much, and this was such an ingrained belief in that first generation of Christians that Paul felt compelled in his first letter to the church at Thessalonica to reassure them that all was well, despite some of their number dying, patently before the second coming. What was going on in the Christian community was a gradual awakening to the fact that the second coming of Christ wouldn’t be quite as soon as some of them had thought. It was sort of like the folks who take all their worldly possessions up onto a mountain, sure that Jesus is coming again at 5:36 am on September 4th, 1908, and when he doesn’t, they gradually begin to look around at one another, then file slowly, a few at a time, down the mountain . . .

What was going on with at least some of the first-generation Christians when Paul wrote Romans somewhere around 60 AD . . . Christianity was in a flux, it had not settled down into an orthodoxy – that wouldn’t happen for a century or so – and there were a lot of opinions about the way Christianity should be. Among those were Paul’s own opinions, and he was writing to kind of give them an overview of his theology, which was very dualistic: as a good apocalyptic Jew he thought in terms of good and evil, light and dark. In the paragraphs right before our passage he says “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”[i]

And so it’s clear that to Paul, that first line of our passage—“Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions”—should be taken in this context of his admonition to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” To put on the Lord Jesus Christ is to welcome those who are weak in the faith, but not for the purpose of feudin’ and fussin’ and fightin’. And what does he mean by “weak in faith?” “Some believe,” he says, “in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.” So: here’s one characteristic of the weak: they restrict their eating. The not weak believe in eating anything. And he says, those who eat everything must not despise those who abstain . . . and those who abstain, must not judge those who eat. Note the difference: he’s warning those who eat not to despise those who don’t, but those who don’t, he warns not to judge. We’ll get back to that a little bit later.

Now. Remember I said that Christianity was in flux? That there had not been an orthodoxy established? That’s what’s going on here. And although we’re not certain about the specifics of what Paul is saying, we know the general outline. There was a debate among first-generation Christians about which and how many rituals must be followed to be Christians in good standing. Most prominent, were the Jewish dietary restrictions of the day, like eating pork or certain kinds of seafood . . . over in Galatians, Paul describes his disagreements with the pillars of the Jerusalem church—James and Peter, among others—about whether or not Christians should observe Jewish dietary rules. And there were apparently other traveling, Christian teachers—perhaps not unlike Paul—who taught that Jewish observances like circumcision and the following of the dietary laws were prerequisite to being Christian. Paul was adamantly opposed to that way of thinking: “we know,” he wrote in Galatians “that a person is justified not by the works of the law” and by law, Paul means Mosaic law “a person is justified not by law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.”[ii]

And so, observing the law in general—and not just dietary laws, but all of the Mosaic law—is not necessary for what Paul calls justification, and we more commonly refer to as salvation. But there were still a large number of brothers and sisters out there who believed that way, who were still what we might call traditional or old-school, that still believed Christians should refrain from doing certain things, like eating certain foods, and in our particular case, meat that had been offered to idols. This stemmed from the general prescription against eating meat offered to God—only members of the priestly caste were allowed to do it—and it had been extended by common practice to meat offered to any god, or as Jews would have it idols. The problem is, you couldn’t always tell if meat had been offered to idols or not, it was common practice to sell such meat in the marketplace, after it had been slaughtered for sacrificial purposes, so it had become common practice in some quarters to avoid eating meat altogether.

But Christians—stemming from the fact that their salvation, their being deemed children of God, comes not through observance of the law but by adoption through Christ—have great freedom which included, apparently, not worrying about whether or not meat had been offered to idols. And for Paul, this freedom in Christ was very important: As he wrote also in Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”[iii] The yoke of slavery he refers to is the Torah and its rules about what you can and cannot eat.

And there were other rules causing problems: religions like Judaism and the pagan faiths of Paul’s converts had festival days. Judaism had Passover and Purim, worshippers of the goddess Astarte had lunar observances, followers of the ba’als had harvest festivals. And for Paul, freedom in Christ extended also to freedom from strict observance of these holy days. As he puts it in our passage, “Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike.” But those who observe the days, just like those who follow dietary laws, observe them in honor of the Lord, and those who don’t do the same. They are all servants of Christ, worshippers of a common Lord. And who is anybody to pass judgment on the servants of another? Who is one servant to pass judgment on another? All serve the same risen Lord.

Those who eat, and those who don’t observe the festival days, who Paul here implies are stronger, must not despise those who do, who hew to the old ways. Those who abstain, who hew to the old ways—who Paul calls weak—are not to pass judgment on those he might call stronger because, as he says, “God has welcomed everyone.” Once again, note the differential: those who are advanced in their faith, those who have claimed their freedom from dietary laws and observance of holy days through Christ, must not despise, must not look down on those whose faiths are weaker, who cling to the old ways. But by the same token, those who are more traditional, more old-fashioned, clinging to the old ways, must not judge those who are more traditional must not pass judgment on those who are more “advanced” in their faiths.

And I don’t know about you, but this is beginning to sound awful familiar. Traditionalists, keepers of the old ways, judging the newer ways to be inadequate or downright unchristian? The less traditional, more “advanced” Christians, looking down their noses at the more traditional in scorn? There’s nothing more smug than a person who’s convinced of the new ways, baby, and who looks upon his more traditional—often older, but often not—brothers and sisters as provincial. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard progressive, mainline Christians—whose churches are by and large failing—make fun of those video-watching, hands-to-Jesus-raising, evangelicals, whose churches, by and large, are growing.

Conversely, there’s nothing more judgmental than Christians who hold to the old ways, who refuse to see that there may be more than one way to worship God, who think that a faith that keeps up with the times is a lesser faith than theirs. Some of those same evangelicals, that advocate that “old-time religion,” where women are in their place and there are no gays anywhere near, are so judgmental, thinking that these peripheral differences, such as about who you ordain or sleep with, are fundamental to the faith, and that more open, tolerant expressions of Christianity are literally the work of Satan.

In a denomination like ours, the motto of which is “reformed and always being reformed,” these divisions become all the more acute. They get labeled conservative and liberal, which is understandable: conservatives tend to resist change, they want to “conserve” the past. Liberals tend to be more comfortable with a more progressive theology and, yes, sometimes contemptuous of those who aren’t; conservatives tend not to be as comfortable with modern theology, and just a weensy bit judgmental of those who are. And it’s splitting our denomination apart.

But it happens within churches too . . . and often—but not always—it’s along generational lines, between people brought up in times. George and Beverly Thompson call these cultural streams, and they point out that at least three are present in a lot of churches: Boomers, Gen-X’ers and so-called “Silents”, those who grew up during World War II. Each of these generational groupings grew up when the conditions surrounding them, with the nation and the local communities, were very different. Because of this, they tend to view the world very differently: Boomers protested the Vietnam War, marched in civil rights demonstrations, dropped in and out of middle-class society, raised kids, married, divorced, and now expect everything life has to offer. Generation X-ers, on the other hand, are less certain, the economic situation is not as clear, they’ve been raised to be more suspicious of middle-class trappings. The Silents are called that way because they don’t believe in protest, they commit to institutions such as church, they helped defeat Hitler and built the post-World War economy. And the point is that each of these groups, because they grew up and matured under very different circumstances, view the world in very different ways, and—this is very important—they view church differently too. Many times, without even knowing it: everybody tends to think that what is apparent, real and important to them is that way to everybody else. And it just isn’t true.

And it’s along these lines that deep divisions within churches tend to develop, that underlying splits emerge—that often never surface directly, but only through trivial carping and fighting. These generational divides, between people with different world views, different ideas about how society and church should be run—can cause deep fissures within our churches.

But Paul is having none of it. We are not to judge or despise one another, but we’re to welcome everyone. And once we get them here, we shouldn’t expect them to be just like us, to like the same music we do, to commit to do the same things as us . . . As Paul says, why do we pass judgment on one another? Or why do we despise one another? As Paul says, we all stand before the judgment seat of God, not that of one another. We all serve the same Lord, who is Jesus Christ. Who are we to pass judgment on another servant of Christ? We are—and will be—accountable to God alone. Amen.
[i] Romans 13:13-14
[ii] Galatians 2:16
[iii] Galatians 5:1

Sermon, September 7, 2008 -- Romans 13:8-14

2008-09-07T15:57:00.000-05:00

“Wouldn’t It Be Lover-ly” (Romans 13:8-14)
Rick Olson, September 7, 2008

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately . . . so naturally I went to the World Wide Web to consult the “Love Doctor,” and he has a Love Calculator, and so I entered Pam’s maiden name and mine, and wouldn’t you know it? We only had a 22% chance to make it together before we were married, and I sure wish the Love Doctor was around back then . . . we wouldn’t have wasted those 29 years. I was just about to call a lawyer when I decided to take one more shot at it, and I entered our married names this time, and what do you know . . . we now have a 96% chance of making it. Boy, am I relieved.

Of course, I’m just kidding . . . I wouldn’t really take the advice of some silly computer . . . love’s too important a thing to take lightly . . . I mean, all you need is love, right? Love is a many splendored thing, as anybody on the love boat could tell you . . . love lifts you up where you belong, I love New York . . . heck, I love American style. Have trouble with your love story? Then take love potion number nine, and you’ll be a victim of that crazy little thing called love, but don’t worry – there must be fifty ways to leave your lover. We’ve got lovin’ in the morning, lovin’ in the evening, lovin’ ‘bout supper time . . . we’re so much in love with love that we even have our own love holiday, with it’s own Saint, and it’s a wonder his name isn’t St. Love . . .

We use love to sell things, everything from toothpaste to deodorant, from Ford Broncos to Dell Computers . . . or maybe that’s sex we use to sell things . . . I do tend to get them confused. After all, we call the act of sex “making love,” like if we just have sex enough times, love will be somehow generated out of thin air. Love’s become an item, a commodity – if we just have enough of it, our lives will be perfect. And the Beatles sing about love as if it’s something you get – love, love, love . . . love is all you need.

But at the same time, we also think of love as an emotion, something you feel . . . I love you, I love my car, I love my cat. We talk about the act of starting to love as “falling in love,” like “falling off a cliff,” as if we can’t help ourselves, it’s an accidental kind of thing – I saw her standing there, and I just flat-out fell in love. This emotional love comes with a pleasurable feeling, a warm-and-fuzzy state of euphoria – flushed cheeks, tingly, prickly hairs-on-end . . . clichéd – but accurate – descriptions of what many of us call “being in love.”

But have you ever noticed that these things wear off after awhile? That cool, sleek car that gave you goose bumps when you first drove it can become nothing more than a hunk of painted metal, especially after a few repairs. That delightful guy you thought was the be-all and end-all of the known universe turns into something ordinary, well-worn, Ozzie to your Harriet – and that little rush when you see him is just no longer there. Scientists – wouldn’t you just know – have studied it, and they’ve found out that pleasurable feeling is caused by a kind of brain-chemical called an endorphin that’s released into the bloodstream when you see your honey, and that eventually, after repeated sightings, it’s no longer released. This takes about seven years, thus accounting for – you guessed it – the seven-year itch.

Marilyn Monroe aside, it’s at this point – if not before – that maintaining a relationship starts to be real work, and loving someone becomes more and more active, more and more trouble. And that’s where Paul comes in, because that’s what love is to him – real, down-to-earth, matter-of-fact, work. In fact, he starts with the image of love as an obligation, as something you owe somebody else. How romantic is that?

“Owe no one anything,” he says, “except to love one another.” And that’s a real downer, because it sounds pretty cold – if we love someone because we have to, it’s can’t be worth much, can it? And what does he mean, owe no one anything, except to love one another? Why would I owe you love, and you me? What could I have done for you that incurred such an obligation? But here’s a thought – maybe it’s not to one another that we owe it to love one another . . . maybe Joe doesn’t owe it to Clara to love her, and Clara doesn’t owe it to Bill to love him, but Fred and Cleo owe it to God to do their loving. And this makes sense, because Paul goes on and says “the one who loves another has fulfilled the law,” and here, as almost everywhere else, Paul is talking about the Torah, the Mosaic law. And Jews are bound to observe it out of covenant obligation. So maybe the obligation is to God for Christians to love one another.

In fact, our passage begins and ends with two very similar statements, both about love fulfilling the law. So it’s a good bet that that’s what’s on Paul’s mind – the fulfilling of the law. In fact, the first statement is a premise, and the final one is a conclusion, restating the premise. And between the two is the proof – all you logical Presbyterian types understand that, and -he lists four of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet,” and any other commandment – and says they’re summed up by only one: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And note that he doesn’t say replaced by the love commandment, but summed up, gathered together, united, and it makes sense – if you love your neighbor, you certainly won’t kill her, or covet her cat or her husband; you certainly won’t steal from her or commit adultery against her. In fact, he says, love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, it is the fulfilling of the law. Q.E.D.

He uses this notion of love as the summing-up of the law to prove his point, and the reason he could do this is that it was a common belief among Christians and Jews of the day – Christians, of course, because Jesus had said something a lot like it like it, but contrary to popular belief among Christians, who think that we invented love, it wasn’t original with Jesus, either – it was a common teaching among Jewish rabbis of the day. But if it was a common belief, why did he make a big deal out of it? Why did he have to write this paragraph at all?

The key is in the word “fulfill,” and his declaration that love fulfills the law – he’s saying that it doesn’t just sum it up, it doesn’t just recapitulate it, but it satisfies the purpose that God intended for it. And that’s about as radical as it comes . . . Paul is saying that love does what the law was intended to do, it fulfills its role.

But this creates a problem for us Christians: isn’t the whole point of the Gospel grace? Isn’t the point that our being made right with God, being justified, being saved, is free, and that we don’t have to do anything, in fact we can’t do anything, to merit it? This love your neighbor stuff sounds like just another thing you have to do to get saved. Hasn’t he just substituted loving your neighbor for abstaining from pork, for remembering to wash up before a meal? Isn’t this just works righteousness in disguise?

But Paul’s not talking righteousness here – he doesn’t even mention the word once, or salvation, either. For Paul, that was never the purpose of the law, to make the Jews – or anybody else, for that matter – righteous before God. For Paul, the law’s purpose was never to provide salvation. The purpose of the law to Paul is to reveal the glory of God to the nations, so that “Israel might be God’s light to the world.”1 And so fulfilling the purpose of the law has nothing to do – in Paul’s mind – with whether someone is saved or not – it’s to show the glory of God to the world, to reveal the meaning of life in the Lord. In a Christian context, we might say it’s the heart of evangelism. Through our communities united by love, we’re to be beacons to the world. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.

That’s why Paul puts it in terms of something we owe God: obligation comes after the fact, after receiving something. God has done something for us, sent Christ to Earth to set us free, made a new covenant with us in his blood, and now our obligation, our side of the covenant, is to love one another. Just as Israel’s side of the bargain was to obey God’s commandments, we’re to love our neighbors as ourselves.

I wonder how big our churches would be if we truly practiced loving one another, just within these walls, if we truly behaved in our churches as if we loved one another? How big could we grow if people could truly see that we’re different from the world at large, that we treat each other with love? I don’t know how many times I’ve heard from people who used to go to church, but something happened, somebody snubbed them, somebody said something hurtful, or they just got tired of the backbiting and the jealousy. In a lot of churches, far from acting like they love one another, members jockey for power, for control, over whose version of the Gospel will be taught, and in what way it will be taught. That is human nature, I know, but we’re supposed to transcend that, we’re supposed to be better than that . . .

And in our passage, Paul’s speaking about loving our neighbors, not just other members of our church family. How in the name of you-know-who are we supposed to do that? I mean, I don’t even like my neighbor – he’s crabby, he plays his music too loud, and he yells at my dog. And to top it all off, he’s not a Christian, he makes no bones about it . . . he thinks it’s pretty stupid to worship some two-thousand-year-old carpenter, and how am I supposed to love a guy like that? And furthermore, the gospels make it pretty clear that the definition of “neighbor” is wider than just the guy next door – remember the Good Samaritan? Am I supposed to love people around the world, with whom I have nothing in common, many of whom – lest we forget September 11 – seem to not particularly love me?

Well . . . yes, but maybe not quite in the way we assume . . . Paul’s not talking about some emotion or feeling, he’s not talking about being in love, about something we can’t help . . . he’s talking about action, something we do. For Paul – and, I think, for most of Scripture – love is action, it’s doing, it’s hard work. . . . and as we’ve seen, we’re obligated to do it. Even if we can’t stand our neighbor, even if we get tired of his face, even if we think his ideas are dangerously crazy, we are to engage with them, to treat them as if we genuinely like them.

And you know what? When we grit our teeth and treat someone we dislike as if we deeply care for them, a funny thing can happen on the way to the forum – we can develop a genuine affection for them, it happens all the time. For a start, treat everybody as you yourself would want to be treated, and then go further . . . be kind to them, do things for them . . . and most of all, try to put yourself in their shoes, try to imagine what their life must be like. Instead of just shaking your head at something you don’t like, try to understand why they are that way . . . is it their religion? Is it the way they were raised, what happened to them as children? Are they insecure, like we all are sometimes? To love someone, in Scripture, is to do for them, it’s not necessary to feel for them . . . although that certainly is expected to come.

New Testament scholar Tom Wright says that Paul’s love is “tough love,” in the sense that it’s tough to do, that because it doesn’t spring from the emotions, it comes from the will, it comes from just doing it, as the Nike ad might say.2 It’s hard work, but it’s our obligation, there’s just no getting around it . . .

But the good news, as always, is that the Christian life is a journey, and as Paul himself knew all too well, we’re not yet at its end, we’re not yet perfected, we’re just on the way. But he also knew that we’re not alone on the road, that we have the Holy Spirit to power us, and intercede for us with sighs too deep for words. He knew that Christ is with us all along the journey, and he will be with us every step of the way. Amen.

1 Wright, N.T., “The Letter to the Romans,” vol. X in: The New Interpreter’s Bible,12 vols., (Nashville: Abingdon), 2002, p 725.
2 Ibid., p 726.

Sermon, August 31, 2008 -- Exodus 3:1-15

2008-08-31T16:00:00.001-05:00

“Every Bush is Burning” (Exodus 3:1-15)
Rick Olson, August 31, 2008

When I was just a preacher-ling, before I went to seminary, I preached at my old church in Starkville, Mississippi, where the buffalo play and the bulldogs roam, and nary a cross word is said to anyone. And in the sermon, which probably wasn’t much of one, actually—and don’t ask me if anything’s changed, please—and in the sermon I was saying something about how some weird things had been happening to me lately, how folks had come up to me I barely know, and ask when I was going to seminary, and stuff like that, and I saw my friend Roberta grinning like a mad-woman in the back-center where she always sat with her husband Ed, and I didn’t quite know why she was doing that, and when I asked her she said. “When God is after you, every bush is burning” Every bush is burning . . . and what she meant by that is if you’re under the gun, if God is trying to call you into the ministry, then everything in your life will point to it.

Even if it doesn’t. Because we all know we can, well, read things into things, that’s why Paul said to test the spirits . . . what he meant was that we should carefully practice discernment to see what things come from God and what things come from us, or some other non-God source like a Chevy commercial or a politician’s sound bite. I used to laugh at some of my acquaintance back in the day who’d say—dramatically, of course—I prayed to the Lord that he give me a sign, I said Lord? If you want me to buy that Cadillac Seville, just give me a sign, and then . . . and then . . . the light changed! And I knew it was a sign, praise Jesus . . . well, that’s over-the-top, of course, but you can see the point: When every bush is burning, you gotta find the one where you won’t get burnt.

Not that it was a problem for ol’ Moses . . . there was only one burning bush out there in the wilderness, where he’d fled after that little, ah, dust-up in Egypt that left a man dead. He was a wanted man back in the land of the Pharaoh, or at least he used to be, he was a long time in the desert, and he’d married the daughter of a Midianite sheep-farmer, and maybe they’d forgotten about him back home . . . and here he is, herding sheep, walking up and down the mountainous wilderness without even benefit of an SUV, or even a measly little trail bike, and he comes up on this bush that’s literally burning, but it isn’t being consumed.

And I’ll bet he looked around for the film crew, for Steven Spielberg maybe or George Lucas, or something, because it had to not be too common even in those days for bushes to burn but not be consumed . . . but there it was, burning away, and Moses says “I must turn aside and see this great sight” literally seeing “and see why the bush is not burned up!” And in just three verses, the Hebrew verb for seeing—or one of it’s derivatives—is used seven times, and now it’s God’s turn, God sees that Moses sees, and calls out to Moses from the bush—and I thought it was an angel: “Moses, Moses!” God says, and Moses says: “Here I am.”

And it’s true: there’s a whole lot of seeing going on, around that mountain called Horeb: God sees that Moses sees, that he is looking, and he speaks to him. Seeing is important to the enterprise of call . . . and make no mistake, this is a call story. Look at the wording. Does it remind you of something? When God called to Samuel in the night, he said “Samuel!” and it took Samuel three times before he said “Here I am.” God came to Samuel in the night, he was asleep; but it’s broad daylight for Moses, there on the mountainside, and with a visual aid as well . . . and Moses looked and saw that it was burning . . . and he turns aside—another important verb in this verse—he turns aside and looks at the bush, and only when the Lord sees that Moses had turned aside does he call out to him.

And look at what’s going on here . . . it’s clear that this call thing is a transaction, an interaction between God and Moses. It’s clear that it involves God revealing God’s self to Moses—the angel of the Lord appears to Moses in a bush that is burning, but it is not consumed. But it’s equally clear that Moses has to see it, to observe it—that verb is used seven times, after all—he has to be open to it. And that’s not easy to do, when you’re busy herding your sheep, when you’re busy living life, it’s not easy to see God wherever you are, but that’s a key to knowing God, to discerning God’s will: first you have to see it.

