A Snippet from Sunday Morning

You see, suffering is part of Jesus’ mission, part of what Jesus came to do. Read Mt 10.24, “Students are not above their teacher, nor servants above their master. It is enough for students to be like their teacher, and servants like their master.” Do we want to be like Jesus? Following Jesus in his mission means doing what he did. And we believe that he came to suffer--that the only way the world could be made right, the only way we could be brought back home to God, was for Jesus to submit to suffering.

Last week I said that Jesus’ mission was to reconcile the broken world to God. God’s way is not to sweep away the pieces of this world shattered by sin and death. God didn’t leave this world behind and create something new. Nor did God force this world back into the mold of what God hoped for. Jesus didn’t ride a horse, wave a sword, and reconquer the world like a holy Caesar founding a Christian Rome. Instead Jesus became vulnerable; he took our sin, sickness, loneliness, and death upon himself. And by doing so, he planted the seed of God’s kingdom in the soil of our broken world. On Easter morning, he brought forth its first fruits.

Jesus calls us to become like our Master-Teacher. Like Paul, we have to take our part of Jesus’ suffering on the cross-shaped way. Like Paul, we have to demonstrate that God’s grace is made whole in our weakness and suffering. We have to accept the scrapes and bruises--even the suffering and death--that come from working with the pieces of the broken world.

April 22 - The Call to Mission

We begin this morning in Matthew’s story about Jesus, in chapter nine at verse thirty-five. We’ll be spending a bit of time the next two weeks here, listening to Jesus and watching as people respond to him. These are words and stories about purpose--our purpose. About why we as a community of believers are here!

So find Matthew 9.35 in a Bible, one you brought with you or one in the chair in front of you. I’d like all of us who can to stand as we listen, just as we've been learning us over the last few weeks. So let’s listen to what Jesus says to us through Matthew 9:35 through 10:8.

Jesus went through all the town and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out evil spirits and to heal every disease and sickness.

These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” Amen?

In three of our four Gospels--in Matthew’s story, in Mark’s story, in Luke’s story--Jesus’ first words to his followers are “Come, follow me, and I will send you out to fish for people.” This is important. When Jesus gathers us to himself and turns us into a fellowship of followers, he gives us a purpose and he gives us a mission.

And it wasn’t just the first handful of followers Jesus gathered along the Galilean lakeshore. Paul talks about his favorite churches in the same way. He praises the young believers at Thessalonica because the Lord’s message rang out from them, so that their faith has become known everywhere. Or hear his words to the Philippian believers: I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel, . . . being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

What I want to say this morning is that unless we are a church going out and living out and shouting out the gospel of God’s kingdom--unless we are a missionary church--we are no church at all. Let me say that again: Unless we each and all take up Jesus’ mission, we are not a church.

Blogging Sacrilege, chapter 6: How to Win

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I don't have to be an oppressive, insecure, offensive fundie to be a Christian. There's a way to follow God in the way of Jesus and win the world with the original message of Good News.
I hope to show that this is why Jesus calls us to meekness in this Beatitude: "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth" (Matt. 5:5)

Jesus the humble and meek, who climbed down out of heaven to come and build a home in our neighborhood, is the answer for both the conflict in the Middle East and the wars fighting within every human heart. Jesus wants his people, his apprentices, to win--to see people changed and converted to his ways--but the methods of winning are just as important as the win itself, because they can't be separated. We win with meekness.
(Hugh Halter, Sacrilege)

A month or so ago I finished Anathea Portier-Young's Apocalypse Against Empire. As part of a larger project contextualizing Jewish apocalyptic writing, Portier-Young provides an approachable yet deeply insightful and precise analysis of life in Jerusalem under imperial Seleucid rule during the years preceding the Maccabean rebellion. I turned over the last page of the volume with a list authors to chase down and my understanding of the literary and cultural context into which Jesus stepped some a century or more later radically redefined.

The fifth chapter of Apocalypse Against Empire, "Seleucid State Terror,"did much of the heavy-lifting in reshaping my understanding of Jesus' context. Portier-Young systematically reviews the archaeological evidence for and the cultural meaning of state sponsored massacres, murders in the home, abductions (for the slave market), and plundering of the temple. Against the backdrop of subjugated Jewish identity Portier-Young establishes in chapter 3, "Interaction and Identity in Seleucid Judea: 188-173 BCE,"this litany of state-sponsored violence (physical and otherwise) begins to help me understand the way in which Jesus' contemporaries--under the oppressive rule of another empire--may have understood themselves, their history, and their oppressors.

