Scripture     Matthew 7:13-29

The Narrow Gate to A Broader Way

Prayer: Gracious God, let any baggage we have carried in here with us – and any fears and anxieties we would imagine before us – lie quiet – fall dormant – be still.

This hour … this scripture … this message. Amen.

Many, many years ago, I walked into a barber shop that was new to me. The kind with the old candy cane-striped, blood-and-bandages pole out front –hearkening to the days of yore when cutters of hair were also cutters of skin.

I needed a haircut – “hair styling” I leave to others – and a trim of the beard I sported then. Greeting me with a broad, toothy smile was a man I’ll call Mike. Mike operated the shop – and was the lone barber that day.

Mike began rummaging my scalp with his scissors. Pleasantries were exchanged, in the course of which I told Mike that I was a pastor.

My mistake. Mike cocked his face to mine. Looking me dead in the eye, he asked me if I as a pastor believed in the necessity of being born again.

Seeking out the high ground, and taking Mike’s question broadly – and realizing he was holding a sharp razor to the base of my beard – I replied, Yes, yes: I believe all need to experience new birth in their lives.

Mike was quite relieved – and so was I. “A lot of preachers don’t believe this,” he said. And I thought to myself: Well, I suppose most of us do believe that when you are holding that razor in your hand.

“And then there’s the matter of hell,” Mike continued. Oh boy, I thought.

A saving grace: his razor had taken cover. But Mike’s teeth never did. He grinned his beatific grin, furrowed his brow and with an incredulous expression asked, “How can you be a Christian and not believe in hell? Jesus spoke often of hell. The Hebrew word is Sheol.”

I didn’t have the heart to share with Mike that Sheol signified the abode for the dead for everyone – long before the dubious concept of hell arrived to us courtesy of the Babylonians. Or that I was more concerned with not living a life in hell today.

Would we have had the time. Lest his proclamations become conversation, Mike proceeded to tell me the story of a customer – a Hindu – who could not understand the importance of this concept of hell for Christians. “I told him,” Mike said, “that you have to believe in Jesus, or else” – he opened his hands and smile even wider – “or else, you go to hell!” He then laughed: “I wish it wasn’t true … but that’s what the Bible says!”

It was then I sensed why I did not have to wait for a haircut that day.

For narrow was Mike’s gate to spiritual entry …

     … or should we say narrow was his spiritual way?

While a pastor for 11 years at Northside Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor, MI, talk sometimes turned to renaming the congregation something more fetching and farsighted – and something less common and mundane.

And besides, several establishments on that side of town were already named Northside – including another church, less than a mile away. Perched as we were on one of the town’s highest elevations – the peak of Broadway Avenue – I ventured that, if we diversity-minded and post-denominational-oriented church folk really wanted to change our name, perhaps we should call it “The Church of the Broad Way”, with Presbyterian in parentheses.

Now, a congregation named “Church of the Broad Way” may not seem copacetic with these words from Jesus today: “Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction.” For if Jesus is advocating a narrow gate here, and a hard road besides: how broad can way be, that he – and we – would have to offer?

A full reading of the Sermon on the Mount verses today suggests that Jesus is speaking with more than a touch of irony here. And that irony is this: Jesus’ narrow gate in this world of ours is the narrow, less-entered gate of relational breadth and depth -- versus the wider, tribal-oriented gate of creedal narrowness.

Which makes more sense when we consider that Matthew’s gospel in particular was addressed to a faith community profoundly Jewish and Gentile both. A scandal in that day, this association – hence, the image of the narrow gate. And so sounding the fugue of inclusion – relational breadth and depth – was central here to this gospel’s harmony. Entering a narrow gate, indeed!

And Matthew’s Jesus expresses that relational breadth and depth today with several vivid metaphors: Sprouting good fruit … gathering grapes and figs … building houses on rock. 

Sprouting. Gathering. Building. Metaphors based not on belief – the wide gate leading to the narrow way of the ideologue – but (metaphors based) on action – the narrow gate leading to the expansive way of the disciple.

I believe the Presbyterian poet Kathleen Norris captures the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount well when she writes that God’s judgment is made – if we must go there – not on what we have believed but on how we have loved.¹

Not on how we believe our way into loving action. But how we lovingly act our way into understanding how we are to believe.

In today’s 16 verses of Jesus’ teaching, the biblical Greek word for “do” or “make” appears nine times. For example, Jesus says whoever does the will of God enters the gate – not all who confess him as “Lord, Lord”: it’s not about belief. Not primarily.

