Wednesday, April 25, 2012
After Easter (John 21)
The text before us this morning is another text about forgiveness and reconciliation. That is a common, if not predominant, theme in Jesus’ post-resurrection, post-Easter visits with his disciples. We have already called attention to this in last week’s homily where we noted that Jesus’ restoration of the disciples after they had deserted and denied him would assure that the church in its formative years, in the power of the Holy Spirit, would be formed into a community that, when it is true to its calling, will be easily recognizable as a place where people know by experience the radical importance of God’s forgiveness. The church, when it is true to its formative moment, is easily recognizable as a community that cherishes and lives by the truth that “God does not forgive us because we are good but makes us good by forgiving us”.
And again this morning, here in this text (John 21), everything has to do with Jesus’ desire to help Peter face himself, his shame over his denial of Jesus, and his fears and uncertainty that led him to desert and deny. Peter had denied Jesus three times by a charcoal fire, as John has recorded it for us earlier in this gospel. Here, Jesus, also with a charcoal fire nearby, a literary nuance that John would not want us to miss, creates three exchanges with Peter that allows Peter to affirm three times his commitment to follow Jesus in mission, to care for God’s flock as a young leader in what will become Christ’s church - three affirmations, one for each of his earlier denials.
I want to note two things about all of this that I hope will help us get our heads and hearts around what this passage might be saying to us this morning. First, Jesus suggests that Peter’s way forward to flourishing will be by taking responsibility to serve others in the way that Jesus has served him. Three times Peter says I love you, and three times Jesus says in so many words: “then love and care for my flock”. This is Jesus, in other words, reminding Peter of what he said to the disciples as he turned to face Jerusalem and the cross: “no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”.
What will hold Peter’s confession of love for Jesus in the future is not his will-power or his inherent goodness. What will hold Peter fast is his experience of Jesus’ restoration of him, reinforced and made solid through the discipline of pouring that same love into the lives of others. Peter, waking up each morning with a concern for the well being of God’s people and his neighbors, whoever they may be, will create the foundation from which he will not fall.
So many times people will say to me, I don’t know how to deal with my doubts about my faith. I just feel like I can’t really commit to my faith because of all of these doubts I have. While it is important to face doubts genuinely and not feel ashamed or weak for having them, it is also important to not allow doubts to paralyze us from living in the flow of God’s love. In other words, what I think Jesus is saying to us, through Peter, is something like this: if you want to experience the authenticity of God’s love for you, then take responsibility for loving others as God has loved the world in Christ.
Or, as the Carmelite Nun, Ruth Burrows puts it in an interview about her book, Love Unknown,
“Many people think they have no faith because they feel they haven't. They do not realize that they must make a choice to believe, take the risk of believing, of committing themselves and setting themselves to live out the commitment. Never mind that they continue to feel that they do not believe. Under cover of being "authentic" we can spend our lives waiting for the kind of certainty we cannot have.”
One thinks here of John’s words in 1 John 3:18:
“Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.”
It would do us well as a church community, as we ponder this deep truth together, to note that there is very little in our socio-cultural setting to reinforce the truth that an authentic experience of God comes in a life of serving and loving others. There is so much in our advertising, in our consumerist mentalities, and in the spirit of free-wheeling hedonism that tempt us to think that a life well lived is a life where the bucket list is checked off - and the bucket list doesn’t seem to include a great deal of occasions of sacrifice for others. Contrary to our zeitgeist, the gospel says that a life well lived will conform to Jesus’ pattern of self-giving love.
Interestingly, speaking of bucket lists, there is also here in this passage a remarkable reference to Peter’s death. Jesus says to him:
“Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”
The tradition of the early church, going back to the early church historian, Eusebius, tells us that Peter was martyred (as also was Paul) in the persecution of the church at the hands of the Roman emperor, Nero, in about 62 AD. There is also a tradition of the early church going back to Origen that Peter insisted on being crucified upside, declaring that he was not worthy of being crucified in the same manner as Jesus.
What is most significant, though, about Peter’s death is not that he was a heroic martyr but that the life that took him to martyrdom was a life poured out in love for others. The Peter who denied Jesus three times became the leader of the early church who, Luke tells us in Acts, when the governing authorities forbade him from preaching the gospel said to them: ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority.*
Finally, Peter tells us in his own words in the first of two epistles bearing his name what sort of life he found to be worth living. It was not a life of religious self-confidence, or intellectual certainty but a life marked by living in the flow of God’s love for people. For Peter, the purification of the soul came through obedience to Jesus’ self-giving love and produces a community known by that love. In Peter’s own words: “Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth* so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply* from the heart.” (1 Peter 1:22)
May God enlarge our faith and expand our imaginations so that we might understand how to order our lives so that we might live for the sake of our brothers and sisters in Christ and for the neighbor.
1. Do you find that sometimes you are guilty of the condition Burrows speaks to above? (i.e. “under cover of being authentic”, spending our lives waiting for a kind of certainty we cannot have.
2. What do you do when you struggle with doubt? Have you ever considered facing your doubts with action (e.g. taking responsibility to pour God’s love into others)? Assuming that most of us could be doing better with all manner of disciplines, what it would like for you to take a greater responsibility for pouring God’s love into others?
3. Does the exercise Jesus went through with Peter (three opportunities to affirm, one for each of the denials) make you think more deeply and imaginatively about the practice of confession of sin and affirmation/absolution? What comes to mind?
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Easter 2012: Creation and New Creation
the recap below is in two parts, marked accordingly - the texts for Easter were Revelation 21:1-4; Romans 8:18-26; John 20:1-18
Part One: Before Communion
Our text before us from Romans 8 is a resurrection text that pictures the hope of the entire cosmos bound up in what God has promised to do for a new humanity destined to be raised in the power of Jesus’ resurrection.
Romans 8:19: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God”
pairs with verse 23, “and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”
Also, the same rich theology is found in the passage which serves as our regular assurance of forgiveness during preparation for communion: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new (2 Cor. 5:17”).
We explored this passage at greater depth during the homily but before we received communion we took note that Paul gives us some important teaching regarding what one of our postures should be towards this great hope of cosmic redemption and our resurrection. The posture? Patience! This may seem a little counter-intuitive. After all, didn’t we just read that “the whole creation”, as one translation renders it, “stands on tiptoes” awaiting the resurrection of human beings? And what are we supposed to be in response to that mind-blowing news!? Patient?!
Why would Paul stop at that point to exhort us to patience? Because he wants Christians to be real about what it is like to experience the promise of redemption in the midst of the messiness of a world that is not yet fully redeemed; he wants us to be real about what it is like for us to experience God’s grace and then fall back into faithlessness; and there is a certain way that he wants us to wear this realism - and the way is patience.
I recently saw at a local coffee shop an ad for a math tutor In addition to listing his credentials as a mathematician and math educator he also included this line: I am patient. I thought that was genius marketing, for everyone who struggles with math anxiety needs a patient tutor.
What Paul is saying here is that we are to have a big-picture patience towards our fellow human beings, with a fallen world, and with ourselves. We need to have patience while we await in faith and hope the promise of the resurrection.
When you sin; when you become furiously frustrated with the seeming futility of your endeavors; or, when you feel paralyzed by doubt - St Paul exhorts you to be patient. He does not say pretend everything is OK or better than it actually is; he does not say become a hedonist or nihilist in the face of your angst; he does not say ignore your sins or your frustration. Instead, he says, in so many words, “be patient with them and with all else”. The question is begged at this point. Why should you be patient? Our answer is in two parts. (1) God is patient with us (2) you have an anchor that holds you to the promise of the world to come - the resurrected Jesus. So, in the meanwhile you can be patient with yourself and others, even if it is a restless patience - and it often is.
But you say you don’t my failure - how can God be patient with me? How can I be patient with myself in light of what I know about myself? Well, here is where it is important to remember that Good Friday and Easter are joined inextricably together. So, when we take a glance back at Good Friday we remember that it is precisely in what is perceived by human judgment to be failure that God heals the world. Jesus went to the cross a failure, a human failure; he disappointed all of the human expectations of who Messiah should be and what Messiah should don. So, he died alone! He was in the minds of even his followers, a failed Messiah.
Even though Jesus’ perceived human failure on the cross is not due to any defect on his part, it is vitally important that we comprehend the ramifications of the fact that he willingly put himself in the place of human shame and failure in order to identify with our shame so that we might be embraced by the Father’s love. In that moment of separation from God the Father, when Jesus had all of the evil and sin of the world taken into himself, that is the same moment that he claimed our failures, in order to take them through the purging fires of death and into the promise of resurrection. As St. Paul puts it in the 6th chapter of Romans, “if you have been united with him in a death like his you shall surely be united in a resurrection like his.”
Discussion Questions:
1. Can you think of occasions when you should have been more patient with the frailties and failures of those around you? What was going on in your mind and heart when you did not exercise patience?
2. Read the part of George Herbert’s poem and Ben Myers’ comment on it below. Then discuss the question that comes at the end of that.
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd any thing.
"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
Commenting on this poem, New Testament Prof Ben Myers wrote on his blog recently:
“The opposite of love is not hatred, but shame. "Love bade me welcome yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin" (George Herbert). Divine love is the abolition of shame. It is hospitality, welcome, the healing of the wounded gaze. "Love took my hand and smiling did reply, / Who made the eyes but I?" Shame stoops over, looking inward on the self. Quick-eyed love stands up straight, face to face with the beloved.” Ben Myers
In light of what Myers says above, do you think you should ever feel ashamed before God? What should it sound like to preach the gospel to yourself if and when you do feel ashamed before God?
3. In light of what we have talked about above, do you think some of these insights (e.g. Jesus’ deliberately taking a place of shame) might help you tell the gospel story a bit more robustly than you might have some time ago? Explain what you mean with examples.
Part Two: After Communion
When the tomb was discovered to be empty this was a mind-blowing experience for the early disciples; no one expected that Jesus would be raised from the dead. It is not as if his disciples went away from the events surrounding his crucifixion and said, as one theologian has put it: “that’s OK -God will raise him from the dead. No, emphatically no! No one expected a resurrection from the dead in this way (devout Jews expected a resurrection at the end of history but not one person, namely the Messiah, in the middle of history). But very early in the life of the church (and we saw it in our Romans text this morning), within not too many years of the disciples’ first experience of the resurrected Lord, they begin to incorporate the reality of the resurrection into their devotional theology; their theological imaginations are taken over by this staggering event and the resurrection of Jesus becomes another crucial lens through which to understand God’s love for this world.
