The Theophilus Project

It's Moving Week!

2018-03-16T08:12:00.004-07:00

As you may have already noticed, this week's sermon was not posted here to the Theophilus Project, and that is because my blog has new online digs, at my new website: ericatcheson.com.

I have loved this blog and getting to share it with you, but after nearly seven years, it was in dire need of a refresh, and as I begin a new phase of my ministry career, combining my blog with my professional website made obvious sense.

The blog is moving, but the writing and advocacy will continue. Especially with Oregon Trail Theology now well into the editing process and my doctoral thesis a little more than two months away from being defended, one of my short term goals is to resume writing content for the blog that goes beyond my Sunday sermons.

While my online presence will be moving, the Theophilus Project will remain up and available for the foreseeable future.

Thank you for reading and hearing what I have had to say over the years. I hope to continue to add to the conversation with you for many more years to come.

Yours always in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "A Great and Powerful Wind," 1 Kings 19:1-14

2018-03-04T13:15:00.001-08:00

1 Kings 19:1-14

Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, how he had killed all Baal’s prophets with the sword. 2 Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah with this message: “May the gods do whatever they want to me if by this time tomorrow I haven’t made your life like the life of one of them.” 3 Elijah was terrified. He got up and ran for his life. He arrived at Beer-sheba in Judah and left his assistant there.

4 He himself went farther on into the desert a day’s journey. He finally sat down under a solitary broom bush. He longed for his own death: “It’s more than enough, Lord! Take my life because I’m no better than my ancestors.” 5 He lay down and slept under the solitary broom bush. Then suddenly a messenger tapped him and said to him, “Get up! Eat something!” 6 Elijah opened his eyes and saw flatbread baked on glowing coals and a jar of water right by his head. He ate and drank, and then went back to sleep. 7 The Lord’s messenger returned a second time and tapped him. “Get up!” the messenger said. “Eat something, because you have a difficult road ahead of you.” 8 Elijah got up, ate and drank, and went refreshed by that food for forty days and nights until he arrived at Horeb, God’s mountain. 9 There he went into a cave and spent the night. The Lord’s word came to him and said, “Why are you here, Elijah?” 10 Elijah replied, “I’ve been very passionate for the Lord God of heavenly forces because the Israelites have abandoned your covenant. They have torn down your altars, and they have murdered your prophets with the sword. I’m the only one left, and now they want to take my life too!”

11 The Lord said, “Go out and stand at the mountain before the Lord. The Lord is passing by.” A very strong wind tore through the mountains and broke apart the stones before the Lord. But the Lord wasn’t in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake. But the Lord wasn’t in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake, there was a fire. But the Lord wasn’t in the fire. After the fire, there was a sound. Thin. Quiet. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his coat. He went out and stood at the cave’s entrance. A voice came to him and said, “Why are you here, Elijah?” 14 He said, “I’ve been very passionate for the Lord God of heavenly forces because the Israelites have abandoned your covenant. They have torn down your altars, and they have murdered your prophets with the sword. I’m the only one left, and now they want to take my life too.” (Common English Bible)

“From Haran to the Negev: When God Foretells Transition,” Week Three

We have just spent two weeks seeing world-class athletes compete not under their own nation’s flag, but under the Olympic flag—as Russia was banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics for their state-run doping program, and even as they had athletes test positive for performance-enhancing drugs during this Olympics, the rest of their contingent continued competing under the Olympic flag.

There is a long tradition of athletes competing at the Olympics under the Olympic flag, often athletes who are stateless, like Guor Maker, also known as Guor Marial. He is a South Sudanese-turned-American marathon runner who competed in track and field in high school and college and eventually qualified to run the marathon in both the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, with the first being under the Olympic flag as well. To answer exactly why he had to compete under the Olympic flag, I’ll let the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees explain:

Guor lost 28 family members during the Second Sudanese Civil War, including eight siblings, and spent much of his early life on the run. He was eventually captured and used as forced labour. In 1994, he joined relatives in the Sudan capital, Khartoum, where he remained until leaving for Egypt at the age of 14. Two years later, he went to the United States, where he was granted refugee status.

In June 2013, to mark World Refugee Day—and after nearly 20 years away—Guor returned to his village in South Sudan from his new home in Arizona. With the help of UNHCR he was reunited with his parents and other family members who had last seen him in 1993.

If you caught the use of the term “forced labor” in that story—that means “slavery.” He was enslaved. But he escaped. He found sanctuary and security as a refugee here in the United States and, on top of competing in two Olympics, just last month enlisted in the United States Air Force as an airman.

Not too bad for someone who was kidnapped into slavery during a genocide.

I don’t want Guor’s story to just fall into the “heroic, noble refugee” stereotype, though. What I want us to take away from this is, if we can imagine even a fraction of it, the sheer abandonment that one feels in being kidnapped into slavery during a genocide, because it is that sort of abandonment that followers of God have felt at so many points throughout history, and what can help us understand Elijah’s predicament here in 1 Kings 19.

This is both a new sermon series and my last sermon series for you here in Longview. With my last few weeks as your pastor, I want to speak to you in spirit and in truth about the nature of our transition into new roles in one another’s lives, and what my own hopes are for this mighty family of Jesus followers when I am no longer here.

To do this, our Lenten sermon series will cover different stories of transition, moving, and new starts throughout Scripture. We began this series with one of the oldest and greatest—the calling of Abram and Sarai by God to pick up their lives at Ur in Mesopotamia and relocate to Canaan by way of a place called Haran, from which this sermon series takes part of its name.

Haran is located in what is now southern Turkey (and is now called Harran, with the extra ‘r’), and its name comes from ancient Akkadian to mean “road” or “crossroads,” which is an appropriate name for both a waystation for a traveling couple and this series as we approach a crossroads in the life of our congregation. So, this series derives its name from it and from the ending of that passage from Genesis 12, which says that Abram and his household continued on toward the Negev.

Last week, we talked about the the story of Moses at the burning bush. The voice of God has just told Moses that God has seen the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt and is sending Moses to right this historic wrong, but there is still more: Moses needs to know who it is that is sending him to undertake this monumental task. God simply replies, “Say to the Israelites, “I AM” has sent you.”

Today, God has sent another Biblical hero—the prophet Elijah, whose defining trait is the passion with which he opposes the worship of the false deities in the Old Testament such as Ba’al. It so determines Elijah’s sense of faith and public ministry that his name, Elijah, means, roughly, “My Lord is my God.” (From the Hebrew words “Elohim,” for “Lord,” and “Yah,” for “God.”)

Elijah’s fierce opposition to Ba’al worship lands him in trouble, though, because he has just bested in public, and subsequently killed, the priests of Ba’al and Ahab, the king of Israel who worships Ba’al and opposes Elijah, has his wife and queen, Jezebel, pursue Elijah. Jezebel is used as an antifeminist archetype in Christianity today, but essentially who she was is the result of ancient Near Eastern diplomacy: an alliance sealed in marriage, and she brings with her the worship of her gods, in this case the Canaanite god of rain and storms.

Elijah’s fear of Jezebel is so acute, though, and his sense of failure so great, that he literally curls up and wishes for death, praying for God to take him because he sees himself as no better than his ancestors who came before him.

But God is not finished with Elijah just yet. And God makes sure that Elijah knows that. As endangered as Elijah feels, God’s messenger makes it clear to him that God is still present.

A great and powerful wind tears through the stones on the mountain, but 1 Kings says that God was not in it. Then an earthquake, and then a fire. But then God’s voice reappears, in what is now known as the “still, small voice.”

It may feel as though a great and powerful wind is strong enough to rip through the cornerstone of a church, but that does not mean that God is in that wind. God may well appear afterwards, after the initial shock and trepidation.

That may not have initially reversed Elijah’s feelings of loneliness and hopelessness or helplessness. But they eventually, as the chapter progresses, spur Elijah back to his feet to go and find his apprentice Elisha so that they may continue their public ministry together.