Enter Jesus. Jesus proclaiming good news from God about a new kingdom arriving. Jesus disrupting social structures that separated the honorable working poor from beggars, bandits, and those who survived outside the official market in goods and services. In healing the sick, purifying the unclean, exorcising the demonized, Jesus brought the outcasts back into the company of good and honest society.

Without a doubt, Jesus sparked hopes that God was finally going to intervene and set up a utopian society, one in which God truly dwelled in Zion and all the (oppressing) nations came and brought tribute to Jerusalem. (We have no doubt about this because John's Gospel confirms in 6.15).

The first few lines of Jesus' kick-off sermon initially seem to confirm this: "Blessed are the poor"--"Amen!" the people thought, "it's time the good and godly poor were visited by God's blessed intervention on their behalf. Maybe this new kingdom will involve less imperial taxation."  Jesus continues, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." And again the people think, "Amen! We've mourned the ruin of David's kingdom for nearly six hundred years. Now Herod presumptuously builds another stand-in temple for us, but what we long for is God to return and set up God's own temple. God, do, come and comfort your people!"

But just as Jesus' followers reach for the pitchforks and scythes to follow their new leader to the seat of power up in Jerusaelm, Jesus says, "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."

Blogging Sacrilege, chapter 5: Comfort, comfort ye my people!

Hugh Halter titles chapter 5 of Sacrilege "The Problem with Family Values." This, IMHO, is a sign of hope.

I am a member of the generation who grew up with "family values" broadcast every morning from Focus on the Family on AM Christian radio. I read the books that, under the guise of defending "absolutes," really duked it out for traditional "family values" (cf. Josh McDowell's Right from Wrong). It seemed then that the fate of Christianity, or American Christianity, stood or fell with the family seated around the table for dinner, teens' attitudes about cheating, and kids keeping their pants on until they were married. The battle over "family values" was in the cultural air so much that Korn would launch the tongue-in-cheek Family Values Tour in Summer 1998.

In his reflection on the second Beatitude, Halter calls "family first" habits and values into question in favor of a practice of hospitality. I fully support this cause. He writes,

"So what I'm suggesting is this: cut out some of the nonstop activities and make room for a few more people in your family room. Keep margin in your life, blank days on your calender, and flexibility in your spare time so that you can adopt a few 'orphans' into your life."

Right on, Hugh! Opening our lives (which some would say is one of the first motions of love) requires that we topple the idols, dethrone the powers which enslave us. Sometimes this is our devotion to our families, our homes, or, even, our hobbies.

Blogging Sacrilege, chapter 4: Letter to a Greek Professor

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After I'd graduated from college with my degree in Bible and smattering of biblical Greek and Hebrew, I remember sitting down and typing out an email to a former prof asking about Jesus inauguratory teaching in Matthew 5: makavroi oiJ ptwcoi; tw/: pneuvmati, o”ti aujtw:n ejstin hJ basileiva tw:n oujranw:n.


For the words that Matthew chooses to introduce Jesus' first meditation on what his good news means for the community he's called around him, these are strange words. Up to this point, in Matthew's telling, Jesus' only public words have been "Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is arriving!" and "Come along with me, and I'll make you fishers for people." So now, after a healing or two, Jesus finally sits down to instruct his followers in what this is all about. And what does he say? "Blessed are the poor in spirit, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs."

Who are these people who have it good? That's what I wanted to know from my Greek professor. What does poverty, spiritual or otherwise, have to do with the dunked-in-the-cleansing-blood gospel I'd confessed from childhood onward? I'm still waiting for an answer that makes complete sense of this to me.

Surprisingly enough, Hugh Halter takes on this saying of Jesus in chapter 4 of Sacrilege. In fact, the remaining chapters of the book seem to take the Beatitudes one-by-one for a structure. Not something I expected from the billing on the book's cover. but I'm always open, even excited, to return to Jesus' words and wait and listen.