It is this lens that makes it possible for Paul to say what he does in Romans 8, where he spells out the promises of individual salvation in the broader context of God’s creation and new creation. I submit to you that not enough importance is put on the importance of seeing our salvation as individual people within this broader story of what the creator God has always intended for his fallen creation.
Warp and woof is a lovely phrase that not many people use anymore; it is comes to us from the world of weaving. The warp threads, in a piece of woven fabric, run lengthwise while the woof threads run crosswise. I like to use this phrase when talking about creation and new-creation/redemption because creation and redemption taken together are the warp and the woof of God’s intentions for this world. He who created did not have to be coaxed to redeem; it was the same love that drove him to create a world - a world that would one day be in dire need of redemption - that drew Jesus to the cross to die on our behalf. Jesus Christ holds the weaving of creation and new creation together. The fall of humankind had cosmic ramifications and so the resurrection of humankind in Christ does as well. The same love that drew forth a world of divine image bearers is the same love that redeems the failures of divine image bearers
The English poet, John Donne, captures the important connections between creation, new creation, and resurrection in these lovely verses taken from his poem entitled, Hymn To God, My God, in My Sickness:
We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ's cross, and Adam's tree, stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.
So, in his purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord;
By these his thorns, give me his other crown;
And as to others' souls I preach'd thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:
"Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down."
What Donne expresses in this beautiful verse is what Paul implies in Romans 8: God’s intention in creation and redemption springs from the same love. Moreover, when we remember that creation and new creation are the warp and the woof of God’s creation-project, we are also provided with one of the reasons why we can trust the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. For, God, unlike us, has no other motive than love when he creates and when he redeems. The only motivation for creation was to make something beautiful; God did not need beauty. His desire to make beauty is sheerly gratuitous. Likewise, in his new creation, our redemption and resurrection, we recognize that he is also motivated by sheer generosity. Redemption and creation are gratuitous, free of charge, and both flow from the fount of God’s love.
Expanding on this idea - Rowan Williams in his book Tokens of Trust, in reflecting on the warp and the woof of creation and new creation puts it to us that we can trust God because his only motive is love; he has no private or hidden agenda. His agenda is for the sake of humankind, whom he created in his own image and in whose image, now known to us as the face of Jesus Christ, we are being redeemed. To illustrate his point, he offers this example from the healing of the man born blind in John 9.
“Jesus asks the blind man he’s just cured whether he believes in the Son of Man. He’s certainly not asking whether the man is of the opinion that the Son of Man exists; he wants to know whether the former blind man is ready to trust the Son of Man - that is Jesus in his role as representative of the human race before God. The man - naturally - wants to know who the ‘Son of Man’ is, and Jesus says that it is him; the man responds with the words, ‘I believe’.
He believes; he has confidence. That is, he doesn’t go off wondering whether the Son of Man is out to further his own ends and deceive him. He trusts Jesus to be working for him, not for any selfish goals and he believes that what he sees and hears when Jesus is around is the truth (Williams from Tokens of Trust, p.5)”.
Questions for discussion:
1. Rowan Williams, in the book mentioned above, observes that a great many people nowadays have a profound distrust of authority. Many, many people simply don’t trust that the authorities and institutions that they have dealings with are really are working for them. Do you agree with his suggestion? Give some examples based on whether you agree or disagree.
2. Can you put into your own words why it is important to see creation and new creation as the warp and the woof of God’s “creation-project”?
3. If someone were to ask you why they should believe in God or trust him, would you feel comfortable using the ideas put forward above, especially the thoughts of Williams around the healing of the blind man?
Part One: Before Communion
Our text before us from Romans 8 is a resurrection text that pictures the hope of the entire cosmos bound up in what God has promised to do for a new humanity destined to be raised in the power of Jesus’ resurrection.
Romans 8:19: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God”
pairs with verse 23, “and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”
Also, the same rich theology is found in the passage which serves as our regular assurance of forgiveness during preparation for communion: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new (2 Cor. 5:17”).
We explored this passage at greater depth during the homily but before we received communion we took note that Paul gives us some important teaching regarding what one of our postures should be towards this great hope of cosmic redemption and our resurrection. The posture? Patience! This may seem a little counter-intuitive. After all, didn’t we just read that “the whole creation”, as one translation renders it, “stands on tiptoes” awaiting the resurrection of human beings? And what are we supposed to be in response to that mind-blowing news!? Patient?!
Why would Paul stop at that point to exhort us to patience? Because he wants Christians to be real about what it is like to experience the promise of redemption in the midst of the messiness of a world that is not yet fully redeemed; he wants us to be real about what it is like for us to experience God’s grace and then fall back into faithlessness; and there is a certain way that he wants us to wear this realism - and the way is patience.
I recently saw at a local coffee shop an ad for a math tutor In addition to listing his credentials as a mathematician and math educator he also included this line: I am patient. I thought that was genius marketing, for everyone who struggles with math anxiety needs a patient tutor.
What Paul is saying here is that we are to have a big-picture patience towards our fellow human beings, with a fallen world, and with ourselves. We need to have patience while we await in faith and hope the promise of the resurrection.
When you sin; when you become furiously frustrated with the seeming futility of your endeavors; or, when you feel paralyzed by doubt - St Paul exhorts you to be patient. He does not say pretend everything is OK or better than it actually is; he does not say become a hedonist or nihilist in the face of your angst; he does not say ignore your sins or your frustration. Instead, he says, in so many words, “be patient with them and with all else”. The question is begged at this point. Why should you be patient? Our answer is in two parts. (1) God is patient with us (2) you have an anchor that holds you to the promise of the world to come - the resurrected Jesus. So, in the meanwhile you can be patient with yourself and others, even if it is a restless patience - and it often is.
But you say you don’t my failure - how can God be patient with me? How can I be patient with myself in light of what I know about myself? Well, here is where it is important to remember that Good Friday and Easter are joined inextricably together. So, when we take a glance back at Good Friday we remember that it is precisely in what is perceived by human judgment to be failure that God heals the world. Jesus went to the cross a failure, a human failure; he disappointed all of the human expectations of who Messiah should be and what Messiah should don. So, he died alone! He was in the minds of even his followers, a failed Messiah.
Even though Jesus’ perceived human failure on the cross is not due to any defect on his part, it is vitally important that we comprehend the ramifications of the fact that he willingly put himself in the place of human shame and failure in order to identify with our shame so that we might be embraced by the Father’s love. In that moment of separation from God the Father, when Jesus had all of the evil and sin of the world taken into himself, that is the same moment that he claimed our failures, in order to take them through the purging fires of death and into the promise of resurrection. As St. Paul puts it in the 6th chapter of Romans, “if you have been united with him in a death like his you shall surely be united in a resurrection like his.”
Discussion Questions:
1. Can you think of occasions when you should have been more patient with the frailties and failures of those around you? What was going on in your mind and heart when you did not exercise patience?
2. Read the part of George Herbert’s poem and Ben Myers’ comment on it below. Then discuss the question that comes at the end of that.
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd any thing.
"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
Commenting on this poem, New Testament Prof Ben Myers wrote on his blog recently:
“The opposite of love is not hatred, but shame. "Love bade me welcome yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin" (George Herbert). Divine love is the abolition of shame. It is hospitality, welcome, the healing of the wounded gaze. "Love took my hand and smiling did reply, / Who made the eyes but I?" Shame stoops over, looking inward on the self. Quick-eyed love stands up straight, face to face with the beloved.” Ben Myers
In light of what Myers says above, do you think you should ever feel ashamed before God? What should it sound like to preach the gospel to yourself if and when you do feel ashamed before God?
3. In light of what we have talked about above, do you think some of these insights (e.g. Jesus’ deliberately taking a place of shame) might help you tell the gospel story a bit more robustly than you might have some time ago? Explain what you mean with examples.
Part Two: After Communion
When the tomb was discovered to be empty this was a mind-blowing experience for the early disciples; no one expected that Jesus would be raised from the dead. It is not as if his disciples went away from the events surrounding his crucifixion and said, as one theologian has put it: “that’s OK -God will raise him from the dead. No, emphatically no! No one expected a resurrection from the dead in this way (devout Jews expected a resurrection at the end of history but not one person, namely the Messiah, in the middle of history). But very early in the life of the church (and we saw it in our Romans text this morning), within not too many years of the disciples’ first experience of the resurrected Lord, they begin to incorporate the reality of the resurrection into their devotional theology; their theological imaginations are taken over by this staggering event and the resurrection of Jesus becomes another crucial lens through which to understand God’s love for this world.
It is this lens that makes it possible for Paul to say what he does in Romans 8, where he spells out the promises of individual salvation in the broader context of God’s creation and new creation. I submit to you that not enough importance is put on the importance of seeing our salvation as individual people within this broader story of what the creator God has always intended for his fallen creation.
Warp and woof is a lovely phrase that not many people use anymore; it is comes to us from the world of weaving. The warp threads, in a piece of woven fabric, run lengthwise while the woof threads run crosswise. I like to use this phrase when talking about creation and new-creation/redemption because creation and redemption taken together are the warp and the woof of God’s intentions for this world. He who created did not have to be coaxed to redeem; it was the same love that drove him to create a world - a world that would one day be in dire need of redemption - that drew Jesus to the cross to die on our behalf. Jesus Christ holds the weaving of creation and new creation together. The fall of humankind had cosmic ramifications and so the resurrection of humankind in Christ does as well. The same love that drew forth a world of divine image bearers is the same love that redeems the failures of divine image bearers
The English poet, John Donne, captures the important connections between creation, new creation, and resurrection in these lovely verses taken from his poem entitled, Hymn To God, My God, in My Sickness:
We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ's cross, and Adam's tree, stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.
So, in his purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord;
By these his thorns, give me his other crown;
And as to others' souls I preach'd thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:
"Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down."
What Donne expresses in this beautiful verse is what Paul implies in Romans 8: God’s intention in creation and redemption springs from the same love. Moreover, when we remember that creation and new creation are the warp and the woof of God’s creation-project, we are also provided with one of the reasons why we can trust the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. For, God, unlike us, has no other motive than love when he creates and when he redeems. The only motivation for creation was to make something beautiful; God did not need beauty. His desire to make beauty is sheerly gratuitous. Likewise, in his new creation, our redemption and resurrection, we recognize that he is also motivated by sheer generosity. Redemption and creation are gratuitous, free of charge, and both flow from the fount of God’s love.
Expanding on this idea - Rowan Williams in his book Tokens of Trust, in reflecting on the warp and the woof of creation and new creation puts it to us that we can trust God because his only motive is love; he has no private or hidden agenda. His agenda is for the sake of humankind, whom he created in his own image and in whose image, now known to us as the face of Jesus Christ, we are being redeemed. To illustrate his point, he offers this example from the healing of the man born blind in John 9.