We do not always escape in this lifetime the very lowest moments of this world. Such moments take the lives of millions, through injustices like the trafficking and slavery of people like Guor Maker, or through addiction and homelessness, or domestic violence—the ways in which we are brought down by one another are seemingly endless, and many do not end in as happy a way as Guor’s story, or Elijah’s for that matter.

It is important to acknowledge that not all stories end the way we necessarily want them to.

But it is equally important to set all our stories up for as much success as humanly possible.

A new chapter in the story of this congregation will soon begin to be written. What it will say, and how it will end, is up to you, as the Holy Spirit leads you.

My hope and prayer, though, is that what you will write—in a job description, in a congregational profile, even in words of encouragement to each other—will be something that reflects the faith in God that lives within you, and does right by that faith.

Elijah felt he could no longer to right by his own fierce faith in God, and for a moment, he let go and waited for death. It is really not a bad example to look to—letting go of certain things can be an important moment of faithful surrender, because Elijah is completely real before God. He is not pretending to be anything other than distraught. There is real honesty and authenticity in that.

But that moment of letting go did not end Elijah’s story. Nor should this time of letting me go, and me letting you go, end your story. Do not think that God has placed a period where, in fact, God may well have placed a comma instead.

There is still much more story to be written. And you remain the ones whom God can use to write it.

Write the story well, my church. Write it well.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

March 4, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "I am Sending You to Pharaoh," Exodus 3:11-20

2018-02-25T13:40:00.003-08:00

Exodus 3:11-20

But Moses said to God, “Who am I to go to Pharaoh and to bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 God said, “I’ll be with you. And this will show you that I’m the one who sent you. After you bring the people out of Egypt, you will come back here and worship God on this mountain.”

13 But Moses said to God, “If I now come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ they are going to ask me, ‘What’s this God’s name?’ What am I supposed to say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am. So say to the Israelites, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’”

15 God continued, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever; this is how all generations will remember me. 16 “Go and get Israel’s elders together and say to them, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me. The Lord said, “I’ve been paying close attention to you and to what has been done to you in Egypt. 17 I’ve decided to take you away from the harassment in Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land full of milk and honey.”’ 18 They will accept what you say to them. Then you and Israel’s elders will go to Egypt’s king and say to him, ‘The Lord, the Hebrews’ God, has met with us. So now let us go on a three-day journey into the desert so that we can offer sacrifices to the Lord our God.’ 19 However, I know that Egypt’s king won’t let you go unless he’s forced to do it. 20 So I’ll use my strength and hit Egypt with dramatic displays of my power. After that, he’ll let you go." (Common English Bible)

“From Haran to the Negev: When God Foretells Transition,” Week Two

The images were quintessentially Olympian, but also personally poignant. One, a devastated second-place finisher, skating on home ice, trying and failing to hold back the tears. The other, a newly-crowned Olympic champion, but taking her first moments in that newfound status to embrace and comfort her vanquished opponent.

Japanese speed skater Nao Kodaira had just won gold in the women’s 500m event, but beside her was an inconsolable Lee Sang-wha of South Korea, who lost the gold to Kodaira by less than two-fifths of one second.

We tend to see our Olympians as champions, representing what is supposed to be the very best of our nations, and whose dedication to their craft is unparalleled. It has to be if you are going to end up on an Olympic podium in any event.

But what is very best in us cannot be limited only to the physical. The very best of us spiritually matters as well. It mattered then, on that ice rink, and especially so given the extremely fraught history that Japan and South Korea share, as the latter bears extensive historical trauma from being conquered and occupied by the former.

Every two years, we send our very best to the Olympics, knowing that they are our very best. But even then, our very best find ways to confound us, to be even greater. The nature of their greatness are made known through their deeds. Such are the ways of God, and of what God expects of us.

To do this, our Lenten sermon series will cover different stories of transition, moving, and new starts throughout Scripture. We began this series last week with one of the oldest and greatest—the calling of Abram and Sarai by God to pick up their lives at Ur in Mesopotamia and relocate to Canaan by way of a place called Haran, from which this sermon series takes part of its name.

We pick up today with the story of Moses at the burning bush. Moses is itself an Egyptian name, because as a child, Moses's Israelite mother set him adrift in the Nile to save him from Pharaoh's purges of the Israelite boys, and he was in turn discovered and raised in Pharaoh's own household. Moses subsequently went into exile after killing an Egyptian, and we pick up with him here as a shepherd in the service of his father-in-law, Jethro.

The voice of God has just told Moses that God has seen the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt and is sending Moses to right this historic wrong, but there is still more: Moses needs to know who it is that is sending him to undertake this monumental task. God simply replies, “Say to the Israelites, “I AM” has sent you.”

Well, that clears things right up!

What God’s name communicates, though, is that God is beyond all our finite words, labels, and classifications such that only God’s name is capable of accurately depicting and describing God. Only God can accurately describe God. Indeed, the name God gives to Moses, Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, is perhaps best translated as “I will be what I will be,” not the more traditional Christian translation of “I am what I am.” Or, as my Jewish Study Bible puts it, “My nature will be made known through my deeds.”

God’s nature will be made known through God’s deeds. God, in other words, will be shown through God’s best, the love, grace, and protection that God has to offer. God is made known by expressions of those virtues, and we are mean to see those expressions in our own lives.

God is, and will always be, the very best, but it is not God who appears before Pharaoh. It is Moses, through whom God eventually performs the plagues that lead up to the Israelites’ liberation.

It is emphatically not a role that Moses wanted, and one that he spends a great deal of the following chapter trying to plead his way out of, and really, understandably so. This isn’t what he has signed up for. He killed a man and expected to live out the rest of his life in exile from his former existence as a prince of Egypt. Why would he, of all people, be the one to now return and be sent to Pharaoh to demand the freedom of Egypt’s Israelite slaves?

Because he still, with all his failings, represented Israel’s best. He became their champion. He was the one to represent them, and he did so movingly.

We do not always get called by God to do that which we think we have signed up for, either. Our circumstances change, the communities around our churches shift, and as much as we might want our church to feel like a time capsule, in which only the bare minimum changes from year to year, we know that this is not a sustainable way to be church. More is required of us. Just look at the children of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. This is never what they signed up for. But they have taken on new roles as our nation's consciences with grace and composure.

We cast about, then, for our own freedom as a parish—freedom from insecurity, freedom from fear, and freedom from a mentality of scarcity. We have been blessed with an incredible story and space, and as poor as we may sometimes feel, we must remember in those moments that spiritually, we truly are not.

It is easy, far too easy, to forget the feeling of being blessed. That ease is why spiritual disciplines are needed of us, for while negative reinforcement tends to turn into stone, positive reinforcement often evaporates into the ether.

So even though I will no longer be here several weeks from now to cheer you on, I hope that you will continue cheering each other on with that positive reinforcement that comes from a belief that your Christian faith still has a role to play in our community. I hope that you will continue to see what is best, and bring that to the fore, during the transition period you are about to undertake.

For I realize that this upcoming interim period will require strength that I imagine will at times, feel herculean or Olympian in nature. You may wonder or even worry if you have such strength in you at all. Rest assured, you do. I have faith in this church to do what is right by God, by the Holy Spirit, and by the Body of Christ. I have faith in what is the very best of us.

That faith does not, and will not, change after I leave. I will always be praying for you and cheering you on from afar. God asks an awful lot of us, but generally rightly so, and I will be hoping for you to keep rising to God’s call in your ears.

I continue to believe that God is calling you to be something new and freeing, that, whatever it is, might unshackle us from feelings of scarcity and back into faithful abundance. It is a big task, but nowhere near as big as what God is asking of Moses here, to free a people from not just spiritual scarcity, but physical and existential scarcity that comes from being enslaved.

Moses, understandably, thinks that God has picked the wrong person. But we know that God did no such thing. Nor, then, should we believe that God has picked the wrong church or congregation.