The Benedictines are past-masters at this sort of thing. They practice it in their daily lives, it’s built into the structure of their days. And the first thing understand is that if you’re not quiet, you can’t hear anything. And so not only do they have the daily office—periods of corporate, chanted prayer four to seven times a day—not only do they pray to God, but they schedule time when all they do is listen. They have several hours a day where they practice some form of contemplative prayer, usually lectio divina, divine reading, in which they open their hearts to the whisperings of God, listening to what God would have them do in and with their lives . . . it is a deeply-held Benedictine belief that God is in all things, that God speaks to us through all things, that there doesn’t have to be a burning bush, and they are quite intentional in looking for God everywhere. This is culminated on a daily basis in their nightly office, said in private, in which they chant the Song of Simeon, in Latin the nunc dimitis: Now, Lord, dismiss your servant in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all the peoples . . . and as they chant it, as they sing about their eyes having seen salvation, they reflect back over the day just ended, consciously looking for just where they have seen it . . .

And as for us, who run like the proverbial chickens all day long, who are over-programmed and near-to-being overwhelmed, I think it’s even more important for us to be intentional about discerning our calls, about listening and looking for God . . . it’s even more important for us today—who aren’t likely to be warmed by the fire that does not consume—it’s even more important tha,t like Moses, we turn aside from our sheep herding to be open to God’s will.

And when Moses did so, when he stopped and looked at that burning bush, that’s when he heard the voice of God issuing forth from it, and it no less than changed his life . . . that’s what encounters with God do, you know, change lives . . . and that’s a frightening thing in and of itself, isn’t it? It sure was in Moses’ case: God speaks to him out of that burning bush, and he says I have seen—there’s that verb again, translated as “observed” here—I have seen the misery of my people, I have heard their cry, and I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians. The Lord has done what the Lord does, God has seen and known, and now he’s gonna do what God is gonna do, and that is to deliver them. The Lord sees and knows and delivers, that’s what the Lord does. “I have come down to bring them up our of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—and I’ve always wondered how the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites felt about it, but that’s the subject for another sermon—God sees and knows and comes to deliver.

And ol’ Moses must have been grooving along, saying “Hey, this is pretty cool, my people have needed delivering for quite awhile now, but then God says “So come! I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” And you can almost hear the screeeeech of the breaks, almost see the look of panic come over Moses’ face . . . after all the seeing and turning aside and knowing and coming and delivering, Moses has gotta do something! He’s gotta respond, and it panics him . . . This is more than he bargained for, more than “Go ye therefore to church and sing Amazing Grace and pray real hard” or “teach ye therefore Sunday school for an hour a week.” Moses is a good little boy, he turns aside and sees, and what does it get him? A whole new life.

And he doesn’t really like it. He starts sputtering like Woody Allen on a first date “Who am I,” he says, “that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” You can almost see him loosening his collar, it’s getting a little hot around here, and besides: he’d fled Egypt all those years ago, something about a dead Egyptian, remember? And now you have me going back? Why couldn’t you just leave me with the wife and kids, and the executive position I’ve achieved in my father-in-law’s organization? Why all the change?

But that’s what happens when we listen to God, when we turn aside and see . . . God is likely to change our lives. Discerning the will of God isn’t a safe little exercise, God doesn’t say, or doesn’t always say, at least: “That’s nice, now run along to church like a good little boys and girls.” Instead God says: “Come, I will send you. I will upend your lives, change the way you do business, pull you out of your comfort zone.”

And do you see? We’re not just whistling Dixie about our doctrine of cooperation with God . . . we really are God’s hands and feet on earth, but I hope you see something else as well: this discerning of God’s will for our lives, this turning-aside and seeing, is risky business, because it has a way of changing lives.

And our church has been in such a season, a season of turning-aside and looking, and can you feel it? We are changing . . . there is something stirring around, we’re beginning to ask questions, to take stock of where we are and where we should be. We’ve learned new ways of being the church, we’ve seen new vision for ourselves, and we are going to be changed by it . . . your session has learned new ways of thinking about our business, of analyzing it and we are beginning to apply them, and as we do, our lives together as a local expression of Christ’s body will be changed, and it won’t always be pleasant.

But you know what? God tells us the same thing as Moses: when there’s a burning bush before you, indeed when every bush is burning, I will be with you. I will be with you. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Paul of Tarsus . . . of Augustine and Calvin and Martin Luther King . . . of your grandfather and mother and aunts and uncles . . . your God, the great I am, will be with you. Amen.

Sermon, August 24, 2008

2008-08-24T16:03:00.000-05:00

“Saying and Being” (Matthew 16:13-20)
Rick Olson, August 24, 2008

Today’s passage is one of those “Watershed Passages” that everybody knows about, and everybody thinks they know what it means. What that is, of course, is the naming of Simon Peter . . . Peter, or in Greek petros, which in turn means rock. “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” And for 1500-some-odd years, the church took this to mean that Peter was the first head of the church . . . and the vast majority of Christians today—Roman Catholics and some of the various flavors of the Eastern Orthodoxy—refer to Peter as their first Pope—pope is a diminutive “papa” from Greek, and they trace the heads of their churches—their Popes—back to Peter and this statement.

We Protestants, understandably, don’t buy into this, and this passage has kind of a diminished stature in our eyes: it takes into account the naming of Peter, true, and it does give some kind of theological hat to hang our foundations on. If Peter is representative of all the disciples, as many scholars understand him to be, if he’s a stand-in for us all, then the church is built upon us all, we are the rock upon which our church is founded. Of course, as the hymn goes, “The Church’s one Foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord,” so we have to be careful to nuance that a bit, but still. It does indeed work, theologically, anyway . . .

But if we look a little bit deeper, maybe we can tease out a little more meat, a little more of interest for us modern day Peters. And the first thing to notice is that for Jesus, it’s a teachable moment. And like any good teacher, he begins with a question, addressed to his followers: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" and notice that he’s using a theological title for himself, one that places him into a theological context, and its one that—surprisingly, for how often it’s used in the New Testament—doesn’t seem to have a fixed meaning. In some contexts—as perhaps here—he’s associating himself with the final judge, who’s coming is described in Daniel as “one like the Son of Man.” And he asks his disciples—in that perfect teachable moment—who do people say I am?

And they answer with the popular ideas of the day, the popular conceptions of who this wandering wonderworker is, this pointer to the kingdom of God, and apparently they think that he’s John the Baptist, or Elijah, or Jeremiah or one of the other prophets. And it’s important to nuance this a little bit: it’s more than a case of mistaken identity . . . the people think that he’s of the old order, that he’s another in a long line of prophetic Hebrew voices . . . they do not recognize in him something new, that God is doing a new thing . . . and people continue to do that, don’t they? They continue to interpret Jesus in the categories of the old . . . he’s like this or like that, he’s like a military commander, storming the gates of Hell, he’s like an innocent lamb, helpless, led to the slaughter . . . some people view him as the ultimate therapist, here to help us through the bad times. Others see him as the head of a victorious army, the church, fighting the pagans wherever they may be . . .

We continually interpret Jesus in light of what already is, in terms of what we already know, and perhaps that’s inevitable, really . . . after all, we can’t conceive of . . . what we can’t conceive of, can we? How can we describe it—on paper or in our mind’s eye?—if it’s completely beyond our imagination, our knowledge-base, our ken? It’s why “the streets of heaven are paved with solid gold,” why “there will be no sickness, toil or danger” and “the lion shall lie down no more” . . . these are all attempts to imagine the unimaginable . . .

And it’s understandable, of course, it’s a human thing, a human weakness, our finite minds are incapable of describing something totally new, but it can be a dangerous thing as well, when we confuse the reality of the Christ with that of the world . . . and that’s what’s going on with “the people” that the disciples describe, they think Jesus is just another prophet, another Jeremiah or John . . .

And following his lesson plan, Jesus now turns it onto the disciples: “But who do you say that I am?” And immediately, Simon Peter jumps in: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!” And Jesus calls Peter blessed because of his confession, and we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking he’s commending Peter for it . . . the word translated here as “blessed” means fortunate, happy and it has the sense of a being a recipient of God’s favor, and Jesus is stating a fact here: Peter is blessed because flesh and blood did not reveal this to Peter, it wasn’t something he learned from someone else, from the Sadducees or Pharisees that Jesus dissed in the passage right before ours, nor did he come to it on his own: flesh and blood did not reveal this to Peter, but God, whom Jesus called his Father in heaven.

Peter comes to this confession, this belief, not by his own will, on his own recognition, but via a revelation of God. God chooses to reveal Gods-self to Peter, not the other way around . . . Simon Peter is blessed in that God made him a believer . . . happy, fortunate, blessed is Simon Peter in that he didn’t learn this by human means. And next Jesus does a little revealing himself—like parent, like son, I guess—he reveals to Simon the meaning of his name: you’re Peter, in Greek Petros, rock, and you are gonna be the foundation of the ecclesia, the church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against the church.

Let me repeat that: the gates of Hades, the evil that stalks this world, that we can feel will not prevail against the church. And isn’t this is a fabulous claim, isn’t it a powerful declaration: despite all evidence to the contrary, the gates of the evil one will not win out in the end. But it certainly doesn’t seem that way at the moment . . . it seems like evil’s got us on the ropes, the church is shrinking, we’re losing numbers and even whole denominations, and ours seems poised to split in two . . .

Just this past week, Juanita and I were at the quarterly meeting of our regional governing body, the Presbytery of Sheppards and Lapsley, and in a sad bit of business, the church at Opelika left the PCUSA for another denomination, and all over our denomination, churches are leaving for one reason or another, and I firmly believe that this is evidence of evil working in this world, that Jesus pictured as the gates of Hades . . . and notice that I didn’t say our brothers and sisters at Opelika are evil, but that nevertheless it is the work of this ancient evil—that our ancestors personalized “Satan” or “the devil”—it’s the work of this evil that our churches are fighting in and among themselves . . . and this dis-harmony does great harm to the work of God, which is the working toward the coming of God’s just reign. Our presbytery spent over a year and resources it doesn’t have trying to fulfill the biblical mandate for reconciliation. But to no avail . . . First Presbyterian Church of Opelika is no longer part of our fellowship.

But Jesus tells Peter that the gates of Hades, this ancient evil—which C.S. Lewis calls “that hideous strength”—will not prevail in the end . . . and why? Because Peter will be given the keys to the kingdom—thus, we picture him at the pearly gates—he’ll be given the keys to the kingdom and the power to use them: whatever he binds on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever he looses on earth will be loosed in heaven. And over in John, Jesus does this after his resurrection, as he breathes the Holy Spirit into them, and there it’s limited to forgiveness of sins: “if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” He gives the church—in the person of his gathered disciples—the power to forgive sins, to bind on earth what will be bound in heaven, to loose on earth what will be loosed in heaven . . . he gives the church the power to do God’s work on earth, to work toward the coming kingdom of God . . .

And whether that extends literally to the forgiveness of sins, as the Roman Catholics would have it—and after all, that is the literal sense of it—or a more generalized mandate to do the work of God, it’s clear that it is a formidable ability that Christ has bestowed upon us . . . that’s why John pictures it as coming at the same time as the Holy Spirit, because that’s what it must be, it must be spirit-led, spirit-powered, spirit-fed. The church—and note that I said the church, not we as individuals—the church has been given the ability, and the mandate, of cooperating with God’s creative, ongoing work here on earth. And, as they say, that ain’t chopped liver.

We are partners with God, partakers and purveyors of his grace . . . every time we feed someone, it is God who feeds them . . . every time we baptize someone, it is God who baptizes them through us. Whatever we bind on earth is bound in heaven, whatever we loose on earth is loosed in heaven, that is the church, that is us. Amen.

Sermon, August 17, 2008 --Matthew 15:10-28

2008-08-17T16:05:00.000-05:00

“Dog Tales” (Matthew 15:10-28)
Rick Olson, August 17, 2008

There’s an old saying—probably by some scurvy prophet or something—that says “I’ve come to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” and that surely applies to scripture as well. There’s nothing more afflicting to our comfortable notions about life and our place in it than scripture. If you read it and pay attention, that is . . . a lot of folks—and I know none of us here are like that—but a lot of folks just read the parts they like and kind of skip over the rest. Or if something bothers them they gloss over it or try to explain it away, assuming “Jesus wouldn’t do that,” or “He really means this.” But one of the keys to a deeper understanding of scriptures is to first acknowledge what it says, period. Not what it means, or what you think it means to us, but what it says, the plain sense of the words on the paper. Once you do that, you can apply what us text critics call “interpretive lenses” or “critical methods” to trying to figure out what it means. But first, you have to acknowledge what it says.

And what this passage says, no getting around it, is that Jesus basically calls the woman and her child dogs. When she begs for him to cast the demon out of her daughter, he says “It’s not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.” No getting around it, he’s called her kid a dog. And the moment I first read it, I thought “Oy vey! That’s not the Jesus I know, that’s just mean, calling her sick, demon-possessed child a dog.”

Ok. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s try to see what it all means. We could take it at face value, you know, but that’s almost as bad . . . it seems as if Jesus—who we Christians confess is God’s own self—it seems as if Jesus changes his mind. At first he’s not going to heal her child—it would be throwing food to the dogs, after all—but then when she says something he likes, he decides to do it after all. Note that here in our passage, Matthew makes it about faith, and do you all remember last week? When Peter didn’t have enough faith to walk on the water? In Matthew it’s about faith a lot, but over in Mark’s version, it’s not about faith at all, it’s about what she says. Over there, he says “for saying that, for saying ‘yes but even dogs get the crumbs off the master’s table’, “your daughter has been healed,” but over here, Matthew makes it about faith, and somehow her response reveals, or maybe confirms her faith, but that brings up another problem: if Jesus is God, if he’s omniscient, why didn’t he know it from the outset? Why put a distraught woman through the ringer if you knew what you were gonna do in the first place? Kind of cruel, don’t you think?

Of course, another possibility is that he actually learns something here, that the Canaanite woman—it’s a Syrophoenician woman over in Mark—that she actually teaches Jesus something. When she says even the dogs eat the crumbs, maybe Jesus is saying “Huh. I never thought of it that way before . . . great is your faith!” But to us on the other side of the Trinity divide that’s not such a great solution, either, and for the same reason: if he were omniscient, how could she teach him anything?

Well. By now you probably get that it all this goes fascinating, age-old debate about what it means for Jesus to be fully human and fully divine, which all the creeds and orthodox Christianity affirm. One of the prime characteristics of being a human is that humans learn, and if Jesus is fully human, wouldn’t we expect him to learn as well? But on the other side of the coin, if he’s fully God, then how could he learn if he knew everything in the first place? He’d be like a seer who saw in advance that something bad was going to happen if he went somewhere, but did it anyway. “If you knew it, then why’d you do it?”

In the theology biz, we call this kind of a thing “a tension” and we make our hands go like this when we come up upon two things that seem to be mutually exclusive, and yet seem indubitably true nevertheless. And it’s important to recognize that this whole thing is far from academic . . . Jesus isn’t fully human, how can we identify with him or, equally important, how can he identify with us? The incarnation—the idea that somehow God became one of us and walked this earth, and experienced everything we do—is an incredibly powerful one that sets Christianity apart from other faiths. It goes to our basic understanding of the Christ: how can he tell us anything about life if he hasn’t experienced it for himself? And just how comforting is some distant parent, way up in the ether somewhere, whose power and knowledge and presence are far beyond even our wildest imagination?

To understand this passage, I think we have to remember the that this was written long before it became a common belief in the Christian community that Christ and God are one and the same . . . as we saw last week, Matthew called him Son of God and he probably meant it, in some literal fashion. As we also saw last week, as he stomped around all over the waters of Galilee’s sea, he could do some of the same stuff—namely make order out of chaos—that God could. But so could Peter, and it’s possible that Matthew believed Jesus was human in the fullest sense, a person with full connection to his maker, one that we as his disciples could participate in as well. And remember that Matthew was a Jew, and although the old canard that his gospel is the most Jewish is an oversimplification, it is true that the fact shows up in some interesting ways, and in the Hebrew Scriptures—that we call the Old Testament—God behaves in a number of ways we can’t square with our conception of God, things like crisping God’s enemies turning folks into pillars of salt.

In fact, another one of Matthew’s salient features, seen in other places in his gospel, is his conviction that Jesus’ mission comes to the Jews first, and only after his crucifixion and resurrection is the field thrown open to the Gentiles, in the “lo, I am with you always” speech. And in Matthew he says as much after his disciples—disgruntled that a lowly Gentile woman is bugging them—try to get rid of her. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he says, and it’s telling about Matthew’s theology that he doesn’t say it over in Mark. But she’s persistent, and comes and kneels at his feet so he can’t ignore her and says “Lord, help me.” And that’s when he gives out the dog comment, using an unfortunate term for gentiles that was making the rounds in Jewish circles in that day.

But she shoots right back at him, doubtless giving ol’ Peter in the process, she shoots right back and says: “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” And it’s more than just a witty riposte, more than simply a clever rejoinder: it signals surrender, it signals submission, as in ok, you got me, I know my place . . . we’re dogs, but even dogs get the crumbs. She’s focused like a laser beam on her daughter’s health and well-being, if she has to grovel—as she has by falling to her knees—to save her.

And even this isn’t a particularly savory reading of the story, especially to modern ears conditioned by feminist thought . . . I can hear the grumbling now: why should a woman have to grovel at a man’s feet to get anything, some would say, and they’d be right, of course, but note what shines through even Matthew’s highly Jewish, highly male-centric gloss of this story. In spite of all that, in spite of all the “I came first to the children of Israel” stuff, Jesus still listens to her. And not only does he listen to her, but he reverses his position and dispenses some of God’s saving grace to this marginal person, this person from outside of God’s chosen children.

And look what he says when he does it: “Woman, great is your faith!” And this had to be a slap in the face to the other disciples, especially Peter, who’d been accused of having very little on several previous occasions, such as in last weeks episode. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And Matthew, perhaps the most Jewish of gospel writers, tells us that her daughter was healed instantly.

Last week, we talked about the nature of miracles, or a signs as I prefer to call them, and we said that to interpret a sign, we first start by figuring out what it points to. Here, the miracle, the healing, comes at the very end, and it’s a powerful pointer, to be sure . . . Jesus heals the Canaanite woman’s daughter, a powerful and potent sign that in the kingdom here and yet to come, even the most marginalized outsiders are welcome, are “deserving” of God’s grace. But there’s something more to this story . . . in a sense, it’s all a sign, the whole shootin’ match, maybe not a pointer to the kingdom per se, but instead to how we should connect with those to whom we minister. Jesus engages with her, he is changed by her, and in a sense, it’s just as much a ministry to him as it is to the Canaanite woman.

I might have told you this story before, but when I was going to seminary, I volunteered at a homeless shelter at First Presbyterian in downtown Atlanta . . . and the way we did it we would sit the men—the shelter was only for men—we’d sit the men down at these big, round tables and bring their food—boiled eggs, ham, and the best grits you ever had. And I felt all warm and tingly and righteous inside until the shelter director pointed out that standing and serving them was such an hierarchical way of doing things, that it was very clear by the distance between them that that we were in charge, that indeed we were slumming, and they were supplicants, not equals. And the director urged us to sit down at the tables and talk with the mainstreamed psychotics, the main-lining addicts and the other denizens of Atlanta’s mean streets, and let me tell you, it terrified me, they were so different from me, it was so hard to do, so that I did it only a couple of times.

And it’s really easy for us middle-class Christians to just make out a check, or drop some cans off at the food bank, and we do it all the time, I do it all the time. And don’t get me wrong: money and food is absolutely necessary for good agencies, both secular and faith-based, doing vital work. But this passage calls us to a different way, a more intense way. It calls us to interact with those to whom we minister, to treat them not as numbers, but as humans, face to face, peer to peer. It’s not easy, it never is when you’re interacting with folks who are different from you are. But Jesus did it, and look where it got him: it changed him, it opened him to new possibilities, and it will us as well. The few times I sat and talked with the folks at the mission, I was blessed four-fold.

Through this story, we are called to engage with those to whom we minister, to interact with them, to let them be a ministry to us, just as we are to them. As we evaluate our mission programs over the coming months with the eye toward the renewal of our congregation, I hope we will keep this in mind. Amen.

Sermon, August 10, 2008 -- Matthew 14:22-33

2008-08-10T16:09:00.000-05:00

“That Sinking Feeling” (Matthew 14:22-33)
Rick Olson, August 10, 2008

Walking on water is a common pop culture motif, and of course it’s all thanks to this story here in Matthew, and its counterparts in Mark and John . . . of all the miracles, all the signs and wonders Jesus does in Scripture, perhaps this one has lodged in the modern mind more securely than any other. So much so, in fact, that it’s become the most iconic miracle of all, if somebody’s getting just a little too big for their britches, you’re liable to hear—sarcastically, of course—“What does he think – he can walk on water?” Of course, the snide innuendo is that the person getting a bit arrogant thinks he’s Jesus. Thinking you’re Jesus, in turn, has been a hallmark of insanity, right up there with funny-hatted Napoleons with their hands in their shirts and all . . .

Walking on water has been a staple image in the arts, as well. Hal Ashby’s droll film of Jerzy Kosinsky’s “Being There,” Chance the gardener is a truly dull man who all around him think is some kind of savant, and in a climactic scene he walks on water, and of course, Ashby’s point is clear: Jesus, in reality an insignificant carpenter, is like Chance: a tabula rasa upon which we write whatever we want, whatever comforts us the most. That there is a bit of uncomfortable truth in this is seen in the split between so-called liberal and conservative Christians—the one camp sees Jesus as a crusader for social justice (just like them!) and the other sees him as the defender of traditional mores, which are, amazingly, just like theirs!

