From Blues to Praise: Letting Our Songs Out

Christmas Eve Message

The year: 1934. Amateur night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. A girl, 17 years young, was about to go on stage to perform a dance routine. But the act preceding her featured a dance performance so good the girl decided she couldn’t possibly follow it with her own. She decided to sing instead – though she had never sung in public, and didn’t even know whether she could sing.

She sang – and won first prize.

The girl’s name? Ella Fitzgerald. One of the greatest blues vocalists of all time.

The blues. Ken Burns goes so far as to call the blues “the underground aquifer that fed all of the streams of American music” in the 20^th century: jazz, r&b, soul, and rock and roll. (1) Music telling an intensely personal story – expressing great sorrow. Sculpting meaning from a situation defying meaning.

The blues. Twin sibling of black Baptist church music. Sacred, in its own way.

Certainly, Mary and Joseph felt if not sang the blues that first Christmas Eve. Expectant parents? They were not yet married. Home birth? The government had other ideas. Labor room? Try a cow trough.

As for the little Lord Jesus: No crying he makes? There was a lot of wailing in that manger bed. For Jesus sang the blues.

The blues. That first Christmas evening: Mary and Joseph and I’m sure Jesus had the blues.

And yet there’s a great difference between having the blues and singing the blues. The miracle takes place in the singing. For the singing gets rid of the having. And all who hear it feel better in the end.

On behalf of Mary and Joseph and Jesus – all three – Luke’s gospel sings the blues with his birth narrative. Helping us all, each Christmas, to do the same. To sing forth the labor of our expectations, inevitably unmet. Helping us all – each Christmas – to let our songs out.

For Luke’s tale begins as a blues-drenched tale. Setting us free to hear, and to sing, the resonances of our own blues. And through hearing the resonances of our own blues, we hear the blues of the world. And we become more human. And we become more humane.

And once we hear our blues being played in the white spaces of this first Christmas story, we can them become more able to hear the praise, bold and in the black:

            And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host,

  praising God and saying,

‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,

               and on earth peace among those whom (God) favors.’

“Praising God and saying …” – or might they have sung this? An orchestral outburst – “a multitude of the heavenly host” – supports the solo intro of one angel to all the shepherds.

I cannot hear these angelic words without hearing the strains of my mother’s favorite hymn: “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” Here is verse one – with two more verses soon to follow:

It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth,
To touch their harps of gold:
"Peace on the earth, goodwill to men (sic)
From heavens all gracious King!"
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.

“To hear the angels sing.” Each of the four stanzas of this timeless treasure ends with a version of this phrase. “To hear the angels sing.” Letting their songs out – so we might hear, and then let out, our own.  

Song belongs with the Christmas story. It’s a match made in heaven – and given to us on earth. It’s why we call our Christmas Eve service “Lessons and Carols.” Proclaiming good news of great joy … glory to God in the highest … and peace on earth to the lowliest. As the most accurate rendering has it, “Peace on earth among those whom (God) favors.” Namely in this narrative those dirty, unrespectable herders of sheep. Namely in this narrative Mary and Joseph and Jesus. Those who could and would initially be found singing the blues.

Song belongs indelibly to the Christmas story. Blues into praise. Brokenness into healing.

My soul wanders back to a Christmas week several years ago. The scene: a packed memorial service at First Presbyterian Church, Kalamazoo. A witness to the resurrection of the mother of one of my Ann Arbor parishioners.

The mother was named Jane. She was a joyful and much-beloved woman in her community. And yet she refused to sing her entire adult life … in church, or out. It seems she had been told as a child that she could not sing. And so, being the decent and orderly Presbyterian she apparently was, Jane did not sing. Which made Jane more … plain. She just would not sing.

Until her final year on earth. The last year she and her family suffered with the dementia Jane had had for some time. For that final year – her memory of “you cannot sing” now completely spent – Jane burst out in song. And it was then – and only then – that her family realized that she seemingly knew every stanza of every hymn she had ever heard. For Jane could sing – even if she could not carry much of a tune!

Still through the cloven skies they come,
With peaceful wings unfurled;
And still their heavenly music floats
O'er all the weary world:
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing,
And ever o'er its Babel sounds
The blessed angels sing.

“O’er all the weary world … Above its sad and lowly plains … The blessed angels sing.”

Or were these angelic strains simply those of the shepherds who had been singing the blues every single day of their forlorn lives?

Blues into praise. The shepherds, traveling to Bethlehem to tell Mary and Joseph of angels’ praise, find the full range of their voices. And in finding that range, their lives take flight.

            O ye beneath life’s crushing load

            Whose forms are bending low,

            Who toil along the climbing way

            With painful steps and slow;

Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.

Hear the angels sing, this Christmas. Hear them sing your song.

For the crushing load and weary road – the glad and golden hours …

… the blues and praise of Christmas both lie nearer to our hearts than we might think.

(1) From http://www.pbs.org/jazz/classroom/bluesimprov.htm 

Newtown: Advent Death Into Christmas Life

The longtime Managing Editor of The New York Times, the late James “Scotty” Reston, once observed, “I’m a Scotch Calvinist and nothing makes me happier than misery.”

Given the profound misery experienced on Friday just three states and 300 miles north, I don’t think any of us who hail or not from such Presbyterian roots could be happy in the least. 