The Exodus story is one that is, at its core, about liberation from the bondage of slavery. It simultaneously belongs to Judaism while also inspiring generations of abolitionists and liberation theologians to change the course of human history for the better. I pray that it, in turn, inspires you to change the course of our own community, and of your own faith and its deeds, for the better.

For there is still much work to do. And you are still among those who can do that work.

Do not ever forget that divine truth.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

February 25, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "God Said to Abram," Genesis 12:1-9

2018-02-18T14:17:00.002-08:00

Genesis 12:1-9

The Lord said to Abram, “Leave your land, your family, and your father’s household for the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation and will bless you. I will make your name respected, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, those who curse you I will curse; all the families of the earth will be blessed because of you.”

4 Abram left just as the Lord told him, and Lot went with him. Now Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran. 5 Abram took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all of their possessions, and those who became members of their household in Haran; and they set out for the land of Canaan. When they arrived in Canaan, 6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the sacred place at Shechem, at the oak of Moreh. The Canaanites lived in the land at that time.

7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “I give this land to your descendants,” so Abram built an altar there to the Lord who appeared to him. 8 From there he traveled toward the mountains east of Bethel, and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and worshipped in the Lord’s name. 9 Then Abram set out toward the arid southern plain, making and breaking camp as he went. (Common English Bible)

“From Haran to the Negev: When God Foretells Transition,” Week One

I still remember the daylong drive here from Berkeley to Longview in September, 2011. I had just last month signed the letter of call establishing myself as your incoming pastor, dropped out of the Master of Theology degree program I would have otherwise begun at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, and gave away what little furniture I owned in the (extremely) humble four-room apartment I shared with my seminary roommate.

Aside from my books, which I had shipped here, the entire rest of my life fit in my modest 2008 Nissan Sentra—the exact same one you see parked by the church most days of the week. Surrounded by precipitously packed dishes and piles of clothes, and chugging Starbucks the whole way to stay alert, I made the sojourn from the Peoples’ Republic to Kelso in one very long day.

And I remember being absolutely terrified.

I was a twenty-five-year-old pastor who had been ordained not even three months ago. I had never been a solo pastor. The previous two years at First Christian Church in Concord as I finished seminary, I had always had a safety net in the form of their then-senior pastor, Russ.

That’s why I told you I like wearing my robes on Sundays—so you couldn’t see my new-pastor knees knocking from nerves.

But God had called me here, just as God calls forth Abram and Sarai (Abraham and Sarah) from Ur to Haran—and that journey was no one-day road trip in an air-conditioned sedan. Imagine the fear they had to set aside…for courage in the face of God is not necessarily the absence of fear, but doing right by God despite the fear you may feel. And it’s where we are at now, six-plus years later.

To do this, our Lenten sermon series will cover different stories of transition, moving, and new starts throughout Scripture. We begin today with one of the oldest and greatest—the calling of Abram and Sarai by God to pick up their lives at Ur in Mesopotamia and relocate to Canaan by way of a place called Haran and then to the Negev, from which this sermon series takes part of its name.

Truthfully, our parish has likely been at that crossroads for a while now. My upcoming departure puts where we are into the spotlight, but we have long been at a place where we have to decide exactly what sort of a faith family we want to be.

Take Abram, for instance. He is already seventy-five years old—already well into what we typically think of as old age—and as his story unfolds, we will see that he has no compunctions about pushing back a bit with God when he feels he should, like when he bargains God down from fifty righteous men to save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to just ten.

But Abram’s longevity does not keep him from picking up and obeying God’s commission to move from Haran to Canaan. On the contrary, the Genesis account states that he “left just as the LORD told him.”

We may see such response to God’s call as an example of, or a lesson concerning, obedience. And we would not be wrong for doing so. But we would be wrong for seeing this story as only about obedience.

It is about trusting in a new future because it is God who calls you into it.

That new future for you will not include me in this role. I may still be young(ish?), but after six-plus years, I can hardly be considered new. But in some form or fashion, newness is going to have to be a part of our congregation’s future, whether by hook or by crook.

Embracing newness in small ways while I am still here can prepare us for the newness that will come in bigger ways after I am gone. One of my biggest wishes for this parish is a way back towards that pursuit of newness that defined the process that brought me here in 2011. I fear that we may have lost sight of that pursuit of what our future might hold in favor of keep as tight a hold as possible on what we still have.

Yet doing ministry from such a place of emotional and spiritual scarcity is never sustainable, because scarcity by definition does not come with a safety net.

As the temptation to withdraw back into the shell of our historic building and of our favorite pews and our favorite fellowship hall tables begins to rear its head, please remember that this is all it is—a temptation.

It is right that we should be tempted during this season—it is Lent, after all, and its forty days parallels the forty days that Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness before Satan appeared to tempt Him.

The things with which Satan tempted Jesus were entirely temporal, though, not eternal. And as you are about to embark on this journey of transition and discernment, know that you too will be tempted by things that are temporal and fleeting. My hope and prayer is that you keep your focus upon that which is eternal: God, God’s love for you, and God’s presence as revealed and mediated through Jesus Christ.

Return, then for a moment, to the story of Abram. There were (and are) so many reasons we come up with to say no to God’s call in our lives—our own insecurities, our own fears, and our own desires for earthly power that have nothing to do with God’s own singularly creative power. We as humans are extraordinarily talented at saying no to God. But Abram said yes—a characteristic which defines his life throughout Genesis.

Abram says yes to God.

We said yes to God together six-and-a-half years ago, and it began for me with a road trip into the unknown, just as I know that my arrival represented for you the beginning of a journey into the unknown.

But now, it is time once more to begin another such journey. It is time to say yes to the God who calls us onto that path towards the future, whatever it might hold.

We are not at *the* Haran, you and I, but we are at *a* Haran—a crossroads. We will soon take different roads from that Haran—different road trips, if you will, each of us hopefully laden with lessons that we have taken from the other from my time here as your pastor.

In that way, too, we shall be a bit like Abram, whom Genesis says brought everything with him from Haran to Canaan—all his possessions and his entire household.

But for us, I hope that the possessions we will be taking with each other when we reach that fork in the road will be emotional and spiritual in nature. For I know that when I pull that same Nissan Sentra out of the parking lot here for the last time, it will be laden not with the threadbare trappings of a recently-freed graduate student, but with the memories of a pastor who has lived and loved alongside you.

How grateful I am for that eventual reality, bittersweet though it is for me to contemplate right now.

May God laden you down, then, with possessions not of the sort we are tempted by, but of the sort that we need as the future points us ever forward.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

February 18, 2018

Ash Wednesday 2018: "Lose the World, Gain the Heavens," Luke 4:1-13

2018-02-15T11:38:00.001-08:00

Luke 4:1-13

Jesus returned from the Jordan River full of the Holy Spirit, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. 2 There he was tempted for forty days by the devil. He ate nothing during those days and afterward Jesus was starving. 3 The devil said to him, “Since you are God’s Son, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” 4 Jesus replied, “It’s written, People won’t live only by bread.” 5 Next the devil led him to a high place and showed him in a single instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 The devil said, “I will give you this whole domain and the glory of all these kingdoms. It’s been entrusted to me and I can give it to anyone I want. 7 Therefore, if you will worship me, it will all be yours.” 8 Jesus answered, “It’s written, You will worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” 9 The devil brought him into Jerusalem and stood him at the highest point of the temple. He said to him, “Since you are God’s Son, throw yourself down from here; 10 for it’s written: He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you 11 and they will take you up in their hands so that you won’t hit your foot on a stone.” 12 Jesus answered, “It’s been said, Don’t test the Lord your God.” 13 After finishing every temptation, the devil departed from him until the next opportunity. (Common English Bible)

Ash Wednesday 2018

It has become a personal tradition by now, my sixth Ash Wednesday with you (it would be seven, but last year’s Ash Wednesday came while I was on sabbatical). In order to set the tone for a unique service that is often much more somber than our more celebratory praise worship services of Sunday morning, I read this short excerpt from the UCC pastor and author Lillian Daniel’s book This Odd and Wondrous Calling, as she recounts the experience of preaching her first-ever sermon as a seminary student performing the required field education internship that all Master of Divinity students must complete in order to earn their degree:

I remember sitting at the back of the sanctuary, reviewing my notes for my very first seminary-intern sermon. It was to be a mighty word from God that would correct all the hypocrisy, greed, and faithlessness of the local church that was, nonetheless, supporting my education as they had supported that of so many others. As I mustered my courage to sock it to them, I overheard one woman lean across her walker and whisper loudly to her pew mate, “Ah, our new intern is preaching. I see it’s time for our annual scolding.”