Currently, an interesting appropriation of the walking-on-water image is by the Vegas magician Criss Angel—suggestive name, no?—who is nicknamed “mindfreak” and very convincingly walks on the water in swimming pools and lakes and birdbaths and such. As he does so, he spread-eagles his arms in a cruciform shape that leaves no doubt about his affectation, as well as the fact that he seems to be mixing his metaphors just a bit, ‘cause I can’t find anything in Scripture that says Jesus was ever an angel . . .

Criss Angel aside, there’s a reason it’s resonated through the ages, and to see it we have to imagine it in our minds: he’s just returned from the mountain where he’s gone to pray to God. And don’t think that Matthew means anything different, either: the notion that Jesus and God were one and the same didn’t begin to take hold until a well after the Gospels were written, so Matthew pictures him as very naturally going up to pray. This is just after, of course, he’s dismissed the crowds that had gathered to hear him preach, and that he’d just fed in another miracle we call the feeding of the 5000.

And so what we have here is a back-to-back telling of two of Jesus’ most well-known miracles, or signs, as I prefer to call them. Because that’s what they are, really, pointers to other things, things that are not immediately evident, hidden even, or to yet come in the future. And so the interpretation of miracles—and I’ve said this before—the interpretation of signs has a lot to do with figuring out what they point to. What reality that is not particularly self-evident, or clear, or not yet here, does the miracle illustrate?

To put it in linguistic terms—for all us pointy-headed Presbyterian scholars, and just because I can—a sign consists of two parts: the signifier—that would be the miracle—and that which is signified, which is what we have to figure out. And in the case of the feeding of the 5000, it’s pretty obvious, at least on the surface: Jesus takes the few crumbs they have on hand and he blesses the bread and breaks the bread and gives them to the disciples, and they feed 5000 men and who knows how many women and children from 5 measly loaves and 2 scrawny fish. And that’s the signifier, and we must pay attention to Matthew’s wording, it’s very specific, he takes the bread and he blesses the bread and breaks the bread and gives it to his disciples . . . take, bless, beak, give . . . this signifier is the four-fold eucharistic actions; that which is signified is the future, and yet already present, right there beside the Sea of Galilee, messianic banquet in the kingdom of God . . . Each month, we repeat that sign as the sacrament we call the Lord’s Supper.

And immediately, he makes them get in a boat and head out over the Sea of Galilee while he prays, and this in itself is a sign . . . or at least a pointer to what we ourselves should do . . . as we do God’s work, as we are God’s hands and feet and arms and legs, it’s important to heed Jesus’ example and replenish our batteries on the mountaintop. He’s been feeding the people, preaching to the crowds, and he takes time to take time . . . we all need time to ourselves, time to recharge, and Jesus’ example leads the way. And by evening, he was up on the mountain by himself, but the disciples were in trouble . . . the winds were against them, the waves were battering the boat, and they were still far from the other side.

And let’s pause right there to think about what the sea represents . . . in the ancient mindset—and you’ve heard this from me before—but in the ancient mindset, the sea represented chaos, it represented misrule . . . predictability was all-important to the agricultural enterprise, and the sea represented the ultimate in unpredictability. It was a force that could be sunny and calm at one moment, and in the next instant rear up and strike you down . . . a storm could come up out of nowhere, the Sea of Galilee was notorious for that, and that’s what doubtless happened to the disciples in the boat that day.

And so when Jesus appears to them, walking on the water, it’s a sign, but of what? What does walking on the chaos mean? Well, what does walking on anything mean? What does it mean when we use it colloquially, when we say “she just walked all over ‘em?” Of course, it means she dominated them, beat them, took them down. Or, looking at it schematically, Jesus is on top of the sea, on top of the chaos. So, to the original hearer of this story, Jesus has conquered chaos, he’s walked all over it, he’s made it his own. Chaos has bowed under the heel—literally—of the Son of Man.

But does it mean that Jesus conquers chaos? What does it point to that he’s walked all over the sea? Who else do we know who’s done the same? Who else has tamed the sea, the primordial chaos? Well, God, of course, at the dawn of creation . . . remember? The earth was a formless void? Darkness covered the face of the deep? And God blew across the waters, and dry land appeared, appeared, and God called it Earth, and the waters God called Seas, and God saw that it was good. And so in our creation story, God tames chaos, and makes it his own. And now we have Christ doing the same . . . so what our sign points to is that Christ is somehow like God—remember Matthew probably didn’t think he was God—or that Christ is God’s child.

But the disciples didn’t get it, as usual, they thought he was a ghost, or in Greek a phantasm, and they cried out in fear . . . and immediately Jesus reassures them, saying take heart, or better Courage! It is I; Do not be afraid. And that’s part of the sign, too . . . do not be afraid. Christ comes to us, calming the chaos, striding over it, taming it, saying do not be afraid . . .

But Peter needs proof . . . and here we should acknowledge something else . . . whenever Peter appears, it’s like he’s a stand-in for all the disciples . . . more, perhaps: he represents something universal in the human condition, and here he’s clearly a doubter, a person who has not enough faith even to believe that it’s Jesus coming on the water toward them. Like doubting Thomas, he asks for proof, if it is you, command me to come to you . . . and I can imagine the heavy sigh with which Jesus does it, but he does do it, he commands Peter to come, and he does. And notice what’s happening here: Peter is doing the same thing as Jesus, he’s participating with him in the creative act of taming chaos, he’s co-operating with Christ in doing God’s work.

But not for long: when he sees the waves and the strong wind, he panics, he loses it. He begins to sink. Help me, Lord, he says . . . and immediately Jesus reaches out and pulls him up, but chastises him saying: you of little faith . . . why did you doubt? And this faith—and the Greek here can be translated also as belief—its belief in what? Not in Christ as his savior, as we often suppose, but its belief, its faith that he himself can stay on top of the water. It’s faith that he is—through Christ—a child of God. But Jesus reaches down and pulls him up, and steadies him, and all the disciples acknowledge it, and they worship him saying “Truly you are the Son of God.”

And we in our little boat—literally, here at Covenant, our sanctuary’s like an inverted boat—we in our little boat are being tossed around more than usual, these days . . . our people are aging, our numbers shrinking, and the church has lost much of its influence on our world. It’s changing so much around us, so quickly, that it is difficult to keep up, hard to know how to do our mission which is to spread the Gospel in thought, word and deed, to people who think so different, behave so different, have such different values. And so, we’re foundering, taking on water, sinking into oblivion or worse, irrelevance . . . and it’s difficult to keep our chins up, it hard not to be terrified as the chaos threatens to sweep over us and drown us out.

But there is a way . . . Jesus does come to us in the chaos, on the very waters that threaten to engulf us. And he commands us to join him there, to not stay in the boat, to not do what is natural and burrow under the seat-cushions, hiding our heads while the water gets inexorably higher and higher. Jesus commands us to come to him, to be out working in the world, so we do not sink with the boat.

But how do we do this? How do we respond faithfully to all the chaos, how do we meet the needs of the new generations while still being faithful to the old? By learning a new way of being church, a new way of responding to crises, a new way of being faithful to God . . . and we will be doing that, brothers and sisters, we’ll be doing that . . . because it’s not too late to teach old dogs new tricks, it’s not too late to learn new ways of thinking about how we do our mission and ministry.

But the key is getting out of the boat, removing ourselves from our old conceptions, taking those first tentative steps out onto the waters, walking and shaping and savoring the chaos for ourselves. And if we are afraid, all we have to do is call out, and our companion along the way, our guide across the waters, Jesus the Christ will reach out and lift us up. And before long—and not in some trivial, illusionary way like Criss Angel or Chance the Gardner—we’ll be walking on the waters as well. Amen.

Sermon, July 27, 2008 -- Genesis 29:15-30

2008-07-27T16:12:00.001-05:00

"The Trickster is Tricked" (Genesis 29:15-30)
Rick Olson, July 27, 2008

OK, so here's the deal: our hero Jacob – or is it anti-hero Jacob? – has arrived in Haran, after fleeing his father's place in South Palestine. You'll remember why he had to leave: his brother Esau was plotting his death in a murderous rage. Why? Because Jacob had tricked his blind, mentally – how shall we say it? – infirm father Isaac into giving his blessing to Jacob, when it by rights belonged to Esau. So, you might ask, what's the big deal? Why doesn't Isaac just give his blessing to Esau as well? I mean, we give our blessing every time somebody sneezes, for goodness sake . . . Aaa- choo! someone goes, and we say "bless you." And who can forget all the "God bless the U.S.A." slogans that appeared on cars and country music lyric sheets, asking – rather selfishly, don't you think? – for God to bless ourselves, to give a great big old theological "bless you" to our 9-11 flu . . . as if we – who've corralled a twenty-five percent of the earth's wealth for our measly four-point-three percent of the world's population – as if we really need any more of God's blessing . . . A friend of mine has a bumper sticker that I think says it all . . . God bless the whole world, no exceptions . . .

But I digress. The point is, we see blessing these days as something pretty trivial . . . we see it as just words, as just a slogan or something polite to say after somebody has a boo-boo. But that's not the way the Old Testament sees it . . . there, it's a deadly serious proposition. In the Old Testament, words of blessing were not empty . . . they had potency in and of themselves. Just the saying of them imparted energy and power . . . when God blessed Isaac, he became a wealthy man . . . and that blessing was irreversibly transferred to Jacob when – disguised as Esau – he served up some game that Rebekah had cooked. And as soon as Isaac figured out who he'd really blessed, he knew what he'd done . . . Esau cried out "Have you not reserved a blessing for me?" And Isaac just said "Your brother came deceitfully, and he has taken away your blessing. I have blessed him, and blessed he shall be."

And now, Jacob the blessed one—blessed in spite of being a cheat and a liar, blessed in spite of what he's done, the same Jacob to whom God has just passed the promise saying "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed"—that Jacob has just gotten to his uncle Laban's place in Haran, and he's greeted him as a kinsman, and then stayed and worked a month for him – apparently without any problems – and now, here, all of a sudden Laban brings up the question of wages . . . he says "Just because you're my kinsman, should you serve me for nothing?" And on the surface it looks like he's being kind here, being generous, but do we detect an undercurrent of deceit already? "Tell me," Laban says "what shall your wages be?" Now, Jacob's already met the beautiful Rachel watering her father's sheep at the well, and we all know that things . . . happen at biblical wells, and so he may have fallen in love with her right there, love at first sight, like in a Harlequin Romance – and so when Laban asks what his wages shall be, he asks for her: "I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel." Of course, he knows about the older daughter Leah, whose eyes were lovely, according to our translation, or weak, as the New International Version has it, and who else in Jacob's life had weak eyes?

And Jacob serves Laban for seven years but they seem but a few days because of the love he had for her – the orchestra swells romantically, heavy on the strings, love is indeed a many splendored thing – and he says to Laban "Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my time is completed," the old romantic devil, and so Laban orders up a wedding feast, and they feast all day – feast, feast, feast – and Hebrew weddings being what they are, drink all day – drink, drink, drink – and in the evening, when I personally am surprised that Jacob could even stand up – Laban brings his daughter into the tent. And when the morning comes, Behold! it's Leah! and can you imagine the chagrin, and maybe even the embarrassment . . . Jacob's slept all night with the wrong woman . . . talk about weak eyes! Hilarity ensues!

Now obviously, this is meant to be funny . . . and it is, in a bawdy way . . . and I want you to notice the earthiness of the scene, the physicality of it . . . the ancient Hebrews were down-to-earth people, and if you think about it, it makes sense . . . sheep-and-cattle herders tend to be matter-of-fact about . . . biological functions, shall we say . . . and here the humor revolves around Jacob being so drunk or stupid or something that he sleeps with the wrong woman or, as the scripture itself puts it bluntly, he goes into the wrong daughter. But of course there's something else at work here, isn't there? The trickster Jacob, who is so good – and so not-repentant – at deceiving others, is himself tricked, bunko-ed, taken advantage of. He's met his match in Laban.

And oh how sweet the irony: he beds the woman whose ambiguous eyes – are they weak or lovely? – recall Jacob's poor old blind father, and the way Jacob is tricked is that he's made blind – again like Isaac – by the dark and the drink . . . and perhaps his love. And the sense of what goes around comes around is made all the more acute by the delicious ironies at work here. And the folks who listen to this story told and retold around the campfire, and those who later hear it proclaimed from the scroll in the temple, nod their heads in satisfaction, because what goes around does come around, and Jacob is only getting what he deserves.

And so folks who were scandalized when Jacob the deceiver got the goods in spite of his deceit get a measure of gratification in this story, and that's why these stories can't be isolated from one another, they are all of one piece in the end . . . the story of Jacob's conflict with his brother and father is incomplete without this tale of his comeuppance.

But . . . what about the women? What about what Rachel and Leah wanted in all of this? What about their preferences here, don't they matter? In a word, no. Lamentably, in those days, women were possessions of the men . . . daughters of their fathers, wives of their husbands . . . they had little formal rights in and of themselves . . . that's not to say, of course, that they didn't have any power . . . see the machinations of Sarah and Rebekah if you think that they didn't . . . but they didn't have any rights, and men could – and frequently did – do with them whatever they want.

To illustrate this, look at the language used here . . . we're told that in the evening, Laban took his daughter and brought her to Jacob and he went into her . . . and this language of taking and bringing and going into the woman is common . . . the woman is passive in this thing, all the verbs – taking and brining and going-into – belong to the males. And the verb "take" is a commonly-used word for "marriage" as in "he took her as his wife." Men were the takers and women were the tak-ees.

And of course this hierarchical, male-centric notion of human relations in scripture has been used to solidify male strangle-holds on power in many places – not least of all the church – for centuries. And our passage takes it all as a matter of course . . . Leah has no say in what has happened, any more than does Rachel . . . and when Jacob complains about being tricked out of his one, true love, Laban shrugs it off – we don't give the youngest before the firstborn in this country – and the final ironic nail in Jacob's coffin becomes apparent. Here he is, running away after successfully subverting primogeniture, after successfully overturning the ancient rule that the first-born gets the lion's share, and now he's hoisted by that same petard. His idyllic dream of life with the ravishing Rachel is dashed by Laban who says oops, I forgot to tell you . . . our laws say that the first-born comes . . . first.

Well. That crafty old Laban manages to bind Jacob to him for another seven years – fourteen in all – in order to get both his daughters married off, and Jacob promises to work another seven years, and he takes Rachel and goes into her, and our passage ends on an ominous note . . . Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah, and it's eerily reminiscent of his own parents' dysfunctional marriage – Isaac loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebekah loved Jacob most of all. What goes around comes around, indeed.

And we might well expect trouble to come out of it, and that's just what happens . . . Rachel is barren but Leah is incredibly fertile, and she gives Jacob four sons, one right after another – Reuben and Levi and Simeon and Judah – and she thought surely Jacob would love her after that . . . but Rachel gives him her maid to bear children in her stead, and she does – Dan and Naphtali . . . but then Leah gives Jacob her maid and she bears him Gad and Asher . . . and then she herself bears two more sons, Issacher and Zebulun . . . and conflict between the sisters, rivalry for Jacob's love – certainly of dubious worth – becomes a way of life for Jacob's family there in Haran . . . and in fact, conflict has surrounded Jacob all his life . . . with his brother, beginning in the womb, for Abraham's sake, and with his father Isaac and father-in-law Laban, and now conflict he cannot control swirls around him once again . . .

And some of you out there might be wanting to ask a simple question: where is God in all of this? Where is the God we know – the God of Abraham and Moses, of Jeremiah and Jesus – where is God in this story of a dysfunctional and deeply conflicted family? Well, I'm glad you asked . . . I have to say that . . . God is right there, in the struggle . . . because out of that conflict comes a people, the people of Israel . . . the sons born to Jacob through Leah and the maids are the patriarchs of the Hebrew nation, the heads of the first ten of the twelve tribes . . . and finally, Rachel conceives and bears a son – Joseph – and Joseph would eventually save them all . . .

God is in the conflict, right square in the middle of it . . . and out of that struggle, out of that crucible of fire and brimstone, God forms a people. God uses this tremendously dysfunctional family, with its huge, gaping flaws, who fight like cats and dogs, and takes them and somehow her will is worked. Out of all the conflict and pain comes . . . life, comes the Israelite people, comes hope. And as a Christian people, we too were forged in conflict, we too were forged in pain, we too were forged in the struggle between one man and the powers that be, the powers that rule the earth, as personified by the Roman empire and their religious-authority toadies . . . and we confess that God – in the person of Jesus Christ – was quite literally right there in the middle of that conflict, and in fact suffered its ultimate expression on the cross.

And I don't know about you, but I’m comforted by the thought of God right there beside us in the struggle, right there with us . . . because it seems like – sometimes at least – that our own lives, no less than Jacob's, are all about conflict. . . families that are less than . . . loving, people that seem bent on our destruction, who seem to be out to get us, all the time . . . when the conflict over survival, the fight just to make it with our health and sanity and life threatens to overwhelm us and just sink us like an overloaded ferry, God is there with us and is working God’s mysterious ways. And just like with Jacob’s unruly life and times, just like in it’s ups and downs and ins and outs and skittering sideways moves, God will triumph in the end, life will emerge, and God’s blessings will be showered on us all . . . no exceptions. Amen.

Sermon, July 20, 2008 -- Romans 8:12–25

2008-07-20T16:15:00.000-05:00

“Eager Longing” (Romans 8:12 – 25)
Rick Olson, July 20, 2008

This morning as I was, uh, putting the finishing touches on this sermon, I was watching this year’s Tour de France, the three week, 2100-mile bike race through the heart of France, and there are several kinds of riders in the tour . . . the most exalted are the General Classification contenders, or GC contenders for short, who have a chance to win the entire race; one of them this year is American Christian Vandervelde. The then there are the stage contenders, like, oh, Aussie Robbie Hunter, who have no shot at winning the overall, but can pick up a win or two in one of the 20 or so 100-mile plus stages each day, and then there are the majority, the domestiques, riders hired by the teams to provide support for the other kinds of riders. They have very little chance at winning a stage, will do so only by chance—for chance plays a huge role in the entire tour—but are vital to their teams’ chances, nevertheless.

But there is one thing they all have in common, and that’s hope: hope just to finish the Tour, which so few people in competitive cycling even get a chance to do it’s not funny. And by it’s nature, it’s a hope for something unseen, that they’ll be there at that finish line on the Champs Elysees, where they’ve all imagined they might be some day . . . and that’s exactly the hope Paul ends our passage with, Christian hope for restoration, for renewal . . . but to see how he gets there, which is half the fun—well, for me, anyway—we have to start off with a fun fact about Paul: he was a Pharisee. He was a trained Torah scholar, steeped in the Pharisitical ways of argument, of thought, and even though he became an follower of Christ, and quit persecuting other followers, it’s important to remember that he still thought like one, and still used the tropes and figures of speech of one in his writing.

And one of the things about Pharisees is that they loved a good dualism, they tended to view things in dualistic terms, that is, as oppositions of two sides that are diametrically opposed. Like light and dark, with the forces of God being the light and the forces of you-know-who being the dark. Or, like in today’s passage, flesh versus Spirit, a dualism that Paul talks a lot about, notably over in Galatians, where he says: “. . . the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing . . . [but] the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Notice that there’s no in between, no compromise: it’s works of the flesh on one side, and they’re all bad, versus works of the Spirit on the other, and they’re all good. As Dana Carvey might have said, imitating George Bush, “Flesh: bad! Spirit: good!”

And our passage this morning begins with this opposition, flesh versus Spirit—and notice that it’s not just any spirit, not spirit as an abstract thing, but spirit as a person, with a capital S, the Spirit of the God of Abraham and Isaac and all of Paul’s other ancestors, and we need to nuance the word “Flesh” a little bit . . . we tend to have a very naughty view of that word, we say “things of the flesh” as if it refers only to sex, but to Paul, it referred more to things of the world, living according to the ways of the world which, of course, includes unhealthy sexual appetites, but much more, things like greed and idolatry and generally war-like and imperial behavior, it’s living according to the precepts of the world and, of course, he viewed those ways as corrupt, as opposed to the ways of God, which are the ways of the Spirit with a capital S.

And if we live according to the world we will die, we will carry the smell of death around with us; our lives will be lives, paradoxically, of death . . . but if we put to death the deeds of the body—and a better translation might be misdeeds, Paul doesn’t want us to do nothing—if we put to death the misdeeds of the body we will, paradoxically again, live. Notice that he doesn’t have to be talking about eternal life here . . . a tendency we modern Christians have is to interpret everything in terms of where we go when we die, but Paul doesn’t say this, he doesn’t use the technical word “justification” he uses elsewhere for being made right with God. So it’s probable—especially given that Paul is the wellspring of grace-not-works in the scripture—it’s probable that he’s talking about a kind of death to God, a death to what is spiritual here in this life.

But whatever the case, the next thing he says is crucial to his whole argument in this section: we didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but we’ve received a spirit of adoption . . . our relationship to God isn’t one of abject ownership, of unthinking subservience—even though God did create us and therefore would have the right—it’s not a relationship of slave to master, but one of love and respect . . . and he underlines it by using the Aramaic word that Jesus himself used for God, Abba, Father, to emphasize that just like Jesus, we are now children of God . . .