For just two days and two hours ago, the statistically dull average of 20 minors slain by gunfire every 2½ days in America suddenly took flesh and dwelt among us in the faces of 20 six- and seven-year-olds in one school time and in one school place.

One school place: a tony suburban shelter. Newtown – by way of Littleton – by way of the Amish children slain at Nickel Mines. That “it-can’t-happen-here” shocker: the media feeds on it. Pulling upon us and tugging upon us in a way that the gun slayings of 21 children in Detroit already this year could never do.

The fact that eight children are being gunned down daily in America should already pull upon us. If not that impersonal fact, then the faces of 21 dead Detroit children this year should tug upon us. And yet: This faceless fact and these scattered minority faces have not proven compelling to us. As for 20 comfortably-kept first graders in a few minutes in a single school … that got our attention.

For a weekend of reflection, at least. And then we can -- and sadly, we probably will -- put this heartbreak on the gun rack next to Littleton and Tucson, Nickel Mines and Aurora, and Virginia Tech. Because, to liberally paraphrase Scotty Reston, nothing seems to make us individually happier in our country than ignoring the social warning signs all around and living aloof of the general misery.

Living individually happy – aloof of the general misery. For after shock, then aftershocks, comes our lived antidote: our daily, languid, suburban indifference.

But not so for an Advent-into-Christmas people! Living happily aloof of general misery is not an option illuminated for us by these three candles this morning!

For with the Advent Christian, living patiently midst this giddy contemporary lie known as the “Christmas season,” these sudden crucifixions cannot be rubbernecked and then driven merrily past. For with the Advent Christian, longing for and living into a joy-filled, resurrected life – as opposed to clinging to a cloistered and removed “happy” life – death and dying of this profundity can never be neatly avoided.

Instead, what this and every Season of Advent testifies to us, the Advent Christians, is something quite the opposite. For Advent testifies not that in the midst of life, there is death to be avoided at all cost. Advent testifies that in the midst of death and out of the specifics of death, we experience life and living and Christmas … as never before!

Christmas – new life – comes again this year to us out of the midst of death  … yet not in the act of death itself. For our God is never a death-dealing God. Our God could not be found in the pulling of those three triggers on those 20 children and eight adults on Friday – and I’m including the gunman. That was not God’s will; that was not part of God’s plan; God certainly didn’t need a few more little angels. Any more than God found it necessary to put God’s son to death on a cross. 

But God can and has been and is still being found in the midst of those deaths, and out of those deaths. For in the midst of those deaths and out of those deaths comes the life-hope of these three Advent candles before us -- lighting the way toward the starlit night of God’s new birth. God’s new birth, as the Prince of Peace: where shepherds lead the way with staffs beckoning forth, as opposed to Caesar’s legions coercing with swords ever drawn.

For in the story of Christmas that awaits us still, there is no right for us around life’s manger to bear any arms. Instead, we are borne forth into God’s incarnation. Into the arms of God’s cradled love.

Embracing Advent: Facing the Shadows of Time

Scriptures   Malachi 3:1-4 ... Philippians 1:3-11

The shadows of time – past, as well as future. What could have been in my life … as well as what might come of me. Hard to face, either direction. And why should Advent be a time to face them, now that Christmas cheer comes knocking on our door?

The prophet Malachi waxes eloquent of shadowy time forward. Initially, he is upbeat. He announces the prospects of consummate joy to come: “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me,” he writes, “and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight.”

Sounds like Christmas certainty, to me! But wait – the prophet is not finished. There’s still the other shoe: “Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”

The shadows of time forward. It takes a prophet to see and name the promise as well as the peril. Who – indeed – can face up to their mortality? Who – indeed – can face it down? For not all of life’s advents may seem desirable to us. I do not necessarily look forward to many things about older age. And certainly, not the end of that age.

As for the age to come: Ah, the hope! Nay: the promise! But none of us knows that time. For some, such a prospect may seem more perilous than promising.

And so each of us is called in the Season of Advent, this time of preparation and readiness for Christmas, to place our life in a healthy spiritual perspective. And to do so by setting our face to the shadows of times past as well as future, with abiding trust in God’s presence in the midst of the present.

• Times past: Facing, in the light of our release, the shadows of our regrets and our resentments.
• Times future: Facing, in the light of our faith, the shadows of our fears.
• Time present: Facing the shadows caused by … well … finding ourselves lost – stuck, even – in times past and times future.

This Season of Advent: Calling us to embrace life’s advent by facing – and then containing –the shadows of time. Dispelling the ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Future. 

The Apostle Paul looks back from his prison cell today, to the church he has helped establish in Philippi. He faces the shadows of times past. And how does he respond? What are his regrets? Do we hear any resentment? “I thank God every time I remember you,” he writes. “Constantly praying for you with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now.”

And then, having faced his past, Paul pivots to the future: “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.”

And finally, the Apostle steers the Philippians back to the present: “It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God’s grace with me.”

Sometimes, it takes a prison cell – or some other detainment, or any sense of loss – to face down and face up to the shadows of time, and in the process envision all of God’s goodness clearly in the present. (Having personally served time in prison – as with Paul, for being a witness to the Good News – I can attest to this occasional phenomenon.)

Again, hear Paul, deeply centered out of his loss and detainment: He looks at the past with joy, not resentment … He looks at the future in hope, not fear … He looks at the present, in sheer compassion: being held – and sharing all.

