October 7 - Snippet from Sunday - Prejudice and the King

I have yet to meet a church whose members don’t quietly hold prejudice and division from one another in their hearts. Already as a small child, I knew there was division in the heart of the congregation I grew up in and loved. The meetinghouse was situated midway between two small towns. Church members came from both towns to worship together as one body. But whenever there was a congregational vote, the church was split along town lines--who lived where, who went to Bible study in one municipality or the other. This internal divided-ness spilled over to the conversations over coffee in the fellowship hall or the church foyer. Those three men were from Town A, that group of women was from Town B, and so forth.

This is not what Jesus wants for the community he calls his body. He prayed that we may be one just as he is one with God his Father, separate in person but united in spirit (Jn 17.21). But even before the New Testament was fully written, already churches were drawing lines and taking sides.

[. . .] According to James in 2.8, the standard we’re held to is unconditional love, love without discrimination, love without favoritism or prejudice. James calls this the “royal” law; we could also translate it “the King’s law.” If we were to read on to v 11, we’d find James focusing our attention more and more on the King, the one who spoke this law to us.

Whether we identify this King with God in the person of Jesus in Mk 12 or Yahweh God speaking to Moses in Lev 19, this law sums up how our King desires us to live with one another. When we nurse prejudice in our hearts or show favoritism, we walk away from what God wants. It doesn’t matter that prejudice is only a feeling or that favoritism is affects how we treat others only a little. Just as surely as if we committed adultery or murder, James says in v 12, we’re walking away from the path to the good, free, and just life God desires for us.

[. . .] My brothers and sisters, this should not be for us. Jesus’ cross has toppled every dividing wall. While age, money, gender, race, class, interests and hobbies are all still realities we live with, we don’t live by them. We don’t let them determine who we extend friendship to. Jesus has crossed the biggest barrier, that between a holy and faithful God and us faithless people, to make us God’s friends. Where that barrier has fallen, no other barrier should still stand.

(Check out the whole sermon after the jump. . .)

September 30 - Snippet from Sunday - Quick to Listen, Quick to Obey

Here we have a kind of firstfruits of this year’s harvest spread out before us this morning. We have the aroma of our celebration of what God has given us wafting up from the kitchen. Like the ancient Israelites at their holy festivals and feasts, we offer a bit of this year’s produce back to God as proclamation that, “Yes, God, all good gifts come from you.” In doing so, we ourselves become a kind of firstfruits of a different sort of harvest. Gathered together, we are the first sheafs of wheat or oats, the first cucumbers and zucchinis, of a redeemed humanity. We are the foretaste, the preview of all nations and all creation praising God.

This year was a good year, and this year was a hard year. This year has been one of loss, but it has also been a one of celebration. It’s for both the joyful times and for the comfort that sustains us in hard times that we thank our God this morning.

Most of all, we thank our God for what James calls in v 17, the word of truth and, in v 21, the word planted in you, which can save you. Of all the good gifts that God our Father gives, the true and powerful good-news word that saves us is the best. We gather on this morning once a year to thank God for a bountiful harvest, for growth and accomplishments in our families, for work well-rewarded and days well-spent in the last year. But every Sunday morning we gather to thank God for the gift of his saving word to us. Even more, every prayer, even every action we perform should be a grateful “Thank you” to the God who saves us. This is what James has to say to us this morning.

One word for living this way is “worship.” Our lives demonstrate to God and to the world the value and the worth of the gospel-word God has spoken to us in Jesus. Maybe we recall Paul telling believers to live out this kind of worship in Ro 12.1: I urge you, brothers and sisters, in light of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God--this is true worship.

Another name for living all of life in grateful response to the good news is “discipleship.” By far, this is the term the early Anabaptists used most to describe how we live in response to the gospel. Many of the sixteenth century Reformers taught that the gospel only asks for our belief, a response of faith. But the Anabaptist believed that faith is only the beginning. The gospel calls for our faith and trust, but it also asks for our faithfulness. Jesus isn’t just a divine sacrifice to trust in; Jesus is also our Lord to be followed and obeyed.

This morning, if our gratitude is only a warm emotion, it is not enough. Our gratitude must become a burning motivation that produces a glorious demonstration of our thankfulness by the way we live from moment to moment. The only true thanksgiving we offer to God is the kind we live with our lives.