And we shouldn’t get hung up on gender here, one way or another . . . gone are the days when we took Paul’s—or Jesus’ for that matter—calling God by a masculine name as normative, that is as an indication that God really is male or that we should address God that way . . . after all, over in Genesis it says “God created humanity in God’s image, male and female . . .” and Paul himself famously wrote that in Christ there is no male and female . . . but by the same token, we mustn’t let our tendency toward inclusiveness obscure the details of our relationship with our creator that is revealed in Jesus and Pauls’ addressing of God as “Father:” it is an intimate one, a familial one, as mother to son, as father to daughter, and it is a relationship not warped by the sad details of human frailty as are some of our worldly—perhaps Paul would say “fleshly”—relationships. No matter how some have portrayed God—including some of the writers in scripture—God is not an abusive parent. No matter how the image of our creator has been used by other broken creatures to shore up their own sense of inadequacy, their own feelings of insecurity, their own need for power, the reality is that God is not an abusive parent. In fact, our relationship with God might be the only perfect one we have. God our creator, the loving parent, enfolding us in merciful arms like an anxious mother, standing up for us like a stalwart father.

That’s the kind of relationship Paul is talking about here, and he knows—again paradoxically—that we are not proof from all suffering, that we are not immune from all the stuff that just happens. Indeed, Paul himself has endured some of it . . . “Five times,” he wrote, “I have received . . . the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea . . . on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters . . .” and the list goes on, and Paul doesn’t say here—although he does elsewhere—that it’s good or bad to suffer, just that it is: “we suffer with Christ in order to be glorified with Christ.” Period.

Note that he doesn’t blame God, either, as the ancient mind-set often does, and he doesn’t have that failing of the dualist mind, that denigrates our body, even though his work has often been co-opted to do so. You know, our life is just a vale of tears, and we can endure anything for its short duration, the kind of thinking used to justify the Conquistadors and other oppressors to forcibly convert the native peoples, with deadly force if necessary, because after all, the body is a worthless vessel, and they go to a far better place via the good graces of their conquerors . . . the kind of dualist thinking that encourages abused women to endure their abuse in the name of their Christian marriage because, after all, they’ll soon join Christ in the great by and by . . .

Paul doesn’t engage in that destructive logic, but he does compare the present suffering with the glory we are about to see and taste and experience and feel: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” And of course a truer statement has never been made . . . the kingdom of God, which will be revealed to us all, the Kingdom of God is more than we can ever imagine, more than we can ever foresee, more than we can ever predict . . . and Paul pictures the creation itself, personified here as a sentient entity, waiting with eager longing for that revealing.

And the thing that’s striking for me about this is and not only we, but creation with us is in need of bondage. Unlike some of the imperial forms of Christianity, where we are elevated above the rest of creation, we are right there with it, right there inextricably tied up with the rest. And for me, in this time of global warming, when even the most reactionary among us admit that God’s good creation is in grave danger, this is a stunning realization: if we are tied up with creation on earth, if we are one with creation in decay, then whichever way goes our natural environment, so goes us. Creation isn’t in this alone, we’re right there with it. And look at something else: creation’s decay—however it’s caused, Paul thinks that, like ours, it’s bestowed upon it by God—creation’s decay is of a kind with ours. And as a consequence, our deliverance from that decay, in Paul’s mind at least, is tied to that of the rest of creation.

And now, just as our passage began with the image of adoption, as in adopted through Christ as God’s children, so it ends with the same image, but changed slightly, as if modified by the verbiage in the middle of the passage, like a charcoal filter modifies the air that passed through it, as is the image of adoption has been modified by all the talk of creation waiting with eager longing, because now it signifies not adoption as children of God, but that final restoration of our bodies at the coming of the Kingdom . . . not only the creation, but we as well, in solidarity with our fellow created things, the rocks and trees and dogs and mountain lions groan inwardly while we’re waiting for this adoption which is, in case we doubt that the metaphor has changed, the redemption of our bodies.

And now, in a final change of tone, a final shift of gears, Paul ends this part of his argument on hope . . . if we wait with eager longing—along with the rest of creation—for the coming Kingdom of God, then it must be hope that keeps us going . . . in all the groaning, in all the wars and degradation and disintegration of creation, in all the nervous chaos that seems to be increasing with each newscast, we as Christians hope for the restoration. And it’s a hope without much evidence in the world . . . nonbelievers ask us “how can you believe in a just God with all the evidence against it? How can you have faith in a God that loves you when things seem to be disintegration around you?” And our answer is hope: Christians—along with all of creation—are saved in hope of that final restoration. And as we are constantly reminded in life, this final restoration is not seen for, as Paul puts it, it’s hope, and if we see what we hope for, it can’t be hope, can it? We Christians are people of hope, and Paul has one more admonition asour passage ends: if we hope for what we do not see, we should wait for it with patience.

And of course, that’s easier said than done, and less than 24 hours after our latest retreat with the Seekers, which was perhaps the most intense session we’ve had, I can’t help but be reminded of this . . . we have been patient, as patient as a domestique in the Tour de France, you have been patient through this long, almost two-year race through the mountains, and it has been hope that has kept us alive . . . hope that God has a new day, a new way waiting for us, and now that we are nearing the end of the formal training process, the formal teaching of your session and other leaders to do church in a different way, a way that enables us to be always looking for God’s will, as the formal process draws to a close, we will begin to spread that process, that training to every member of this body. And as we do, as we teach every committee, every commission, every new session member as they come on board, our hope for renewal will be realized. We are people of hope, it is our anthem, our song, and we are just now beginning to sing. Amen.

Sermon, July 13, 2008 -- Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23

2008-07-13T16:18:00.000-05:00

"Bad Agriculture" (Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23)
Rick Olson, July 13, 2008

It 's hot there beside the sea, great billowing, shimmering sheets of heat rise from the sand, so that even the healthiest shrub looks wasted, shriveled-up, ready to die, and that's the way all the humans feel as well . . . dry, used-up, parched-grey in the afternoon light . . . it's too early for cool breezes, for desert-evening evaporative cooling . . . and yet, still a crowd gathers, a roiling, dangerous, smelly crowd . . .if it's hot outside the crowd, in the open desert that wraps the sea of Galilee like a shroud, imagine what it's like in it's middle . . . and personal hygiene? Well, it's not of the highest caliber, and the disciples, who'd followed Jesus out of the house, are now sandwiched 'twixt crowd and water, and everybody gets it when Jesus hops into a boat tethered in the shallows, and so there they are, crowd and disciples on the beach, Jesus in a boat just off-shore, late-afternoon sun beating on them so that it felt like you could crack an egg and fry it right there on Bartholomew's bald head.

But then Jesus speaks and the disciples forget the heat, they forget the discomfort, they forget that most people around them hadn't used Dial – don't you wish everyone did? – because the master is speaking, and though he doesn't have an unusually fine voice, though it isn't a street-corner orator's practiced instrument, though he doesn't sound like Biggus Maximus—currently number one on the Palestine top-50 with his hit "Do The Existential With Me"—the crowd is transfixed, stopped cold in their tracks, frozen like a cheap margarita. And although later on, nobody in the crowd – including the disciples – can say what it was about his voice that moved them, everyone is caught up in the moment, the earth seems to stand still, and Jesus begins to speak.

"Listen," he says, "A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path." and from the crowd comes a murmuring: "Uh, oh . . . that can't be good . . ." "That's gonna be a waste of some good seeds . . . " And when Jesus says, "the birds came along and ate them up," there's a general agreement from the crowd, a wise nodding of heads – "That's right," someone says, "Been there, done that!"

Jesus continues: "Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where there wasn't a whole lot of soil, and they sprang up like a house afire, 'cause the soil was so shallow, you understand . . ." and again the crowd is with him, cause it's an agricultural area they're in, and everybody knows about planting seeds . . . and so when Jesus tells them that the sun rose and scorched the seedlings and they withered away, they're way ahead of him "I just knew that was gonna happen," they say. . . . and the story goes on in the same vein: "Other seeds fell among the thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them," and now the crowd's turning on him "We came out in this heat for that?" they're saying "that's just basic common sense . . ." And finally, Jesus ends it, he reaches the punch-line "But the other seeds, which fell on good soil, they brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!"

And up from the crowd we hear a collective . . . "Huh? What's he trying to say here? Of course when you plant seeds on the path, they're gonna get eaten . . . of course when you plant 'em in the rocks, they're gonna get burnt up . . . of course when you plant 'em in the briars they're gonna get choked out. Every farmer worth his salt knows that . . . and while we're on the subject, what kind of farmer does a thing like that, anyway? That's some kind of bad agriculture you've got there . . ."

Now of course, it doesn't stop there . . . the more thoughtful among them know that there's more to it than meets the eye . . . or rather than meets the ear . . . and a number of people in the crowd set about trying to figure out what it all means . . . let's see, who does the sower represent? The emperor? But if it's the emperor, then what's the seed? And why would that ol' skinflint Tiberius waste any of it, anyway? The only thing he's known to waste is other people's money, and then for his own pleasure . . . So maybe the sower is God, but that leaves the same problem, what's the seed? Maybe it's rain . . . after all, didn't Jesus himself say that God sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike . . . maybe the rocky ground is the unrighteous and the good soil the righteous but then what's the pathway represent? And the briar patch? In an allegory, you see, you have to have a one-to-one correspondence . . .

Meanwhile, the disciples ask Jesus why he speaks in parables, why he doesn't just say what he means outright, and his answer – conveniently cut out of the middle of our lectionary reading – is basically because it's for them – i.e., the disciples to know – and everybody else to find out, and that's a whole 'nother sermon, thank the Lord, but he does tell them the meaning of the allegory, for that's indeed what it is.

"The seed," Jesus says "is the Word of the kingdom" – and the disciples hit themselves on the forehead and say "of course, the Word of the kingdom . . . why didn't we think of that?" – and when anyone hears it but doesn't understand, the evil one comes along and snatches it away – that's the bird action, here – and that's what's sown on the path. And the disciples are nodding their heads – God must be the sower, the seed's the good news of the Kingdom of God, the pathway signifies folks in which the devil removes that Kingdom-news from their hearts, just plucks it up like a ripe pomegranate. Got it.

"And furthermore," Jesus says "the seed sown on rocky ground is the person who receives this Kingdom-word with joyful heart, but shallow roots . . . and the scorching sun of adversity and persecution burns hot, and he is scorched and falls away . . ." and again the disciples nod sagely . . . yes, yes, we know a few folks like that, that's for sure . . . And it goes on like that, Jesus explaining what each correspondence in his allegory means: the word sown in the thorns is the one who hears the words, but lets the cares of the world—and the lure of riches and wealth—choke it out of them; the seed sown in good soil is the one who hears the word of the Kingdom and understands it, who bears fruit and yields results for the Kingdom, "in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty."

And so now the disciples understand, now they get it: Don't be like that pathway guy . . . don't let those old birds come along and snatch the word right out from under your noses . . . and don't be rocky-ground shallow either, don't be rootless, stand firm . . . don't let a little thing like a death in the family or bankruptcy or genocide in Darfur destroy your faith in God . . . and perhaps most importantly, don't let idol worship, the worship of planes, trains or automobiles, choke the word out of you like a blackberry vine . . . be careful – it's easier for a seven-forty-seven to land at Greensboro Airport than for a rich man get into heaven.

And so there it is . . . a simple morality tale, don't be a don't bee, do be a do bee . . . the seed on the rich soil understands the word and acts on it, producing fruit and yielding yield. They go out, proclaiming the Word to all the nations, and the deep-soiled folks who hear it do the same, and pretty soon, you've got a world religion.

And that's how it's often preached today as well . . . all you out there in the pews, stand firm in adversity, don't let the love of things, the love of your money, choke the faith out of you, etc., etc. And maybe that's OK, but what I want you to notice is that we read admonition into this passage, it's not there on the surface . . . that is, Jesus doesn't say that his listeners need to act one way or another, he doesn't end his explanation with "Therefore I say unto you, be like the deep-soil . . ." In the parable of the sower he's merely describing what happens when the word is sown . . . it's either plucked up, scorched out, choked out or it produces. Furthermore, in that part of the passage conveniently cut out of the lectionary, he implies strongly that it's God who causes people to not understand that very parable – certainly word of the Kingdom in and of itself.

Hmmm . . . what if we concentrate not on the results of the sowing – that is, not on the people in which the word is sowed – but on the sower. After all, Jesus himself calls it that, he calls it the parable of the sower, not the story of the soil . . . and the first thing that hits me about the sower is that bad agriculture we talked about earlier . . . the sower seems to be a pretty grim farmer. I mean, seed is expensive, it costs money, a lot of companies like Pioneer and Monsanto have made a bundle producing seed . . . and here this sower is, just wasting it – what we have here is a picture of a farmer – whom we know is God, right? – pitching the seed on infertile ground and fertile, on the receptive and unreceptive, on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, and God seems to have no control over the end result.

Wait a minute . . . no control? That doesn't sound like the God we know . . . the God we know is in charge, in control, or – as we good Calvinists say – our God is Sovereign. Consider the lilies of the field, why don't you, God's got them – and the whole world – in his hands. And since God made the pathway, the rocky soil, and every briar in that old briar patch, God must know ahead of time which one's gonna be receptive and which one's not. Unless . . . maybe the sower in our parable doesn't represent God! Maybe we've just assumed that because, well, who else would sow the word of the Kingdom if not God's own self? Well . . . we Christians, for one. We're supposed to preach the gospel, we're supposed to spread the Good News like so much broadcast soybean seed . . . the last thing Jesus says in this Gospel is "Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

And if we're the sower, it's not up us to determine who the receptive soil is or where it's going to be, it's not up to us to determine to whom the seed goes, we are required just to spread it everywhere, on pathways and rocks and thorn-choked ground and deep, rich soil . . . it's up to God the creator to determine where it bears fruit. This – to me, anyway – is a powerful, freeing word . . . it's not up to us, it's saying, it's up to God.

Note that this doesn't absolve us of responsibility, it doesn't mean we're not to work for the coming of the kingdom, proclaiming the Gospel – as St. Francis said, in words if necessary. After all, we are the sower. What it means is that if the word is faithfully planted to the ends of the earth, we aren't responsible for the results.

And it means something else, as well . . . God's word – which the Gospel of John says is Christ Jesus himself – God's word, God's saving grace is so abundant, so overflowing that it can be sown where it might not produce . . . on rocky ground and on flagstone pathways . . . in the most secular-seeming avenues of power and our most blasted-out, cement-choked ghettos. God's grace is super-abundant, outrageously abundant, scandalously abundant . . . there's enough for Christians and Muslims, CEOs and meth dealers, U.S. Presidents and subway bombers. And, gloriously, magnificently, amazingly, there's also enough . . . for you and me. Amen.

Sermon, July 6, 2008 -- Matthew 11:16-30

2008-07-06T16:21:00.000-05:00

“Light Yokes” (Matthew 11:16-30)
Rick Olson, July 6, 2008

Have you ever met somebody who just wasn’t happy, no matter what you did, no matter how you tried to please him? I know I have, and I suspect you have too . . . business-people see them all the time . . . they’re called “customers” . . . and I know, not all customers are like that, but if you spend any time at all talking to businessmen and women – especially folks in the customer service end of things – you’ll realize that they’re distressingly common. The sitcom “Frasier” took dead aim at people like this in its mythical – but aptly named – coffee-house, Café Nervosa. Radio Psychologist Frasier Crane is one of the fussiest characters ever written for TV, and in one episode he sends his coffee back three times. The first time it’s “Oh, excuse me, did I say decaf?” and when she says no, he makes her take it back anyway . . . when she brings the decaf, he says: “Is that non-fat milk?,” and when she says no it’s “I hate to be a bother, it's just that I'm watching my fat intake.” and when she brings that he says “Oh dear, is that cinnamon on that foam?” Finally, she brings his brother Nile’s second order, but not his, and when he asks about it, she says “We’ve got a team of specialists working on it . . .”

That’s kind of how the religious authorities strike me in our passage . . . “John came neither eating nor drinking,” Jesus says “and they say, 'He has a demon';” On the other hand, “the Son of Man” – that’s Jesus himself – “came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'” It’s as if they are never happy . . . John doesn’t eat, and they accuse him of being demon-possessed . . . Jesus eats and drinks, and they say he’s a drunkard and friend of tax collectors and sinners . . . and we mustn’t underestimate the severity of the accusation . . . these aren’t fussy Seattle shrinks Jesus is dealing with here, they’re powerful figures, and what they charge him with puts him squarely on the outside, squarely on the side of the outcasts and scum of the earth – tax-collectors and sinners – those who are unclean, anathema, and might even face death . . .

They’re like children, sitting in the marketplace, calling back and forth to one another, throwing accusations back and forth . . . we played the flute, and you didn’t dance, we wailed and you did not mourn . . . these law-bound religious authorities, these children, whine when they don’t get their way, when their rules aren’t followed, when they play the flute and Jesus did not dance to their tune . . . Their accusations embody the different characters – and different functions – of John the Baptist and Jesus . . . John is an ascetic, he lives a rigid, controlled, sparse life, waiting for the Messiah’s coming . . . by contrast, Jesus – who is that promised one – leads a joyous, delight-filled existence, marked by hospitality and table-fellowship with his disciples and those very outcasts the authorities ignore. John lives a life dedicated to the observance of the Torah, the Jewish law, and you’d think he’d be well-regarded by the authorities, but he isn’t . . . Jesus flouts the law, eating and consorting with the unclean, and he’s marked, eventually for death.

It’s no accident that Matthew follows this story up with the one about keeping the Sabbath . . . Jesus and his disciples are trucking through a corn field on the Sabbath, and the authorities – who conveniently seem to be following Jesus around – accuse them of working, and Jesus replies by saying that the Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath . . . and that’s kind of what the accusers of John and Jesus are doing in our story . . . they’re insisting on a narrow, strict interpretation of the rules and regulations, and moreover, it’s undoubtedly their interpretation . . . We played the flute, and you did not dance . . . we wailed and you did not mourn . . . we wanted a decaf Zimbabwe latte, and you brought us one that was caffeinated.

Wisdom, Jesus says, is vindicated by her deeds . . . wisdom – the feminine Sofia, in Greek – is often personified as a woman in Scripture, and here Jesus says that she’s shown to be righteous by her deeds . . . and Jesus’ wisdom – expressed by hanging out with tax-collectors and sinners, by picking corn on the Sabbath, by eating and drinking any old time he wanted – Jesus’ wisdom is justified by its deeds, its fruit . . . and what is the fruit? Deeds of compassion, of healing, of feeding thousands with only five loaves of bread. And in the cities, where Jesus had done most of these deeds, they did not repent, they did not believe, they only whined about his loose living and association with riff-raff. And so Jesus, like his predecessor prophets of the Old Testament, pronounces God’s judgement on these places . . . “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! . . . on the day of judgement, it will be better for Tyre and Sidon than for you.” The cities, where the authorities complain about Jesus not being pious enough, are under the judgement of God.

Frasier Crane and his brother Niles orbit around each other like little, self-absorbed planets . . . and much of the humor derives from making fun of that self-important shallowness. But the genius of the show lies in the fact that they know they’re like that, or at least Frasier does . . . but here we’re given no indication that there is any self-enlightened awareness on the part of the accusers of Jesus and John. They have seen the miracles of Jesus, his deeds of power and healing and compassion, and remained unmoved.

The summer before I came here, the summer of Katrina, I went down to Mexico to help mind a group of a hundred kids – including my son Mike – as they built houses for extremely poor Mexican families . . . the week after that, I was at a preaching conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, ground zero for uppity Presbyterians . . . and the contrast between the two couldn’t have been more profound. The area where we were building houses was about an hour South of the border . . . just outside of Tijuana, and the difference between the way they live and the way we live is huge. Mike and I were working for a family of four who lived in a house that was about the size of this chancel area here. They were fortunate in that they didn’t have to carry water – they had water to the house, from a line shared by all the families on their hillside – but it wasn’t potable water, that is, they couldn’t drink it. And the house we built for them – by our standards, no more than a shack – the house we built for them close to doubled their living space.

Princeton, New Jersey, on the other hand, is Chorazin, it’s Capernaum, teeming with power and wealth. Houses start at half a million dollars, and the only way the pastor of Nassau Presbyterian church – membership fifteen hundred – can afford to have a house is if the church owns 40 percent of it. One Friday night I cut across the Princeton University Campus, past the location where A Beautiful Mind was shot, past that Nassau church, and into the trendy shopping district, where it’s difficult to find a good meal for under thirty dollars and the streets are lined in discreetly leafy elegance . . . and as I looked for a restaurant that wouldn’t break the bank, the casually-chic, overwhelmingly white denizens of Princeton were out in full force . . . Jags and Porsches gliding silently past shops with names like Benetton and Chanel and Louis Vuiton. It’s difficult to imagine, looking at that tanned, toned, buffed-up crowd, that there are any outsiders, any tax-collectors or sinners around at all.

And yet . . . if you know where to look, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, as somebody once said, you can begin to see the them . . . they surely don’t live in Princeton, but they serve the people who do . . . they’re the Chicano cleaning ladies in the dorms, the weary-footed waitresses in the tony restaurants, and the minority serving staff at Princeton Theological Seminary They’re the almost – but not quite – hidden, minimum-wage underbelly of Princeton, and I wonder what would happen if deeds of power began to be worked among them? What would happen if a woman who hangs out with the Latino janitors, hob-nobs with the sky-caps at Newark Airport, lives in a back alley or a door-way in the Princeton boutique district began healing folks? What would happen if miraculous healings, over-abundant feedings, and plain old grace-flowing-over broke out among the outcasts of Princeton, New Jersey . . . or Seattle, Washington . . . or for that matter, Tuscaloosa, Alabama? Let’s bring it home: what would happen if some highway vagabond camping down by the Black Warrior, regularly harassed for the amusement of the Tuscaloosa police, what would happen if she began healing broken bones, curing inoperable tumors, or conjuring up five-course meals out of beach-grass and fire ants? Would the people of Tuscaloosa – or Princeton or Seattle – welcome such a person? Would they praise God for her? Would they believe her deeds of power? Or would she be nabbed for practicing medicine without a license? Would the health department or the business-licensing board shut her down . . . Would she be locked up as a menace, maybe thrown into some dark asylum to rot away and never get out, a living sacrifice to our need for control?