Later, I would pastor a church near that very divinity school, and hear for myself a few “annual scoldings.”

An annual scolding is a helpfully humorous way to describe Ash Wednesday—the first day of the church season of Lent and a day of penitence in which we confess to God our sins and seek forgiveness both from God and from those whom we have sinned against.

Lent lasts for forty days—from now until Good Friday, minus the Sundays—and that number is meant to parallel the forty days that Jesus spends fasting in the wilderness according to Matthew and Luke before being tested by Satan, which is Hebrew for “the Adversary.”

“The Adversary” is an apt label for the devil in this passage from Luke, for he verbally jousts back and forth with Jesus, tempting the Son of God with one thing after another before finally fleeing and thus permitting angels to tend to our Messiah.

The first of the devil’s temptations is simple enough: ask Jesus to turn stones into bread. As a common theme in these temptations, both the devil and Jesus quote Scripture back at one another, and together with the first temptation, it shows that even the most fundamental building blocks of physical and spiritual sustenance—bread and the Word of God—can be turned into weapons with which to do harm when put in the wrong hands. Jesus resists such weaponry, though, despite the starvation inherent in so long a fast.

The third of the devil’s three temptations involves Jesus throwing Himself off the highest point of the Jerusalem temple so that angels will catch Him and prevent Him from dying. To choose so central a point from which to jump makes the intent of the temptation clear, albeit unspoken in the text itself: people will see Jesus evade death through this divine intervention, and thus believe in Him as the Son of God. Yet Jesus, quoting Scripture, again demurs.

It is the second of these three temptations, the temptation to be given power over all the kingdoms and nations of the earth, that I want to talk about the most with you tonight.

I want to talk with you about it because it is perhaps the most relevant to ourselves in our own human condition. Yes, we crave food, but food is not by itself sinful—we are simply admonished as Jesus says, to not live on the food alone, and so we don’t.

Nor must we feel terribly tempted to leap from the highest point in town to prove our own divinity, because we each know that we are not the Messiah.

But being tempted by earthly power? That’s right up our alley, and always has been. Never mind the fact that, at its core, Christianity has always been a religion about surrender—the surrendering of complete divinity that becoming human entailed for Jesus and His surrender to the Roman Empire after the machinations that led to His crucifixion were put into motion.

That is not how we ourselves typically want to go. But it is the way of Jesus, and giving up what we must in order to follow that way is not a request, it is an expectation.

We fail to live up to that expectation, though, each time we put our desire for control and power over the wellbeing of another, be it another person, or another group of people, or even an entire nation. That tendency is but another form of selfishness, but a form that is not merely contained within our own thoughts and feelings that we otherwise keep only to ourselves.

This crass pursuit of transactional power—you give me influence, I give you influence—is increasingly what American Christianity has been associated with over the past couple of years. I say that quite confidently. We are known not for our pursuit of self-control and surrender, but by our pursuit of earthly power, control, and influence.

Just hours ago today, we saw one lethal consequence of pursuit of such earthly power and influence—although it is a consequence that we have seen on replay again and again since the Columbine High School shooting. The Parkland mass shooting in Florida is the latest in a long string of such attacks that, by pure happenstance, happen in a nation with some of the most lax gun laws in the industrialized world—laxness that exists because of the temporal power, control, and influence that groups like the NRA have over our political leaders.

That influence, by the by, is in the interests not of people, but of material possessions—of guns. Guns have no heart, no soul; as we are continually reminded by their defenders, they don’t kill people. People kill people. But would the Christ who repeatedly exhorted His followers to forsake material possessions make a similar defense? The same Christ who told the rich young man who loved his possessions to sell them and then have treasure in heaven? Or would Christ champion the children, not the gun?

But that is not where the locus of political power is at present in our nation. And we are seduced by such powerful forces that promise us the means with which to not only obtain power but also to keep hold of it. Surrendering it tends not to be in our nature—as a nation, as a church, and as individuals. We not only want what we cannot have, we want what we already have—desperately.

Yet, if Christ is to be our eternal example, then our mandate is clear: to lose our worldly power if we must, but in so doing, to gain the heavens. For every single thing the devil offers Jesus is fleeting. Bread crumbles. A moment of drama is but a moment. And earthly power, over generations, always is handed over, whether by hook, by crook, or by the inevitable passage of time.

That is the common question asked by the temptations the devil presents to Jesus: are we willing to sacrifice eternity for what we want in the inherently fleeting present moment? And not what we *need* in the present—but, again, what we *want*.

The well-deserved knock against those of us in the church is that far, far too often—both lately and at many other times throughout our history—our answer to that question is absolutely, we are willing to sacrifice the heavens to gain the earth, not the other way around.

In so doing, we do harm to one another. We do harm to God. And we do harm to ourselves.

May we take this season of Lent, then, as a time to turn that harm into healing, in the hope and prayer that our renunciation of such harm, of such pursuit of fleeting power to forsake the heavens and their creator, ends with us, and that a new church, one surrounded by life and not by murder, and which heralds a world of goodness rather than violence, might yet be possible.

It is a dream I have.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

February 14, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "Mother of Nations," Genesis 17:15-22

2018-02-11T15:03:00.001-08:00

Genesis 17:15-22

God said to Abraham, “As for your wife Sarai, you will no longer call her Sarai. Her name will now be Sarah. 16 I will bless her and even give you a son from her. I will bless her so that she will become nations, and kings of peoples will come from her.” 17 Abraham fell on his face and laughed. He said to himself, Can a 100-year-old man become a father, or Sarah, a 90-year-old woman, have a child? 18 To God Abraham said, “If only you would accept Ishmael!”

19 But God said, “No, your wife Sarah will give birth to a son for you, and you will name him Isaac. I will set up my covenant with him and with his descendants after him as an enduring covenant. 20 As for Ishmael, I’ve heard your request. I will bless him and make him fertile and give him many, many descendants. He will be the ancestor of twelve tribal leaders, and I will make a great nation of him. 21 But I will set up my covenant with Isaac, who will be born to Sarah at this time next year.” 22 When God finished speaking to him, God ascended, leaving Abraham alone. (Common English Bible)

First Christian Church 90^th Anniversary

I still remember the garish yellow chairs. They were almost a punchline in the church plant I was raised in. Bright canary yellow and patently uncomfortable, they were so memorable an eyesore that for several years, the church would give them away as gag gifts to our graduating high school seniors.

But that is what I associated church with as a child. The bright yellow chairs that fit into a trailer that we took with us from one elementary school to another for the better part of a decade while the church went about the long and painstaking process of searching for a piece of land, saving up the funds for the down payment, hiring architects to design the church building, and then saving up to have that built.

Those memories make my love for a solid, historic home even stronger, because I know exactly what it is like to belong to a homeless church. Home matters.

It is easy to forget, because it was so long ago, that even our congregation did not originally have this historic building. It was planted in 1928 as a house church before worshiping temporarily at the Longview YMCA while architect George Macpherson was making the design that led to this structure being built in 1930 and 1931 on land that R.A. Long donated.

We turn ninety this year. First Christian Church is older than Moses was when he went to Pharaoh to demand the release of the Hebrew slaves, we are older than the prophetess Anna when she blessed the newborn Christ in Luke 2, and we are now as old as Abraham’s wife Sarai when she was renamed Sarah by the Lord and told that she would bear a son and name him Isaac.