“Jesus asks the blind man he’s just cured whether he believes in the Son of Man. He’s certainly not asking whether the man is of the opinion that the Son of Man exists; he wants to know whether the former blind man is ready to trust the Son of Man - that is Jesus in his role as representative of the human race before God. The man - naturally - wants to know who the ‘Son of Man’ is, and Jesus says that it is him; the man responds with the words, ‘I believe’.
He believes; he has confidence. That is, he doesn’t go off wondering whether the Son of Man is out to further his own ends and deceive him. He trusts Jesus to be working for him, not for any selfish goals and he believes that what he sees and hears when Jesus is around is the truth (Williams from Tokens of Trust, p.5)”.
Questions for discussion:
1. Rowan Williams, in the book mentioned above, observes that a great many people nowadays have a profound distrust of authority. Many, many people simply don’t trust that the authorities and institutions that they have dealings with are really are working for them. Do you agree with his suggestion? Give some examples based on whether you agree or disagree.
2. Can you put into your own words why it is important to see creation and new creation as the warp and the woof of God’s “creation-project”?
3. If someone were to ask you why they should believe in God or trust him, would you feel comfortable using the ideas put forward above, especially the thoughts of Williams around the healing of the blind man?
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Palm Sunday 2012 - Missional Humility
It is a sobering thing to think that we might be guilty of making God in our image and acting as if we know our needs better than he does. This is of course what many of Jesus’ first century contemporaries had done with regard to the image they had drawn of what messiah should be for them.
Many of Jesus’ contemporaries wanted their messiah to come on a war horse and mount a successful revolt against the Romans. Before we think that too incredulous we must admit that such a sentiment would be an understandable desire for any group of people who were under the foot of Roman imperial power. However - and this is what we note each year on Palm Sunday, Jesus did not come on a war horse. He came on a humble beast of burden.
Ben Witherington (some of you have heard this before but it is worth repeating) has a nice summary of what many in the crowds of passover wanted:
“The cry Hosanna (see Ps. 118.25) seems to in fact be a plea in Hebrew meaning “Save Now!”. The crowds were crying out for a particular kind of political liberation it would appear on the spot, but Jesus had another idea in mind entirely of what made for peace, what made for pacification of our warring madness, what made for liberation and redemption. The real enemy was not Romans or Greeks, or foreigners in general. The real enemy lurked within the hearts of every fallen person—it is called sin.”
It should be arresting to realize that each of us is capable of making God in our own image and refusing to recognize him when he comes to us on his terms. It is a temptation that all of us deal with whether we are first century Israel of old wishing for the blood of Roman oppressors to run through the streets, or a nice upper middle class person who refuses to recognize his own sin but desires for God to exact some sort of vengeance on his work colleagues who slighted him at the last team building meeting.
Again, Witherington about Jesus on Palm Sunday: “Jesus did not come to meet either his earliest followers expectations or ours. He came to meet our needs.”
Jesus wants to deal with the deep needs of our heart in spite of our desire to hide them away from him. As we prepared to come to the communion table this past Sunday we encouraged one another to ask God to reveal to each of us the deep needs in our hearts, needs we must ask him to speak to through the Spirit. I remarked that perhaps there is something for which you and I need to ask God’s forgiveness but we have been too preoccupied by everything else to have the spiritual focus to repent. I suggested that perhaps you or I are so deeply angry with a friend or loved one that we have forgotten the basic call to love, forgive and seek to be the agent of reconciliation. We concluded the communion meditation with these words: whatever it is that you bring to God this morning you can rest assured of one thing - the one who came to his throne on a beast of burden comes to you in order to take your burdens and make them his own.
It is a commonplace to talk about Jesus’ humility on Palm Sunday and we have many times at Grace. But for many of us - when we think of humility we just tend to think of it as the opposite of pride. So far so good. Arrogance, self-importance, egoism and pride all come up as antonyms for humility and who wouldn’t rather be with someone who is the opposite of all those things? However, Jesus’ humility is much more than the opposite of pride, arrogance, self-importance and egoism. For Jesus, his humility was joined to his mission of giving his life away for the sake of others (Philippians 2:1-11). So, I submit that this is what is truly important to know about Jesus’ humility: it is not the sort of humility that is simply polite and good manners. You know what I mean - you are at a dinner party and someone compliments you on your accomplishments etc. and you respond by saying that you really can’t take credit for it because you have such good help and a wonderful team and what not. Funny enough..... many people may be impressed by that sort of humility and so impressed that they might tempt you to take pride in it - tricky business talking about humility, right?
Perhaps the best way to talk about Jesus’ humility is to recognize is as a missional humility. God is on a mission to reach all of humanity with his life changing love. Jesus came into the world to live a life of perfect self-giving love for the purpose of helping all people become alive to God’s way of being human. And all of this is so that we may begin to live now in the same way that we will live in God’s new world, the world to come. God’s new world is already alive in this world and becomes transparent to us whenever we respond to God’s love. When we respond to God’s love in Christ we pull back the veil and the world to come is alive in our presence. This is what theologians often refer to as the already and the not yet. In Jesus, human beings can already live by faith and repentance the life that will come in perfection when this world is joined to the world to come. Living like this is sort of like a leaning forward AND into the promises of God. Living like this is about having our life now framed not by the forces and pressures of this world but, instead, framed by the reality of God’s future. To reiterate, it is so that we may begin to live this way that Jesus came; it is his missional humility, the mission of his self-giving love.
So, if Jesus’ humility is a missional humility as we have just talked about it, then it follows pretty quickly that we need to figure out what it looks like to join him on mission.
For Jesus, so much of his mission seemed to boil down to treating people a certain kind of way and about telling them the truth about God’s forgiveness and his love. To build on that thought and what we said just a moment ago let me put it this way: God’s mission in Jesus is about opening people up to God’s future, about teaching people to see their present life circumstances in light of God’s promised world to come - a place where, as the 14th century English Christian mystic Julian of Norwich put it, “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”.
In order to think with you a moment or two about following Jesus in mission with regard to treating people a certain kind of way and telling people the truth about God’s forgiveness and his love I read an account from the gospel of Luke, familiar to many of us but perhaps not from the angle I am presently proposing as a vantage point (Luke 7:36-50).
Let’s talk about treating people a certain way. When Jesus came across people who the religious power brokers of his day did not want near them (or him for that matter), Jesus treated them with dignity and respect - he honored them. For instance. the woman who barged in on the dinner party and began to wash Jesus’ feet with ointment - the important people around the room wanted her gone. Jesus honored her and made her act of hospitality an example to be emulated by them.
One way of testing ourselves to see if we are treating people the way Jesus would have us to is to ask ourselves the question: do we see people at the margins of society as people with whom we have a great deal in common? Here, of course, is what we have in common: a radical need for God to love us and supply all of our needs. However, the way the powers of society are set up, we are perpetually tempted to imagine that what is most important to our lives, material possessions, social position etc., gives us nothing of importance in common with the poor. Hence, we don’t see our connection to those at the margins and so we allow ourselves to be blocked from being able to treat them the way Jesus would have us to treat them. We, like the others at the dinner party in the gospel story, do not want the woman there showing her neediness. She makes them feel uncomfortable; she makes us feel uncomfortable.
I love one of the recent Allstate commercials.... a teenage driver driving an old beater rear ends one of his suburbanite neighbors who is older, established, and driving a late model luxury car. The teenager whips out his Allstate card and the older more established authority figure is dumbfounded: and I paraphrase from memory - “I thought you would have one of those cheap discount insurance plans but you have Allstate and we have the same agent” The teenager says, “yeah, we’re connected.” "No we’re not", says the older gentleman.” “Yes we are”, says the smiling teen....”yes we are”.
Well, that is a silly illustration I am leaning on to get you to wrap your imaginations around a very serious aspect of the gospel. I submit that we must see how much we have in common with the poor and those at the margins in order to treat people in the way that Jesus would have us. I would go so far as to say that our capacity to love all people and treat people as Jesus would have us is directly proportional to the degree to which we see how much we have in common with the poor and those at the margins, our mutual and radical need for God’s mercy and love.
So, as we said earlier, following Jesus in mission boils down not just to treating people a certain kind of way but also about telling people the truth about God’s forgiveness and his love. This is, of course, what Jesus does in this story from Luke, as he goes on to tell the woman in the presence of all that her sins are forgiven. What a gift to this woman and to anyone else who had ears to hear and eyes to see. Jesus framed the woman’s life in light of the gospel and the veil between this world and the world come was pulled back. God forgives those who come to him wanting a relationship and it matters not what others may think of them; all that matters is what God thinks of them.
Now, we are not Jesus and we are not about the business of directly announcing to people the forgiveness of their sins in the way Jesus did, For us sinners it is more about finding unique and imaginative ways to tell people the truth of our lives, which is that we depend on God’s forgiveness to keep us moving in the right direction in this fallen world. Much more can be said about that but if we simply ask God to give us the integrity to be honest with people about our need for God’s forgiveness and love so much of the rest just takes care of itself. May God give us the grace to treat people in a certain kind of way and to tell people the truth about our experience of God’s forgiveness in Christ.
Questions:
1. When you think about “making God in your image” what comes to mind?
2. Do you find that you sometimes are preoccupied with wishing that God would punish people who have wronged you rather than praying for them, as “your enemies”?
3. Do you think that simply being a Christian with some means in the United States offers unique temptations to distort the image of God portrayed in Jesus? If not, why not? If so, how so?
4. Do you think that you should do a better job at seeing that you have a great deal in common with the poor and those who are at the margins of our society? Do you agree with the substance of the argument above? (Maybe think about this question in relationship to this specific teaching: Matthew 25:31-36.)
5. Do you think you share your story of experiencing God’s forgiveness as truly and often with others as you ought to? If not, how might you embark, for the sake of others, on a path of pulling the veil back on your experience of God’s forgiveness, and communicating to more people the story of your life in light of the gospel.
Many of Jesus’ contemporaries wanted their messiah to come on a war horse and mount a successful revolt against the Romans. Before we think that too incredulous we must admit that such a sentiment would be an understandable desire for any group of people who were under the foot of Roman imperial power. However - and this is what we note each year on Palm Sunday, Jesus did not come on a war horse. He came on a humble beast of burden.