Just because we’re not in a big city doesn’t mean we can get all smug about these things, to get all self-righteous and say "Right on, Jesus, preach it, brother! Those cities are a mess . . . thank God we don’t live there . . ." Jesus is railing against them because of their legalism, because of the laws that exist to prop up the status quo, to keep the elite at a safe remove from the riff raff, to keep the cast outs, if you will, cast out. And every community has them, every community has children that call to each other . . . we played the flute, but you didn’t dance to our tune . . . we created a bureaucracy, but you didn’t follow the rules. And you know you can’t keep ‘em happy . . . John didn’t eat or drink and they told him he was crazy, Jesus ate and drank, and look what happened to him.

But there is grace in this passage, there is good news . . . because no matter how it looks, the ultimate victory is Christ’s. All things have been handed over to him by God the Father, Jesus tells us, it’s not all up to you and me, either in Princeton or here in Tuscaloosa . . . it’s not all in our hands . . . Christ is in charge, and no one else . . . and get this: No one knows God except the Son . . . and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal God. And the Good News here, the truly amazing grace of it all is that that’s us! That’s us Christians! We have been chosen, even though we are scared, even though we don’t always see Christ among the tax-collectors and the sinners, even though we sometimes hide behind all our privilege and rules. Jesus say, come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, all you who feel the crushing need to circle the wagons, to ratchet up the rules and laws so the terrorists won’t get you, come to me, follow me, Jesus says, and I will give you rest.

And following Jesus, taking up his yoke, learning from Jesus – who is, in contrast to those religious authorities, gentle and humble in heart – because following Jesus, taking up his yoke means this: that we give up our fears and worries and need to control everything around us. And in doing this, we will quite simply find rest for our souls. Amen.

Sermon, June 22, 2008 -- Gen 21:1-21

2008-06-22T16:29:00.000-05:00

“Call Me Ishmael” (Gen 21:1-21)
Rick Olson, June 22, 2008

This is a tale of two children. Isaac is a child of the promise, a son of the covenant between God and Abraham. Ishmael is a child of desperation, of barrenness and brokenness and embarrassment . . . Sarah remembers when Ishmael was born, what it felt like when Hagar taunted her and laughed at her, and intimated she was not-quite-woman because she couldn’t give her husband an heir.

And now, after all that, after she laughed in bitter humor at God’s promise she would conceive, after cowering in her tent at God’s voice, we get an answer to the question posed to her in her tent way back at the Oaks of Mamre: “Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?” And the answer we get is “no.” In stately understatement, we hear the good news: “The LORD dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as he had promised.” Dealing as said, doing as promised – once again, God speaks – on a dusty road, inside a hot tent – and newness is the result, a new creation is the result. And Abraham is a hundred years old, well past the time of child-birth, and it’s no picnic for Sarah at ninety . . . but Sarah is joyous, she laughs again, this time in delight, and it’s light-years removed from that hot tent by the Oaks of Mamre . . . God has done a brand new thing, opened a new avenue, sewed a new seed. Sarah names her son Yitzak, Isaac, laughter in Hebrew, saying “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”

And yet . . . all the hoopla seems . . . muted, somehow. All the laughter, the gratitude, the parties . . . it’s only eight verses long. God did what God promised, gave Sarah a son, she named him laughter, and Abraham threw a party. It’s a simple little scene, with a simple little plot – a child is born, his parents rejoice – and it should remind us of something – that nevertheless changes the world. It’s through these ordinary, day-to-day activities – through births and deaths and the living in between – that God works God’s wondrous ways.
But there’s a cloud hanging over the proceedings, and it’s a cloud with a name. Call it Ishmael. He hovers in the background like a low-grade fever, and finally breaks out into our world. Because Ishmael has to be taken care of, he has to be satisfied . . . after all, he’s the innocent son who hasn’t been chosen, but it’s through no fault of his own. Who knows why God does what God does? I certainly have no idea why it’s Isaac over Ishmael, do you? It is what it is. God is God and does whatever God darn well pleases, and doesn’t have to justify it to us. But God’s own justice – not yours or mine or your Aunt Edna’s – demands that Ishmael be taken care of, and so he breaks into our happy little fantasy about fulfilled promises and offspring like the stars in the sky. There’s unfinished business here – what’s to be done with Ishmael?

And it all starts with Sarah, sitting and chatting with the other women, working on some knitting, and she looks over and sees Ishmael, laughing and playing and running on the playground. She sees him swinging on Isaac’s swings, climbing on Isaac’s jungle-gym, and riding on Isaac’s merry-go-round that takes you round and round until you fall off and throw up. And she just snaps. Ishmael’s laughter brings all Hagar’s taunting words and humiliation back to her, and she goes to Abraham and says “Cast out the slave-woman and her son into the desert, for I won’t have him inheriting along with my son.”

Now, this catches old Abraham off-guard – he’d thought things were going pretty well. After all, he’d worked pretty hard, raised lots of sheep and cattle, and bought quite the household full of slaves. By anybody’s accounts, he was a wealthy man. In addition, he’s got a son, an heir to all his fortune, and a back-up as well, just in case. It seemed to him to be his salad days, where he could just sort of kick back and let things slide . . . and now this happens, and it upsets his equilibrium, it unbalances the his life’s serene stability. The original Hebrew sums it up best – it’s evil in his eyes.

But God says “Don’t sweat it – do whatever she says. Because it’s through Isaac that offspring will be named for you.” It’s like God’s said all along – Isaac’s the one, not Ishmael. And God says, “Besides, I’ll make a nation of him as well, because he is your offspring.” So Abraham, always obedient, gets up early the next morning, gives Hagar Ishmael and a water-skin, and casts them out into the desert.

Now this isn’t the first time Hagar’s gone into the desert. The last time an Angel came to her, but that was before, when she carried Abraham’s only son, and now there’s one heir too many, and the sun beats on her like a hammer, it slashes at her, sweat evaporates off her like steam. She can feel herself withering, drying up as she stumbles over the sand. And all she can see are stunted bushes and scraggly trees, hunched over like skeletons in the glare.

She tries to conserve her water, tries to make it last, but it runs out, and she gives the last little sip to Ishmael and sits him down under a slim shade of a bush, and lurches off a hundred yards or so and sits down to die. She can’t see her son from where she sits, and that’s how she wants it. She can’t bear to see him die. But she can hear him, his cries weaker and weaker as he screams for his mother, and she lifts up her voice to the skies and joins in a wail of despair.

And God hears the child’s cries there in the wilderness and sends an angel saying: “What’s the matter with you, Hagar? Don’t be afraid, God’s heard the boy’s voice where he is. Go pick him up, hold him in your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.”

Suddenly, she sees what she could have sworn wasn’t there before – a well, complete with palm trees and playful breeze, and a maybe a margarita or two, and she runs to it and brings her son a drink. And from that day forward, God is with the boy and he grows up strong and mighty, he can hit a boar’s eye at a hundred paces he’s so good. And he lives in the wilderness and Hagar gets him a wife from her people in Egypt.

And this salvation in the desert is just as miraculous – and much more dramatic – than Isaac’s birth, and maybe even more shocking, because—and this is important!—God saves the un-chosen just like the chosen! There’s no doubt Isaac is the main man, the real deal, that it’s through him God’s people will be born, and yet . . . God saves Ishmael too! God saves the un-chosen!

But it’s not without pain, not without consequence – Ishmael is rescued all right, but only just . . . he’s brought back from annihilation’s brink, from certain death . . . and it’s not all sweetness and light for the chosen, either. We know what Ishmael’s banishment will lead to, we know where that cruelty will end. Twenty-five-hundred years later, another religion will arise from the hot sand, claiming ancestry from Abraham through Ishmael, and there seems to be no end to the conflict . . .

What do we do with Ishmael? He’s haunted us like a bad dream, we wrestle with it endlessly and it’s happening in our denomination even as we speak. That’s what the battle over declaring Jesus the only way to God, the one we wrangled over several years ago, is really all about . . . it’s about what to do with Ishmael, what to do with the “other.” How do we even talk to other faiths – like Islam – if we start by saying “believe what we believe or else?” What do we teach our children about them, how do we get along? What do we do with Ishmael?

What God does with him is take care of him . . . the text is clear about that. Abraham caves in to Sarah – at God’s insistence, mind you – and sends Hagar and Ishmael into Beer-Sheba’s oven. And God does take care of him, he’s saved in the end, and so is that the answer? Do we throw him out into the desert, on a water-skin and a prayer? Do we throw him out and let God take care of him, in all good hope he’ll be rescued? Somehow, I don’t think dumping women and children into the desert is good behavior to model.

Look at the original blessing, the original promise at Haran, way back in chapter 12: Abraham is blessed so that he can be a blessing, and it echoes the original blessing in Genesis one . . . God gave us the earth for our nurture, and for us, in turn, to nurture . . . we are blessed to be a blessing. We are God’s chosen people so we can do God’s work, right alongside God. Our chosen-ness, our election, as we Protestants like to call it, is for a purpose, and that is to be God’s agents in the world. Mission is inextricably linked with our status as chosen people . . . the two are inseparable, opposite sides of the coin. Blessed to be a blessing, chosen to do God’s work.

But God’s work with Ishmael shows us something else, as well. There are hints of it elsewhere – when Abraham told Abimelech’s men that Sarah was his sister, it is God that keeps Abimelech—a Philistine, not one of the chosen—from sin. When Isaac’s servant goes to Laban, Laban greets him saying “Come in, O blessed of the Lord!” If God had only been active in Abraham’s family of the promise, how did Laban know about God? And in Ishmael, we see it all spelled out – God works in the world outside and apart from God’s chosen people. Isaac’s the chosen son, there’s no doubt about it, but God rescues Ishmael the un-chosen anyway. Kind of makes you wonder what it means to be chosen, doesn’t it? If God rescues the un-chosen anyway, what are we chosen for?

The lead character in Moby Dick—arguably the greatest American novel—is called Ishmael, and he begins the book and ends it the same way—alone. He wanders the docks of Manhattan, isolated in the hustle and bustle, and joins the crew of Ahab’s ship. By story’s end he’s alone again, floating on a coffin, exiled even from death’s dark fellowship. Call him Ishmael. And this theme of alienation pervades our arts, our literature and movies and plays . . . we flock to movies about outsiders—Liza Doolittle, Dirty Harry, Shane—people who are apart or shunned or alienated from society. We gobble up mysteries with private-eye-loners and westerns with strong silent types who prevail against all the odds, who are redeemed in the end, like . . . Ishmael. Could it be we identify with these stories? Do we feel on the outside, shunned, cast into the wilderness, do we feel un-chosen? Sometimes – even in all our privilege and comfort and relative wealth—we are the alienated ones, we are the outsiders, we are the “other.” Call us Ishmael . . .

And the glorious fact is that God rescues us just like Ishmael. God comes to us where we are and says “I have heard your cry” and there it is, God’s oasis of love and acceptance. We know we are chosen by God, we know we are heirs to Abraham, children of the promise, grafted into Israel’s covenant through the life and death of Jesus Christ. And we also know that nobody can box God in, nobody can contain the wildness, the utter freedom of God . . . God is working in the world, outside the bounds of what we know, and I for one can’t say in what way. The Spirit blows where it will, and we cannot know from where it comes or where it goes. I’m just glad it stopped here. Amen

Sermon, June 1, 2008 -- Matthew 7:21-27

2008-06-01T16:31:00.000-05:00

“Flood Insurance” (Matthew 7:21-27)
Rick Olson, June 1, 2008

There are three main things we need to know about this passage. The first thing is that it’s very solidly grounded eschatologically, that is, in the already here and yet somehow still approaching Kingdom of God, which Matthew always calls the Kingdom of Heaven. The second thing we need to understand is that when Jesus says “kingdom of heaven,” he’s not talking about a place filled with streets of gold where we go the minute we die, where angels flutter around on wings, and we’ll be playing harps for the rest of eternity. Heaven, in the 1st-Century world view reflected in this passage, is where God, whom Jesus calls Abba/Father, lives. The kingdom of heaven is the reign of heaven, the rule of heaven, that is here and will be here on earth. Thus, it’s as much about what’s going on in the present as it is in the future; when Jesus says “enter into the kingdom of heaven,” he means participating in God’s just reign on earth which does have an eternal component, but it’s also in the here and now. And the point Jesus is making here is, only one who does the will of God can participate. Jesus says “Not everyone who says to me “Lord, Lord” will enter that kingdom, but only the one who does the will of God.”

And so, brothers and sisters, right off the bat we have almost a litmus test of who is participating in that kingdom, and according to Jesus here in Matthew, it’s whoever does God’s will. And I think in these times of politicians who claim to be Christians and yet do very non-Christian things, we ought to heed these words carefully: Not everyone who professes to be a Christian, not everyone who calls Jesus “Lord, Lord” is a participant in the coming/already here Kingdom of God. But only those who do the will of God.

In fact, Jesus says, many will say to him “Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?” And Jesus will tell these people “I never knew you, depart from me, you doers of evil.” And this is a pretty stunning development . . . religiosity is not a guarantee of being right with God. Did we not preach powerful sermons in your name, did we not cast out demons—the modern equivalent would be heal in your name—and did we not do many deeds of power in your name, did we not grow denominations, raise up big hospitals, did we not bring ‘em in through the front doors, all the desirable young families with children? Did we not rejuvenate our churches, sing all the right hymns, and attend every Presbytery meeting at every church from here to Birmingham?

And it’s important to know that this anti-religious strain is not new with Jesus . . . through the prophet Isaiah, God says “Is this the worship that I choose? . . . Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Is not this not the worship I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” And in Micah: “Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? . . . The Lord has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” God has always valued action over empty religiosity, empty bowing and scraping and church-building . . . but not just any action, mind you, not just any doing, but doing the will of God.

But how will we know what that is? How will we know what is this will of God of which Jesus speaks? That’s a question that’s debated along denominational lines, or along lines that separate so-called evangelicals from the main-line rest of this . . . for the evangelicals, for the so-called religious right, the will of God often boils down to moralism, “being good.” We saw this in the two issues that have floated their boats over the last few years: abortion and homosexuality. Mainliners, on the other hand, see the “will of God” in terms of social justice, in terms that Isaiah might understand: breaking the thongs of the yoke of poverty and injustice, to let the oppressed go free, to do social justice.

So the question is: just what is the will of God? Well, Jesus offers some more clues in the next section, the parable of the wise man and foolish man . . . it contrasts two men, one who built his house on rock and the other on sand, and in the middle-eastern dry season—which is a long one, let me tell you—in the dry season, both houses do just fine, thank you very much, but in the rainy season, when the rains came and the winds howled around the eaves, the guy who built his house upon a solid foundation was cool, his house survived just fine, but the guy who built it on the sand was not so fortunate, he was picking up the pieces in no time. And this parable is linked to the stuff about doing the will of God by a then: “Everyone then hears these words and acts upon them is like the guy who built his house on the rock . . . but everyone who hears these words and doesn’t act upon them is like the guy who built it on the sand.” And the key is “these words ,” whoever hears these words and does them must be doing the will of God.

The will of God is associated with the words of Jesus, and so we come to the third thing we need to know about this passage—they are the concluding words of the Sermon on the Mount. Mount, which was named a sermon by 2nd Century scholars, but it wasn’t called a sermon by Jesus or Matthew. What it really is is a teaching, so I suppose maybe “Lesson on the Mount” would be more appropriate or “Lecture on the Mount” or even “Ethical Instruction on the Mount,” because that’s what it is: the sermon contains instructions on how to live the Christian life.

And these words that for Jesus define the will of God are contained in this teaching, this sermon on the mount. And so, doing the will of God means, oh, let’s see now . . . considering the lilies of the field, who neither toil nor spin and the birds of the air, who neither sow nor reap, and yet God takes care of them all . . . doing the will of God means “not worrying about tomorrow,” as Jesus says “for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.” Doing the will of God means we’re not to judge, lest we ourselves be judged—we talked about that last week—it means to be meek for they will inherit the earth . . . it means being merciful, for the merciful themselves receive mercy. . . it means being peacemakers, for they are the children of God. And it means we’re not to resist evil violently . . . if anyone strikes us on the right cheek, we’re not to hit ‘em back, but turn the other also . . . likewise, we’re to go the extra mile . . . give up our cloaks as well as well as our coats . . .

And notice that in the entire Sermon on the Mount, which for Jesus defines what it means to do God’s will, there is no mention of the conventional morality stuff that so obsesses many of our brothers and sisters in Christ. There’s nothing about who you sleep with, or who you marry, or anything sexual at all. And hold your cards and letters, ‘cause I’m not saying Jesus approves of all that stuff, but simply that these things aren’t mentioned in his catalog of the God’s will. In fact, they’re not mentioned in the Gospels much at all—except as it pertains to divorce: they seem to be way down on Jesus’ sin-o-meter.

And many will say Lord, Lord, many will call upon the name of the Lord, and though we’re not to judge them, lest we ourselves be judged, we’re not to be fooled either, and maybe we’d better be a little more careful about following them, you know what I mean? Maybe we ought not to take them so much at their word when they say “Lord, Lord,” when they say “I’m a Christian,” maybe we ought to actually look at whether they’re doing the will of God, whether they’re making an attempt to live by the precepts of the Ethical Instruction on the Mount . . . I think in an election year, especially, we ought to keep all of that in mind . . . not all folks who say “Lord, Lord” are worthy of our allegiance here on earth . . .

And there’s another thing we should keep in mind, especially now as we’re trying to renew our church, as we’re trying to let God revitalize this congregation . . . it’s not about the externals, it’s not about the surface stuff, the religious stuff . . . it’s not about signs and wonders, not about great prophesy . . . some will come to Jesus saying “Look at what we’ve done, look at all the great preaching and buildings and people we’ve brought in through the doors” but it’s not about that stuff, it’s not about building the biggest church building, fielding the biggest pipe organ, or maintaining the most beautiful sanctuary. It’s not about having the most enrolled in Sunday school, or the biggest vacation bible school, or even increasing the membership rolls of the church. Participating in the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of heaven, as Matthew calls it, is a matter of doing the words of Jesus, of performing the will of God.

And that’s why we’ve spent a season discerning what that will looks like translated for this time and this place and this church, and why in fact we should never stop discerning this so, even as we are involved in practicing it, even as we are involved in acting upon Jesus’ words. If we stop asking ourselves what God wants us to be doing at any given time and place—and realize that as the world changes, so might our doing of God’s will change—if we stop continually asking ourselves what that will of God looks like to us here at the corner of Hargrove and Prince, we will die.

Perhaps paradoxically for a process where we’re supposed to “let go and let God,” discerning God’s will at any given time and place isn’t necessarily easy, it isn’t necessarily obvious, it’s much easier just to plow ahead, doing what we think is right, or equally bad, to continue on doing the same thing long after it ceased to be effective.

But you know what? As first fruits of our season of discernment, God has given us a pattern to guide us in that process. God has given us a design to work from, a constellation to guide us in making concrete God’s will. It’s a vision God has given us, just like the vision given to the prophets, to the princes, to the leadership of God’s people. God has given us a vision of Covenant past, present and future. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermon, May 11, 2008 -- Pentecost, 2008

2008-05-11T16:06:00.001-05:00

“Spirit Movings” (Pentecost, 2008)
Rick Olson, May 11, 2008

Spirit is a very special word, in the multiple languages of the church, anyway . . . in Hebrew, it’s Ruach . . . that acccch on the end is a consonant found only in the semitic languages, and it gives a breathy, almost whispery sound to the word . . . it’s a word that’s onomatopoeic . . . it sounds like what it means, and what it means is breath, it means wind it means spirit . . . Can it be a coincidence that it’s found in the very first scene of the very first book in Scripture? “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind, while a spirit, while a ruach from God swept over the face of the waters.”

And what does this spirit do? What does this breath make? Order out of the deep, out of the roiling, rolling anarchy that was there before creation . . . and without that order, without the particles being organized in regular and useful configurations we call matter, humankind cannot exist, it cannot live, it cannot sustain itself . . . and so this spirit that swept across the waters, across that ancient metaphor of unrest, creates the very stuff of our being, the very order that keeps us alive . . .

And there’s another face to the metaphor . . . ruach means breath, and breath means respiration, the stuff of life . . . all of life, plant or animal takes in oxygen and through a kind of combustion, a kind of fire, through a burning that produces heat, life is motivated, given motive force. This motive force is nothing less than stored energy, in the form of ordered matter, that life needs to power itself, that it needs to function . . . and I hope you’re beginning to get the picture, I hope you are beginning to understand the depth of our spirit-metaphor, and why it is such a rich source of poetic force in Christian community. Breath, spirit, ruach is the stuff of life’s existence, the power that makes us go . . .

And although it’s more romantic in Hebrew, more primitive and elemental, in Greek it’s no less meaningful . . . in Greek it’s pneuma, from whence we get the term pneumatic, of course, air-powered, air-filled, filled with the breath of God . . . and so the apostles gathered together on that first Pentecost encounter living metaphor, actualized experience of ruach, of pneumatic force rushing down upon them, an exquisite embodiment of what was happening to them . . .
Of course, they weren’t gathered there by accident . . . the apostles were gathered together for the Jewish festival of Shauvot, one of the three great pilgrimage festivals of the Hebrew people, traditionally calculated as fifty days (thus the “pente” in Pentecost) from Passover. And although it originated as a festival marking the beginning of harvest—of the first fruits of the harvest—it had gradually, over the centuries, come to commemorate the founding of the Jewish people in the giving of the Torah, the law, the force that bound them together as a nation and a people. And can you see where we’re going with this? Can you see where we’re headed? On Pentecost, on Shauvot, on the very day the Hebrew people celebrate their formation as the people of God, the spirit of God, the breath of the Lord, comes down upon the apostles, like the rush of a violent wind, and fills the entire house where they were sitting.

