Note: I wrote this sermon on Romans 5:1-8 and I didn't have anything to say and I didn't much want to either. So I waited for the last possible moment and made something up. My sermons can only get better from here, and after I have revised this (for homework) I will post the revision.
Everything I post is my own opinion unless otherwise stated, except this sermon, because I won't lay claim to it either.
heather
The thing about Paul is that he never met a dangling participle he didn't like. I can only hope that in the original Greek Paul sounds as passionate and clear as I hope to be in interpreting his words. In order to unpack this, however, there is one word that need some interpretation. We come into this space from our stay in the secular world and we often listen with our secular ears. Unfortunately, sometimes the secular world has taken words and twisted them to a new meaning so that the original intent is hiding within them.
I want to spend a moment looking at the word righteous. Whole books have been written on the word righteous and what it means to be righteous, but I will have you know that most if not all of those books will put you to sleep at night and you still won't know what the technical theological word righteous means. One of my favorite ways to understand the meaning of a word is to look it up in a thesaurus and see what the similar words are. Webster gives three distinct categories of righteous similes. The religious one is Holy and it includes words like devout, pious, reverent and fervent. Another definition is Self- Conscience and includes self-righteous and egotistic. The last is virtuous and it has words like noble and clear-conscience and reliable.
If you didn't know what righteous meant but that it was a religious word and you looked it up in the dictionary, would you connect it with reliable or goodhearted, or would you connect it with self-righteous and rigid?
If someone told you, “No one would die for a righteous person, but they might for a good person” wouldn't you agree? Given that in a religious context the dictionary says that a righteous person thinks they are right even to the point of hypocrisy. We can easily concede that many died following Ghandi to freedom because he was a good person, but I can't think of a single person who died bravely for the sake of Pat Robertson.
You might be thinking that the dictionary isn't written by religious people or for religious people and you would be right. All the dictionary tells us is how people use terms. And people don't use the term righteous in a good way when speaking of religion. Why? That is certainly a topic worthy of one of those long dry books I was telling you about.
The bible is not the dictionary. It is the story of a religious people creating a common record to share their religious experience. As such, we do use words with technical meanings and we then have a responsibility to keep the bible as accessible as possible. We cannot hand people a bible when they ask about God and tell them it contains everything they need for salvation. That is the experience that many people have of the bible but the bible does not come with a secret decoder ring. Not only are we required to actually know what we mean when we use words like righteous, we need to make ourselves available to explain and clarify those terms when we encounter them in our secular lives.
Let's look at that sentence again with some of our similes. Lets see if replacing righteous and even good, which is a pretty vague and technical term, can make this sentence any easier to understand.
Rarely will anyone die for a reliable person-though perhaps for a reliable person someone might actually dare to die.
It looks like the simile method of bible study breaks down here. I thought it did too, until I suddenly remembered my favorite chapter of the bible. First Corinthians Chapter One . Verse 21 says “God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.” So, the technical term for our simile sentence is a tautology, which means the beginning of the sentence says exactly what the ending of the sentence says, or 'its true because it's true.”
So who would die for a tautology? This is church after all, you know the answer. Christ died for a righteous person or a good person, and most importantly, he died for a reliable person. Verse 8 says “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” which sounds prettier than the more easily understood verse 6, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”
Before we can accept the absurdity of Christs death, we have to accept the truth of our own reliability. We have to accept that we can be relied on- to fail God and to fail each other. We aren't actually reliable at all – but God loves us anyway. God made a way for us to move beyond that unreliability. God made a way for us to reach beyond our humanness and experience something of his love and to share that love with each other. What Paul is trying to tell the Romans, and what he has to say to us even today, is that we do not have to become worthy to be worthwhile people. Martin Luther, in 1517, says “we do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds, but having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.” We do not have to be worthy of God's love, but we must simply accept God's love, and in doing so, we will share the love of God.
What you should do about it? Paul has an answer for that too. Boast he says. Tell everyone you know and everyone you meet that Jesus died so you don't have to. And whether they look at you funny, or they walk away, or they put you in jail, you will still have God's love, for no other reason than you believe in it. Paul is speaking from a place that few Americans have to experience, that of being REALLY persecuted for being a Christian, and so when he talks about the process we go through to reach a secure foundation of hope, well, my hope is that there are no lions.