And his concluding words for Matthew’s entire three-chapter teaching collection leave us no doubt: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise (one) who built (a) house on rock … And everyone who does not act on them will be like a foolish (one) who built (a) house on sand.”

I felt that my barber Mike boasted many relational gifts. In fact, I was fond of the haircuts I received from him – and I returned to him several times.

What a shame he felt compelled to express those gifts not through the narrow gate of curiosity, but through the narrow prism of exclusivity.

And so what will be for us, as a church? Curious ears, for the concerns of the world … or exclusive eyes, overlooking the same sins in one another?

I feel that our Social Action meeting following Worship two Sundays hence is so vital – so essential – for our witness as a church.

Don’t know if you have noticed: We have not made a concerted presence known beyond these grounds for many moons.

In our budget this year, we have $10,000 in undesignated funds invested in making that presence known. More importantly, of course: We have you.

And we have our Worship Charge. The Charge we say as one at the conclusion of Worship each and every Sunday. We are good at reading it. We are good at thinking it. We are even good at rewording it.

And many of us are good at acting upon it as individuals ... by casting our bread on certain community waters of our own personal choosing – and personal control. Ways each of us can go about improving our world: one person at a time.

And yet the narrow gate I believe Jesus is calling us to pass through is this: letting go of our need for recognition as individual benefactors enough to trust and invest in our calling as church. To enter the narrow gate of exploring as one body a ministry of relational breadth and depth far more impactful than any personal witness any of us can make.

Our regional Manna Food offerings and letters on food policy to Bread for the World: those we will continue; those are Sunday starts. But what does it mean to be in living, active partnership with Bethesda Cares – especially as they prepare to move clients into our Church House next door? Commitment to relational depth and breadth: it’s a narrow gate to enter. And what does it mean that we are a church of sanctuary witness for immigrants? What does it look like – as a congregation – to be a model of Earth Care?

The cover of our 2018 Year in Pictures puts it well: We are a church about Love In Action. As many of you know: That’s our simple calling. And, I trust, that means more to us than Johanna In Action … or, Donna in Action … or, Chuck In Action.

Jesus knew – and Matthew’s first century church knew: Narrow is the gate through which we must pass for relational breadth and depth in this world.

It means being open. It means being vulnerable. It means being intimate.

It means trusting in a God more expansive than we have known.

Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.

¹Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (NYC: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 315.

Intro to The Prayers of the People …

O God, O Christ, O Holy Spirit,

     our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.

And so we rest them today, O God, in gratitude. In gratitude to you, and the challenge of the narrow gate through which Jesus calls us to pass.

The narrow gate that leads to diversity – living as we do near four of the 10 most diverse cities in our country, all in Montgomery County.*

The narrow gate that leads to destruction of walls and the building of bridges – not the construction of walls and the burning of bridges.

The narrow gate that leads us not to "issues", but to very human concerns.

The narrow gate that leads us to reconciliation with one another by taking different stands alongside different peoples — and then to sit down from our stands to work concerns out.

The narrow gate that leads us to where you call us to stand, as followers of Jesus: with the most vulnerable in body and spirit among us. That we might discover your profoundest riches and intimacies of relational breadth and depth …

  *Silver Spring, Rockville, Gaithersburg, Germantown

People Serving Money … or, Money Serving People?

Scripture     Matthew 25:14-30   

The scene: a children’s message. The pastor asks the little ones, “What is brown, has a furry tail, and stores nuts?” Silence. The pastor asks again: “What is brown, has a furry tail, and stores nuts?” Again: No response. Finally, a wise little girl pipes up: “Umm … I think the answer is supposed to be Jesus. But it sure sounds like a squirrel to me!”

As we approach this widely-misunderstood parable in the gospel today, let us remember: We may think that the master is supposed to be Jesus – though it sure sounds like something this. Not a squirrel. More like a rat.

As you know, this is Stewardship Season. Time when the pastor tag teams with others to inspire us to financially pledge, and pledge generously, for 2015.

And every three years, in our church lectionary cycle, this passage drops in the pastor’s lap as preaching manna on stewardship. And – like a lot of pastors – I used to give profuse praise to God for this gift.

My thoughts would turn to the three servants in this story, and their different responses to the talents they were given. Many of us have well know the stewardship mantra of the 3 Ts: time, talents, and what? … treasure. Well, voila! – here, in this story, we have two of the three! We have talents, and we have treasure! The talent being – well, a monetary unit actually, the Greek talantan: one talent representing 15 years of day labor: a lifetime in those days. And yet, this word sounds like what I should be exercising with my life, to wit: How I should be investing my talents – taking risks in my discipleship venture. How I should be multiplying my return for my Lord.