Powerless over his captivity and his life unmanageable, Paul has embraced, and made friends with, the shadowy destiny of his life. He has embraced God’s unveiling advent for his life by facing down, and facing up to, the shadows of time. 

King Jesus? Kingdom of God!

Scripture: John 18:33-37

Biblical scholars across the theological spectrum rarely agree on anything – especially given the antiquity of their subject matter and of course the passions faith differences can arouse. Interestingly and remarkably enough, almost all of them do agree on one thing: The focus of Jesus’ life and teachings does not fall on the person of Jesus, but on the building of the kingdom, the reign, the realm -- the common-wealth -- of God.

In this scripture, even the greatest gospel promoter of the Lordship of Christ seems to recognize there’s something much greater to the gospel than Jesus himself.

The Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, asks his prisoner, “Are you the King of the Jews?” A yes answer, and Pilate has his man; Jesus could then be judged a threat to the empire Pilate is sworn to uphold. But Jesus deftly deflects the self-focus back to Pilate: “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Later, after Jesus makes a “my kingdom” reference, Pilate returns to his line of questioning: “So you are a king?” Jesus will not bite: “You say that I am a king.”

How remarkable this exchange! Even though Jesus self-references throughout this gospel in lofty ways – John’s Jesus is the “highest” Jesus of all, the one we most associate with a Godlike Christ – he could not and would not directly claim himself a king. He's a lower Jesus ... a  humbler Jesus. Fully human ... fully humane.

Sounds like the real Christmas narrative to me.

The final Sunday of each Church year* is recognized worldwide by many Protestant communions as well as by Catholics as “Christ the King Sunday”. How unfortunate. Anything to keep our eye on Jesus’heroic person, lest we actually journey his humble journey for ourselves. Anything lest we claim his real vision for the world: the kingdom of God. Christ as King? Might as well stuff him in a red-and-white suit! 

But politicians cannot mock -- and our economic forces cannot trivialize – a Jesus who repeatedly turns our church attention from his sanctified (read, Santa-fied) self to where God’s reign really lies: the highways and byways of all our marginalized lives.

For it’s one thing for a nation to neutralize the power of God’s kingdom message: Beginning the celebration of the messenger’s birthday with a pre-dawn rush on big screen TVs. It’s another thing altogether for a church to unleash God’s healing power: Tending the broken lives of those who wait in line for a Christmas they can never seem to achieve. A Christmas they think – we think – we should have, and they think – we think – our children must have.

King Jesus? What bullshit! He's all about the kingdom of God! Perhaps we should be, as well. Perhaps, as we prepare for Christmas once again this year, we should turn to a new picture of Jesus -- which is really the oldest: The narrative of his humble birth, not as a distant substitute of his for ours, but as an immediate invitation of experiencing ours in his.

  *This year, that final Sunday was November 25.

Could the Economic Be the Most Spiritual Matter of All?

Psalm 127:1-2  God gives, we do not earn 
Mark 12:38-44  God gives, we return

“Where your treasure is … there your heart is, also.” Note that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount teaching doesn’t turn those clauses the other way around. Jesus does not say, “Where your heart is, your treasure will follow.” Instead, Jesus says, “Where your treasure is …” well …

Think Jesus cared or talked little about money? Think again! As with the story of the widow and her two small coins today, over half of Jesus’ consummate spiritual teachings – his parables – deal head-on with economic matters of his day.

  For as many a married or otherwise committed couple knows …

  As anyone who has ever saved money for a future knows …

  As every victim of Sandy who lost their possessions knows …

  As every church seeking to do the ministry of Jesus knows …

The economic just might be the most spiritual matter of all.

In today’s gospel passage – in the gospels throughout – we discover Jesus saves his strongest words of reproof for those who take and those who horde: “Beware of the scribes. They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive” – hear these words – “the greater condemnation.”

And then Jesus takes a seat, opposite the temple treasury. How a Jewish prophet symbolically sits when preparing to cast a judgment on the “opposition”. For contrary to popular pious renderings of this story, Jesus does not at the end of this story simply extol the widow for her generosity to the treasury. He excoriates the authorities who prompt her to do this.

He actually does both in this story, I believe. He lifts up the love (“this poor widow has put in more”) and he condemns the injustice (“they devour widows’ houses”). The twin pillars of Jesus' spiritual teachings: being loving, and doing justice. Twin spiritual pillars propping up the edifice of these seven simple verses. 

All about the use and misuse of our money. For Jesus knew – he really, really knew – that the economic just might be the most spiritual matter of all.

Still skeptical? Consider the intimate connection between the “secular” word “economics” and the “spiritual” word “ecumenical”. As some of you know,  ecumenical is a church word used to describe Christian cooperative efforts.

Both economics and ecumenical find their root in the Greek word oikos: “house”. Both words, in other words, hearken to how we operate the houses – the communities – we live in. The economic and the ecumenical: So closely related! For as a modern-day prophet recently pointed out, every budget of every “house” – home, church, or federal – is at its heart a spiritual document.

The economic just might be the most spiritual matter of all.

Still skeptical? Let us move beyond the connections between these two more technical words to the interchangeable meanings of eight quite everyday words.

    Save … Redeem …Worth ... Value … Trust … Bond ... Possess ... Debt.