Boasting, for Paul leads to suffering, and suffering requires endurance, and endurance leads to the personality traits we call character. I must admit, I have no idea how character leads to hope, but I do like the progression from boasting to hope. And hope that “does not disappoint” is certainly something to boast about.
Let us go forth and boast of God, but let us do so with a sensitivity to the ways in which the world will distort our message, through deliberate misunderstanding and genuine confusion. Let us go forth and boast of God, but let us keep the absurdity of undeserving grace for us ever present in our hearts as we interact with others. Let us go for and boast of God, and let us hold fast to our hope for we will neither suffer nor endure anything without the Holy Spirit which is the source of that hope. Let us go forth. Amen.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Do as I say, Not as I do
I speak to you in the name of the living God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For by the authority of the father we will do what must be done, even though we will often grumble along the way. Amen.
Introduction
You will have noticed when I read Today's gospel I started at verse 23 instead of verse 28, which is where the lectionary picks up the story. I really felt that the whole story was needed to see how absolutely radical this tale of siblings was and to explain why, when we read just verses 28-32 we get all excited and just know that one of those sons is Jesus and then he starts talking not about himself but about John.
When we do bible study on Wednesday nights, the first thing we do is go back and figure out who Jesus is talking to. In this passage, Jesus is at the temple and he is teaching in the corner, mostly minding his own business. Since I don't imagine he did a very good job of being unnoticeable, the priests and elders came over and asked him what right he had to teach. Teaching, especially in the temple,was their business and they didn't want anyone to get the idea that just anyone could be a teacher or administrator in the temple.
So Jesus says he will tell them if they can tell him why they think John has any authority to baptize; to create a whole new sacrament. This is a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they don't really think he has any right but on the other hand, John is really popular and there is a disturbingly large crowd of people waiting for an answer and the officials aren't really sure they want to cause a riot. So bringing all their bureaucratic skills to bear they come up with a great answer. “We do not know.” Does Jesus give them a way out of their ignorance? Does he patiently explain why John does have this authority that they don't? No. Jesus doesn't argue the point. He says, well, if you can't even figure out John, and he is making new sacraments, I am certainly not going to try to tell you what I am all about.
Were Jesus a true disaffected youth, he would have turned his back and kept teaching the crowd. But he isn't. He is, in fact, very quick with a parable and an analogy. And he really isn't one to avoid an opportunity to teach anyone, especially people he thinks ought to know better.
What is says
So he doesn't turn around, he pulls out an analogy. Two kids are asked to go into the fields and work, one says no but does it anyway and the other says sure and goes out with his friends. In this analogy, the vineyard is the traditional metaphor for Israel, and the children are John and these administrators of the temple. We have all seen this analogy enough times to think that the priest ought to know they are being set up. But you have to remember that this is a test, and it isn't a take home test. Jesus has just rephrased the question of authority not in human terms but in God's terms. We think it is now in human terms because we are talking about children whereas before we were talking about heaven. But in the first go around, the priests are only worried about the response of the people. In the second, Jesus has rephrased the same question, about where John gets his authority, from the perspective of Abba, of the Father. And he has just done it in front of a large crowd that the priests are a little bit afraid of.
So when Jesus offers these naughty children as an example and asks his audience which child is the obedient one they go with their gut instinct. After all, this seems like a fairly simple question, one we all know the answer to. We all know, as parents, that the lip service is nice, but what we really want is for our children to do what we ask them to do.
What it means
Here Jesus pulls his best teaching trick. He pulls out of the analogy. He has gotten his answer, that authority comes from God in Heaven, not from the fear of unruly crowds. Honestly, he tells the reigning wise men, people you won't even let into the temple are entering the Kingdom of Heaven, are experiencing the Kingdom of Heaven right now, and John came by to let you in on it and you turned him away. What he is telling them and the crowd is that the crowd, who aren't even allowed into the inner sanctum of the temple have a better relationship with God than they do. This is because the temple officials are follow the letter of the law and all the while missing the purpose of it. In doing so they tell God what he wants to hear without doing what he asks them to do.