But the ninety-year-old Sarah would do even more than that. Even though Abraham disagrees here with God over the rejection of Abraham’s son with Hagar, Ishmael, God is still poised to make Sarah a mother of nations through her son, Isaac.

Abraham and Sarah don’t really know what to do at first with this pronouncement—after all, Sarah is ninety and has been barren up to this point, which is why Abraham had a son with Hagar to begin with—but that matters not to God. Whatever your age, God manages to find a purpose for you, and for each of us. And that age tends to come with it some truly astounding stories and impact.

That is something I have never stopped being grateful for as the pastor of a church with such a deep past. People visiting on Sundays for worship, or on a Saturday for a wedding, or even amid their tears for a funeral, will tell me about how they once attended children’s church here, or were baptized here, or were married here. They became regular, living reminders to me of the Holy Spirit’s presence not just across space, but across time.

It also makes it impossible to count the number of people who have been impacted or affected in a positive and beneficial way by the presence in Longview of First Christian Church over the past nine decades, but I would be willing to bet that such a number is in the tens of thousands.

That is a nation that this church is, in some sense, the mother of. We are a mother of nations.

And if we scoff at how this could really be the true scope and scale of our impact across time, it is likely because we ourselves cannot grasp just how great that impact has truly been.

From our home across from Lake Sacajawea here at 20^th Avenue and Kessler Boulevard, out into the mission field and the kingdom, have gone tens of thousands before us. From our home here today, we too shall issue forth to love and serve in the name of Jesus Christ, making ourselves a part of that selfsame nation, and children of that selfsame mother.

Abraham and Sarah responded to God’s call in their own way, just as we do now, just as we did reaching all the way back First Christian Church’s inception in 1928, and just as all churches do. I cannot say for absolute certainty that FCC never had some version of the garish yellow chairs as prank gifts in our past. But it would be pretty illuminating if we did!

Because such an artifact would add to the many we already have that lend tangible witness to how our congregation has changed and evolved over these nine decades. We have experienced the leadership of eight different settled senior pastors, and the three of whom who are here today represent a combined twenty-seven years of ministry here. We have gone from being a congregation with an all-male lay leadership to being a congregation with a majority-female lay leadership. We have experienced changes in in our worship music, in our choice of Bible translation, and so much more. And still additional important decisions on the direction of our congregation’s future lay ahead of us.

But what has not changed is the presence of God whom we worship, the God who has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ, and the God who guides us still today by the light of the Holy Spirit. That God has always been present here among us, and if we are a great church, it is only because we serve a great God.

May we continue to celebrate that divine greatness in our days and weeks to come together while I still remain your pastor, and may our affirmation of the great story and history of our congregation be a part of that celebration. May we forever give thanks to God for the mother of our own nation of sorts, of loved ones and neighbors, of friends and family: First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) of Longview, Washington.

Thank you for being here today. Thank you for celebrating with us today. May God bless you.

Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

February 11, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "Out of Egypt, I Called My Son," Matthew 2:13-23

2018-01-28T14:17:00.000-08:00

Matthew 2:13-23

When the magi had departed, an angel from the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up. Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod will soon search for the child in order to kill him.” 14 Joseph got up and, during the night, took the child and his mother to Egypt. 15 He stayed there until Herod died. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: I have called my son out of Egypt.

16 When Herod knew the magi had fooled him, he grew very angry. He sent soldiers to kill all the children in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding territory who were two years old and younger, according to the time that he had learned from the magi. 17 This fulfilled the word spoken through Jeremiah the prophet: 18 A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and much grieving. Rachel weeping for her children, and she did not want to be comforted, because they were no more.

19 After King Herod died, an angel from the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt. 20 “Get up,” the angel said, “and take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel. Those who were trying to kill the child are dead.” 21 Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus ruled over Judea in place of his father Herod, Joseph was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he went to the area of Galilee. 23 He settled in a city called Nazareth so that what was spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled: He will be called a Nazarene. (Common English Bible)

“From Slave State to Refuge: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary America,” Week Four

Almost two years ago, I got up here on a Sunday morning, like I almost always do, to give to you my message for the week. It was April 24, the day set aside for remembrance of the Armenian Genocide, which my mother’s family fled by immigrating to the United States as olive-skinned, non-English-speaking refugees.

They did so after my great-grandfather’s brother, Madiros, was summarily executed in one of the initial waves of purges in the genocide. Arriving at the family home demanding the rest of our family, Ottoman soldiers then executed Madiros’s wife Esther. Madiros’s father, my great-great grandfather Sarkis, committed suicide out of grief just two days later.

My great-grandfather Krikor immigrated to the United States, bereft of his father and one of his brothers. He and his wife, my great-grandmother Satenig, use fake passports to cross the border, and then eventually settle down in Detroit and raise two daughters and one son, my great-uncle Albert. Albert would go on to serve the Marines in 1945, toward the end of World War II, and that summer, he was KIA on Okinawa. According to family legend, my great-grandpa Krikor never smiled between the death of his son and the birth of his first grandchild, my mother, nine years later.

It was the loud voice in Ramah, of Rachel refusing to be comforted because her children were no more. Krikor could not be comforted, because his child was no more.

That’s who my family is. A family that came out of a tiny country in West Asia, but was so American that it gave its only son to the most titanic conflict the world has ever seen. Out of Armenia, my family was called, and out of America, my great-uncle was called to live and to die in the service.

What worlds do we call our children out of, and then into? And what can we do to make those worlds new?

This has been both a new sermon series and a new year for us. This series began on the day after a very special holiday on the liturgical calendar. January 6 is Epiphany, the day that tradition says the Magi finally arrived to present Jesus with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Epiphany is the beginning of a very violent, very sorrowful chapter of Matthew’s Gospel that entails the massacre of all the infant boys in Bethlehem on orders of the Israelite king Herod the Great (who was, in turn, a vassal of the Roman emperor Augustus). To prevent Jesus from meeting that same fate, Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt and remain there until Herod is dead, at which point they safely return to Israel.

The Holy Family’s flight into Egypt is what fundamentally informs this new sermon series, which will last the entire month of January, because it is a flight that we should be increasingly familiar with by dint of the news cycles circulating around the immigration debate taking place in our country. As we’ll see in later installments of this series, Egypt holds a terrifying legacy of slavery and displacement for ancient Israel. Yet in the moment, it acts as a refuge for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

There is an obvious parallel for us in the United States today. For instance, how can we be a place of safety and refuge for, say, the courageous people in Iran protesting their regime today, if we have also banned them from entering our country?

We began this series with the Epiphany story itself in Matthew 2:1-12, and then we dug into the person who is the Hebrew Bible parallel to the Epiphany story: Moses. Last week, we arrived at a passage from Isaiah 31 that recalls Egypt as a place of false promises, and today, we end the series by returning to Matthew 2 to continue on the ghastly track that his Epiphany story places us upon.

We’ve discussed in past sermons within this series how Matthew situates his second chapter adjacently to the Exodus narrative. For Matthew, Jesus acts as a direct successor to Moses, and just as Moses had to be rescued from a mass infanticide by his mother, so too did Jesus have to be rescued from a mass infanticide by His parents.

Yet the verse from Matthew from which this message draws its title actually has its roots in one of the so-called “minor” prophets of the Hebrew Bible: Hosea, in 11:1. Matthew hearkens back to this particular verse, as he often does with snippets of Hebrew Bible prophetic literature throughout his Gospel, as supporting evidence for his contention that Jesus is the new Moses and thus a reinterpretation of Hebrew Bible scripture and tradition. Matthew does this three times in just the eleven verses of this passage, referring to Hosea here as well as explicitly to Jeremiah’s prophecy of Rachel mourning in Ramah. And again, this matters to Matthew because of the new Moses he sees Jesus as.

And that suits us fine until that “reinterpretation” of Jesus as the new Moses becomes Jesus as the “replacement” for Moses, and we begin erasing Jesus’s fundamental Jewishness with our own Christianity.