Ben Witherington (some of you have heard this before but it is worth repeating) has a nice summary of what many in the crowds of passover wanted:
“The cry Hosanna (see Ps. 118.25) seems to in fact be a plea in Hebrew meaning “Save Now!”. The crowds were crying out for a particular kind of political liberation it would appear on the spot, but Jesus had another idea in mind entirely of what made for peace, what made for pacification of our warring madness, what made for liberation and redemption. The real enemy was not Romans or Greeks, or foreigners in general. The real enemy lurked within the hearts of every fallen person—it is called sin.”
It should be arresting to realize that each of us is capable of making God in our own image and refusing to recognize him when he comes to us on his terms. It is a temptation that all of us deal with whether we are first century Israel of old wishing for the blood of Roman oppressors to run through the streets, or a nice upper middle class person who refuses to recognize his own sin but desires for God to exact some sort of vengeance on his work colleagues who slighted him at the last team building meeting.
Again, Witherington about Jesus on Palm Sunday: “Jesus did not come to meet either his earliest followers expectations or ours. He came to meet our needs.”
Jesus wants to deal with the deep needs of our heart in spite of our desire to hide them away from him. As we prepared to come to the communion table this past Sunday we encouraged one another to ask God to reveal to each of us the deep needs in our hearts, needs we must ask him to speak to through the Spirit. I remarked that perhaps there is something for which you and I need to ask God’s forgiveness but we have been too preoccupied by everything else to have the spiritual focus to repent. I suggested that perhaps you or I are so deeply angry with a friend or loved one that we have forgotten the basic call to love, forgive and seek to be the agent of reconciliation. We concluded the communion meditation with these words: whatever it is that you bring to God this morning you can rest assured of one thing - the one who came to his throne on a beast of burden comes to you in order to take your burdens and make them his own.
It is a commonplace to talk about Jesus’ humility on Palm Sunday and we have many times at Grace. But for many of us - when we think of humility we just tend to think of it as the opposite of pride. So far so good. Arrogance, self-importance, egoism and pride all come up as antonyms for humility and who wouldn’t rather be with someone who is the opposite of all those things? However, Jesus’ humility is much more than the opposite of pride, arrogance, self-importance and egoism. For Jesus, his humility was joined to his mission of giving his life away for the sake of others (Philippians 2:1-11). So, I submit that this is what is truly important to know about Jesus’ humility: it is not the sort of humility that is simply polite and good manners. You know what I mean - you are at a dinner party and someone compliments you on your accomplishments etc. and you respond by saying that you really can’t take credit for it because you have such good help and a wonderful team and what not. Funny enough..... many people may be impressed by that sort of humility and so impressed that they might tempt you to take pride in it - tricky business talking about humility, right?
Perhaps the best way to talk about Jesus’ humility is to recognize is as a missional humility. God is on a mission to reach all of humanity with his life changing love. Jesus came into the world to live a life of perfect self-giving love for the purpose of helping all people become alive to God’s way of being human. And all of this is so that we may begin to live now in the same way that we will live in God’s new world, the world to come. God’s new world is already alive in this world and becomes transparent to us whenever we respond to God’s love. When we respond to God’s love in Christ we pull back the veil and the world to come is alive in our presence. This is what theologians often refer to as the already and the not yet. In Jesus, human beings can already live by faith and repentance the life that will come in perfection when this world is joined to the world to come. Living like this is sort of like a leaning forward AND into the promises of God. Living like this is about having our life now framed not by the forces and pressures of this world but, instead, framed by the reality of God’s future. To reiterate, it is so that we may begin to live this way that Jesus came; it is his missional humility, the mission of his self-giving love.
So, if Jesus’ humility is a missional humility as we have just talked about it, then it follows pretty quickly that we need to figure out what it looks like to join him on mission.
For Jesus, so much of his mission seemed to boil down to treating people a certain kind of way and about telling them the truth about God’s forgiveness and his love. To build on that thought and what we said just a moment ago let me put it this way: God’s mission in Jesus is about opening people up to God’s future, about teaching people to see their present life circumstances in light of God’s promised world to come - a place where, as the 14th century English Christian mystic Julian of Norwich put it, “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”.
In order to think with you a moment or two about following Jesus in mission with regard to treating people a certain kind of way and telling people the truth about God’s forgiveness and his love I read an account from the gospel of Luke, familiar to many of us but perhaps not from the angle I am presently proposing as a vantage point (Luke 7:36-50).
Let’s talk about treating people a certain way. When Jesus came across people who the religious power brokers of his day did not want near them (or him for that matter), Jesus treated them with dignity and respect - he honored them. For instance. the woman who barged in on the dinner party and began to wash Jesus’ feet with ointment - the important people around the room wanted her gone. Jesus honored her and made her act of hospitality an example to be emulated by them.
One way of testing ourselves to see if we are treating people the way Jesus would have us to is to ask ourselves the question: do we see people at the margins of society as people with whom we have a great deal in common? Here, of course, is what we have in common: a radical need for God to love us and supply all of our needs. However, the way the powers of society are set up, we are perpetually tempted to imagine that what is most important to our lives, material possessions, social position etc., gives us nothing of importance in common with the poor. Hence, we don’t see our connection to those at the margins and so we allow ourselves to be blocked from being able to treat them the way Jesus would have us to treat them. We, like the others at the dinner party in the gospel story, do not want the woman there showing her neediness. She makes them feel uncomfortable; she makes us feel uncomfortable.
I love one of the recent Allstate commercials.... a teenage driver driving an old beater rear ends one of his suburbanite neighbors who is older, established, and driving a late model luxury car. The teenager whips out his Allstate card and the older more established authority figure is dumbfounded: and I paraphrase from memory - “I thought you would have one of those cheap discount insurance plans but you have Allstate and we have the same agent” The teenager says, “yeah, we’re connected.” "No we’re not", says the older gentleman.” “Yes we are”, says the smiling teen....”yes we are”.
Well, that is a silly illustration I am leaning on to get you to wrap your imaginations around a very serious aspect of the gospel. I submit that we must see how much we have in common with the poor and those at the margins in order to treat people in the way that Jesus would have us. I would go so far as to say that our capacity to love all people and treat people as Jesus would have us is directly proportional to the degree to which we see how much we have in common with the poor and those at the margins, our mutual and radical need for God’s mercy and love.
So, as we said earlier, following Jesus in mission boils down not just to treating people a certain kind of way but also about telling people the truth about God’s forgiveness and his love. This is, of course, what Jesus does in this story from Luke, as he goes on to tell the woman in the presence of all that her sins are forgiven. What a gift to this woman and to anyone else who had ears to hear and eyes to see. Jesus framed the woman’s life in light of the gospel and the veil between this world and the world come was pulled back. God forgives those who come to him wanting a relationship and it matters not what others may think of them; all that matters is what God thinks of them.
Now, we are not Jesus and we are not about the business of directly announcing to people the forgiveness of their sins in the way Jesus did, For us sinners it is more about finding unique and imaginative ways to tell people the truth of our lives, which is that we depend on God’s forgiveness to keep us moving in the right direction in this fallen world. Much more can be said about that but if we simply ask God to give us the integrity to be honest with people about our need for God’s forgiveness and love so much of the rest just takes care of itself. May God give us the grace to treat people in a certain kind of way and to tell people the truth about our experience of God’s forgiveness in Christ.
Questions:
1. When you think about “making God in your image” what comes to mind?
2. Do you find that you sometimes are preoccupied with wishing that God would punish people who have wronged you rather than praying for them, as “your enemies”?
3. Do you think that simply being a Christian with some means in the United States offers unique temptations to distort the image of God portrayed in Jesus? If not, why not? If so, how so?
4. Do you think that you should do a better job at seeing that you have a great deal in common with the poor and those who are at the margins of our society? Do you agree with the substance of the argument above? (Maybe think about this question in relationship to this specific teaching: Matthew 25:31-36.)
5. Do you think you share your story of experiencing God’s forgiveness as truly and often with others as you ought to? If not, how might you embark, for the sake of others, on a path of pulling the veil back on your experience of God’s forgiveness, and communicating to more people the story of your life in light of the gospel.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Road To Emmaus: Guest Preacher, Tim Bowyer
Homily Recap:
Isaiah 42, Psalm 42 and 43, Luke 24:13-35
We opened with a question: What story are we telling when we worship on Sundays and when we
celebrate the Eucharist? We remembered that at the table, we tell a story. We all read a creed and
confession, we hear the words of institution and we get up together, share bread and wine, sit down, and
pass the peace. These acts tell a certain story - a story of a God of love who is reconciling the whole
world to himself through Christ - who has given us new life so that we might live in love with each other
and the world. But we reflected on what stories often race through our heads as we perform these actions
together. Depending on the day, and what has happened that week, or that morning, we may be speaking
the words and moving through the performance telling one story, while our minds are racing telling a
completely different one. Which one do we listen to?
The two psalms we read, Psalm 42 and 43, demonstrate a practice of telling a greater story over a lesser
story in the form of prayer. The Psalmist composed what we now call Psalm 42 and 43 originally as one
song with a beautiful refrain: “Why are you downcast, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.” We see this three times in the two
psalms. Throughout a prayer naming to God the depths of his longing from exile, and his deepest desires,
we find the refrain that reincorporates his forsaken despair into hope, into praise, and into a greater truth -
that God, though seemingly far away and indifferent, is yet God and a present help to the psalmist. This
kind of movement is all through the psalms - awful experiences that would otherwise crush the psalmist
do not, because he wraps them up in the praise and hope of God and God’s promise. We find this is
rather hard to practice. How do we allow that greater story to so wrap ours up, that in the midst of the
immediate circumstances, we might see and feel and trust in God promise?
The Director of Swiss Labri, Greg Laughery, comments on this matter in a recent reflection: “Feelings and
experience can often attempt to be our sole sources and criteria for assessing who we are and what the
world is like. Someone says, “I feel like I have to accomplish something in order to be liked.” Why?
“Because this has been my experience.” Another says, “I feel ashamed.” Why? “Because I have to hide
my real self from others and I experience this as my fault.” Both confirm, “This is the way the world
works.” While feelings and experience are valid dimensions of being human, the question of whether or
not we should trust or be suspicious of them cannot be solely based on feelings and experience. Why? In
themselves they offer no valid way to discern if the perceptions of ourselves and the world are accurate.
Unless we’re willing . . . to raise the difficult question of what is true, we will spin around in circles of the
same, never having adequate criteria for being able to evaluate which feelings and experience can be
considered trustworthy and which suspicious. Once we begin to focus on this explosive question and start
to answer it, trust and suspicion will function in better ways that will in turn lead to truer view of ourselves
and the world.”