And every time I see read this image, every time picture this in-rushing of the respirative ruach of God, I think of a tornado, and all of those reports of people who have survived them . . . what did it sound like? They are asked, and invariably what they say is that is sounded like a rushing wind, like a freight train . . . and so the tornado of the Lord, the freight train of the holy spirit, the breath that gives us life as a people, came barreling down upon them, rattling the windows, shaking the eaves, raising the roof . . . but unlike a tornado, unlike some F5 monster from the plains of Texas or the depths of a Mississippi Piney Woods, it is not a destructive force, but a creative, and it entered them, it powered them, it gave them respiratory life . . . it made them a people.

On the very same day that the Hebrew nation celebrates their people-hood, their coming together as a nation of the children of God, the apostles experience their own formation, and so . . . a new people is born, a new identity is forged . . . on Pentecost we celebrate the formation of the church and—mark this well—it is all dependent upon that rushing wind, that freight-train ruach, the holy spirit promised by Christ. Fifteen hundred years later, Calvin would use an apt metaphor about the spirit, he would say that it binds us to Christ—just as the Law does for the Jewish people—it binds us to Christ and thereby to each other. Without the breath we would not be bound together as the body of Christ.

The self-same breath of God, that created order out of primordial disorder, that self-same breath creates the order that is the church. And that fact has fed a stunningly deep well of meaning over the years . . . in Paul’s vision of the church as Christ’s body, it is the breath of God that animates, that in-spires, in-breathes that body . . . but that’s not the first bodily image of a people . . . remember those old dry bones of Ezekiel? “I will cause breath to enter them,” says the lord, “I will cause ruach to infuse them, to dwell within them . . . Come from the four winds, o ruach, and breathe on them, that they might live” . . . and the breath comes into them, and they live and they stand on their feet, a vast multitude, a coherent people of God.

But there’s another metaphor at work here, as well, and it’s dancing around the Apostles there in the room where they gather . . . “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them,” Luke says, “and a tongue rested on each of them.” And this is where we get that red that’s in our banner and paraments, and in the stole hanging around my neck, and the image is of spirit as a fire that burns within us, that warms our hearts, that powers us like the flames of a coal-fired boiler.

But there’s another, less exciting figure of speech—no pun intended—here . . . tongue of course has a double meaning, we say “tongues of flame” to indicate the flickering, leaping blaze, but tongue has a more mundane connotation, as in a mouth-part, and indeed the next line indicates that that double meaning is in Luke’s mind as well “a tongue rested on each of them,” he says, and suddenly “all were filled with the holy spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” And the word our NRSV translates as languages is the same in Greek—glossais—as for tongue, so a more literal translation is “divided tongues appeared among them . . . and they began to speak in other tongues, as the spirit gave them ability.” And so this second image, of divided tongues, of divided languages is a quite graphic metaphor of the human tongue, split into multiple languages . . .

And so the coming of the Spirit, here in Acts at least (the Gospel of John has other ideas, of course), this coming of the Spirit revolves around two images, two movements, if you will: one a gale-force wind, strong and loud, which creates order from chaos, it binds us to one another, as the body of Christ . . . but what good is that binding if we cannot understand one another, if we cannot work together because we are so different, because we speak different languages, literally as well as metaphorically? And so the second spirit move, the multiple tongues, the multiplicity of voices within the body . . . divided tongues, each division speaking a different language, a different dialect of the body of Christ.

But note: it doesn’t say they all began to speak the same language! It doesn’t say that everybody started speaking Greek or Aramaic or Hebrew, it doesn’t say they all began playing the same hymns, using the same translation of the scripture . . . all began to speak in other languages, ones they didn’t know, ones they weren’t comfortable with . . . and did they then go their separate ways? Did those who spoke Aramaic go over here, Greek over there? Did those who sang 5th-Century lyre-chants go across town while the ones who played on tambourines stayed put? No . . . they gathered together and they worshiped together, they respected the diversity and Luke tells us they were astonished at it.

I think there’s a lesson for our situation today . . . when an organization—a corporation, a denomination, a church—is in decline, the human inclination is to circle the wagons, to turn inward, to cling to familiar ways, comfortable ways . . . but brothers and sisters, that’s not the way the strongest churches are, and that’s not the way shown to us by the Spirit. The fact of the matter is, diversity breeds strength, not weakness . . . the strongest organizations are those with the most diverse interests, for they are the ones that can stand the vagaries of changing context, changing fashion, changing times. And when those divided tongues—they were divided, people, they had components that were different from one another—danced around the apostles’ heads, and wove in and out of their company, that’s when they were the strongest, that’s when they were the most resilient, that’s when they were the most alive.

But you say “Preacher”—I get called that a lot, you know—you say “Preacher, what’s to keep us from fightin’ amongst ourselves over the diversity? What’s to keep us from shakin’ apart over what kind communion to do—intinction or in-the-pews?—or where to spend that ten thousand dollars extra we may have—on paint for the fellowship hall or a mission trip for the youth—or how often to use guitars in the service—some would like to see it every week, some not in their lifetimes. What’s to keep us from fighting like banshees over these and other questions?

Ah . . . that’s where the breath comes in . . . that’s where that creative force, that wind like a freight train that binds us together in Christ. The spirit we celebrate is what creates order out of chaos, that sustains that order, that nourishes it and maintains it . . . it’s the infrastructure that maintains the house, the glue that ties us together. The very spirit that brings on the diversity, that lights us up with with those divided tongues, is the same spirit that can hold us together as a body. We just have to let it. Amen.

Sermon May 4 2008 -- Acts 1:1-11

2008-05-04T09:58:00.001-05:00

“All About Ascension” (Luke 24:44-53; Acts 1:1-11)
Rick Olson, May 4, 2008

Whenever I think of Jesus ascending on a cloud, I picture a stately progression, like a really slow elevator, or maybe a ship sailing up into the sky, Jesus looking back at the disciples onshore, giving a little wave, or just letting his gaze rest upon them one more time. It wasn’t at all like the ascension of Elijah, who was jolted off the ground by a whirlwind . . . it was majestic, regal, lordly, wholly befitting the newly-installed King of Heaven. No out-of-control, in-the-grip-of-forces-beyond-him craziness for Jesus. No sir! God transported God’s son – as gently as cut-glass crystal, or the most delicate Fabergé egg. And it took time – Jesus’ follower stood there, watching him go . . . they probably got cricks in their necks as he got higher and higher, and I wonder if it sunk in that he was really gone? Maybe not . . . if I were the disciples, I wouldn’t be sure of anything anymore. After all, he’d been crucified and killed, but he’d appeared to them anyway, against all hope, where they were gathered for supper. Maybe he wasn’t gone for good this time either, maybe somebody would run into him on the street, like they did that time on the Emmaus Road.

Luke tells that story in his previous book, which we call the Gospel of Luke, and he also describes the ascension in Luke, which I just read, the and so in Acts, he’s recapping the Gospel to remind his reader – one Theophilus – of where he left off. His gospel was written to Theophilus too, and just about all we know about him is his name, and we can’t even be sure of that – it could have been written to those in general who love God, because that’s what it means: Theo (God), philus (lover) – God-lover. I like to think it was written to you and me – we love the Lord, don’t we?

Anyway, in the beginning of Acts, he gives us a summary of what happened in the last book – he says he “wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven.” Now we know that Luke didn’t write about all that Jesus did and taught, but we can forgive him the hype . . . he was just following a convention of Greek rhetoric that calls for amplification to emphasize the importance of a topic. And Luke knew that Jesus’ actions and teachings were of paramount importance to his followers, and actually the whole world . . . But in addition to his teachings and actions, Jesus gave instructions through the Holy Spirit to his chosen apostles, and this foreshadows the actions of the apostles and later converts, who spread the gospel through the power of the Holy Spirit, which – according to Luke – will be given to them in just a few days.

And further, Luke says, he proved himself alive by “many convincing proofs,” and in Greek that’s a technical term for an argument that can’t be refuted, that leads inevitably to one conclusion, and that’s the resurrection. For Luke, the resurrection has been proven beyond doubt. But when he was ready to go, he told them not to leave town, but to wait there for the promise of the father, which is, of course, the Holy Spirit. “For John,” he says, “ baptized with water but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

In response, they ask him a question: “Is this the time when you will restore the Kingdom to Israel?” And it’s a natural question – Luke seemed to believe that the Spirit’s coming would signal the Kingdom’s, and it was also believed that the kingdom of Israel would be restored when that happens. And Jesus doesn’t deny Israel’s restoration, or the Kingdom’s coming . . . he just says it’s not for them to know when. It’s not for them to understand when the end times are to be, just as, presumably, it’s not for us to know it either.

Basically, Jesus tells the apostles that it’s none of their business when it’s going to happen, all they need to know is when they get the Spirit, they’ll be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. Never mind that man behind the curtain, he does his job, you do yours. And note that he doesn’t say “if you choose to, you can be witnesses” or “if you feel like it,” or “when you’re not busy doing something else” – he says that the Holy Spirit will come . . . and you’ll be witnesses. Period. End-of-story. Now obviously, this goes against our precious American values – free will and free choice and all that . . . and maybe he is just making a prediction. Maybe he’s just telling them how it’s going to be, what’s going to happen to them. It surely foreshadows, because that’s what Acts is all about, the witnessing of the first Christians.

But what if it’s not only predictive but prescriptive . . . what if we have no choice, what if we are witnesses whether we like it or not? What if just receiving the Holy Spirit makes us witnesses? If whenever we’re driving in our car, yelling at the RV ahead of us, or telling one of those little white lies that seem to get out of hand, or whenever we snub somebody who asks us for help, what if whenever we do these things, we are witnessing to the Gospel? Makes me shudder to think about it . . . I had a pastor one time who wouldn’t put a Christian bumper sticker on his car because he didn’t want to embarrass Jesus, and that’s stopped me every time I thought about doing the same thing. What Would Jesus Do? Well, he sure wouldn’t cut some poor slob off coming out of Bruno’s . . .

The Holy Spirit cuts both ways, I think . . . it gives us the power to proclaim the Gospel, to do marvelous things in God’s name, but it changes us at the same time . . . we’re no longer the same, we’re different whether we like it or not, whether anyone knows we’re Christian or not, we’re witnesses . . .

And as the disciples look upward, as they watch in awe as he dwindles to the size of a speck in their eyes, they notice they’re not alone. There’s a couple of guys in white robes standing next to him, and they all know what that means. White robes, sudden appearances, miraculous events . . . they’re angels, that’s what they are, and the apostles – and Luke’s reader Theophilus – can’t help but think back on the last time men in dazzling robes had appeared. It was at the tomb, to the women who’d come early on Easter morning, and that time they’d asked a question too . . . why do you seek the living among the dead? Here they are again, Jesus is gone again, and they’re asking questions, again – “Men of Galilee,” they say, “why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

And it’s the same kind of question they asked the women at the tomb – once again, they’re looking for Jesus in the wrong place! We disciples seem to have a habit of doing that . . . And then the angels continue “This Jesus, who’s been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go.” And the apostles are reassured that just like that other time when he came back from the grave, he will come again. But they get the rebuke, as well, especially remembering what Jesus had just said . . . Why are you looking up into heaven? It is not for you to know the times and seasons of God’s appointed hour . . . he will return, just like he left, right back here to good old Earth, so get on with it already, get on with the job of being witnesses for God.

And they did – they got on with it. The whole book of Acts tells us about it, about the carrying of the Gospel to the four corners of the earth. We follow Peter as he preaches the good news, we see the Pharisee Saul become evangelist Paul, we see Ananias and Sapphira, and Phillip, and the early church’s struggles to live out Jesus teachings . . . and we see the dark side, too, as Stephen – full of the Holy Ghost – is stoned to death by an angry crowd, and we see the persecution grow, until in the end, as Paul reaches Rome, it’s bittersweet, because we know he’ll be killed there by the Emperor Nero . . . this witnessing business has it’s ups and downs, and it’s no wonder we’ve made an English verb for sacrificial death – martyr – from the Greek word for witness.

And so the temptation is always there for us to keep our eyes on the prize, to keep them on heaven . . . early Christians looked forward to the next life because their earthly one was so miserable, and the thought of heaven as a reward sustained and comforted generations. When Christianity became the official Roman religion, and persecution stopped, focus on the hereafter was still encouraged, promoted, even, because it kept them under control, down on the farm, snugly at the bottom of the Roman Catholic hierarchy . . . with their eyes on the next world, they didn’t worry so much about inequities in this one . . . it was no accident that the Roman Catholic hierarchy was often from the upper class . . .

And so, over the centuries, Christian thought and preaching, at least at the lay level, became focused sharply on the question of salvation . . . are you or are you not saved? And if you aren’t, how can you be? And if you think you are, then how do you know for sure? If you have to somehow accept Christ, how can you be certain you are sincere when you do it? Were you sincere when you did? Better do it again, just to make sure . . . And on and on and on . . . until pretty soon, proclaiming the Good News became synonymous with saving souls, and the number of notches on your belt, the number of souls in your bag, became the sum total of your witness. I can see it now . . . St. Peter at the pearly gates, grading on the stair-step method. He throws your bag o’ souls on the scale – weighing’s faster than counting, you know, souls average 10.3 ounces – and if it’s not heavy enough, back you go . . .

But Jesus defined the Good News by what he did here on earth, what he taught and what he preached and the signs he did. And although he spoke about the kingdom of heaven, and who’s out and who’s in, he spent many more words on good old mother earth, telling us how to live and how to be with one another. He redefined community and taught us who are our neighbors and how to depend on God, and not on ourselves. All stuff about our earthly existence, never mind some heavenly one.

And so it’s no accident that here on the border between Jesus’ ministry and ours, after the triumph of Easter, and “Christ the Lord has Risen Today!” and we’re flush with victory and we’ve watched Jesus float upward on that cloud, on the Glory Train into heaven, we get a reality check in this passage. We get some wiseacre angels, standing on good old terra firma, and asking some very pointed questions. Why are we gazing up into heaven? Don’t we know that this Jesus who has been taken away will come back here again? Don’t we realize that this Kingdom will be on Earth? We’d better get cracking. Amen

Sermon April 27 2008 -- Acts 17:16-34

2008-04-27T09:55:00.001-05:00

“Poetic Justice” (Acts 17:16-34)
Rick Olson, April 27, 2008

Athens was four-hundred years past its prime in Paul’s day . . . but it was still a center of learning and the arts. And what's more, it lived on its past glories . . . Rome left it pretty much alone because of them . . . after all, it was the cradle of Western civilization . . . Every philosopher worth his salt ended up in Athens . . . they were as thick as thieves, they literally wandered the streets . . . philosophizing. It was a heady atmosphere . . . ideas perfumed the air like hyacinths, or like jasmine on a summer’s eve . . . there was an incredible lot of them, flying back and forth around the marketplace.

Paul came there on his second missionary trip, and he acted like nothing so much as a tourist, doing the town, looking it up and down . . . I can imagine he was just a little in awe, probably climbed up onto the Acropolis, grabbing passers-by, having them snap his picture in front of the Parthenon. It was Athens, for gosh sake, he could touch what Plato touched, walk where Socrates walked . . . the foundations of Western thought and all that. But what got his goat, what distressed him deeply, as Luke puts it, was the sight of all the idols around. The place was lousy with ‛em.

Anyway, he went to the synagogue to teach and debate with the Jews and the God-fearers – our translation has “devout persons” – who were Gentile believers in the Hebrew God, and he went to the marketplace, the great public square in the lower part of town, and debated with whoever happened to be there . . . but it was his run-in with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers that got him in trouble. They were materialists, you see, who didn't believe in spirit, they thought even God was matter . . . albeit really, really good matter. Epicureans believed that the highest good was pleasure, and the highest pleasure was that of the mind . . . their gods were so interested in their own pleasure that they ignored people. For the Stoics there was a divine, rational principle in everything, and their goal was to live in harmony with it, which amounted to living in tune with nature. Both Epicureans and Stoics were rationalists, who thought the mind was superior to the emotions. In this, of course, they would have made good Presbyterians.

And it was these guys who got Paul in trouble – “what does this babbler want to say?” And the Greek for “babbler” is “seed-talker,” as in a bird who scatters thoughts at random, who eats any old kind of seed, and spits them out onto the ground at random. It was an insult to those – like the philosophers – who prized rational, orderly thought. But this other thing they said, that he's a proclaimer of foreign Gods, that was downright dangerous – it's the same thing got Socrates thrown into jail and poisoned. And the reason they thought it, had something to do with his preaching, something about the good news of Jesus and the resurrection.

Whatever it was, they hauled him off to appear before the Areopagus, a council that met up on Mars Hill, and it’s clear they weren’t ready to charge him with anything, because they asked for more information. “What you’re saying is strange; we’d like to know what it means . . .” It was kind of like a judicial inquiry, or maybe a grand jury, trying to decide whether to indict. At any rate, Luke kind of snickers at it, saying the Athenians and foreigners living there spent all their time doing nothing but hearing and saying new things . . . he saw the irony in Paul being called a babbler by these people. It was like the pot calling the kettle black.

But since they asked, Paul stood up and began to talk, and what came out of his mouth is the single most-talked-about passage in Acts. At its core, it's an argument in the classic sense, it starts from a premise – that God made the world – ands ends up condemning his listeners’ idolatry.

But first there’s the opener – every preacher has to have one, an introduction that grabs them and sucks them in. “Athenians,” he says, “I see how extremely religious you are . . .” and this touches bases with them, flatters them, almost puts them off their guard. And it also gets them wondering: why does he think them so religious? Well, he says, as he was making a careful survey of their objects of worship – i.e., their temples and idols – he saw they even had an altar to “an unknown God!” What dedication! What religiosity! They were so religious that they covered all their bases, they didn’t want to miss a bet.

And after the set-up comes his thesis, his proposition, what he’s trying to say: “What you worship as unknown is what I am proclaiming to you.” He’s being reasonable, just like his audience – he’s only telling them something new . . . but what he proceeds to tell them couldn’t be more radically different than what they believed: Paul’s God, the God who made the world and everything in it, Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t live in shrines made by human hands . . . and furthermore, God’s not served by human hands either – how could that be true? How could the God who’s given us everything—life and breath and trees and crops and flowers—how could that God need anything? And this has his audience mumbling to themselves. This flew in the face of materialism . . . if this God made everything, all matter, all of us, how could he be a part of it? How could God be matter if God made all matter? If God made everything, God must be apart from it, separate from it, not a part of it . . .

Paul goes on to build on his creational theme: God made every nation from one ancestor, and their purposes are to live on earth, and to seek after the Lord . . . and this must have irritated them even more, because they didn’t buy the notion we’re all one people in the end . . . and as for the Stoics and Epicurians, their purposes were right-living and personal pleasure, not to seek after God . . .

What Paul is doing is stealthy, it’s roundabout, it's almost sneaky – his goal is the condemnation of idolatry, but he’s focused his audience – the philosophers and law-makers of Athens – on this unknown God, whose characteristics are at right-angles to their cherished ideas; he’s distracted them, maybe gotten them thinking about how much they disagree, so that when he sneaks up on them with his end-run, they’re taken by surprise.

And now comes the coup de grás: he quotes a couple of their poets. The first tells us that “In God we live and move and have our being;” and the says it's because “we too are God’s offspring,” and then Paul's trap shuts . . . “Because we are God’s offspring,” he says, “we ought not think that God is like gold, or silver or stone, an idol, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.” If even your own poets say that we are God’s children, how can we think that idols are God? If God made us, if we are God’s seed, then how could we have made God? Paul has snuck up behind them and slapped them up the side of their heads: If we’re God’s children, how could inanimate objects – which we have made – be God?

And now, in the wind-up, he appeals to pathos, to the emotions, specifically to fear: You may have been groping along, feeling your way to God, you may have been worshiping a god you didn’t know, and God overlooked this before Jesus came, but not anymore, now God has commanded all people to turn away from that path, to repent, because Jesus has come to judge in righteousness the whole earth . . . and this word righteousness—di-kai-súne in Greek—encompasses all he's been talking about . . . it refers to right-relationships with God and with other people. And the right relationship with God is as God's children – we are not God's makers, God is our maker. And our purpose is to seek God, not pleasure or right-living or being at one with nature. And most of all, the things we make are not our Gods. As proof of this relationship, as proof that God is the ruler over life and death, not the other way around, God raised God's Son Jesus Christ from the dead.

And the whole speech, carefully constructed within the confines of rhetorical convention, moving ahead by stealth and delaying tactics, by what the classical Greek rhetoricians called insinuato, and what’s more, the whole of the speech turns on the words of poets. Paul spoke to an audience infested with Epicureans and Stoics, believers in the dominance of mind over mood, of rationality over emotion, of thinking over feeling, and they were done in by poetry, the language of the heart. What a deliciously fine irony.

Maybe it’s not an accident—and I know I’ve told you about this before, in other contexts, but it bears repeating—maybe it’s not an accident that even in Greek, that most intellectual of ancient languages, the word for poet is the same as the word for “do-er,” for “make-er.” In fact, our English word is from the Greek – po-e-tón, poet, one who creates, one who makes. And it is through poetry, through metaphor and allusion and simile, the stuff of verse, that our minds are altered, our hearts are changed, and our realities are made.