Or until we begin erasing the identity of, say, the Dreamers as Americans with our own beliefs of what Americans should look like, which may or may not actually comport to the inclusive ideals of Christianity. Or the identity of the Indonesian Christians who are literally taking sanctuary in churches to avoid ICE deportation raids that they fear would lead to their persecution for being Christian.

Out of America, then, what children shall God call? And in America, what children shall Rachel mourn and lament for because they are no more, deported off to parts and places unknown to us?

This must be a component of the ongoing transition of the United States from slave state to refuge and sanctuary. If we are to be a place for people who are fleeing oppression, persecution, and violence, we cannot be that which further compounds such sin.

So what welcome are we prepared to give to people for whom their lives are of the essence such that they fear they cannot simply throw themselves upon the mercy of our often arbitrary immigration system? Are we prepared to allow in a family fleeing violence in their hometown the way that ancient Egypt allows in the Holy Family, or are we not?

I realize that I have probably spent the last three weeks making at least some of you a little (or potentially) a lot uncomfortable. I make no apologies for that. Jesus did not come to earth to make us comfortable, or to teach us comfortable things. I am utterly convinced that He would not be content, or satisfied with, a church dedicated to being polite and chewing with your mouth closed.

We didn’t need for God to become flesh as our Messiah just to say that. It’s selling Christ’s mission short, and it’s selling God short for thinking we needed so drastic a step just to be taught things so surface-level and relatively trivial.

Depth can make us uncomfortable, though. Pressure increases the deeper you go—not just emotionally or spiritually, but quite literally if you are in water. Pressure increases as depth increases. In order to go deeper and deeper into the ocean depths, humans require all sorts of specialized equipment and technology.

But deeply we must go into these questions of welcome and hospitality, just as deeply the Holy Family went into Egypt to flee a murderous Herod the Great, and deeply they plunged right back into Israel once Herod had died, to Nazareth where they would raise this child, both to avoid Herod’s heir to the throne and so that, as Matthew says at the end of this passage and chapter, “He may be called a Nazarene.”

I make no claims to it being easy to take such a plunge into the deep, such a leap of faith, such a walk into the unknown. But I will say this: at this point in time in Matthew’s Gospel, the entirety of Jesus’s public ministry is yet to come. The rest of His story was not yet written at the time of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt.

But we know now that His story was, and is, written—in the pages of our Bibles, across the contours of our hearts, and in the divine recesses of our souls. How we elect to act upon those words that have been written to us, for us, and upon us is up to us, and us alone.

So, as I have continued to exhort us all throughout this sermon series—and will continue to exhort you to in my remaining two-plus months as your pastor—may we choose wisely. May we choose compassion. And, ultimately, may we choose well in the sight of God, as God would have us do—not merely as we would have ourselves do.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

January 28, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "Idols of Silver and Gold," Isaiah 31:1-7

2018-01-21T13:42:00.002-08:00

Isaiah 31:1-7

Doom to those going down to Egypt for help! They rely on horses, trust in chariots because they are many, and on riders because they are very strong. But they don’t look to the holy one of Israel; they don’t seek the Lord. 2 But God also knows how to bring disaster; he has not taken back his words. God will rise up against the house of evildoers and against the help of those who do wrong.

3 Egypt is human and not divine; their horses are flesh and not spirit. The Lord will extend his hand; the helper will stumble, those helped will fall, and they will all die together. 4 The Lord has said to me: When the lion growls, the young lion, over its prey, though a band of shepherds is summoned against it, isn’t scared off by their noise or frightened by their roar. So the Lord of heavenly forces will go down to fight on Mount Zion and on her hill. 5 Like birds flying aloft, so the Lord of heavenly forces will shield Jerusalem: shielding and saving, sparing and rescuing. 6 People of Israel, return to the one whom you have deeply betrayed! 7 On that day, you will each reject the idols of silver and the idols of gold, which you have sinfully made for yourselves. (Common English Bible)

“From Slave State to Refuge: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary America,” Week Three

Juan Carlos Coronilla Guerrero was, by almost all appearances, living the American dream, so much so that you couldn’t tell him from Adam. He had found work as a carpenter, he and his wife were raising three kids, he had settled down, life was good.

Then he had to appear in court on a misdemeanor possession charge for carrying a quarter-ounce of marijuana on his person. And he had immigrated here illegally from Mexico into Texas after being deported once before. While the county of the courtroom he appeared in had previously not, as a matter of policy, turned over illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nonviolent misdemeanors, things were different last year with Trump’s crackdown on sanctuary cities and counties ordered a year ago yesterday. And there at the courtroom to greet Coronilla were a pair of ICE agents to arrest him for reentry after deportation, a felony. I’ll let Sarah Stillman for the New Yorker pick up Coronilla’s story from here:

Coronilla’s wife begged a federal judge to spare her husband. Gangs had overrun his home town in Mexico, and deportees were prime targets for crime, since they were presumed to have money. Coronilla was deported in June. Three months later (in September), gunmen woke him from the bed where he slept with his young son. According to the Austin American-Statesman, he tried to soothe the boy, saying, “Don’t worry, my love.” His body was found about forty miles away, filled with bullets. When I spoke to Coronilla’s wife shortly after his death, she told me that she’d returned to Mexico to claim his body. She now fears for her own life. “He was a good man,” she said. “Now I have to prepare for his funeral.”

Whatever your beliefs are about marijuana—and I have my own—holding a quarter-ounce of it should not merit a cascade of dominoes that results in your deportation and, three months later, subsequent murder by a cartel while telling your terrified child not to worry. But that is the death we have wrought, all in the name of “they took our jobs,” and all while somehow claiming to be “pro-life.” And the reckoning for such masquerades is fast becoming due.

This is both a new sermon series and a new year for us. This series began on the day after a very special holiday on the liturgical calendar. January 6 is Epiphany, the day that tradition says the Magi finally arrived to present Jesus with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Epiphany is the beginning of a very violent, very sorrowful chapter of Matthew’s Gospel that entails the massacre of all the infant boys in Bethlehem on orders of the Israelite king Herod the Great (who was, in turn, a vassal of the Roman emperor Augustus). To prevent Jesus from meeting that same fate, Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt and remain there until Herod is dead, at which point they safely return to Israel.

Last week, we began this series with the Epiphany story itself in Matthew 2:1-12, and last week, we dug into the person who is the Hebrew Bible parallel to the Epiphany story: Moses. Today, we arrive at a passage from Isaiah 31 that recalls the Israelites’ time in Egypt as chattel slaves.

The Hebrew Bible professor William L. Holladay sums up Isaiah 31 as a “message…of the hopelessness of relying on Egypt,” and it is easy to see why, even just by glancing at the first line of verse one: “Doom to those going down to Egypt for help!” But the prophet goes on to explain why, exactly such doom is to be expected in verse three: “Egypt is human and not divine; their horses are flesh and not spirit.”

Egypt, in other words, may represent a temporary and temporal solution to the question that faced eighth-century BCE prophets like Isaiah of what to do about the perpetual existential threat that an Assyrian conquest of the land represented, but Egypt did not represent a spiritual solution.

Egypt, then, to turn a phrase from Isaiah himself at the end of this passage, represents an idol of silver and gold, such idols that we have made for ourselves and which Isaiah says we must and will eventually reject.

Such idols can be made of silver and gold, but not necessarily. The key ingredient is that they are made by us, not by God, just like the original idol of silver and gold: the golden calf formed by Aaron at the peoples’ behest at Mount Sinai.

And ultimately, that is what things like our borders are. We drew them. Humans drew them. Not God. Our border with Mexico was drawn via the Gadsden Purchase and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War.

To treat those borders as idols, as gods, is not what God expects or demands. We can argue for border security, but not in the name of God, or God as revealed through Jesus Christ. And we cannot use our love of borders to say that God wants us to act with such cruelty and wanton indifference to Dreamers brought here as children for whom the United States is home.

What other things of ours that we have made, what idols of silver of gold, have we elevated to graven image status, to godhood in our own selfish spheres of existence?