Most of us have mixed opinions about truth. While we still have ties to Modernist assumptions about truth
- that it can only be discerned by the scientific method or by historical criticism or by objective analysis,
we also are inundated by postmodern voices - that what matters most is what we experience. And being
“true” to that experience is how we find meaning. The modernist arrogance is something that needed to
be called to question. We understand now that stories constitute meaning and truth far more than the
brute facts of life, the raw data. We know that stories are what make up our identity and meaning. But we
get a bit lost, wondering whether to let our experience and our emotion take control of our destiny or to
hold on rigidly to the supposed facts as if they are the lifeline to meaning or salvation.
The Psalmist names the history of God’s promise, his faithfulness, his love and the present-future of his
Kingdom as the story and Truth that frames his otherwise suffocating reality. That great and greater story
of God cannot be reduced into mere historical data, nor will it be itself as a meaningful story for some,
some of the time. It takes the whole of our lives into it, all people are held together in it, any and every
experience gets wrapped up into it, all emotion finds its end in that greater context – of forgiveness, of
hope, and of new life. The practice of faith is one that tells that greater story as a refrain, so that whatever
we are experiencing, be it poverty, injustice, suffering, rejection, failure, confusion, boredom, or struggle in
sin, though it be valid and true, finds itself wrapped up in the greater story of God reconciling the world to
himself through Christ.
For the homily, we reflected on Luke together, having seen and heard it read to us dramatically. We noted
that Luke has a great appreciation for history and for narrative, weaving themes of travel, conversion,
Eucharist, and the fulfillment of scripture into his gospel and the book of Acts. The experience of the
disciples and their sense of disappointment are slowly wrapped up in a greater story that Christ reveals to
them. Luke tells it in this way to reassure his audience that all the promises of God made to his ancient
people - read in Moses, the prophets, and the psalms - about saving the world through them - had come
to fulfillment, but in an unexpected way. It was not through the fury of insurrection, but in the humble life,
in the suffering and death, and now in the resurrection of Jesus. The story of despair the two disciples are
agonizing over is laid down for the shining truth of a larger story they yet had no imagination for.
This is what often happens when we meet Jesus. We have too many expectations to name and most of
them are let down. We are frustrated, tired, and disappointed. Our experiences in this life have
devastated us and on our emotions, whether we show that openly or whether we push it down, retreating
into ourselves. But we meet Jesus because he comes to us on the road. He joins us, lets us hash out our
own stories, gives us time. But he invites us into a greater story and a different way of imagining him, the
world, and ourselves. He is no failed prophet or a stranger, who is out of touch with reality. The world is
not a only a place of splintered stories without meaning. We are not absolutely forsaken. Rather, he is the
one who has gone before us into death and risen before us into life. All stories find their end and center int
that one. We find our experiences and emotions wrapped up in that greater truth. We need not close
ourselves off from others or from God in the story of our own experience or emotion. Our story can be
taken up into his as we participate in following after him. In this, as the disciples along the road too
discover, our hearts may just start to warm, and we may start to live in greater courage.
To help us imagine what this might entail for us, we told two stories: the story of my friend and the story of
the seed. My friend was raising her young children and her husband was suffering in severe depression
and without work. She would sit by herself after dark on the back porch, and through tears name the
things that she was thankful for - a roof, food enough, and friends. In a small way, she was telling a
greater story than her immediate severe pain. She said at this time that she couldnʼt believe in the gospel,
but she continued to be in a church. The people there would say to her, “Thatʼs just fine. Weʼll keep on
telling the story and weʼll stand next to you.” She did not dismiss her story and neither did the church, but
they TOGETHER, slowly, wrapped it up in a larger one. Planting, like theses stories, reminds us that the
veil of the immediate emotion or experience is not the end of the story. The dark soil, at first, would tell a
story of death, of wrapping all that falls to the ground in its arms, engulfing the seeds in a cloak they
cannot see past. Yet water and sun call them upward. By forces unknown to them, they are being drawn
into air and into new being.
Lent is a journey on the way to the passion of Christ. Since it entails self-discipline and identifying with the
suffering messiah, we may feel like we’ve been on a journey that is designed only to wear us down. Or
maybe life is enough to wear down on us and we didnʼt need Lent to remind us. We may have lost a
sense of the greater story. But the end is not suffering, not the cross, but the resurrection. That is why we
speak of resurrection on the 5th Sunday of Lent. We were never meant to journey without the memory and
hope of that future. Jesus is already walking beside. His story goes before us and after. His story
envelops our in grace.
Questions:
1. Where do we look for and find meaning in our lives? Are experience and emotion valid ways of
determining meaning?
2. If you can share, what are the stories that interrupt, combat, or threaten to overshadow the story of the
gospel?
3. Do you have a practice, like that of the Psalmist, which weaves any and every experience and emotion
into a greater story through refrain? What might this look like for you?
4. How is the church to practice this kind of reincorporation of the lesser story into the greater? Can you
think of examples where this has been done well or poorly?
Isaiah 42, Psalm 42 and 43, Luke 24:13-35
We opened with a question: What story are we telling when we worship on Sundays and when we
celebrate the Eucharist? We remembered that at the table, we tell a story. We all read a creed and
confession, we hear the words of institution and we get up together, share bread and wine, sit down, and
pass the peace. These acts tell a certain story - a story of a God of love who is reconciling the whole
world to himself through Christ - who has given us new life so that we might live in love with each other
and the world. But we reflected on what stories often race through our heads as we perform these actions
together. Depending on the day, and what has happened that week, or that morning, we may be speaking
the words and moving through the performance telling one story, while our minds are racing telling a
completely different one. Which one do we listen to?
The two psalms we read, Psalm 42 and 43, demonstrate a practice of telling a greater story over a lesser
story in the form of prayer. The Psalmist composed what we now call Psalm 42 and 43 originally as one
song with a beautiful refrain: “Why are you downcast, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.” We see this three times in the two
psalms. Throughout a prayer naming to God the depths of his longing from exile, and his deepest desires,
we find the refrain that reincorporates his forsaken despair into hope, into praise, and into a greater truth -
that God, though seemingly far away and indifferent, is yet God and a present help to the psalmist. This
kind of movement is all through the psalms - awful experiences that would otherwise crush the psalmist
do not, because he wraps them up in the praise and hope of God and God’s promise. We find this is
rather hard to practice. How do we allow that greater story to so wrap ours up, that in the midst of the
immediate circumstances, we might see and feel and trust in God promise?
The Director of Swiss Labri, Greg Laughery, comments on this matter in a recent reflection: “Feelings and
experience can often attempt to be our sole sources and criteria for assessing who we are and what the
world is like. Someone says, “I feel like I have to accomplish something in order to be liked.” Why?
“Because this has been my experience.” Another says, “I feel ashamed.” Why? “Because I have to hide
my real self from others and I experience this as my fault.” Both confirm, “This is the way the world
works.” While feelings and experience are valid dimensions of being human, the question of whether or
not we should trust or be suspicious of them cannot be solely based on feelings and experience. Why? In
themselves they offer no valid way to discern if the perceptions of ourselves and the world are accurate.
Unless we’re willing . . . to raise the difficult question of what is true, we will spin around in circles of the
same, never having adequate criteria for being able to evaluate which feelings and experience can be
considered trustworthy and which suspicious. Once we begin to focus on this explosive question and start
to answer it, trust and suspicion will function in better ways that will in turn lead to truer view of ourselves
and the world.”
Most of us have mixed opinions about truth. While we still have ties to Modernist assumptions about truth
- that it can only be discerned by the scientific method or by historical criticism or by objective analysis,
we also are inundated by postmodern voices - that what matters most is what we experience. And being
“true” to that experience is how we find meaning. The modernist arrogance is something that needed to
be called to question. We understand now that stories constitute meaning and truth far more than the
brute facts of life, the raw data. We know that stories are what make up our identity and meaning. But we
get a bit lost, wondering whether to let our experience and our emotion take control of our destiny or to
hold on rigidly to the supposed facts as if they are the lifeline to meaning or salvation.
The Psalmist names the history of God’s promise, his faithfulness, his love and the present-future of his
Kingdom as the story and Truth that frames his otherwise suffocating reality. That great and greater story
of God cannot be reduced into mere historical data, nor will it be itself as a meaningful story for some,
some of the time. It takes the whole of our lives into it, all people are held together in it, any and every
experience gets wrapped up into it, all emotion finds its end in that greater context – of forgiveness, of
hope, and of new life. The practice of faith is one that tells that greater story as a refrain, so that whatever
we are experiencing, be it poverty, injustice, suffering, rejection, failure, confusion, boredom, or struggle in
sin, though it be valid and true, finds itself wrapped up in the greater story of God reconciling the world to
himself through Christ.
For the homily, we reflected on Luke together, having seen and heard it read to us dramatically. We noted
that Luke has a great appreciation for history and for narrative, weaving themes of travel, conversion,
Eucharist, and the fulfillment of scripture into his gospel and the book of Acts. The experience of the
disciples and their sense of disappointment are slowly wrapped up in a greater story that Christ reveals to
them. Luke tells it in this way to reassure his audience that all the promises of God made to his ancient
people - read in Moses, the prophets, and the psalms - about saving the world through them - had come
to fulfillment, but in an unexpected way. It was not through the fury of insurrection, but in the humble life,
in the suffering and death, and now in the resurrection of Jesus. The story of despair the two disciples are
agonizing over is laid down for the shining truth of a larger story they yet had no imagination for.
This is what often happens when we meet Jesus. We have too many expectations to name and most of
them are let down. We are frustrated, tired, and disappointed. Our experiences in this life have
devastated us and on our emotions, whether we show that openly or whether we push it down, retreating
into ourselves. But we meet Jesus because he comes to us on the road. He joins us, lets us hash out our
own stories, gives us time. But he invites us into a greater story and a different way of imagining him, the
world, and ourselves. He is no failed prophet or a stranger, who is out of touch with reality. The world is
not a only a place of splintered stories without meaning. We are not absolutely forsaken. Rather, he is the
one who has gone before us into death and risen before us into life. All stories find their end and center int
that one. We find our experiences and emotions wrapped up in that greater truth. We need not close
ourselves off from others or from God in the story of our own experience or emotion. Our story can be
taken up into his as we participate in following after him. In this, as the disciples along the road too
discover, our hearts may just start to warm, and we may start to live in greater courage.