Likewise, I think it’s no accident that everybody’s favorite book of Scripture . . . is poetry, the Psalms, where the Hebrew people talked, wept and cried aloud to their God . . . “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God” . . . “O God, you are my God, eagerly I seek thee” . . . And God answered them, answers us in the poetry, in the images and metaphors and imagination, God talks back to us, God’s people, and assures us we are not alone – “Comfort, comfort O My People, says the Lord your God.” “We shall mount up on wings like Eagles, we shall run and not be weary, we shall walk, and not be faint.” In poetry, we can say the unsaid, elliptically, playfully, subversively . . . The poets told the Athenians what the philosophers couldn’t – that we are God’s children, offspring of the Almighty.

And it’s the same way for us as it was for Paul’s accusers, as it was for those dilettantes trapped in the mind, trapped in a world where all that matters is matter, enslaved by things, by idols made from gold and silicon and stone, Gods of rubber, silver and plastic, deities of wood and glass and clay . . . idols that run us up and down the highways, pour televised commercial messages down our throats, and jingle pleasantly in our pockets . . .

But Unlike the Athenians, we know who our Gods are, know all too well . . . they live in temples in our cities, shiny buildings with names out front . . . Chrysler, Exxon, Weryerhauser . . . Our world is devoid of spirit, flattened, dull, grey . . . we may not live among philosophers, but things rule us nevertheless . . . like jealous toddlers, they are our children, but they are in fact in charge . . .

But when all our media lies, when the television and the radio and the newspaper tell us the great lie of our culture, that happiness is found in metal and glass and leaving a great-looking corpse, the poets tell us the truth, they create a radical, truthful space, and in their verse, in their playful, allusive metaphor, they dare to speak against the dominant reality, the reality of the world, of more and more money, more and more power, more and more things. In the face of all our possessions, they insist the world is possessed by God, that the “world is the Lord's and all that is in it.” In the depths of our abandonment, when all that we love seems gone, they tell us that even there God's hand will guide us, his right hand shall hold us fast.

God is revealed in poetry, God lives in it, dwells in that sweet, still space that insists things are different from what they appear on the surface, that we are God's children, the sheep of God's pasture, we are not adrift or cut off from the divine. It’s a space of truth and light, where miracles happen and God is active in our lives. Paul's lesson for the Epicures, sealed by the poet, sealed by the Spirit, is the same for us today . . . how can our Gods be stone or silver or gold? We are created by God, not the other way around, and God is in charge of us, like an infinitely patient, wonderfully tender mother, like a gentle, forgiving father, we nestle in God's arms. Amen.

Sermon April 20 2008 -- 1 Peter 2:1-10

2008-04-20T09:52:00.000-05:00

“Spiritual Milk” (1 Peter 2:1-10)
Rick Olson, April 20, 2008

Last week, we saw how the first Christians attempted to live out their calling as followers of a risen God. We saw how the devoted themselves to fellowship, to koinonia, and prayer and care for one another. We saw that they had all things in common, that they sold all their possessions and gave the proceeds to whoever had need . . . for them, the post-resurrection reality was substantially different from that before, Christ’s teaching and living among them necessitated a re-thinking of how they lived their everyday lives.

This week, we get another look at that post-resurrection reality, the state in which believers are now living after that first Easter morning . . . and it’s important to remember that fact: it’s a reality only in light of the revelation of God’s Word on that Easter morning . . . just before our passage is a rather famous assertion: The grass withers, the flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures forever. That word is the Good News that was announced to you . . . and so it’s only in the light of that Word—who remember is Jesus Christ incarnate, crucified and then resurrected on the third day—that the reality described here stands.

Rid yourselves, 1^st Peter says, of all malice, guile, insincerity, envy and slander . . . a laundry list of maladies we are to avoid. And note that that they all take two or more to tango, they’re not solitary sins before God—malice is toward someone or something; envy is of something somebody else has; and slander, of course, is about saying bad things about somebody else. And thus, they interfere with living the Christian life which, as we saw last week, is meant to be lived with others. Malice and insincerity. Envy and all slander: all are things that make living in that post-resurrection koinonia difficult, if not impossible. And what are we to do instead? We are to long for the pure, spiritual milk . . . Like newborn infants—like sucklings, like helpless, mewling kittens, like hairless, baby rabbits—like infants, longing for that pure, spiritual milk . . . and notice that 1^st Peter writes as if we have a choice, as if we have a choice between insincerity, malice and guile, and longing, desiring that spiritual milk. We normally think of desire as involuntary, as in we like what we like, we can’t help it, sorry about that . . . but 1^st Peter acts like it’s our choice to long for this pure, spiritual milk . . . and if we drink of it, we may grow into salvation, into our vocations as children of God . . .

Let’s pause right here and consider this remarkable imagery . . . the Gospel as pure spiritual milk, as if from a mother’s breast . . . it’s a feminine image, in a sea of masculine prose for the divine. In the 1^st century, just as here in the 21^st, milk has a comforting image, a nourishing image, a down-home connotation . . . milk is nurturing, it comes from the mother’s breasts, so this is a pretty radical image of the Gospel—and the Gospel, of course, is personified by that Word incarnate, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The Gospel is likened here to milk—as nurturing, comforting, body-building, as milk, come from the breast of God . . . how does the commercial go? Milk does a body good? Well it certainly does . . . that pure spiritual milk, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Word incarnate, does the church body a world of good . . . it causes us to grow into salvation, into sanctification . . . if we have tasted that the Lord is good, that is . . .

And it is this tasting that the Lord is good that defines believers for 1^st Peter, if we have indeed tasted the sweet nectar of salvation . . . and if we have tasted thus, if we are believers, we are to come to Christ, and in the Greek it’s clear that Christ is the living stone in this instance, so a better translation might be “come to him as to a living stone,” one that has been rejected by mortals, and yet chosen—and in the Greek it’s our old favorite “elected”—by God and precious in God’s sight . . . and this election, this choosing of Christ is the basis of our own election, our own choosing, and that of course is the true wonder of this living stone, this living milk from the heart of God . . . through our association with Christ, we are like living stones ourselves, and like those living stones, we are to let ourselves be built into a spiritual house and a holy priesthood.

And so here’s another metaphor for what we are, what congregations are . . . alongside the family metaphors in the Gospels, the bodily metaphor in the writings of Paul, here we are likened to a spiritual house and a holy priesthood. We are to be a building, a house, and the word in Greek is oikos, house, home . . . it’s where we get ecos as in ecology . . . and calling it a house or household or a home implies that someone lives there.

So as living stones—molded in the image of Christ—we are to let ourselves be a house, a home . . . and a home is for something or someone to dwell . . . so the question is, who are we a home for? Who are we—collectively, as a body—a home for? Paul thought it was the Holy Spirit . . . he said—using his body metaphor—that your body, that is plural, as in the congregation, the body of Christ—is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and so is that what 1^st Peter is saying? That we, as living stones, fed spiritual milk from God, are to be a house of the Holy Spirit, a place filled by it, animated by it, quickened by it?

I think so, though it’s not totally clear from the text, but I can tell you something that I do know: this wing of the house, this particular branch of the body called Covenant certainly is spirit filled . . . I see it every day, I see it when the halls are filled with children with autism, when we are thrilled in our service by spirited, liturgical dance, when I arrive on the third Sunday of every month, like I did this morning, and see that parking lot full, and know that some of those cars have been there since 3:30 in the morning. When I walk in that door and see the faithful, dipping out grits and eggs, filling those Styrofoam trays, that’s when I know the Spirit lives within this body . . .

And I know the Spirit abides within us when I see an active, vital youth program on Sunday and Wednesday nights, when I see us gathered together around the table, breaking bread and laughing and crying together, bound, as Calvin might say, by the Spirit to each other and to Christ . . .

And I can feel the movement of that Spirit, rustling against my cheek, swirling around and through you all out there in the pews, over and under and beside us all, as we begin to awaken, as we begin to stir in our concern for this beloved congregation. The Spirit is here in the whispers as we discuss the possibilities—no, the probabilities—for renewal and hope for our future . . . make no mistake about it, the Spirit is in the Seeker process, as halting and as incoherent and frail a vessels as we have been . . . I am enormously grateful for each and every one of you out there, that we’ve hung in there. What better evidence of the Spirit could there be? We members of Covenant are a temple, collectively, a house, an ecosystem for the presence of the Holy Spirit, and I for one feel it every day.

But wait . . . there’s more! We’re to be made a priesthood, a holy priesthood, set aside for a reason . . . to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God . . . Our sacrifices are not just material, though those are important, they’re spiritual as well . . . we’re to intercede for the world—that’s one of the functions of a priesthood—we’re to intercede for the world, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. And the most obvious way we do that is through prayer, which floats up like incense, a pleasing odor to the creator of the universe . . .

But that said, I have to say as well that we often create a false dichotomy between spiritual and material in our teaching and—I know you’ll be shocked by this—our preaching. (Ok, I’ll just up and say it . . . my preaching) We separate our mission as a household of God into two separate spheres . . . the spiritual, which includes praying and contemplation and all that stuff, and doing, which includes social justice and making programs and plans and et cetera. And like Presbyterian congregations tend to do, we make jokes about what a bunch of head cases we are, but we lose sight of the fact that they are two sides of the same coin, or of the same mission of God. All the prayer in the world, all that vertical stuff between us and God, isn’t worth a hill of beans without action, without process, without doing in the world; by the same token, all the activity, all the horizontal work—in the community and within our own house—is incomplete without the listening, the stillness, the vertical dimension between us and God.

I think it’s one of our tasks in our Covenant household to find a unique spirituality for ourselves , to discern what spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God look like for us, alongside and apart from what others have found. Oh, we should listen to the advice of others, we should consider about Christian spirituality in its many forms, from social action to contemplative practice, from William Sloan Coffin to Richard Foster, but honed and particularized for our neck of the house-of-God woods.

A spiritual sacrifice, acceptable to God encompasses everything we do, everything we say, everything we pray, and as such it presupposes a balance between the doing and the being, the activity and the listening, that is bound to be unique for Covenant Presbyterian Church at 113 Hargrove Road in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 35401. And the trick is, we must be continually involved in discerning that balance, and of what it should consist, both within this Seeker process and beyond . . . We must put into place practices that allow us to continually and perpetually hone and tune that balance to fit our time and surroundings, what we call in church-speak our ministry context.

But you know what? Saying we must put into place, we must discern is misleading . . . one of the first things that struck me about this passage is it’s continual passive construction . . . like newborn infants—the most helpless kind of human being—we are to let ourselves be built into that spiritual household, that holy priesthood . . . allow ourselves to be built, and we know who the builder is, don’t we? We know who the construction foreman is on the spiritual household project, don’t we? But we must allow it, we must let go and let that foreman do that foreman’s business . . . if we don’t, if we try and do it ourselves and build it in our image instead of God’s, then it’s doomed to fail.

Brothers and sisters, we are a chosen race, a priesthood of the royal house of Christ the King. And the one who did the choosin’ was God, not us . . . we didn’t elect ourselves, we were elected by God, and for a reason: proclaim the mighty acts of the Christ who called us out of darkness, as 1^st Peter says, into this marvelous light. So let’s long for that spiritual milk, let’s pine for that milk from the bosom of God with every fiber of our being . . . let us put aside the power-mongering, the turf-protecting, and the malice and bickering that tear us down . . . we are a household of God’s spirit, a temple of God’s mighty motivating force in the world. Once we were not a people, but now we are God’s people . . . once we had not received mercy, but now we have. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermon April 13 2008 -- Acts 2:42-47

2008-04-13T09:49:00.001-05:00

“Commune-ity Relations” (Acts 2:42-47)
Rick Olson, April 13, 2008

Believe it or not, we pastors can get a little cynical now and then. I know it’s shocking . . . but between all the feudin’ and fussin’ and fightin’ that goes on and all the scapegoating and railroading and power-tripping, well, it’s hard not to sometimes. And there’s a scene in one of the Coen brothers’ movies – Barton Fink, to be exact – that sort of sums it all up. Barton – I guess you could call him “our hero” – is riding downstairs to meet the cops who want to interrogate him about a murder, and on the way down he asks the elevator operator a question: “Pete,” he says, “Have you ever read the Bible?” And Pete thinks about it for a beat and says “The holy Bible?” Barton says “Yeah.” And Pete says “I think so. At least I heard about it . . .”

This is funny, and all, but sometimes I wonder if it isn’t more than a little true, I wonder if anyone in our churches ever reads the Bible (present company excluded, of course). And if we do, does this passage make us a little uncomfortable? I know it does me . . . I’ve done pretty well in our free-market capitalism, thank you very much, I’ve got a house and a couple of cars, and the last thing I want to do is sell it all and redistribute the wealth. I like my stuff.

But there it is . . . Luke—who wrote Acts—gives us an early example of how Jesus’ followers interpreted the mandate to live as Christians, and they come up with a way of life that resembled, in some respects at least, communism. And it was a reaction as much as anything to the system in which they were embedded, which might be considered an extreme form of unregulated, market capitalism . . . and it’s unregulated nature resulted, in part, in a two-tiered system: there were wealthy property-owners on one hand, and on the other . . . everyone else. There was no middle class . . . and the “everyone else” included kitchen workers, craftsmen, farm workers and tenant farmers, as well as slaves owned by the land-owners. The wealth of the relatively few land-owners was thus supported by the labor of many in the lower socio-economic classes. By Jesus’ day, the transfer of wealth from many small, family holdings was largely complete; many who’d held land in their families for generations had been turned into tenant farmers or day workers by that same old same old: in marginal times—and there were a lot of those in Palestine—they wouldn’t quite make it, so they’d borrow from the landowners, at a hefty interest rate, and in the next marginal time they couldn’t pay the vig, I mean, interest; they get deeper into debt and eventually, they lose the land and become mere tenants. We saw it in the last century in South Africa; it’s happening even as we speak in this country, as family farms are giving way to large corporate land-holders, by much the same processes as well.

That’s the economic system that Jesus came into, a two-tier system of wealthy landowners and everyone else, and that everyone else being many of the followers of Jesus, many of the hundreds of disciples that the scriptures tells us he had. And after the Easter experience, after the cataclysmic events of a resurrection—a new age indeed!—and the coming of the spirit at Pentecost, his followers sat back on their knees and reflected upon what it meant to live in the spirit, to have life, as ___ read from John, and have it abundantly.

And Luke provides us with a snap-shot of how they attempted to live out their Christian faith, what they thought was important, what kind of economic system they thought was dictated by the life and teachings of their master Jesus Christ. First of all, he says, they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship . . . they learned as much as they could about this new way of living their lives . . . study is mentioned right off the bat, it’s seen as fundamental to the way of life that they learn about it as much as possible. And they devoted themselves to fellowship—the Greek for that is koinonia, and it’s derived from koine, “in common,” as in they were together, having things “in common,” and goes beyond just Wednesday night suppers and coffee after the surface, it implies a true, holistic one-ness with one another. Paul often used the metaphor of siblings, of family, but he also used the metaphor of a body, with each person as organs in that body. Thus, the connection between members of a fellowship was to be much more intimate than mere acquaintance, or even friend . . . it was to be a filial relationship or—closer—a connection as of tissue and blood and bone.

Thus, the connection between members of the early apostolic church—who devoted themselves to koinonia—was one of mutual dependency, of mutual vulnerability, quite unlike that in our modern-day Western churches. Steeped in rugged individuality, in the can-do, self-sufficient national myths of the West, we are very uncomfortable with intimacy, with interconnection, and most of all, with mutual dependency and vulnerability. If we’re in need, we’re embarrassed, we hide our finances one from another . . . our society equates need and vulnerability with failure, as in the people who succeed are better than those who fail, and only failures need help . . .

And this carries into the churches, where we certainly no longer devote ourselves to Christian education, in many churches—especially, the perhaps not-so-coincidentally dying main-line churches—in many churches, adult education is limited to barely an hour on Sunday morning, and then of course a 15-to-20-minute sermon . . . and very much less than half of the adults in most mainline churches attend any form of Christian ed . . .

But the early Christians devoted themselves to learning and koinonia, and their communal meals became the Lord’s Supper, which is doubtless the breaking of the bread that Luke describes. And they were filled with awe because of the signs and wonders, because of the clear inbreaking of the Kingdom of God, and they were all together and had all things in common, and holy socialism, Batman, but that was the way they tried to counteract the oppressive economic realities in which they were embedded . . . having all things in common, all things koine, they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had any need.

And so we see the shape, as well as the results, of this intense koinonia, this interdependency as of one bodily organ to another. We can see how it was accomplished, as they had a common pool of goods and distributed them to any who had need. And we should note that this didn’t mean they were totally uncoupled from the economic system of Palestine . . . they certainly continued to work for their masters to earn whatever they were paid, it’s just how they lived in community that was different . . . and note too that they were not necessarily living in common, or in a commune as this sermon’s cheeky title implies . . . good Jews that they were, they spent much time together at the temple, and then in their homes—perhaps what would come to be known as house-churches—they broke their bread, celebrating the Lord’s Supper with glad and generous hearts.

And this . . . way of living was a response, it was a considered rejoinder to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Teachings such as “whatever you do the least of these you do unto me,” teachings such as the story of the king’s banquet, where the servants are sent out into the highways and hedges to bring in the poor, the halt and the lame . . . Jesus offered a radical way of living—abundant life, he called it—and the followers that Luke describe interpreted those teachings and Jesus’ example while amongst them, and this is how they tried to live them out. They held all things in common—and remember that’s the same root word in Greek as fellowship—they held all things in common and redistributed it as any had need.

And it was a radically different way of living, in that world as much as it would be in our own . . . it was very different from the surrounding culture, distinct and apart, and Luke tells us what the reaction of that surrounding culture was: they had the goodwill of all the people—and this is important—day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. And in this context, being saved is purely physical: it’s being saved from the oppressive economic system surrounding them

Day by day the Lord added to their number, people were flocking to join the church where all goods were held in common and distributed as any had need . . . where the people were devoted to Christian study and the breaking of bread together and the prayers . . . where the members were devoted to fellowship, to being in common one with another, to being as interdependent one upon another as bodily organs, as an eye is to the lungs or as the kidneys are to the heart.

People flocked not to a place where the livin’ was easy—nobody said this was easy—but to where the livin’ was different, more rewarding than what the society around them offered. It was a place that provided shelter, respite from the ravaged system, where not only their spiritual needs were met, but their physical ones were as well. The Christian way of life provided a clear alternative to the societal norm, and it attracted converts by the droves.

And it continued to be this way for quite some time . . . early Christians had a well-known and well-deserved reputation for integrity and care for the weak. The 2^nd and 3^rd-century Christian leader Tertullian wrote, "Our care for the derelict and our active love have become our distinctive sign before the enemy...See, they say, how they love one another and how ready they are to die for each other." Even the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate acknowledged the radically counter cultural life of the early Christians: "The godless Galileans feed not only their poor but ours.”

I think it’s safe to say that we’ve lost that reputation . . . we’ve become so assimilated into today’s culture that our lives are essentially no different from our non-Christian friends. At a time when the poor are ever-more front and center, when the difference between the haves and have-nots is wider than ever, studies have shown that Christians overall give no more to the poor than the society at large . . . at a time when social-scientists have documented how disconnected and isolated people feel today, leaving them longing for a "more collectively caring community," Christian churches have abandoned the devotion to fellowship and interdependency Luke describes in our passage, and their have become just as individualistic, just as disconnected as folks in the world.

Is it any wonder folks aren’t flocking to churches nowadays? Is it any wonder that the Lord is not adding to our number daily those who are being saved? Why should people come in through those doors if we’re no different from anybody else? Why should they spend even the one hour most church members do a week—when the way we live is no different than the Sunday morning crowd down at Starbucks, where at least you can get a decent cup of coffee?

Brothers and sisters, I’m convinced that one of the keys to the renewal of the modern church is a renewal of commitment to lives that are different from the surrounding culture. A life of dedication to learning about Christ and what he would have us do. Do I think we are called to sell our goods and redistribute the proceeds to anyone who has need? Not necessarily . . . but we are called to be in the world but not of it . . . to live in a style that, as pastor Dan Clandenin puts it, “prizes intellectual vibrancy, economic generosity, and communal caring.” Maybe when we’ve figured out what this means in the 21^st century, what it looks like in our current socio-economic system, we too will be turning ‘em away in droves, as the Lord adds daily to the number who are being saved. Amen.

What Kind of Website do You Want?

2008-04-08T11:46:00.006-05:00

Howdy, Covenant folks! I'm doing a survey of wants/needs in a Covenant website. We're looking at revamping the one we have; there are newer technologies out there (like this blog) that make a re-evaluation of the one we have now necessary.

So . . . do you regularly use the web? If you do, what kinds of things do you think a website needs? If the calendar were kept up to date, would you use it? How about sermons and newsletter articles -- do we need them on line, or is it just my ego? What about staff bios and such? How often would you use a dynamic, up-to-date website?

Leave a reply by pressing the comment link below, and leaving your name and email. No anonymous comments allowed!

Rick

Sermon, April 6, 2008 -- Luke 24:13-35

2008-04-06T09:21:00.002-05:00

“How Then Shall We Know Him?" (Luke 24:13-35)
Rick Olson, April 6, 2008

This week's lesson tells of a post-resurrection appearance by Jesus . . . it's the third Sunday in a row that we've heard such a story, and the second one told in Luke. Although this Easter, we heard Matthew’s version, John’s is perhaps the best loved . . . remember? Mary Magdalene finds the empty tomb, and brings Peter and the beloved disciple, but when they leave, she stays behind . . . and suddenly there’s Jesus, but at first she doesn’t know him, she thinks he’s the gardener or something . . . and last week’s story takes place in the home where the disciples had gathered in fear, and they believed in him, they recognized him as the risen Lord only after they'd touched and seen his crucifixion wounds, still visible in his resurrected body . . . and now, we come to the familiar story from Luke, perhaps the most beloved of all . . . two disciples are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and Jesus joins them along the way . . . he's like them, just another weary traveler – and like those other disciples in the upper room, they don't recognize him right off the bat, it isn't until later, when he shows them hospitality at their destination, that they know he is the savior.