In what ways have we—and you—become like the ancient Egypt of old, the ancient Egypt that cannot be relied upon except for its own selfishness and self-centeredness?

And what can you then do to melt those idols of silver and gold into something different, something that can be a gift rather than an empty gesture, a blessing rather than a curse, and a God-image rather than a graven image?

This past Friday marked the March for Life on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. But it also marked the day of a willingness to shut down the government over the lives of people who want and need only what we already have and are far too stingy with—the identity of being American.

In the face of life, in the face of identity, our own objections to them become idols, and that is not pro-life.

Those objections, those idols, create and cause death, like that of Juan Carlos Coronilla Guerrero, murdered as he was desperately trying to comfort his terrified son, because we have decided over the past decade that being American means being white, and that is the most sinful of graven images.

That is what Isaiah, and Jesus, would condemn today—our unreliability to people who aren’t us.

Jesus, on the other hand, was the rock not just for His Jewish followers, but for His Gentile followers. Beseeched by Romans and Canaanites alike, He performed miracles. Confronted with a Samaritan woman held in disgrace, He exalted her, so much so that she returned home singing His praises and bringing other Samaritans into the fold.

We can be the imago Christi—the image of Christ—or we can be the graven image of idols in the world.

Which will it be?

What way will we choose?

And what will that choice say to others about our ultimate priorities?

May we choose wisely and compassionately, then, as God would have us do, so that we may do what is right not by our idols, but by our God.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

January 21, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "Out of Egypt, Bring My People," Exodus 3:1-10

2018-01-14T13:30:00.000-08:00

Exodus 3:1-10

Moses was taking care of the flock for his father-in-law Jethro, Midian’s priest. He led his flock out to the edge of the desert, and he came to God’s mountain called Horeb. 2 The Lord’s messenger appeared to him in a flame of fire in the middle of a bush. Moses saw that the bush was in flames, but it didn’t burn up. 3 Then Moses said to himself, Let me check out this amazing sight and find out why the bush isn’t burning up.

4 When the Lord saw that he was coming to look, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” Moses said, “I’m here.” 5 Then the Lord said, “Don’t come any closer! Take off your sandals, because you are standing on holy ground.” 6 He continued, “I am the God of your father, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God.” Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.

7 Then the Lord said, “I’ve clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain. 8 I’ve come down to rescue them from the Egyptians in order to take them out of that land and bring them to a good and broad land, a land that’s full of milk and honey, a place where the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites all live. 9 Now the Israelites’ cries of injustice have reached me. I’ve seen just how much the Egyptians have oppressed them. 10 So get going. I’m sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” (Common English Bible)

“From Slave State to Refuge: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary America,” Week Two

The daguerreotype of the young man was remarkably moving, not just for the striking nature of his portrait, but for the scenes of his short but extraordinary life that surrounded the portrait. And for Anthony Burns, a black Christian preacher and escaped slave sold back into slavery, it was a life that ought to have been taught to every single child in the United States.

One of the most under-taught aspects of United States history, to our discredit, is the extent to which black slaves who were introduced to Christianity by white slaveholders in bad faith—the slaveholders did not actually care about life and liberty for their slaves, but simply saw Christianity as a way of making their slaves more subservient—and then took that racist brand of Christianity and turned it into a worldview of freedom and liberation. Absalom Jones was a slave who became the first black Episcopal priest in the United States and went on to campaign vigorously against the slave trade. Harriet Tubman, the famed conductor of the Underground Railroad, was a devout Christian.

And Anthony Burns escaped slavery in Richmond to Boston before being arrested, tried, convicted, and extradited back to Virginia under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which mandated that escaped slaves be sent back to a state of slavery with only perfunctory due process, if any at all.

Abolitionists in Boston rallied and protested for his freedom to no avail, even going so far as to raise the funds to buy Burns’s freedom from the slaveholder, who refused to do business with anyone who wanted Burns emancipated. It took another black pastor, Leonard Grimes, to surreptitiously buy Burns’s freedom from the next slaveholder. This time, Burns stayed free, wrote his memoir, earned a scholarship to Oberlin College, and became the minister of a church in Canada before his life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis at age 28.

Of the significance of Burns and his plight, the abolitionist Amos Adams Lawrence said, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs, and woke up stark mad abolitionists.”

It is the sort of transformation I see as well in the Biblical figure of Moses, and it is one I hope we are able to draw from and hearken back to in present-day America, especially today, on the weekend of Martin Luther King Day.

There is an obvious parallel for us in the United States today. How can we be a place of safety and refuge for, say, the courageous people in Iran protesting their regime today, if we have also banned them from entering our country?

Last week, we began this series with the Epiphany story itself in Matthew 2:1-12, and today, we’ll dig into the person who is the Hebrew Bible parallel to the Epiphany story: Moses.

The story of Moses at the burning bush is one of my absolute favorites in all of Scripture. A passage from it was read at my ordination, I did a sermon series on it here exactly six years ago, only months after I arrived out of seminary, and I still get goosebumps listening to Val Kilmer voice that scene in The Prince of Egypt.

Exodus 3 represents the start of that story, after Moses was born to a Hebrew slave mother and, to save him from the purges ordered by Pharaoh, set adrift the Nile River in a basket. Moses was found and, ironically, subsequently raised as a member of the royal family before killing an Egyptian guard, burying him in the sand, and going into exile. In exile, he marries Tziporah and enters into the service of her father, Jethro, the priest of Midian, as a shepherd, which is quite a downgrade from being a member of the royal family of one of the most powerful nations of the ancient world—from prince to, quite literally, peasant. And that’s where today’s story opens.

Moses is, in short, presented to us the sort of old-fashioned, keep-your-head-down-and-do-the-work chap. But upon encountering the voice of God at the burning bush, and hearing God say that God has seen the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt, and has heard their cries, Moses is woken up as, to use Amos Adams Lawrence’s term, a stark mad abolitionist!

Sometimes it takes a specific injustice to get a person up from their workaday existence and into the realm of a prophetic, like with the plight of Anthony Burns. Other times, it takes a direct wake-up call from Almighty God, as was the case for Moses, who, after some wheedling and pleading, agrees to take up the cause of God’s people to the Pharaoh of Egypt.

What that divine spark is that ignites our own passion for faith, and of doing right through that faith, thus varies. Maybe you haven’t seen a tree catch alight and hear a booming voice crashing straight down from heaven into your ears. That’s fine.

But God still expects us to be moved by one another, if not also by extemporaneous pyrotechnics.

It is easy to forget that this happened this week after the president referred to “these people” from “sh*thole countries” and expressed a desire for more actual, real-life Aryans to immigrate to the United States, but it was also announced that the government would be ending the protections for some 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants who had been living here as economic refugees, after similar moves had been made last year against Haitians who have been living in the United States as well.

Like ancient Egypt, the United States has a painful and horrible history of slavery in its past (and present, truthfully—slavery was still alive and well in ancient Egypt under Roman rule, and human trafficking still exists to a larger scale than we probably think today). And, like ancient Egypt, the United States is still capable of being a sanctuary for those outsiders who need us to be that. But to do that, we must hear the cries of those hurt by our racism, and see the harm that we have done.

For God never stopped hearing the cries of the people. God never stopped seeing their suffering. God may not be parting Red Seas at present, but that does not mean that we escape culpability.

Nor do we do not get to excuse ourselves from being moved by what others experience to be able to live in what we call the Land of Opportunity, not the least of which is because we call it that. We do not get to brag about being the best country in the world (because there’s a gold medal to be had in that category…) only to then resent the fact that other people want to be in said best country in the world. If we’re being made great again (debatable), and other countries are sh*tholes (even more debatable), we don’t get to tell people to stay in their holes if we really care about their flourishing.

But more to the point, Moses was a murderer in exile. God still charged him with a tremendous responsibility—to seek the liberation of a people enslaved. That may seem above your particular pay grade, but it is not as though Moses had a perfect past and a sterling resume with which to begin.