To help us imagine what this might entail for us, we told two stories: the story of my friend and the story of
the seed. My friend was raising her young children and her husband was suffering in severe depression
and without work. She would sit by herself after dark on the back porch, and through tears name the
things that she was thankful for - a roof, food enough, and friends. In a small way, she was telling a
greater story than her immediate severe pain. She said at this time that she couldnʼt believe in the gospel,
but she continued to be in a church. The people there would say to her, “Thatʼs just fine. Weʼll keep on
telling the story and weʼll stand next to you.” She did not dismiss her story and neither did the church, but
they TOGETHER, slowly, wrapped it up in a larger one. Planting, like theses stories, reminds us that the
veil of the immediate emotion or experience is not the end of the story. The dark soil, at first, would tell a
story of death, of wrapping all that falls to the ground in its arms, engulfing the seeds in a cloak they
cannot see past. Yet water and sun call them upward. By forces unknown to them, they are being drawn
into air and into new being.
Lent is a journey on the way to the passion of Christ. Since it entails self-discipline and identifying with the
suffering messiah, we may feel like we’ve been on a journey that is designed only to wear us down. Or
maybe life is enough to wear down on us and we didnʼt need Lent to remind us. We may have lost a
sense of the greater story. But the end is not suffering, not the cross, but the resurrection. That is why we
speak of resurrection on the 5th Sunday of Lent. We were never meant to journey without the memory and
hope of that future. Jesus is already walking beside. His story goes before us and after. His story
envelops our in grace.
Questions:
1. Where do we look for and find meaning in our lives? Are experience and emotion valid ways of
determining meaning?
2. If you can share, what are the stories that interrupt, combat, or threaten to overshadow the story of the
gospel?
3. Do you have a practice, like that of the Psalmist, which weaves any and every experience and emotion
into a greater story through refrain? What might this look like for you?
4. How is the church to practice this kind of reincorporation of the lesser story into the greater? Can you
think of examples where this has been done well or poorly?
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
good news for those trapped in slavery
It is common during the season of Lent to read and meditate on the passage before us this morning, of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. Clearly, the 40 days in the wilderness is meant to evoke the image of God’s ancient people, Israel, wandering for 40 years in the wilderness - you may remember that those four decades come, remarkably, on the heels of their dramatic exodus from the chains of slavery. Tragically, having been set free from slavery in Egypt, God’s people of old exhibited the oh-so-human tendency to forget about God’s goodness, faithfulness, and love, about his power to redeem and about his concern that we humans live our lives in a certain kind of way that brings God’s goodness, peace, and justice to bear in this fallen world in a pattern that makes for human flourishing, our own and others. But the wilderness generation was just like the rest of us when they were showing what it looks like to be a broken and sinful people. They were demonstrating that the human condition is universally a broken mess; this mess is sometimes given the label, original sin. However, when we hear language like, original sin, it can be tempting to think of it as some sort of abstract concept like, in the words of one theologian, “a great metaphysical curse hanging over humanity”. But it is probably more helpful to talk about it in this way: Rowan Williams goes on to say, “there is a tangle that goes back to the very roots of humanity.... In humanity's history, the ingrained habit of turning inwards, turning in upon ourselves, is passed on. We learn what we want.... by watching someone else wanting it and competing for it. Before we begin to make choices, our options have been silently reduced in this way.... Our learning how to exist is mixed in with learning what does not make for our life or our joy. And every failure and wrong turn in the history of a person as in the history of our species locks us more and more firmly into ourselves. No wonder we drift further from peace, become less and less free to give. Something needs to reverse the flow, to break the cycle..... Only a human word, a human act will heal the process of human history; it isn't ideas and ideals that will do this, but some moment in history when relations are changed for good and all, when new things concretely become possible.”
That human act is Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. His human success in loving God in the wilderness is the beginning of that reversing of the flow that Williams talks about above. Jesus’ mission can be summarized in many ways but one way of talking about it is to say that he came to pioneer a new humanity, to put human beings in proper relationship with God and with each other by being in proper relationship to God and to his fellow human beings. (Ultimately, this mission would entail his death on the cross, which would also accomplish the forgiveness of ou sins. ) But back to the passage at hand: as a human being, his “saying no” to the devil in the wilderness is the first time a human had said an unmitigated yes to God since Adam’s and Eve’s fall from grace.
As the new Adam, the first representative of the New Exodus, he enters into the darkness of temptation in the wilderness so that we might know that he is near to us in our darkest moments. In our dark moments, he is there to break our cycles of self-destruction, to help us love others as we are meant to, to enable us to forgive those who hurt us, to be peacemakers in our families and communities. How about you and me this morning? Are you in the midst of a cycle that needs to be broken? If so, and we often are, Jesus is near you in your temptation and he is there to break that cycle for you and with you. Is there something in your life that you need to name and of which you need to repent hat is taking away your freedom to love others as you are meant to love them and want to love them? If so, Jesus is near to you and wants to help; will you ask him? Is temptation to bitterness and envy threatening not only to steal every ounce of joy from your life but ruin your friendships and work relationships? Have pride and self-sufficiency kept you from turning to God to ask him to help you grow into the person he wishes you to be? In all of these dark patterns, Jesus is near to you in any and every moment of your struggle to say yes to God; he is there to help you.
When you come to this communion table this morning, remember, “God has heard the cry of his people”. He is drawing near you - not in harsh judgment but in sympathetic love and with the power to redeem.
There are many different ways to summarize the gospel but one way to talk about it is as the response of God to the cries of those who are trapped in slavery. Slavery can take many forms. We talked about spiritual slavery, so to speak, before communion but the spiritual is never sealed off from the physical in scripture and God cares about what we do (and what others do) to our physical bodies.
The form slavery took among God’s ancient people at the time of the great Exodus from Egypt is similar to a great deal of the slavery that still goes on today. As I am sure most of you know, heinously, many millions of people today experience slavery through human trafficking, and various forced labor scenarios. It happens in the United States more than anyone usually wants to talk about; the most terrible and terrifying examples have to do with the trafficking of minors in prostitution - the ads for sex trafficking make media companies wealthy (e.g. lots of classifieds owned by ‘reputable companies’). What an awful situation!
When Jesus announced that he is preaching good news to the poor and to those who are
enslaved he has in mind people suffering at the margins of society and those who cannot really do much if anything to help themselves. He has in mind the people among us in the world today who are radically poor, enslaved, or at the margins of our world. One of the things that I wanted us to think about - and feel - on the way to communion this morning was that the good news of God’s coming kingdom is MEANT to feel liberating and compassionate to you. But how does that work out for those who are modern day slaves, or trapped in deep, multi-generational poverty. With regard to these people, we who have power and wealth have a large measure of responsibility as to whether or not we have made the gospel to be good to news to the poor or the exploited. Those of us with status and power must realize that the reason we have the resources of the world is to share them with those who do not. It is tempting to try to prescribe how to play this out in details but really I think with most of us we need to acquire or reacquire the discipline to realize moment by moment that we are here on this earth to join with Jesus on mission, to help those who have less than we do and to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.
1. As mentioned above, Jesus’ unmitigated yes was the first in human history since “the fall”. What has Jesus’ yes made possible for us who are united in his life, death and resurrection? Maybe framing your answer in response to this passage would be an interesting exercise. Romans 6:1-7.
2. If we are free to say yes to God in Christ, why don’t we always say yes? Perhaps you might frame your response to this in light of this passage: 1 John 1: 5-10
3. In light of what was drawn out in the two meditations above, why is it important to know that Jesus has given us the power to say yes to God?
4. Can you think of something new you can do that will make the gospel to be good news for the poor and exploited?
That human act is Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. His human success in loving God in the wilderness is the beginning of that reversing of the flow that Williams talks about above. Jesus’ mission can be summarized in many ways but one way of talking about it is to say that he came to pioneer a new humanity, to put human beings in proper relationship with God and with each other by being in proper relationship to God and to his fellow human beings. (Ultimately, this mission would entail his death on the cross, which would also accomplish the forgiveness of ou sins. ) But back to the passage at hand: as a human being, his “saying no” to the devil in the wilderness is the first time a human had said an unmitigated yes to God since Adam’s and Eve’s fall from grace.
As the new Adam, the first representative of the New Exodus, he enters into the darkness of temptation in the wilderness so that we might know that he is near to us in our darkest moments. In our dark moments, he is there to break our cycles of self-destruction, to help us love others as we are meant to, to enable us to forgive those who hurt us, to be peacemakers in our families and communities. How about you and me this morning? Are you in the midst of a cycle that needs to be broken? If so, and we often are, Jesus is near you in your temptation and he is there to break that cycle for you and with you. Is there something in your life that you need to name and of which you need to repent hat is taking away your freedom to love others as you are meant to love them and want to love them? If so, Jesus is near to you and wants to help; will you ask him? Is temptation to bitterness and envy threatening not only to steal every ounce of joy from your life but ruin your friendships and work relationships? Have pride and self-sufficiency kept you from turning to God to ask him to help you grow into the person he wishes you to be? In all of these dark patterns, Jesus is near to you in any and every moment of your struggle to say yes to God; he is there to help you.
When you come to this communion table this morning, remember, “God has heard the cry of his people”. He is drawing near you - not in harsh judgment but in sympathetic love and with the power to redeem.
There are many different ways to summarize the gospel but one way to talk about it is as the response of God to the cries of those who are trapped in slavery. Slavery can take many forms. We talked about spiritual slavery, so to speak, before communion but the spiritual is never sealed off from the physical in scripture and God cares about what we do (and what others do) to our physical bodies.
The form slavery took among God’s ancient people at the time of the great Exodus from Egypt is similar to a great deal of the slavery that still goes on today. As I am sure most of you know, heinously, many millions of people today experience slavery through human trafficking, and various forced labor scenarios. It happens in the United States more than anyone usually wants to talk about; the most terrible and terrifying examples have to do with the trafficking of minors in prostitution - the ads for sex trafficking make media companies wealthy (e.g. lots of classifieds owned by ‘reputable companies’). What an awful situation!
When Jesus announced that he is preaching good news to the poor and to those who are
enslaved he has in mind people suffering at the margins of society and those who cannot really do much if anything to help themselves. He has in mind the people among us in the world today who are radically poor, enslaved, or at the margins of our world. One of the things that I wanted us to think about - and feel - on the way to communion this morning was that the good news of God’s coming kingdom is MEANT to feel liberating and compassionate to you. But how does that work out for those who are modern day slaves, or trapped in deep, multi-generational poverty. With regard to these people, we who have power and wealth have a large measure of responsibility as to whether or not we have made the gospel to be good to news to the poor or the exploited. Those of us with status and power must realize that the reason we have the resources of the world is to share them with those who do not. It is tempting to try to prescribe how to play this out in details but really I think with most of us we need to acquire or reacquire the discipline to realize moment by moment that we are here on this earth to join with Jesus on mission, to help those who have less than we do and to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.