(Check out the whole sermon after the jump. . .)

At School with the Prophets

Each morning for the last year, right after I set my tea-water to boil and read morning prayer, I open my bible to the prophets and transcribe a chapter longhand in my journal. I began in Isaiah last April, and I've walked my way through to Ezekiel, interspersing Isaiah and Jeremiah with Paul's prophetic and apostolic letters to young churches.

The prophets have profoundly changed what I understand to happen when the church gathers together. I grew up in a Montana bible church where a sermon was a lesson, a chance to understand what the text says and then learn how to apply it to our lives. These words--understand, learn, apply--speak a basic separation of God's story and our stories that can only be bridged by the intellect and the will. If the Spirit shows up, he comes as one who enlightens--another intellectual word.

But the prophets, they don't preach principles and applications. In Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Paul, the Spirit speaks directly to the audience. He busies himself with politics and the private idolatries of the residents of Jerusalem, he confronts the cheating business practices of those claiming to be Yahweh's people and derides the charlatan successes of local political powers. More, Yahweh tells his story in a way that swallows up the stories of Judah and Israel. The prophets tell the only story in town, they tell the truth.

That's what happens when the church gets together: If we listen--if we quiet down and listen--we hear the Spirit speaking in ways specific and salvific. In our prayers and liturgy, our passing of Jesus' peace, our sermons and sharings, God is ready to speak. If only we would let go of our stories, our plans and projects and needs and concerns, we would hear the Spirit's whisper of the coming kingdom and the resurrection life now filling the common cup, now filling our veins.

I've been reading a great book by Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way. I'm a big fan of his unfolding series on spiritual theology. (If you check the sidebar list of suggested books, you'll find Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, the first book in the series.) In this volume, he mulls over the ways and means of following Jesus. Jesus does not ask us to follow him in any old way. God's new resurrection life has a particular shape, a Jesus shape. It's a good book.

Peterson spends a lot of time with the prophets--Moses, Elijah, Isaiah of Jerusalem and Isaiah of the Exile. They come out of the wilderness, they come out of the city, they live in exile, and they demand that Yahweh's people follow Yahweh in Yahweh's way. They denounce the imperial aspirations of kings, the commercial rapacity of merchants, the self-satisfied comfort of aristocrats, the panicked grasping for security that causes slave and landowner, beggar and king chase after Baal, god of the thunderclouds, and his consort Asherah, goddess of fertile fields and pregnant bellies.

It's not that the people didn't worship Yahweh. Beggar and king alike would identify themselves with the Yahweh cult (Peterson points to Ahab as a prime example). But their fears and their hopes take first place, and they begin to worship Yahweh in the way the people around them do, as one god among many, as one way to get things done.

I'm not going to list the ways that our hopes and our fears cause us to read the Jesus story, the ways that we write our own stories over God's story. We each can list the lies that rule in our hearts, that drowned out the Spirit's voice.

What I want to know is, "Who are the prophets of our generation?" Who is confronting your church in Chicago or Montana or Macedonia or Russia with God's life-swallowing story lived by Jesus? Let's make a list.

Oscar Romero - d. March 24, 1980

Today marks the 29th anniversary of the death Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador. He was assassinated while performing the mass because he named the ways in which the gospel demanded that his society and its government change.

I value Mark Van Steenwyk's reflection: 

Instead of venerating him, let us be more like him. And instead of lifting up as some sort of patron saint of peace and justice, may his lingering prophetic voice, which still echoes through the halls of time, encourage to lift our own voices as we follow Jesus in our place and time.

Follow the (different yet rather similar) links below links below to read more reflections on Romero.

Remembering Romero and Resisting Abstraction - Jesus Manifesot

Remembering Romero - Inhabitatio Dei

Remembering Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero - kingdom praxis

Remembering Romero - flying.farther

March 1 - The Faithless Disciples and the Freed Demoniac (Notes)

First Presbyterian Church of DuPage - The Five O’Clock
Mk 4.35-5.20 & Lent - “The Faithless Disciples and the Freed Demoniac”

Note: I normally write my sermons out in manuscript form, composing each word and phrase. This week I made a go at working off only some notes. You can all be the judge of how successful I was (I'm open to constructive criticism!). Here are my notes for my talk on Lent and two scenes from Mark.