And so, these three resurrection stories – Mary in the garden, the disciples behind closed doors, the travelers on the Emmaus road – these three stories are in a sense about recognition or – more precisely – misrecognition of their Lord and savior . . . and of course it's eminently applicable today . . . when he was a young pastor, before he became the pre-eminent theologian of the last century, Karl Barth knew this as a seminal problem in Christianity today – we misrecognize the risen Christ, we see him as something he is not . . . Barth talked about it in terms of God's "otherness," saying that God is "wholly other than" the God of our religion.

We can see that in the stories . . . just why did Mary, who knew Jesus as well as anyone, just why did she not recognize him? Why didn't the disciples in the locked room – it's clear that they don't recognize him until after they've seen the wounds? Here on the Emmaus road, Luke gives us the biggest clue . . . he says "their eyes were kept from recognizing him." Note the passive construction of the verb – "were kept." The disciples were prevented from recognizing him, as in by something or someone . . . the question is, by whom? or by what? Well, this being the Bible and all, we immediately jump to the conclusion "well, it was God of course, who did the preventing" . . . and that may have been what Luke thought, and intended to imply, but I wonder . . . why would God do such a thing? Just for laughs? So God could say to Gabriel "Did you see the look on their faces when they found out it was Jesus?" Could be . . . I rather think God does have a sense of humor (after all, God did make me a pastor . . .) but, I don't know, it seems to be a rather trivial thing, a rather childish thing for the Creator and master of the Universe to do . . .

Maybe it was Jesus himself . . . maybe he shaved off his beard or averted his face or something . . . but again, why? What earthly – or heavenly – reason would he have to do such a thing? Well . . . maybe our passage can give us a clue . . . he joins them on the road, and they're discussing everything that's happened – and Luke uses three different phrases for discussing, a total of four times, so he really means it, they really are deep in conversation – and Jesus asks "what are you discussing" and they come to a standstill, there on the dusty road, it was like they couldn't walk and confront the thing at the same time, and they're looking all downcast and Cleopas says "are you the only stranger who doesn't know the things that have taken place in Jerusalem these days?" And Jesus says "What things?" – and note that he doesn't deny knowing about them, the Greek can mean just as easily which things – but they take it to mean that he doesn't know what went on, and this of course doesn't help with the recognition problem – surely Jesus would know what had been done to him . . .

So they tell the whole sad story in a nutshell – Jesus was a prophet mighty in deed and word . . . the chief priests and leaders handed him over to be crucified . . . and here we thought he'd come to redeem Israel, but he up and got himself killed instead . . . and to make matters even more confusing some women came to the tomb early this morning, when the dew was still on the roses, and they didn't see his body there, and they told us there were some angels who said he was alive. And when some of us went to the tomb, they found it just as they said, but they didn't see the Savior, and so there. You'd be jaw-boning about it too.

And I can just picture Jesus standing there, with an incredulous look on his face, How foolish you all are, how slow of heart to believe . . . here you've had the prophetic works right in front of you, and you still don't know what's going on . . . "Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?" Note the interchange here – they had told him about Jesus, a prophet mighty in deed and word, who they thought had come to redeem Israel, but he'd been crucified instead . . . and Jesus counters this vision with reality . . . the Messiah – the one who would redeem Israel – would have to suffer before entering into his glory. So it's the same old story we've heard before . . . the disciples thought him mighty in deed and word, that he was going to lead a revolutionary charge to redeem Israel . . . when in actuality, he displayed weakness, he allowed himself to be humiliated on a cross. The Messiah they knew was one they'd constructed in their minds, built by their hopes of an Israelite nation restored to the glory of the house of David . . . the Messiah they knew was mighty in deed and word, but the resurrected Messiah, the one standing right in front of them on the Emmaus road, was a Messiah who'd suffered and died an ignominious death, who'd suffocated, nailed to a tree . . . was it any wonder they didn't recognized him?

And so, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them all the things in the scriptures that were about him, all the predictions, all the pointers, all the precursors to him that were in the Hebrew Scriptures, that body of work we call the Old Testament . . . all the prophetic utterances – a man of constant sorrow . . . my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me . . . all the way back to the Torah, the books of Moses, he shows them how to interpret all their scriptures in a new light . . . in light of himself, in what theologians would call a Christological light . . . how the Messiah must suffer these things, and enter into his glory. And although they don't recognize him right there – that had to wait for one more sign – they looked back on it and said to themselves "Were not our hearts burning within us while he was opening the scriptures to us?" Jesus' explanation had the force of revelation, it re-ordered the way they looked at scriptures, re-orientated their suppositions about the nature of the one they had followed in life.

Have you ever had such an experience? Have you ever read something or seen something or heard something that changed the way you looked at things, that affected you so much that – after you read or heard or saw it – you didn't look at the world the same from that time forward? I have . . . I once read a book by a New Testament scholar that re-oriented me in the way I read the Gospels, that seemed so right and so explanatory that it changed the way I do exegesis, the way I interpret scripture. It provided me with another filter, another lens through which to view Gospel and the world, and I remain changed by it to this day . . . and it was this kind of experience – only perhaps more radical, after all it was Jesus himself – that the disciples had there on the Emmaus highway. Jesus' teaching re-oriented their thinking, it related a new paradigm, a new way of connecting to scripture – and the world – that forever changed the way they operated. "Were not our hearts burning within us?"

But – like last week in the upper room – it wasn't until Jesus showed them the nail-scars and the sword-pierced side that they recognized him, it wasn't until he demonstrated the breaking of his body and the spilling of his blood by serving them bread and wine that they got who he was. Luke is very clear about it . . . "he took bread, he blessed and broke it, and gave it to them." Took, blessed, broke and gave, the four movements of the Lord's Supper . . . it had been only four days since the disciples had seen the same thing before the crucifixion in the upper room . . . and for Luke's congregation, hearing the Gospel read straight through fifty-odd years later, it had only been about five minutes since they heard the same words during the scene of the Last Supper, and so nobody had to be told twice what this represented . . . it was the Eucharistic scene all over again, the movements that Jesus himself had instructed them to do in remembrance of him, as a reminder of what the Messiah is really like, and from whence their redemption really comes. Far from being a mighty-in-deed leader of a glorious militant restoration of Israel, the Messiah's body was taken and blessed, broken and given so that they might have life.

And for the past 2000 years, Christians have faithfully repeated what Jesus did on that Emmaus day . . . they interpret the scripture, relating it all to our story of Jesus, who is God with us – they call it preaching – and then they demonstrate, with concrete action in the Lord’s Supper, just who Jesus is, and what his redemption means . . . Christians have been doing this for two millennia, and yet . . . how come they still misrecognize Jesus when they see him in their lives? How come they confuse the Jesus of scripture – who came to bring good news to the poor and freedom to the oppressed – with some god who justifies an unprecedented concentration of wealth, of God’s good creation, intended for everyone, in the hands of so very few? How come they misrecognize the Jesus of the upper room – nail scarred hands and sword-pierced side – with a God who bestows on this country some manifest-destiny, divinely-inspired right to use force to impose our way of life on those who don’t want it? How can they confuse the Jesus of the Gospel, of the cross, whose body was taken, blessed, broken and given, with a violent, retributive god, a god of power and might, who favors a tiny handful of the world’s people at the expense of suffering billions?

If, as Karl Barth suggested, Jesus Christ is "wholly other" than the god of our religion, how then shall we know him? How shall we quit misrecognizing him, how shall we know him when we see him, separate him from the false gods of our religious construction? Jesus himself gave us the interpretive key – in Matthew he instructs us to see him in the "least of these," in the very people excluded by our idolatrous, false conception of god. Irony of ironies . . . seeing him precisely where we refuse to look, exactly in those away from whom we turn our heads . . .

Ironic perhaps, but strangely fitting . . . on the Emmaus road, the disciples recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread, that four-fold sacrament we celebrate once a month. In that sacrament, we re-member (among other things) the self-giving act of ultimate service that our Lord performed for us, scapegoat for our culture of violence and sin. So it is only appropriate that we see, that we remember Jesus every time we see one of our own scapegoats . . . a mother with two jobs, working for minimum wage so that we can have cheap designer clothes . . . a mainstreamed psychotic, wandering the highways so society won’t have to pay for his hospitalization . . . a drug addict, languishing in prison, so we won’t have to pay for his treatment . . . a church worker, scapegoated, hung out to dry, so we don’t have to be involved in the program.

Brothers and sisters, as we travel down our own Emmaus roads, every time we see one of the least of these, try to recognize Jesus there. Try to see the risen Savior in her face, to feel the nail scars on her hands and observe her sword-pierced side. If we try, if we really make an effort to do what after all, Jesus commanded us to do, we might just be surprised that it really works. Amen.

Choosing to Rest in God's Arms

2008-04-02T09:46:00.002-05:00

Pastor Page, April 2, 2008

Monday night I was with a group of college students, leading a discussion of the film Gone Baby Gone, and it’s full of grist for the spiritual/theological mill (it’s also full of rough language, so beware if you’re sensitive to that type of thing). In the very first scene, the protagonist—a small-time private investigator named Patrick Kenzie—reflects on the nature of where he comes from and what he does. “It's the things you don't choose that make you who you are,” he muses, as the camera pans across the rough-hewn denizens of Boston’s mean streets, and then he tells about the time he asked his priest how to get to heaven and still protect his family. The priest responded by quoting Matthew 10:16—significantly, from the sending out of the disciples—“See: I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

The twin themes of personal responsibility and mission wind throughout the film. We see that Patrick is a moral man, an upstanding man, but he is always running into folks from the seamier side—crack-addicts, drug-runners, murderers—that he went to school with or knew in some fashion. And the question becomes: why did Kenzie make it and they didn’t? Was it some personal choice they made, some wrong turn they negotiated that led them to ruin? Or was it their family and surroundings—as Kenzie implies in the opening scene—that was the prime determining factor? And how does he balance the needs of self—of family and personal satisfaction—with those of living a moral life, of doing the mission of God the priest quite literally sent him upon?

There are questions here that are fundamental in everyone’s lives, but they have special resonance with Christian discipleship . . . how much of who we are—where we have gone in life, how successful we are—is God’s good gift (albeit in the form of good, family upbringing, perhaps) and how much the choices we ourselves make? How much of our mission is us—our own efforts, our own choices, our own sweat—and how much of it is God’s? Of course, everything is ultimately due to the creator, but where’s the equilibrium, how do we balance the two? This question is especially germane in this Seeker process, as we seek to balance our natural desires to get off our rears and do something—we are, after all, doers in this church—and the real need to sit back and let God tell us what to do.

On another tack, how do we balance our need to protect ourselves and our livelihoods with the needs of God’s work? How do we balance our desire for a certain kind of church experience, one that “feeds” us, with the need to proclaim the gospel, to invite the un-churched and never-churched into our doors? How do we take care of ourselves and still reach out to others? The way we answer these questions as a congregation will have real impact on the future of our church.

Sermon March 30, 2008 -- John 20:19-31

2008-03-30T09:35:00.002-05:00

“Seeing is Believing?” (John 20:19-31)
Rick Olson, April 7, 2002

Our passage begins resurrection night . . . that morning, Mary Magdalene had come face to face with the risen Lord, she told the disciples “I have seen the Lord,” and John doesn’t say if they believed her or not, but he implies they didn’t. And why should they? After all, they hadn’t seen him, and she was a woman, and in those days of full-tilt patriarchy, women weren’t considered reliable witnesses . . . but the disciples didn’t have long to wait, because that evening, as they huddle behind locked doors, hiding from the authorities, Jesus comes to them. And as John writes it, the episode is a meditation on believing, and seeing, and it got me thinking about our beliefs as modern-day Christians.

People saw the miracles Jesus did, and time and again, they believed they were real. When he turned the water into wine, his disciples saw it and believed and even drank. When he fed the five thousand, the people saw it and believed. And when he raised Lazarus from the dead, people saw that and came to the faith in droves. These days, if a miracle happens on the streets, we look around for the special effects man, we try to figure out how it was done . . . we just know it has to be trickery, has to be a gimmick. Wires or smoke or mirrors or something, ‘cause things like that don’t just happen, not nowadays, anyway . . .

Oh, they happened back in Jesus’ day, but not anymore . . . maybe we can figure out when it stopped: “Let’s see, now, God quit doing miracles at around, oh . . . 5:47 AM, Monday March 3^rd, 120 AD.” Jewish scholars have already done something similar with prophecy . . . they declared it to have been over a few hundred years before Christ. Good thing, too . . . wouldn’t want a living tradition . . . I for one am glad miracles don’t happen anymore . . . they always came along with revelation, and that wouldn’t do . . . ongoing revelation’s embarrassing when your mind’s already made up . . .

Of course, I’m being facetious . . . the laws of physics didn’t change right after Jesus’ day, demons didn’t stop—or start—haunting the woods, gravity didn’t suddenly become stronger so people wouldn’t rise up into the sky anymore. Although God could’ve changed and stopped doing signs, I don’t think it happened. I don’t think God’s changed, I think we have . . . we’re on the other side of a cultural revolution called the “enlightenment,” where we’ve supposedly put away childish things, like belief in ghosts and demons and miracles. Unless it can be scientifically proven, we don’t want anything to do with it. Remember all those TV commercials in the 50s and 60s, with Very Serious Men in white lab coats? They’d look into the camera with great sincerity, hold up the hair-spray or motor oil or whatever it was they were selling, and spout some pseudo-scientific gobbledy-gook about d-methyl-ethyl-toluene or super-scrubbing bubbles? Madison Avenue types knew that Americans are suckers for science—or they used to be, anyway—and would believe anything a scientist told them.

And lo, it came to pass that only something one could prove scientifically or rationally caused belief. Only something that could be shown to be plausible through a chain of cause-and-effect was accepted. And that meant only something that was repeatable was true . . . because if it’s logical, if it’s the result of a chain of occurrence, related by cause and effect, then you oughta’ be able to repeat it for verification. Just start out with the same initial conditions, do the same things to it, like you did before, and – voilá! – it becomes true! It happens again.

But of course there’s a problem with this . . . it leaves no room for faith, or at least faith in God . . . Miracles aren’t repeatable. I don’t care how many years you tramp around Galilee with twelve guys and a mule, a resurrection’s not likely to happen. If it’s not repeatable, if it’s not logically explainable through a series of cause-and-effect steps, it must be fantasy. And so a peculiar thing has happened to modern-day believers . . . they’ve separated their faith from their everyday life. They’ve taken their belief in the supernatural, their belief in the resurrection, their belief in God, and placed it over in a little separate compartment. On Sundays, or whenever they’re at church, or maybe in the privacy of their home, they believe in the supernatural, believe in – or at least give lip-service to a belief in miracles. But in their everyday lives, where they live and breath and eat and sleep, they’re thoroughly modern, Milly . . . they say “prove it” or else.

Biblical scholar Walter Wink calls this a “theological world view”¹ . . . all things spiritual are relegated to their own sphere, their own bubble, where they don’t interfere with anything we do in real life . . . we’ve even developed a theological language for it, we separate church from the rest of creation . . . when I give the charge at the end of the service, I sometimes say “Go out into the world . . .” as if here in the church, we’re somehow not in the world . . .

And the results have been insidious . . . a grad student from Columbia Seminary did a study—using scientific methods, no doubt!—where she asked the question: “Could a Christian, practicing the ethics of Jesus Christ, survive in business today?” The answer she got was . . . no. Despite all the writing to the contrary, all the books on being a Christian in business, all the weekly Christian business-men’s breakfasts held around the country, she found no room for an ethics of Christ in the boardroom. If we keep our beliefs compartmentalized, if we keep our religion separated in some private sphere, it’s all too easy to relegate Christ-like behavior over there as well.

Why do we believe, anyway? All our other beliefs are based upon what we can measure, what we can touch, what we can feel . . . what we can see. What’s so special about our faith? Note that the disciples were more like moderns in this regard, they believed only after they’d seen . . . only after they’d seen the nail-scarred hands, only after they’d seen the sword-pierced side and only after they’d heard Jesus’ voice. And after they rejoice, after they believe that he was among them once again, Jesus says a second time “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And he breathes on them, as God breathed across the waters at creation, and he gives the Holy Spirit to them . . .

But one of them is missing, one of them doesn’t see the hands and side, doesn’t hear his voice . . . Thomas the twin, whom we slander as Doubting Thomas, isn’t in the room when Jesus first comes, he doesn’t see what the others see. And when he’s told about it, he doesn’t believe either, and says so right up front: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Unless he has the same experience the others had, of the physical presence of Christ, unless he can measure the scars with his hand, he refuses to believe . . . and exactly a week later, the disciples are in that room again, this time with Thomas, and again Jesus comes in, and again he says “Peace be with you,” and shows himself to the disciples, and he says to Thomas . . . “Put your finger here,” he says, “see my hands. Do not doubt, but believe.” And Thomas does, he believes when he sees Jesus, just like the others did.

Then Jesus says “Because you have seen me, you have believed? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe.” And right away we congratulate ourselves: We haven’t seen, and yet we believe, so we must be blessed! Yay for us! It’s a reward! That’s how we read it anyway – if you believe, you’re blessed . . . cause and effect, cause and effect. But that’s not what it says. It simply says that those who believe and have not seen are blessed. We supply the causal connection in our minds, it isn’t in the text, in either the English or the Greek.

Have you ever tried to believe on your own? Have you ever tried to believe in something without any evidence to support it? Or worse, when all the evidence is against it? Try it some time. Try to will yourself into belief . . . I believe . . . that tomorrow I’m going to be taken by a flying saucer and transported up for dinner on Mars. Or . . . I believe that great-Aunt Tilly is coming down to Tuscaloosa tomorrow, when I know she’s in Connecticut . . . try to really become convinced of it on your own, to really have faith in it . . . I’ll wager you can’t, it’s almost impossible, especially in these post-enlightenment times . . .

And so why do we believe? Why do we have faith? Could it be that it’s a gift of God, just like everything else we have? That’s what John Calvin thought . . . and that’s what Reformed Christians the world over think. None of the disciples – or Mary, for that matter – come to belief on their own – it’s all at the instigation of Jesus. He comes to them, he shows them the hands, and the side, they see him, and rejoice in their belief. Belief is a gift of God, just like any other. That’s the thing about blessing, you see . . . it’s from God, not us. And the blessing for those who believe without seeing . . . is the belief itself.

Do you remember after Jesus fed the five-thousand, and the people followed him back across the Sea of Galilee? Do you remember what he told them about belief? “No one can come to me,” he says, “unless drawn by the God who sent me.” God is the author of our belief, not we ourselves.

But . . . inquiring minds want to know: what is the mechanism of that belief; if we can’t come to God on our own, how is it accomplished? The clue is in our passage . . . it relates two appearances of Jesus, side by side, and John constructs them in parallel, with identical beginnings, and he uses identical language. It’s at the same time, in the same house, behind the same locked doors, and Jesus says the same thing: “Peace be with you.” And so John invites us to compare the two . . . and an obvious difference is that Thomas isn’t there the first time,

But there’s another difference as well. The first time, Jesus breathes on them and in that moment, the Holy Spirit comes upon them, the power-plant of faith, the active presence of Christ in the world. And, Jesus has already told us, the spirit of truth . . . in his final speech before the crucifixion, Jesus had promised them the Spirit, the Advocate . . . and he said the Spirit will guide us into all truth, and declare to us the things that are to come. When Thomas missed the first meeting, he missed more than Jesus, he missed the Spirit as well . . . and therefore he has to see to believe, just like the other disciples did before they received the Spirit.

How do we believe what we believe? By the Spirit of power and truth, who guides us into all truth, who speaks what is heard, and declares to us things that are to come . . . who creates in us an enduring, unbreakable belief . . . we are blessed, we who believe without having seen, we are blessed by the Spirit who comes in power and gentleness . . . I think Calvin’s language says it best . . . “The Holy Spirit,” he writes, “is the bond by which Christ . . . unites us to himself.”² We are bound to Christ, our belief is created, by Christ, through the Holy Spirit. We believe, not through any merit of our own, not through anything we think or do or say, but by the sheer power of the breath of God.

And that’s good . . . because in the end, we’re frail vessels . . . we’re part of God’s good creation, but we’re not perfect . . . we’re easily led, and easily mis-led. We’re immersed in a culture of skepticism, a culture of dis-belief. It’s a culture that requires evidence for everything, proof for everything, and the temptation is to follow along, become burnt-out, and cynical. Our faith gets pushed over into that separate box, that separate sphere of our lives, where we can take it out and turn it over in our hands before putting it back again.

But the Spirit changes all that, and I think the first step in re-integrating our faiths with our lives is the recognition that we don’t have to do anything . . . paradoxically, we don’t even have to recognize it . . . But that’s the grace of it all, isn’t it? The joy of our faith is that, like salvation, we don’t have to do it ourselves, we don’t have to maintain it through anything we do, thank goodness . . . God has blessed us in the Holy Spirit, blessed us in our faith . . . we have not seen, and yet we have believed! Amen.

¹ Wink, Walter. The Powers That Be, Galilee Press, 1998.

² Calvin, J, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.I.2, in Library of Christian Classics, vol. XX, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1960, p 538.