1. As mentioned above, Jesus’ unmitigated yes was the first in human history since “the fall”. What has Jesus’ yes made possible for us who are united in his life, death and resurrection? Maybe framing your answer in response to this passage would be an interesting exercise. Romans 6:1-7.
2. If we are free to say yes to God in Christ, why don’t we always say yes? Perhaps you might frame your response to this in light of this passage: 1 John 1: 5-10
3. In light of what was drawn out in the two meditations above, why is it important to know that Jesus has given us the power to say yes to God?
4. Can you think of something new you can do that will make the gospel to be good news for the poor and exploited?
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
the blind leading the blind
Psalm 100 Call to Worship
Romans 12:9-18 Lesson 1
Luke 6:37-42 Lesson 2
As we mentioned last week, Lent is not so much a season to come up with epiphanies (little liturgical humor there - very little) at least not epiphanies of things we have never thought of before Rather, it is a time to wake up to what we know but what we don’t often apply in our lives. For example, we know that we are meant to be people who are joined to Jesus in his movement to reconcile people to God and to each other but we, ourselves, often prefer to brood over the wrongs we have suffered than desire to be energized to reconcile and see people hopefully. Sometimes we even get addicted to a sort of grinding pathology whereby we only look at peoples faults, rather than the good God is doing in their lives. It is hard to move in the direction to being at peace with people, as our first lesson exhorts us this morning, when you look at people that way. What helps is to remember that if we are to make any progress at all in this regard we must be disciplined to see people the way that God sees them, through the lens of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection - to see them in a new context, the context of his love for them and the future he has promised to them. If you do that you will be more likely to have your default set to desiring to love and forgive others as God has loved and forgiven you.
There may have been a twinkle in Jesus’ eye when he said the proverb about the blind leading the blind, because that little saying, together with the story of the log and the speck, are meant to conjure funny mental images which, in turn, would be easy to remember. The blind leading the blind really is like something out of the British comedy troupe, Monty Python. Think of it like this: a blind person says to the person sitting next to him in the village square, “hey I need to go to my next social appointment, would you guide me?” The fellow says, “yes, certainly”, but the joke is on the first guy - because the guide ends up being blind too and off into the ditch they go.
Now, the first thing to note about this little story is that it is meant to be confrontational to a certain way of approaching life. It is not offered as an abstract principle about how to choose good teachers, though it is adaptable in that way; it is rather a warning to Jesus’ followers that if they continue approaching their life with each other and God according to the way the current religious leadership of the day were teaching them, they were going to end up in the ditch. Jesus was saying that those who opposed his message of God’s grace and love for all people were blind and should not be followed. Follow the Pharisees and you end up not being able to get past their blindness which is what is meant by the comment about a student not being able to get past her teacher.
What follows in our text from Luke is a description of the way in which many of Jesus’ rival teachers were approaching human relationships and, in turn, their relationships with God. What a depressing image of a community we have here: a group of people who are bent on pointing out the faults of others, presumably in order to feel better about their own lives.
(You may remember from last week, the story of the good Samaritan, wherein the religious leader was seeking to justify himself by attempting to gain a definition of who qualified as his neighbor, a definition that would would make being a neighbor manageable, so to speak. However, Jesus disturbs him and his approach by telling the story that makes it plain that the neighbor can be anyone and anywhere. That seems to be a common theme among Jesus’ opponents, a desire to smugly justify themselves through an adherence to a manageable moral code and a manageable approach to ritual purity, all the while ignoring the condition of their hearts. Jesus said elsewhere of that approach that it was like straining out a gnat but swallowing a camel.)
Here in our text today Jesus exposes the condition of the human heart by drawing, with his words, a cartoon that describes the way we often are with people. The little picture he draws is potent! I mean it really does look silly, right? Someone is running around with a log jutting out of his eye who, instead of being worried about the log, is more worried about what he perceives to be a bit of sawdust in his neighbors’ eye. What an absurd vision but I bet it describes all of us at one time or another.
When we desire to hold power over others based on our perception of their faults, rather than being so aware of our own sins and of God’s love for us in spite of them, we can become addicted to that way of looking at others. Eventually, having only an interest in appearing to be better than others, we lose sight of the darkness in our own hearts and become numb to God’s love - what a mess!
What is the cure for this? what keeps us from running amok in that way? Well, a bit later in the gospel, Jesus says that we are to build on a firm foundation. That firm foundation includes a daily confession that Jesus was right when he said, in so many words, over and over again, that God “does not forgive us because we are good but he makes us good by forgiving us (Rowan Williams).” May that gospel truth lead us out of the ditch of self-righteousness and into the hospitable path of God’s love for all people. There is your firm foundation!
1. Have there been occasions for you where you realize that you have desired to look at people first and foremost in the context of their faults? What alarm bells go off in your head and heart when you head in that direction? Do you listen to the alarm bells?
2. Should you feel free to point out the sin of someone else? If so.....
Under what circumstances should you do that? What gives you the justification to do that? What should you say? How should it be done?
3. Is it ever right to confront someone else about something they have done wrong without leading off by choosing something appropriate to confess as a weakness or sin of your own?
Romans 12:9-18 Lesson 1
Luke 6:37-42 Lesson 2
As we mentioned last week, Lent is not so much a season to come up with epiphanies (little liturgical humor there - very little) at least not epiphanies of things we have never thought of before Rather, it is a time to wake up to what we know but what we don’t often apply in our lives. For example, we know that we are meant to be people who are joined to Jesus in his movement to reconcile people to God and to each other but we, ourselves, often prefer to brood over the wrongs we have suffered than desire to be energized to reconcile and see people hopefully. Sometimes we even get addicted to a sort of grinding pathology whereby we only look at peoples faults, rather than the good God is doing in their lives. It is hard to move in the direction to being at peace with people, as our first lesson exhorts us this morning, when you look at people that way. What helps is to remember that if we are to make any progress at all in this regard we must be disciplined to see people the way that God sees them, through the lens of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection - to see them in a new context, the context of his love for them and the future he has promised to them. If you do that you will be more likely to have your default set to desiring to love and forgive others as God has loved and forgiven you.
There may have been a twinkle in Jesus’ eye when he said the proverb about the blind leading the blind, because that little saying, together with the story of the log and the speck, are meant to conjure funny mental images which, in turn, would be easy to remember. The blind leading the blind really is like something out of the British comedy troupe, Monty Python. Think of it like this: a blind person says to the person sitting next to him in the village square, “hey I need to go to my next social appointment, would you guide me?” The fellow says, “yes, certainly”, but the joke is on the first guy - because the guide ends up being blind too and off into the ditch they go.
Now, the first thing to note about this little story is that it is meant to be confrontational to a certain way of approaching life. It is not offered as an abstract principle about how to choose good teachers, though it is adaptable in that way; it is rather a warning to Jesus’ followers that if they continue approaching their life with each other and God according to the way the current religious leadership of the day were teaching them, they were going to end up in the ditch. Jesus was saying that those who opposed his message of God’s grace and love for all people were blind and should not be followed. Follow the Pharisees and you end up not being able to get past their blindness which is what is meant by the comment about a student not being able to get past her teacher.
What follows in our text from Luke is a description of the way in which many of Jesus’ rival teachers were approaching human relationships and, in turn, their relationships with God. What a depressing image of a community we have here: a group of people who are bent on pointing out the faults of others, presumably in order to feel better about their own lives.
(You may remember from last week, the story of the good Samaritan, wherein the religious leader was seeking to justify himself by attempting to gain a definition of who qualified as his neighbor, a definition that would would make being a neighbor manageable, so to speak. However, Jesus disturbs him and his approach by telling the story that makes it plain that the neighbor can be anyone and anywhere. That seems to be a common theme among Jesus’ opponents, a desire to smugly justify themselves through an adherence to a manageable moral code and a manageable approach to ritual purity, all the while ignoring the condition of their hearts. Jesus said elsewhere of that approach that it was like straining out a gnat but swallowing a camel.)
Here in our text today Jesus exposes the condition of the human heart by drawing, with his words, a cartoon that describes the way we often are with people. The little picture he draws is potent! I mean it really does look silly, right? Someone is running around with a log jutting out of his eye who, instead of being worried about the log, is more worried about what he perceives to be a bit of sawdust in his neighbors’ eye. What an absurd vision but I bet it describes all of us at one time or another.
When we desire to hold power over others based on our perception of their faults, rather than being so aware of our own sins and of God’s love for us in spite of them, we can become addicted to that way of looking at others. Eventually, having only an interest in appearing to be better than others, we lose sight of the darkness in our own hearts and become numb to God’s love - what a mess!
What is the cure for this? what keeps us from running amok in that way? Well, a bit later in the gospel, Jesus says that we are to build on a firm foundation. That firm foundation includes a daily confession that Jesus was right when he said, in so many words, over and over again, that God “does not forgive us because we are good but he makes us good by forgiving us (Rowan Williams).” May that gospel truth lead us out of the ditch of self-righteousness and into the hospitable path of God’s love for all people. There is your firm foundation!
1. Have there been occasions for you where you realize that you have desired to look at people first and foremost in the context of their faults? What alarm bells go off in your head and heart when you head in that direction? Do you listen to the alarm bells?
2. Should you feel free to point out the sin of someone else? If so.....
Under what circumstances should you do that? What gives you the justification to do that? What should you say? How should it be done?
3. Is it ever right to confront someone else about something they have done wrong without leading off by choosing something appropriate to confess as a weakness or sin of your own?
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
How Big Is Your Neighborhood?
This morning we come to a story that is familiar to many of us and, indeed, we have looked at this story as recently as last year during one of the homilies. However, looking at familiar truths during the time of Lent is a good practice because Lent is not meant to be a time to think about things we have never thought of before; rather, Lent is a time to think of things we have thought about quite a lot - but perhaps that is where it has stopped for many of us with regard to certain familiar truths of the gospel; we have thought quite a lot, but in many instances have not sought to actively apply the truths to our life-settings. Lent invites us in a focused way to ask of God’s spirit to expand our faith and couple our faith with the courage to act in accordance to the familiar truths we know.
So, a few things about this familiar story.
The lawyer asks the question who is my neighbor, Luke tells us, seeking to justify himself. That might puzzle us at first glance - seeking to justify himself? What is he fishing for here that could help him to justify himself? New Testament scholar GB Caird offers this insight - - and I paraphrase:
“many of the religious leaders in Jesus’ day, in a passionate devotion to the OT Law, attempted to make it applicable to every eventuality of daily life - their method? To spell out in detail the exact requirements of the law in such a way as to define the limits of their liability.”