   

Is each word economic … or, is each word spiritual? Or how about, “both of the above”? Going down the list:

• We save for the future. God saves us in Jesus, for the future … and for the present.
• We redeem coupons. God redeems relationships.
• “What’s the worth of your estate?” “What’s the value of your property?” God finds infinite worth, and infinite value, in each human being … in every aspect of the divine creation.
• We put our savings in trusts and bonds. Yet long before we found the words on our coins, our churches have taught us, “In God We Trust”. And long before most citizens played the market, churches have sung, “Blest Be the Ties that Bind.”
• We may own a few possessions, and we may sometimes go into debt to get more. In the process, we can become possessed by something other than God, though God forgives debts and debtors both.

Save … Redeem … Worth … Value … Trust … Bond … Possess … Debt. Eight words that the world teaches and the church teaches, both.

What the world teaches in one way, God teaches us in another. Which begs a new question: For each of these words, which of these teachings is more important to us? How the world teaches? Or how God teaches?

And if your answer – as I hope – is located with the latter: Shouldn’t all of these eight economic things we push across counters and move between accounts, be at the primary beck-and-call of the One who so graciously, so generously, so lavishly bestowed them upon us, to begin with?

And yet, if our ultimate faith question is conceptual  -- “Could the economic be the most spiritual matter of all?” -- what difference does it make in our lives to answer, "Yes!"? It is our “Yes!” to the relational that counts; it always is. The widow’s “Yes!” to a question quite the reverse of the sermon’s title question.

And that question is this: “Could the most spiritual matter of all to us 

be how we return economically what is God’s, to begin with?

From Belief's Limitations to Love's Abundance

 

Scripture: Mark 12:28-34 ("The Great Commandment")

For the religious powers-that-be confronted by Jesus in Jerusalem during Passover, it all came down to the scribes.

For already, in this holiest of cities on this holiest of weeks amidst the heaviest of crowds, Jesus had whomped the Pharisees and Herodians in Debate #1: Caesar and taxes. And then came his victory in Debate #2: his square-off versus the Sadducees, those who couldn’t and wouldn’t believe in resurrected living.

And so, down two debates to zero to this common adversary – a nonviolent man, a popular man, a dangerous man –the religious powers-that-be sent in the debating experts themselves: “One of the scribes came near … and asked (Jesus), ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’” That is: the most important of all?

The answer wasn’t difficult. Any observant Jew such as Jesus would know it. The most important was the Shema – the two verses from the Book of Deuteronomy worn on the heads and adorned on the doorposts of many an observant Jew then, and to this day. And so Jesus responded accordingly: “The first one is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

And so the scribe heard Jesus say. Must have been music to his God-defining ears: “A-ha! Now we’ve got him! Now we’ve staked out the high ground again! Now we can say to that rabble gathered around him, ‘So your leader believes this – just like we do? Well, here we are, your friendly local scribes. Since so few of you can read or write, here we are to guard this belief for you. Here we are to interpret this for you. In other words: Here we are to tell you how – how to believe in this God that we profess! You can do this, but you can’t do that. You can relate to these, and not to these.’

“For we – the literates, the logical, the powers-that-be – we are the ones still in charge! Here to shape our Temple fence anew. For here’s the deal: This crucial, central, core belief about God will be managed by us, and followed by you. As so we will it; as so we use it. Guarding you and protecting you – all to carefully limit your world. Lest, of course, you should take matters in your own hands.”

So must the scribe have been thinking, when Jesus ritually ticked off the Shema. “Love God … Love God … Love God.” A nice and limited statement of belief. Easily manipulated … easily controlled. The scribe had Jesus just where he wanted him! Now he and his fellows could reclaim their authority! Again they could shepherd their Passover lambs!

If only Jesus had just stopped there. But then, in perhaps his most powerful display of spiritual jujitsu this side of his crucifixion, Jesus flips the debate on that scribe – and upon us all.

“The second (commandment) is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

For Jesus understood, he really understood, that creeds about God are always limited and controlled – and limiting and controlling, by those in religious power. It is so, with creeds. But not so with compassion, extended to all.

The compassion that comes when we make a very important move in our faith. A very important move, beyond our limitations of the beliefs we are taught about God into the abundance of love that is of God.

From the limitations of our beliefs to the abundance of love.

From a God carefully measured to a God endlessly generous.

Which God will it be for you – for us? That’s important to decide and to know. For which God we ultimately put our trust in is the God we ultimately choose to share with the world.

This Great Commandment story before us teaches us much about the generosity of living – on all levels. For it is all too easy for us to circumscribe our beliefs or our bank books for our own private use – guarding our version of what’s God to us in our world. But when we lead our lives less as guardians of a measured Lord and more in gratitude to our abundant God, our beliefs and our generosity naturally expand.

For our consumer culture of careful measures and God’s kingdom culture of generosity abundant stand at cross purposes. Implicit to the worldview of the careful measures of scribes is a zero-sum game: “There’s not enough for all in the world. So let us get as much as we can for us.” But that’s not the kingdom worldview of Jesus. His is just the opposite: “Thanks be to God there is more than enough in the world. So let us now distribute it widely.”

 “There’s Not Enough”: That’s the voice of the scribe in today’s narrative. It stops all relationships dead; beyond our relationship with God, everything loving is open to negotiation. With “There’s Not Enough”, someone must carefully define that god – to keep some in, to keep many out.