What you should do about it
Where do you think you are in this? Are you in the crowd? Are you standing in a huddle with the rest of the building administrators trying to do what is right without trying to feel what is right? I have to admit to a love of the Prayer Book for exactly this reason. It offers a nearly perfect vehicle to guide my worship and open me up to the guiding of the Holy Spirit. It also offers me an easy out when I don't want to pay attention to God and his promptings. And who will ever know, because I can recite these things almost in my sleep and put on a good show for my pew mates, and even for God.
But God knows. He knows how hard it is to follow Jesus, to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, to believe the radical authority he gave to John. God is OK with our grumblings. He is OK if we tell him no. I think he is even OK if we put on our coat and make the phone call for a lunch date. God is happy with the person who says he is an atheist but then sees the truth and goes out and proclaims the gospel anyway. How disappointing for God when we show up on Sunday and recite the Creeds and Confessions and have a cup of coffee and then never think of Him again all week.
I suspect this escapes all bounds of a traditional sermon, but all the while I was working on this, one hymn kept humming through my mind and I would actually like to close this sermon with it. Not only do I promise we can sing this a cappela, I promise I won't ask you to sing any more songs this morning. So if you would pick up the blue hymnal and turn to page 490, I would like you to join me in singing 'I want to walk as a child of the light' I will even start. For by the authority of the father we will do what must be done, even though we will often grumble along the way.
conclusion
I want to walk as a child of the light...
Introduction
You will have noticed when I read Today's gospel I started at verse 23 instead of verse 28, which is where the lectionary picks up the story. I really felt that the whole story was needed to see how absolutely radical this tale of siblings was and to explain why, when we read just verses 28-32 we get all excited and just know that one of those sons is Jesus and then he starts talking not about himself but about John.
When we do bible study on Wednesday nights, the first thing we do is go back and figure out who Jesus is talking to. In this passage, Jesus is at the temple and he is teaching in the corner, mostly minding his own business. Since I don't imagine he did a very good job of being unnoticeable, the priests and elders came over and asked him what right he had to teach. Teaching, especially in the temple,was their business and they didn't want anyone to get the idea that just anyone could be a teacher or administrator in the temple.
So Jesus says he will tell them if they can tell him why they think John has any authority to baptize; to create a whole new sacrament. This is a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they don't really think he has any right but on the other hand, John is really popular and there is a disturbingly large crowd of people waiting for an answer and the officials aren't really sure they want to cause a riot. So bringing all their bureaucratic skills to bear they come up with a great answer. “We do not know.” Does Jesus give them a way out of their ignorance? Does he patiently explain why John does have this authority that they don't? No. Jesus doesn't argue the point. He says, well, if you can't even figure out John, and he is making new sacraments, I am certainly not going to try to tell you what I am all about.
Were Jesus a true disaffected youth, he would have turned his back and kept teaching the crowd. But he isn't. He is, in fact, very quick with a parable and an analogy. And he really isn't one to avoid an opportunity to teach anyone, especially people he thinks ought to know better.
What is says
So he doesn't turn around, he pulls out an analogy. Two kids are asked to go into the fields and work, one says no but does it anyway and the other says sure and goes out with his friends. In this analogy, the vineyard is the traditional metaphor for Israel, and the children are John and these administrators of the temple. We have all seen this analogy enough times to think that the priest ought to know they are being set up. But you have to remember that this is a test, and it isn't a take home test. Jesus has just rephrased the question of authority not in human terms but in God's terms. We think it is now in human terms because we are talking about children whereas before we were talking about heaven. But in the first go around, the priests are only worried about the response of the people. In the second, Jesus has rephrased the same question, about where John gets his authority, from the perspective of Abba, of the Father. And he has just done it in front of a large crowd that the priests are a little bit afraid of.
So when Jesus offers these naughty children as an example and asks his audience which child is the obedient one they go with their gut instinct. After all, this seems like a fairly simple question, one we all know the answer to. We all know, as parents, that the lip service is nice, but what we really want is for our children to do what we ask them to do.