In other words, they worked out a schema for all of life that told them exactly what the limit of their responsibility would be in any given situation - they wanted to define life so that they could always see their responsibility to God and others within the category of limited liability - I have done what I am supposed to do and I have acted for whom I am supposed to perform so now I am done here; I am justified.
The lawyer was fishing for a definition of neighbor that would help him to justify himself.
However, Jesus messes this up by turning the lawyer’s reasoning and question on its head. Iinstead of giving a definition, Jesus tells a story that makes it clear that to represent God’s hospitality in this fallen world we must be preoccupied with a different question: am I a neighbor to whomever needs a neighbor regardless of who this person is and where I find them?
So, back to Caird - “The question, 'who is my neighbor', is a request for definition; and the answer of Jesus frustrates the desire of the lawyer to define his liability. Jesus offers a definition of neighbor that asks the lawyer to embrace an ethic of unlimited liability.”
One of the Lenten actions that some of our families at Grace will be doing with their children this week really drives the message of this parable home in a practical way by asking us to take a look at where our clothes are made. The action simply suggests, look at your stuff and see where it is made - leaves the rest up to you.
For the thoughtful person, finding out, or remembering, that one's clothes are made far away (as they are for many of us), is an immediate reminder to us that our neighborhood is bigger than we initially may have thought. And, in light of our theme today, I suggest that it would require an unimaginative, if not insincere, reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan to not see that, in our contemporary setting, we must have a large enough and holy enough imagination to recognize that our neighbor is someone living across the world and making our clothes and other stuff. What are our responsibilities to these neighbors? The answer will be a bit different for each of us but Jesus’ teaching calls all of us to recognize one thing for sure: they are our neighbors.
But what about our responsibility in situations such as these? I fear that in the United States we are either too distracted to think about this much - which is a whole problem unto itself - or, if we do think about it very much we are too mired in our political opinions about whether US businesses should be taking advantage of cheap labor overseas to think about what our own response as a follower of Jesus ought to be to the neighbor who made our what-nots and thingamabobs.
Some may advocate that our government should do something about all of this - to regulate and legislate in such a way as to end the opportunity for businesses here to make a profit on the backs of those who suffer workplace horrors. Others say, that is not the answer: "do you really want to take away the contribution our economy is making? "Better", these folks say, "for our relationships to continue to allow for slow reform over time, etc." Both of these views can be and are often held by faithful followers of Jesus - neither is un-Chrstian per se - but neither really has much to do with the gospel either.
What I want to suggest is that both of these political positions can end up distracting us from having as deep and meaningful a reaction as we ought to be having to the dire situations we have come to know about some workplace horrors overseas, Each of these political positions can keep the problems overseas distant from our hearts because if, on the one hand, we imagine that it is a problem just for policy people to fix we are tempted to limit our liability by transferring it to the halls of congress; on the other hand, if you want the markets to work it out and leave it at that then you are willing to limit your liability by transferring it to the invisible hand of capitalism to eventually help those who are sometimes working in situations that we would never allow to befall a loved one or friend.
I am not suggesting an easy, one-size fits all action-plan for every Christian regarding this issue. I am simply suggesting that the circle of people who include our neighbors, according to the gospel-logic of Jesus’ story before us this morning, includes many people we may initially be blind to, including those who make our stuff.
At the very least, when we become aware of injustices done to those overseas who are making our stuff (and by the way - I am not suggesting that every company is guilty of this, but some have been) - when we become aware we need to resist the initial impulse to think about the issue as a problem for someone else. We first must realize that it is a problem for us to pray about, and ask God what we are to do.
Perhaps the starting point for each of us after prayer would be to think about and formulate what we might want to say about this issue in the public square and start saying it; but when we do, we must do it humbly, for most of you are more like me than not when it comes to being a consumer - this sermon was typed on a computer made overseas and printed on a printer that was probably made overseas so we are all in this together. The first thing that came to my mind when I prayed about this was to write a letter to several companies I do business with and simply say that I care about this issue and from here on forward I will be giving more careful consideration to my consumption based on what I find out about how that company operates with workers in other countries.
Whatever we do, as Christians, we must be clear that the purpose of the gospel is to say to empire and power, whatever empire and power looks like when and where the gospel is preached, that Jesus is King and that he holds everyone with power accountable for the well-being of their neighbor who lies bleeding on the other side of the road. Specifically, as Christians, we must stand for an ethic that leads us to those who lie bleeding on the other side of the road, because an ethic of limited liability leads us away from the generous love we ourselves have received from God. May God give us wisdom, imagination and courage to work out what it means to be a neighbor to any and all.
1. What do you think God might want you to do differently in the midst of your mundane life in light of you most recent experience (this Sunday past) with this parable in worship?
2. An “ethic of unlimited liability” can sound pretty scary in terms of what it asks.... how do you embrace this sort of approach to the needs of others while maintaining the rest of your life and obligations? Examples would probably be helpful here..... for example, is the best approach to work with the idea of percentages of time and resources, by feel, etc.?
3. Do you think the church allows partisan politics to gag her voice on issues of social justice?
So, a few things about this familiar story.
The lawyer asks the question who is my neighbor, Luke tells us, seeking to justify himself. That might puzzle us at first glance - seeking to justify himself? What is he fishing for here that could help him to justify himself? New Testament scholar GB Caird offers this insight - - and I paraphrase:
“many of the religious leaders in Jesus’ day, in a passionate devotion to the OT Law, attempted to make it applicable to every eventuality of daily life - their method? To spell out in detail the exact requirements of the law in such a way as to define the limits of their liability.”
In other words, they worked out a schema for all of life that told them exactly what the limit of their responsibility would be in any given situation - they wanted to define life so that they could always see their responsibility to God and others within the category of limited liability - I have done what I am supposed to do and I have acted for whom I am supposed to perform so now I am done here; I am justified.
The lawyer was fishing for a definition of neighbor that would help him to justify himself.
However, Jesus messes this up by turning the lawyer’s reasoning and question on its head. Iinstead of giving a definition, Jesus tells a story that makes it clear that to represent God’s hospitality in this fallen world we must be preoccupied with a different question: am I a neighbor to whomever needs a neighbor regardless of who this person is and where I find them?
So, back to Caird - “The question, 'who is my neighbor', is a request for definition; and the answer of Jesus frustrates the desire of the lawyer to define his liability. Jesus offers a definition of neighbor that asks the lawyer to embrace an ethic of unlimited liability.”
One of the Lenten actions that some of our families at Grace will be doing with their children this week really drives the message of this parable home in a practical way by asking us to take a look at where our clothes are made. The action simply suggests, look at your stuff and see where it is made - leaves the rest up to you.
For the thoughtful person, finding out, or remembering, that one's clothes are made far away (as they are for many of us), is an immediate reminder to us that our neighborhood is bigger than we initially may have thought. And, in light of our theme today, I suggest that it would require an unimaginative, if not insincere, reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan to not see that, in our contemporary setting, we must have a large enough and holy enough imagination to recognize that our neighbor is someone living across the world and making our clothes and other stuff. What are our responsibilities to these neighbors? The answer will be a bit different for each of us but Jesus’ teaching calls all of us to recognize one thing for sure: they are our neighbors.
But what about our responsibility in situations such as these? I fear that in the United States we are either too distracted to think about this much - which is a whole problem unto itself - or, if we do think about it very much we are too mired in our political opinions about whether US businesses should be taking advantage of cheap labor overseas to think about what our own response as a follower of Jesus ought to be to the neighbor who made our what-nots and thingamabobs.
Some may advocate that our government should do something about all of this - to regulate and legislate in such a way as to end the opportunity for businesses here to make a profit on the backs of those who suffer workplace horrors. Others say, that is not the answer: "do you really want to take away the contribution our economy is making? "Better", these folks say, "for our relationships to continue to allow for slow reform over time, etc." Both of these views can be and are often held by faithful followers of Jesus - neither is un-Chrstian per se - but neither really has much to do with the gospel either.
What I want to suggest is that both of these political positions can end up distracting us from having as deep and meaningful a reaction as we ought to be having to the dire situations we have come to know about some workplace horrors overseas, Each of these political positions can keep the problems overseas distant from our hearts because if, on the one hand, we imagine that it is a problem just for policy people to fix we are tempted to limit our liability by transferring it to the halls of congress; on the other hand, if you want the markets to work it out and leave it at that then you are willing to limit your liability by transferring it to the invisible hand of capitalism to eventually help those who are sometimes working in situations that we would never allow to befall a loved one or friend.
I am not suggesting an easy, one-size fits all action-plan for every Christian regarding this issue. I am simply suggesting that the circle of people who include our neighbors, according to the gospel-logic of Jesus’ story before us this morning, includes many people we may initially be blind to, including those who make our stuff.
At the very least, when we become aware of injustices done to those overseas who are making our stuff (and by the way - I am not suggesting that every company is guilty of this, but some have been) - when we become aware we need to resist the initial impulse to think about the issue as a problem for someone else. We first must realize that it is a problem for us to pray about, and ask God what we are to do.
Perhaps the starting point for each of us after prayer would be to think about and formulate what we might want to say about this issue in the public square and start saying it; but when we do, we must do it humbly, for most of you are more like me than not when it comes to being a consumer - this sermon was typed on a computer made overseas and printed on a printer that was probably made overseas so we are all in this together. The first thing that came to my mind when I prayed about this was to write a letter to several companies I do business with and simply say that I care about this issue and from here on forward I will be giving more careful consideration to my consumption based on what I find out about how that company operates with workers in other countries.
Whatever we do, as Christians, we must be clear that the purpose of the gospel is to say to empire and power, whatever empire and power looks like when and where the gospel is preached, that Jesus is King and that he holds everyone with power accountable for the well-being of their neighbor who lies bleeding on the other side of the road. Specifically, as Christians, we must stand for an ethic that leads us to those who lie bleeding on the other side of the road, because an ethic of limited liability leads us away from the generous love we ourselves have received from God. May God give us wisdom, imagination and courage to work out what it means to be a neighbor to any and all.
1. What do you think God might want you to do differently in the midst of your mundane life in light of you most recent experience (this Sunday past) with this parable in worship?
2. An “ethic of unlimited liability” can sound pretty scary in terms of what it asks.... how do you embrace this sort of approach to the needs of others while maintaining the rest of your life and obligations? Examples would probably be helpful here..... for example, is the best approach to work with the idea of percentages of time and resources, by feel, etc.?
3. Do you think the church allows partisan politics to gag her voice on issues of social justice?
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