But “There’s More Than Enough” of kingdom culture opens the door – reveling in our abundant opportunities to love. Celebrating our God of glory, who created everything and deemed it all good. Celebrating our God of generosity, who sows the kingdom seed on soil, rocky ground, the path, and thistles – the Lord cares not where the abundance is cast! Celebrating our God of grace, who re-creates us from broken Friday bread to a Sunday abundance known as resurrection living.

Our beliefs, our creeds … our bottom lines? They are all good things – but far from the best. For we are always limited whenever we use these; and we always limit ourselves when we do. For beliefs and creeds and bottom line faith all make for good signposts. And yet – by nature – they self-constrict.

Quite plainly, Jesus does not intend for us to hang our discipleship on the post of a sign – much less upon the ledger of a church budget. Jesus intends us to follow along with him instead – along what the earliest Christians simply called The Way. Not to look at him, through limited, loving-God-only eyes. But to look with him, through a love-God-and-neighbor-and-self panorama.

To look with Jesus to the abundance of loving relationships God has in store for us. Loving relationships we can establish with the More Than Enough around us … that we might give widely to those needing our love.

The Great Commandment story teaches us quite well: Let us move our faith to a different place. Let us move our faith away from our self-limiting beliefs about loving God, and God only. Beliefs that might tell us, “There is just not enough of our God to go around. Our God needs to be strictly guarded and dispensed.” Let us move our faith away from this, Jesus is saying, to a living trust in God’s abundance of love.

A living trust: One that pays the greatest of relational dividends in our lives – serving people through our money, and not vice versa. Banking our discipleship upon the riches of all our loving relationships, rather than foundering it upon the shores of our beliefs’ limitations.

A great jurist of a century past, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once wrote, “The life of the law has not been logic. It has been experience.”

In a similar vein: The life of our faith has never been our “logic” of beliefs. The life of our faith has always been our experience of love.

The life of our faith: Not beliefs that constrict our loving relationships from the start. But our loving relationships that extend far beyond any and all of our beliefs.

The abundance of loving opportunities in our world – opening up our minds and our hearts. Nourishing a living trust, in the One who gives so much to us … and expects only the spirit of that generosity in return.

Not because God needs it. But because our world does.

  And perhaps most of all: Because we do. 

Passing the Baton: Lessons for an Intergenerational Church

Scripture: 2 Kings 2:1-14

The art of passing the baton is essential to the power of creating and maintaining an intergenerational church.. Even -- especially -- when one or more age groups seems lacking in numbers, the intergenerational church becomes more and more important, and needed.

1. The truly intergenerational church is less definitive about what to believe as it is how to experience belief – together.

2. The truly intergenerational church is less about creating rules for how to behave than it is showing others how to do it (the art of intention) and why we do it (the art of imitating Christ).

3. The truly intergenerational church is less about who I am – the religious question of rebellious Protest-ants – as it is in whose we are: who we belong to, in a world of profound alienation: economic, environmental, and tools of violence ranging from the purely manipulative to weapons of mass destruction.¹

The power of the intergenerational church: the place where our ways of belief, behavior, and belonging take on a special form. A mentoring body of experienced belief, of learning behavior by intention and imitative discipleship, and – in the end – a belonging body, bound as a covenant “whose” in a world full not just of alienation, but also of affinity groups and voluntary associations ironically loose and exclusive both.

Such is the power of the intergenerational church -- countercultural as it is. And such are the believing, behaving, and belonging ways the prophet Elijah passed the baton to the prophet Elisha.

1. Elisha did not receive the baton – or more specifically the prophet’s mantle – because he believed like Elijah. He received it because he insisted on experiencing the passing of Elijah as he approached his time of earthly closure.

“Stay here,” Elijah kept telling him. “The Lord has sent me as far as Bethel” … and then, “as far as Jericho” … and then, “to the Jordan.” But Elisha would not stay there. He would leave Elijah alone …

Elisha would not leave Elijah … alone. Elijah’s experience, he knew, must be endemic to his experience. Even if, at the end, it was only to see what transpired – to see the vision. The vision Elisha received of Elijah being spirited away, when he could not participate in the act. The vision that ensured Elisha he would receive a double share of Elijah’s spirit – which is what the first-born Hebrew son typically receives. First, not because he believed like Elijah, but because he believed with him. Even to the point of accompanying him to mortality’s edge – and to a new vision out of it all, and after all.

Elisha received Elijah’s baton … because he insisted on experiencing belief with him. The way an intergenerational church, likewise, passes the baton of belief.

2. And Elisha honored the intentional actions Elijah took by imitating his behavior after he was gone. At the time of Elijah’s passing, tearing his clothes dramatically away from his body – not simply because of grief, but also to fit himself, we hear, with Elijah’s mantle fallen from his predecessor’s shoulder. Wearing now his mantle, Elisha then struck the water of the Jordan as Elijah had done … and it parted for him, as well!

Remember the very first biblical parting of the waters? Moses parting the sea so the Hebrew people could be liberated from Pharaoh? The Pharaoh who killed all the firstborn sons of the Hebrew people? Pharaoh did not want an intergenerational church on his hands. The parting of the sea for Moses … for Elijah … for Elisha meant the baton could be passed, and the mantle of liberation worn, by an intergenerational church. The liberating mantle of intentional and imitative behavior, worn as a testimony to a world of less-flexible and often capricious rules of behavior found in a more personality-driven or program-regimented body.