What it means
Here Jesus pulls his best teaching trick. He pulls out of the analogy. He has gotten his answer, that authority comes from God in Heaven, not from the fear of unruly crowds. Honestly, he tells the reigning wise men, people you won't even let into the temple are entering the Kingdom of Heaven, are experiencing the Kingdom of Heaven right now, and John came by to let you in on it and you turned him away. What he is telling them and the crowd is that the crowd, who aren't even allowed into the inner sanctum of the temple have a better relationship with God than they do. This is because the temple officials are follow the letter of the law and all the while missing the purpose of it. In doing so they tell God what he wants to hear without doing what he asks them to do.
What you should do about it
Where do you think you are in this? Are you in the crowd? Are you standing in a huddle with the rest of the building administrators trying to do what is right without trying to feel what is right? I have to admit to a love of the Prayer Book for exactly this reason. It offers a nearly perfect vehicle to guide my worship and open me up to the guiding of the Holy Spirit. It also offers me an easy out when I don't want to pay attention to God and his promptings. And who will ever know, because I can recite these things almost in my sleep and put on a good show for my pew mates, and even for God.
But God knows. He knows how hard it is to follow Jesus, to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, to believe the radical authority he gave to John. God is OK with our grumblings. He is OK if we tell him no. I think he is even OK if we put on our coat and make the phone call for a lunch date. God is happy with the person who says he is an atheist but then sees the truth and goes out and proclaims the gospel anyway. How disappointing for God when we show up on Sunday and recite the Creeds and Confessions and have a cup of coffee and then never think of Him again all week.
I suspect this escapes all bounds of a traditional sermon, but all the while I was working on this, one hymn kept humming through my mind and I would actually like to close this sermon with it. Not only do I promise we can sing this a cappela, I promise I won't ask you to sing any more songs this morning. So if you would pick up the blue hymnal and turn to page 490, I would like you to join me in singing 'I want to walk as a child of the light' I will even start. For by the authority of the father we will do what must be done, even though we will often grumble along the way.
conclusion
I want to walk as a child of the light...
Friday, September 23, 2005
My 2 cents on hurricanes
I wasn't going to add my two cents to the save Katrina blogs, but I saw a bumper sticker today that said "I want to be like Jesus." Since Jesus practiced what he preached, being like Jesus tells us that we pretty much only need one set of clothes and can eat or sleep wherever we are invited. You know who is being like Jesus these days? People being evacuated for hurricanes. I'm grateful I don't have to be like Jesus today.
The Devil Speaks through Potted Meat
Jean Baker asked me to consider writing about the process of learning to talk about God in the 21st century. I think this is a great idea and the next few columns will be devoted to expanding that thought. This month I want to start with what it feels like to talk TO God in the 21st century. This is a tale of two television shows that envision what it is like to talk to God.
First, I want to talk about Joan of Arcadia. Two summers ago I painted the interior of my home, mostly on Friday nights so I could watch Joan of Arcadia. The most obvious adjective for the show is sincere. Everyone was sincere and Joan was a good kid who never violated anyone's expectations of her, even God's. Sure she disappointed them but she never, even in doing God's will, turned her back completely on her social paradigm. This is the view I think we all want of God, that we will never be startled out of our comfort zone and that God wants us to comprehend his will.
As for Wonder Falls, I doubt many of you have ever heard of it. I hadn't until it showed up from Netflix but I found it far and away does a better job of depicting how I feel God interacts with me and the whole world. Jaye, our heroine had defied every expectation that her family, friends and coworkers have ever had for her. Her family is wildly successful – her mother is an author, her father is a surgeon, her brother is an atheist getting a doctoral degree in comparative religion and her sister is an immigration attorney. Jaye is nouveau poor. She has a philosophy degree from Brown University, works in a gift shop in Niagra Falls and lives in a trailer. Jaye raises self-righteous indignation to an art form; right up to telling people to stop calling her a hero for catching a baby. Unlike Joan who interacts with God through different people each week, God speaks to Jaye through clearly inanimate objects-defective wax lions, brass monkey book ends and wind-up penguins. In every episode Jaye is asked by God to defy social norms, like withhold someones mis-delivered social security checks or reveal a historical lie that has made someone famous. Every time Jaye tries to do what God asks the situation gets noticeably worse, but in the course of events, something bigger and better and beyond expectation happens for the person that Jaye interacts with.