The United States, and the Christian Church, may not have a perfect past either. Far from it, in fact. It is a truly brutal past. But God still charges us with a colossal responsibility to love our neighbors as ourselves, and those neighbors include the people being made to stand up and be cast out.

We can acknowledge our sinful collective past and begin to make things right by resolving not to repeat the sins of our forebears. We can begin our communal repentance by recognizing that no matter how difficult it is or how uncomfortable it may make us, that we have an institutional advantage in this country.

Jesus, when presented with such disparities in the Gospels, is always unequivocal: you can give up unfair and ill-gotten advantages, or you can end up being condemned by them.

So may God bring us out of them. “Out of Egypt, bring my people.” Out of Egypt and the slavery it represents, and into something new to be: a refuge and a sanctuary for all. Out of slavery, including slavery to sin, may we be brought by the liberating Christ of whom the Gospels speak.

May we, then, as a church and a nation stand, then, not on the side of condemnation, but on the side of the Samaritan, of the neighbor whom we are called to love as ourselves, of the slave, and, ultimately, of God as revealed by Jesus Christ.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

January 14, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "God Still Remains," Matthew 2:1-12

2018-01-07T13:47:00.000-08:00

Matthew 2:1-12

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the territory of Judea during the rule of King Herod, magi came from the east to Jerusalem. 2 They asked, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We’ve seen his star in the east, and we’ve come to honor him.”

3 When King Herod heard this, he was troubled, and everyone in Jerusalem was troubled with him. 4 He gathered all the chief priests and the legal experts and asked them where the Christ was to be born. 5 They said, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for this is what the prophet wrote: 6 You, Bethlehem, land of Judah, by no means are you least among the rulers of Judah, because from you will come one who governs, who will shepherd my people Israel.”

7 Then Herod secretly called for the magi and found out from them the time when the star had first appeared. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search carefully for the child. When you’ve found him, report to me so that I too may go and honor him.” 9 When they heard the king, they went; and look, the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stood over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were filled with joy. 11 They entered the house and saw the child with Mary his mother. Falling to their knees, they honored him. Then they opened their treasure chests and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 Because they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they went back to their own country by another route. (Common English Bible)

Epiphany 2018/ “From Slave State to Refuge: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary America,” Week One

Do you know someone, or are you such a person yourself, who only watches the Super Bowl for the advertisements? Well, that’s how I’ve come to read airline magazines.

Especially after the disappearance of SkyMall (rest in peace, you entertainingly demented market of assorted junk), I typically only read those airline magazines for the ads, which can be just as funny as SkyMall was. Hats that grow your hair back. Plastic surgery for body parts you didn’t know you had.

But buried in United’s Hemispheres magazine as I was returning here from my parents’ home in Kansas City was a story about a Torah scroll that was originally from then-Czechoslovakia and had recently resurfaced. It was one of hundreds of precious and monetarily valuable items looted by the Nazis from its Jewish victims, and the retracing of such items has often taken decades—eight in this case.

There is the added dimension of the Torah’s financial worth. Unlike Bibles, which are mass-produced and can be purchased by you or me for a few dollars, Torah scrolls are painstakingly composed by hand by specialized professionals, using highly specific components and ingredients. The scrolls take months, if not years, to produce, and typically cost tens of thousands of dollars.

And this particular scroll survived the war, and all the privations that would have entailed. It got its own first-class seat back to the Czech Republic, where it was reunited with the descendants of the community that was its original rightful owners.

A massacre of a scale never before seen had taken place. Yet God’s Word had survived. There is something profound in that. And we should pay attention to it.

This is both a new sermon series and the day after a very special holiday on the liturgical calendar. January 6 is Epiphany, the day that tradition says the Magi finally arrived to present Jesus with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. It is the beginning of a very violent, very sorrowful chapter of Matthew’s Gospel that entails the massacre of all the infant boys in Bethlehem on orders of the Israelite king Herod the Great (who was, in turn, a vassal of the Roman emperor Augustus). To prevent Jesus from meeting that same fate, Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt and remain there until Herod is dead, at which point they safely return to Israel.

So let’s talk together today not so much about the actual Epiphany story—which I imagine most of us know well enough—but about how we arrive at the Epiphany story to begin with.

The background of the whole journey by the Magi is fraught with palace intrigue and politicking, as Herod demands to know who this boy king might be who could possibly usurp him as monarch. He elects to send these Magi on a reconnaissance mission of sorts, under the guise of good faith. The Magi, tradition says, were not Israelites themselves but members of a nationality somewhere to the east, but it would not have been uncommon for an ancient king to have foreign advisors in his retinue, and Herod may well have felt that such faces might have presented a friendlier face to Mary and Joseph than an Israelite guilty of collaborating with Rome.

The threat, though, was still very much real—though not due on any part to the Magi themselves. Learning that they had been used, they elected to not report to Herod what—and more importantly, who—they discovered, and basically quit Herod’s court by deciding to return home instead.

Their decision at least grants a reprieve to the Holy Family, which likely does not know just how much danger it’s in at this point in the story unless the Magi informed them. But that decision also does nothing for the other male babies who will soon be massacred.

So…could the Magi have done more? Should they have? I think that is an honest question worth wrestling with when we consider the Epiphany story in its entirety instead of just the nativity scene that we all know and love.

More to the point, could God have done more? It’s a question that gets posed in the face of all manner of tragedies, from the Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem to the Holocaust in which six million Jews are murdered, yet one of their Torah scrolls survived and is returned.

God endures all our strife, all our struggle. God outlasts us, yet also grieves for us. God eclipses us, yet also demands that we grow, and learn, and do better.

What could the Magi have learned from this encounter?

What have we learned from the Holocaust?

Or, what have we learned from the dreamers and the families, the people who are the very same souls Emma Lazarus speaks of in her poem The New Colossus that is emblazoned upon the Statue of Liberty, “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Have we anything to learn from their plights and their experiences, or have we, too, closed off our hearts to the pains they endured to get here, even as we claim to honor the pains it took Mary, Joseph, and the newborn Christ to make it into Egypt?

For this is the fundamental truth that girds this sermon series, and I hope it makes you at least a little bit uncomfortable: if ancient Egypt approached outsiders the way we do today in the contemporary United States, there is a very good chance that our religion would have literally died in the cradle.

Yet God made provisions for something else to occur, just as God did in the Exodus story, which fundamentally informs this one and which we will be talking about next week. Then, as here, a king (Pharaoh, in Exodus) hears of a newborn threat to his power and orders the male children murdered. And then, as here, God finds a way using nobodies to create a way forward.

That parallel, that common thread, from Pharaoh to Herod is no accident. Both are a part of a continuous narrative that places God’s ways as beyond what we can affect with all our violence and bloodlust. Quite simply, God is bigger than the sins we do to one another.

We should live, then, as though we really are children of so big and great a God, in the reassurance that the cults of personality we build around sinful leaders are temporary, but God remains permanent.

That truth exists as a common thread throughout the Scriptures, from the Exodus to the Epiphany and to Easter, where God’s permanency and love endures even what we inflict upon Jesus on the cross during Good Friday.

And that permanency extends beyond the Scriptures into our own experience, as explained by the ordained pastor and homiletics professor Thomas G. Long in his commentary on Matthew:

If we have seen Herod’s hatred before in Pharaoh, we know that we will see it again and again. Pharaoh, Herod, Hitler, Stalin—the chronicles of human history are full of dictators who believe they can secure their power through murder and genocide. This text stands as a confident word that the despots of this world come and go, but that God’s will outlasts and overrules them all. This theological conviction can be seen in terse form in Matthew 2:19: “When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared…” Herod is dead, but the Word of the Lord continues. Herod is dead, but the messenger of the Lord is still appearing, speaking, guiding, protecting. Herod is dead, but the mercy of God is everlasting.

Herod is dead, but God still remains. God always remains.

May that truth be ever on lips, and always in your actions, as we enter into a new year of kingdom-building, doing church, and living the mission of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to which we owe our salvation.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

January 7. 2018