Intention and imitation: the hallmarks of one generation passing the baton of behavior to the next. Not through some stodgy, stiff “how-to-be-a-prophet” rulebook – the next generations need and will want to find their own path.

Passing the baton. As the disciples did with Jesus – well, almost to the end – Elisha experienced the belief, the faith, of Elijah to his mentor’s final breath: sticking close by him, catching his resurrection vision in the process. And as the disciples did with Jesus, Elisha absorbed his mentor’s intentional behavior, then imitated it for his own liberating parting of the waters.

3. And finally, the Elijah-into-Elisha story teaches us the belonging power of the intergenerational church – the passing along of the baton – through the company of prophets that follow the two throughout the story. Prophets from whom each of them – as prophets – could not be separated. To whom each of them ultimately belonged.

All of which begs the question: What about us, at Bethesda Presbyterian Church?

Will those who have been a member or friend here since before 1990, please raise your hand. And keep your hand raised as I ask you three simple questions …

1.   First, let me ask you this belief question: How have you transmitted your belief – your faith – as an experienced faith to the next generations here, including those who have passed through here – as so many transient DCers have done? Your experienced faith, after all, is what they are desperately looking for. Not belief as creeds … but belief as companionship. Not faith as certainty … but faith as wisdom.

2.   Second, let me ask you this behavior question: How have you intentionally practiced your faith that it might be imitated by others? Not by purity of worship – tempting as that is in a sanctuary of this stature! And not to strut your stuff – I don’t think many of us have that issue. How have you let your God-given light shine as just that – God-given – for the gospel to be seen and heard by others?

How have you practiced your faith intentionally, that the next generations might imitate spiritual disciplines you practice – not matter how “well” you do them? Spiritual disciplines borne of twenty centuries of Christian discipleship? Outward ones, such as simplicity and service? Inward ones, such as meditation and prayer? Communal ones, beginning with worship, and continuing with study, with celebration … and dare I say with confession to one another?²

3.   And finally, let me ask you this belonging question: When was the last time you reached your hand out, during the Passing of the Peace, to a person of a different church generation … first? Especially reaching out first to a person who is a guest, and brings only their own church generations with them … or none at all?

You pre-1990 church veterans may put your hands down now. And so that you know that this is not all on you, though you know now how you are charged: Would those who have been a member or a friend since 1990 please raise their hand? Keep those hands raised throughout as I ask you …

1.   How have you put yourself in the position of experiencing the belief of those who were just standing or raising their hands? Have you stayed close to them in hard and anxious times – like Elisha with Elijah? Will you be around to witness their chariots of fire to come?

2.   And the behavior question: How have you imitated the best of their actions? Have witnessed them strike the waters that divide peril from promise with their mantle, which will soon be yours to do the same?

3.   And how have you made the effort to belong to their company-of-prophets story – by listening to them, learning from them, passing the baton of this church’s rich legacy of ministry that surges through them – that courses through their veins?

Passing the baton. And being passed the baton. By experiencing belief together … intentionally and imitatively practicing Christian disciplines, or behaviors, together … belonging, by bringing in the longing, and knowing that we all belong here, together …

… we then experience the power of being an intergenerational church. For without that power: What could it be that we are left with?

More importantly: Without that power, what do we leave with the generation next?

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

¹I am deeply indebted to Diana Butler Bass for the rephrasing of our believing-behaving-belonging questions in these ways for a new, “spiritual-but-not-religious” way of being church. See her Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (HarperOne: 2012).

²For these and other classical spiritual traditions, see Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (HarperCollins, 1978). 

What Kind of God Are We Willing to Live For?

This blog entry is a condensed and revised version of the Witness in Word at Bethesda Presbyterian Church's Sunday morning worship on October 21, 2012.

Scripture: 1 Kings 18:20-40

In this story of a contest between gods on Mount Carmel, Elijah throws down the gauntlet to the people of Israel – and to us all: “If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.”

 

Indeed: What kind of god are we willing to live for? An idol: a person, place, or institution we give our whole lives to even to the point of compulsion, obsession … addiction? Or are we willing to live for the One over the many: the God of Exodus liberation, the prophets’ justice, the Jesus of love? A no-fire-in-the-belly, limp-along god of scarcity such as Baal: an impotent god of famine in the land? Or the God of Elijah and outreach witnesses such as Umbrella Initiatives* and Bread for the World we celebrate in Worship today: the true God of fiery abundance, living not in the problem, but in the solution?

Israel was seduced then as we are seduced today. The idolatry Baal offered the people of Israel then is the idolatry of our nation today. It’s an idolatry known as Security Through Fear.

Security through fear. An idolatry embraced and promoted by King Ahab and Queen Jezebel through their court prophets of Baal. An idolatry embraced and promoted in every generation by what the Apostle Paul called “the powers and principalities” – seeking peace at any price, meaning a few have the peace while the many pay the price.

As with every idol, security begins as a good; Social Security is a prime example. But when a value like security gets promoted to the best … there’s a frightening price that must be paid. And that price is idolatry’s telltale heart: Fear.