What have been your past experience of Lent? Do you have any Lenten traditions? When we talk about Lent, what thoughts do you think and how do you feel?

 We entered the season of Lent this week on Ash Wednesday. The church had a service where we officially marked the beginning of Lent by smearing a cross on our foreheads out of the ashes of last years Palm Sunday palm fronds. Lent stretches through the forty days leading up to Easter

Lent has been a part of the church calendar since the first centuries following Jesus’ resurrection. At first it wasn’t something the whole church participated. Only the catechumens, those people preparing to be baptized take part. A lot of churches liked to baptize new believers on Easter (even though it wasn’t called Easter yet). The catechumens would spend

 the forty days before their baptism in increased spiritual disciplines, like fasting and prayer, discerning the new way of life they were beginning at baptism and repenting, swearing off the old way of life they were leaving behind. The Didache, the earliest church handbook we have, spends a lot of time talking about the Two Ways, the way of life in Christ, following Jesus, and the way of life not in Christ. I’m going to read the first paragraph so you get an idea of what the early baptismal candidates were reflecting on.

The Two Ways and the First Commandment. There are two ways, one of life and one of death, but a great difference between the two ways. The way of life, then, is this: First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself, and

 do not do to another what you would not want done to you. And of these sayings the teaching is this: Bless those who curse you, and pray for your enemies, and fast for those who persecute you. For what reward is there for loving those who love you? Do not the Gentiles do the same? But love those who hate you, and you shall not have an enemy. Abstain from fleshly and worldly lusts. If someone strikes your right cheek, turn to him the other also, and you shall be perfect. If someone impresses you for one mile, go with him two. If someone takes your cloak, give him also your coat. If someone takes from you what is yours, ask it not back, for indeed you are not able. Give to every one who asks you, and ask it not back; for the Father wills that to all should be given of our own blessings. 

Didache, chapter 1.

I want to pose another question: What does baptism have to do with discipleship?

Feb 22 - Dirt

First Presbyterian Church of DuPage - The Five O’Clock
Mk 4.1-34 - “Dirt”

When Jesus was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. He said to them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those outside, everything is in parables, so that although they look they may look but not see, and although they hear they may hear but not understand, so they may not repent and be forgiven.”

He said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? Then how will you understand any parable? The sower sows the word.”

I am going to ask you to make a decision tonight. Jesus has some strong words for us, and they force us to a decision.

I rode the bus for the first year and a half of high school. Pretty early on my freshman year, I became good friends with a high school girl who also rode my bus. We both lived out in the sticks, so we’d be on the bus together at least a good forty-five minutes. We both liked to read the same science-fiction and fantasy books, so we’d talk about the books we read while we bounced down the dust, washboard roads. The beginning of sophomore year, we were still both riding the bus, and still really good friends. Or, I thought we were just good friends. She had secretly been considering other ideas. One day she worked up the courage to tell me that she really liked me, and not just as a friend. “Do you want to go out, Josh?” she asked. Here I am, blindsided by this confession (I was kinda an oblivious teenager!). What am I to do? Do I pretend I misheard? Do I ignore her? Do I say yes and figure out the consequences later? I am forced to do something. After a few minutes mumbling and backpedaling, I worked up the courage to tell her that I just wasn’t really ready to date anyone yet, and we got back to being good friends.

This is the way it is with Jesus’ message about God’s kingdom. It’s like he shows up and says, “I, uh, really like you.” Really, it’s more like he’s the guy who runs into the store yelling, “There’s a bomb! The door’s over here! Everyone get out while you still can!” These sort of things, a confession of love, a bomb warning, they force us to respond. Do we bolt toward the exit sign, to escape, to safety? Or are we the sort of people who get distracted by the fashion display or the Dollar Spot on our way to the door? Do I date my friend, do I let her down gently, or do I pretend she never said anything? Whatever we do we are responding.

We’ve heard and seen and got “wrapped up in” in three parables tonight. What is a parable? Some people assume that it’s all about symbolism and secret meanings. Other people go to the other extreme and just look for some sort of moral or feel-good principle. But these stories aren’t really either of those things. A bit closer is to call a parable a riddle, but the most useful definition of a parable I’ve heard is “a story with a point.” So what is the point of the parables we’ve heard tonight?