God identifies himself to Joan and patiently guides her through the steps she needs to take, even if he won't always tell her why. God won't even admit that he isn't Satan to Jaye because she must exercise her free will. She does, and she grumbles the whole way.
This is what the bible tells us it is like to interact with God. But because we know the stories in the bible so well, they seem normative, and because we keep them in the bible, we forget how they describe non-normative events for their time. Interacting with God takes us outside ourselves, and God doesn't always or often choose someone sincere and well meaning to spread his message to us. Paul's letter to the Corinthians about being fools for God (see 1 Corinthians, chapter 1) is oft quoted but perhaps rarely understood. God is trying to break us out of our complacency, to experience a paradigm shift that embraces the other. How often do we not listen to someone because they aren't Christian and so infer that God would not speak through them? How often do we not speak or act because we do not believe we are powerful enough for God to speak through us? How often do we not do so because what God needs for us to say is neither polite nor politic?
When we are self-righteous (when we think of ourselves before others), we are not able to build the kingdom of God. Being self-righteous happens when we think we are right to the exclusion of all others, but it also happens when we think that God wouldn't work through us. Are you letting God work through you?
Joan of Arcadia had two seasons and they have a fan site www.joanofarcadia.com if you are interested. Wonderfalls had one season and their fan site name says it all www.savewonderfalls.com.
First, I want to talk about Joan of Arcadia. Two summers ago I painted the interior of my home, mostly on Friday nights so I could watch Joan of Arcadia. The most obvious adjective for the show is sincere. Everyone was sincere and Joan was a good kid who never violated anyone's expectations of her, even God's. Sure she disappointed them but she never, even in doing God's will, turned her back completely on her social paradigm. This is the view I think we all want of God, that we will never be startled out of our comfort zone and that God wants us to comprehend his will.
As for Wonder Falls, I doubt many of you have ever heard of it. I hadn't until it showed up from Netflix but I found it far and away does a better job of depicting how I feel God interacts with me and the whole world. Jaye, our heroine had defied every expectation that her family, friends and coworkers have ever had for her. Her family is wildly successful – her mother is an author, her father is a surgeon, her brother is an atheist getting a doctoral degree in comparative religion and her sister is an immigration attorney. Jaye is nouveau poor. She has a philosophy degree from Brown University, works in a gift shop in Niagra Falls and lives in a trailer. Jaye raises self-righteous indignation to an art form; right up to telling people to stop calling her a hero for catching a baby. Unlike Joan who interacts with God through different people each week, God speaks to Jaye through clearly inanimate objects-defective wax lions, brass monkey book ends and wind-up penguins. In every episode Jaye is asked by God to defy social norms, like withhold someones mis-delivered social security checks or reveal a historical lie that has made someone famous. Every time Jaye tries to do what God asks the situation gets noticeably worse, but in the course of events, something bigger and better and beyond expectation happens for the person that Jaye interacts with.
God identifies himself to Joan and patiently guides her through the steps she needs to take, even if he won't always tell her why. God won't even admit that he isn't Satan to Jaye because she must exercise her free will. She does, and she grumbles the whole way.
This is what the bible tells us it is like to interact with God. But because we know the stories in the bible so well, they seem normative, and because we keep them in the bible, we forget how they describe non-normative events for their time. Interacting with God takes us outside ourselves, and God doesn't always or often choose someone sincere and well meaning to spread his message to us. Paul's letter to the Corinthians about being fools for God (see 1 Corinthians, chapter 1) is oft quoted but perhaps rarely understood. God is trying to break us out of our complacency, to experience a paradigm shift that embraces the other. How often do we not listen to someone because they aren't Christian and so infer that God would not speak through them? How often do we not speak or act because we do not believe we are powerful enough for God to speak through us? How often do we not do so because what God needs for us to say is neither polite nor politic?
When we are self-righteous (when we think of ourselves before others), we are not able to build the kingdom of God. Being self-righteous happens when we think we are right to the exclusion of all others, but it also happens when we think that God wouldn't work through us. Are you letting God work through you?
Joan of Arcadia had two seasons and they have a fan site www.joanofarcadia.com if you are interested. Wonderfalls had one season and their fan site name says it all www.savewonderfalls.com.
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