Security Through Fear our Presidential candidates have eagerly fed on, and have then fed back to our eager ears: “National security!” “Homeland security!” “More jobs!” “Middle class!” In order for us to be made secure as a people, they say, we will make you safe from something. Safe from big government. Safe from Wall Street. Safe from weapons of mass destruction – weapons, that is, in hands other than ours.

Safe from prophets who would have us worship and rely upon a different God. A God not of fearful security, but a God of faithful abundance. A lavish God who says to all of creation, “I have given you enough to live well on, my children. Now go and distribute generously and widely.”

Nowhere can I find in our scriptures, “Be secure!” Our scriptures testifying to our God of abundance simply do not celebrate the value of security – especially the security of false prophets, as we have seen. What our scriptures are long on are two quite contrasting words: “Fear not!”

The choice is ours, my friends: Security through fear … or, freedom from fear. The way of Baal: Security of a nation from the rest of God’s world, rallying the wagons, closely aligned with the powers-that-be. Or, the way of God: The boldness of Elijah which is freedom from fear, overcoming famine with the fire of faith.

The choice is ours: What kind of god are we willing to live for …

• One who advances security through fear? Or, one who promises freedom from fear?
• A god of coercive protection for some? Or a God freely supportive of all?
• A god of scarcity, by whom we declare a war on terror? Or a God to whom we can reach out in trust?

My friends: What kind of god are you willing to live for?

*Umbrella Initiatives was co-founded and is directed by two Bethesda Presbyterian members: Yenny Delgado & Dr. Robert Rivers.

Think It's God? Phone A Friend!

Scripture   1 Kings 19:8-18

In this scripture, Elijah hears the voice of God. That is: He hears what he thinks is the voice of God.  

What reaches the prophet’s ear is what our New Revised Standard Version translates as a “sound of sheer silence” – some of us may be more familiar with the older translation, “a still, small voice”. In the midst of life’s cacophony and hubbub, listen for God’s still, small voice within us, we are told – or a sound of sheer silence, for that matter. Listen for it – just listen. All will be well, if we but quietly and meditatively and inwardly listen for God’s will.

But then there occurs what the late radio showman Paul Harvey would call “the rest of the story.”

For the silence is but prelude for the holy voice to come: “Go, (Elijah), return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. Also you shall anoint Jehu … as king over Israel; and you shall anoint Elisha … as prophet in your place. Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill. Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel.”

Rather brutal … wouldn’t you say? Hear again not God’s still, small voice, but the Almighty’s clear, strong voice: “Prophet, do what you prophets do: Anoint a king. No, wait: Anoint two kings! And – while you’re at it – anoint your prophetic successor. And whoever King 1 does not kill, King 2 will kill. And whoever King 2 does not kill, your prophetic successor shall kill. Oh, and P.S. I will spare a holy remnant. Carry on.”

Think that’s God? Think that’s of God?

If there is a singular moral-of-the-story to Elijah’s today, it’s this: Going it alone in spiritual matters is quite dangerous and usually unnecessary. How often have we heard the most well-intentioned of persons claim the guidance of God when it was all too plain that they were sorely mistaken? Lacking both practice and humility, they – often, we – become deluded and able to justify the most arrant nonsense on the ground that this was what God was actually saying.

It is worth noting that persons of very high spiritual development almost always insist on checking in with friends or spiritual advisers regarding the guidance they feel they have received from God. Surely, then, a novice ought not lay herself or himself open to the chance of making foolish, perhaps tragic, blunders in this fashion. While the comment or advice of trusted others is by no means infallible, it is likely to be far more specific and more spiritually reliable than any guidance we may think we receive in attempting individually to establish or discern direct contact with God.

If only the prophet Elijah knew all this. Alone, isolated, caught in a fright-and-flight mode for a very long time, hiding out in his own personal cave, he listens, and listens hard, for God’s voice to make itself known to him. And what does he hear? Crown this king, and this king, and this prophet, and tell them to go out and mop up the blood of each other’s mass murder.

Oh, Elijah was sincere, all right. Many spiritually-seeking persons are. And yet, somehow I believe that God values honesty with our sister and fellow human beings far more powerfully than our sincerity!

Which is why we worship together every Sunday as the Body of the living Christ. Which is why communal spirituality – soliciting advice, phoning a friend, praying with others – has no substitute. No amount of personal, daily time of devotion … no amount of basking in God’s incredible flora and fauna of creation, finding God in the sunrises and sets … no amount of mano-a-mano struggle with the universal (as many pastors do on many a Saturday afternoon) … none of any of this personal piety can substitute for the community of faith broken as living bread for one another, and poured out as a libation of God’s healing in return.

Healing Brokenness: From Caring About the Cause to Creating the Care

Scripture: James 5:13-20

James writes, “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”

“Confess your sins.” In recent years, sin has gotten a lot of bad press. Listen to the fundamentalists and the evangelists – if we were to believe the mass media, these are about the only professing Christians there are. It’s easy to see why many of us and especially the younger generations associate the word sin with guilt and general bad behavior. Some of you may recall, many years ago, the televangelist who got caught in a zipper issue. He then famously threw himself at the mercy of his TV audience, weeping, “Lord: I have sinned!”

Well … yeah! And yet, this televangelist’s promiscuously public confession does not represent the heart of the biblical understanding of sin – not even close. For sin is a given of the human condition. Sin may not be necessary, but it is certainly inevitable. For sin is separation – we cannot avoid it, in the closest of our relationships. For sin means brokenness – we see it all around, in the holiest of the whole. Sin represents how we are driven away from relationship with God, with others, with God’s creation, into that separation – and into brokenness. We are driven: meaning, we are not in control.

All of which means – again – that sin is a given. Which means locating a particular cause for a particular brokenness in our world – as important as it is to know that cause, to ferret out that injustice – is not the ultimate goal of the community of faith and the kingdom of God.

For as important as a particular cause for a particular brokenness might be, when we don’t know what it is – when we can’t know what it is – when we can only guess at what the cause is … it is important for us – it is imperative for us – it is essential for us to do two things:

1.     Admit that sin is at work in the world in all things; and therefore,

2.     Move where the Holy Spirit moves. Meaning, move our discipleship energies on over. Over, from caring overly much about the cause to creating and cultivating an environment of care.

I wonder if often, too often, our cause-oriented diagnostic conditioning – many of us are professionally trained in that way – prompts us to move from an acceptance of the inescapable and immutable condition of sin in the world, into a direct engagement, and then ranking, of the particular sins in our world. And because we confuse sins with sin, I have come to wonder that perhaps -- just perhaps -- the ranking of sins could be the rankest of sins. In an ironic manner of speaking.

We get lost in the particulars of “sin” in our world. But James could seemingly care less about ranking sins, when he writes, “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” Confess your sins – after all, we all have them. Confess your sins, that this church might become God's vision for us: A Place For Healing.

Not, confess your sins if you sin. Not, confess your sins only after we have determined that that sin needs to be confessed– though some confessions need to be handled with more care and discernment than others. “Confess your sins,” James says, because: Sin is a given. Our brokenness is a given …

But our honesty about our sins – our brokenness – is not a given. In some way – in some fashion – they must be shared. If our sanctuary is to be indeed a sanctuary: confessed sins and all. If our healing is to take place at all!

Perhaps we can take a cue from the Cornerstone United Methodist Church in Naples, FL. In her book Christianity for the Rest of Us, Diana Butler Bass writes this about that church:

A preppy-looking retired man is talking to a man covered with tattoos. Senior citizens … and single people mingle in the entryway. There are several people from other ethnic backgrounds, too … Three black-clad teenage girls with pierced noses and Goth makeup approach an elderly woman in a wheelchair. One by one, they lean down, kiss the woman on the cheek, and ask her how she is doing.*

Such hospitality, I would imagine, can only be exercised once questions about the nature of our sin – our brokenness – are set aside. Only then can our focus fall on creating the caring community of social healing the letter of James envisions today.

“Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another … so that you-plural” – in the original Greek, it is you plural – “may be healed.”

That’s a plural you: that y’all – or the Southern plural of y’all, “all y’all” – may be healed. For when individual confession over our inevitable sinning, and then the prayer surrounding it, are exercised, it’s a community healing, and not simply an individual one, that transpires.

  Scripture is huge on that!

  Go, and do likewise.

*HarperOne, 2006, 78-79.

Seeking Immortality? Discover Resurrection!

Ah, the faces of death. We face them daily, dying a thousand deaths. Each and every day, long before we face the actual cessation of our breathing.

And yet, who wants to die?

Who wants to experience their mortality?

Who doesn’t want to be immortal?

If not in the body … then immortalized in memories, and in legacies?

Seeking immortality. It’s the great and heroically self-obsessed search of nearly every human being I have ever met. For barring some deep chronic suffering, none of us wishes to die. We want to live on. If not in body, then in the hearts and minds and souls of our loved ones – and perhaps even more. Heroes, and “sheroes,” for a greater cause! As the theme song for the movie “Fame” puts it, “I’m gonna live forever … baby remember my name.” Ah: my legacy! To just be remembered!

In the midst of our search for immortality in this world, Jesus shows us an even better way – and even a better promise. Jesus shows us a way and a promise we know as resurrection.

The difference? The active seeking of immortality -- "im-mortal", literal meaning: "not dead" -- means not being willing to die. I’m just not going to die! “Baby, remember my name.”

Jesus' crucifixion-into-resurrection way and promise of life, on the other hand, means dying is a must, first. We die to live – when the dying holds the seeds of redemption. Living in a resurrected manner, we die and must face dying each and every day. Meaning, each and every day we at least implicitly say no to more trivial actions before we can say yes to more fruitful actions. The payoff? Discovering a way of living we could hardly know otherwise.

Immortality, Resurrection: Note the different verbs corresponding with each of these life pathways:

Immortality, we seek.

Resurrection, we discover.

For we cannot seek resurrection – even as much as we can discover immortality! For with resurrection, we do not and cannot imagine the splendor of new life and living on the other side of death and dying.

Resurrection is something we discover. Something we find only when we encounter and acknowledge and stare down the fear of our mortality … and trust there is something greater once we pass through the fire.

Resurrection. In Mark’s gospel, on three separate occasions, Jesus talks openly to his disciples -- to us -- about his path to resurrection through the crucifixion fire. And contrary to nearly every Google image under "Resurrection" I could find, Jesus well understood three things: 

A) Resurrection is not just about "Him". 

B) Resurrection is not just a one-time event.

C) Resurrection is ultimately about us -- and the way we discover we can live.