Until a casual comment about this parable at a ministers conference two decades past led me to do some peeking behind the story’s curtain. To follow the money, that we might better follow the spiritual meaning contained within.

The master delights in the slave he entrusts with ten talents – 150 years’ labor! – giving him back twenty – 300 years.  Let’s follow the money here. How much of that 300 years of salary does the slave get? Nada. As for the one with five talents who gives him back ten? Nothing. “Enter the joy of your master!” The master cries to each. “I will put you in charge of many things!” His joy. His things. This master who openly admits what the third slave accuses: He reaps what he does not sow.

And that’s the Lord I am to worship? The One I am to follow? One who would give me the equivalent of 75 years of wages, or 30, or at least 15 – and then I would wind up where I began: without worth?

Doesn’t sound like our Jesus or our God to me. Sounds more like a cash-cropping, family farm-eating, imperial absentee landowner pathetically common in Palestine in Jesus’ day. Someone who was about his debt slave servants serving money – so that he would be the only one served.


Imagine these three slaves, after receiving their great riches, taking a reflective moment. Imagine them asking themselves two questions, supremely spiritual and economic both: “What am I really worth?” and “What is really my value?”

It seems to me that the first two slaves felt they were worth very little. They felt compelled to trade on the talents given to them, to gain more and more and more for their master, read: the master of their identity. Always trying to prove themselves of value, although their new-found riches would be bled from them in the end. Seduced by the riches of a maleficent parasite, versus trusting in the abundance naturally bestowed upon them by a beneficent God.

As for the slave given one talent: He knew what he was worth. He knew of his own value. He knew that even one talent from the hand of someone who would be his lord – who would be his master – who would control and manipulate his destiny – would compromise his integrity, his stewardship … his identity. For there is really no worth – no value – that this unearned lifetime of fifteen years’ wages could have over him. He is infinitely more worthy and valuable than that. He would have none of it! He cannot be bought.

And so this one-talented slave the brutal master intuitively would not trust with his greater riches to begin with decides to take his talent and practice a little street theater. This laborer of the land – entrusted with dominion over God’s good creation – “plants” the talent into the ground. As if to say, let’s see if this huge chunk of change from this absentee landlord – this man who would be master over my life – springs forth from God’s soil! See if this obscene amount of money has any worth or value, now!

“After a long time,” we are told, the absentee landlord returns. (Fascinating how they do that: They return only when they want something from someone for themselves.) “You wicked and lazy slave!” he snarls to the one-talented “beneficiary”. “You knew, did you not, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.” My, my – MY – I, I, ay! And, and by the way: What a “worthless slave” you are!

Worthless, to this master … because the slave had set himself free. Because the slave knew – he really, really knew – his real worth in the eyes of a living and loving and abundant God.

A God whose love and joy won’t be bought. A God we learn in the next story in this gospel does not side with ruthless landlords, but with the allegedly “worthless” ones, “the least of these.”

Those “worthless” ones …

The earliest Christians, buried like that talent, underground in the catacombs, who knew their true worth from an abundant God.

Faithful oppressed peoples today – around the world – whose hospital wards are often buried underground to protect their patients from enemy shelling, including “bunker buster” bombs.

Those anywhere and everywhere who find they must bury their allegiance to the powers-that-be, that they might liberate themselves to serve others and not money.

Those who bury a painful memory so deep in shame – who cry out for us to accompany them toward healing and wholeness.

Which of these three slaves do you think act as their master’s extension agents? Making 100 percent profit for The Man – most likely through exploitation and graft? Slaves enslaved to serving the monied?

And which of these slaves do you think acts not as the master’s impoverished agent, but as a disciple of our abundant God – standing, literally standing, on the principle (principal) of money serving people?


Which will it be for us – today? Will we be slaves enslaved in anxiety and fear: to serving the monied? Or servants set free to serve the people?

What are you worth? What is your value?

And what is the worth and value of our church’s calling as a Place for Healing, to you?


Each of us can rest assured that our church board, the Session, will see to it that the funds we pledge next Sunday for 2015 will be used grounded on one principle – and one principle alone: as money serving people – and not people serving money.

Money serving people through the calling God has given our congregation. Not to provide a place for good people to get better – no, no, no. Our gospel is so much more powerful and richer than that! Why stop with providing a place for the good to get better? God calls us instead to do something greater: to provide a place for the weary, the worried, dare we say the broken, to get well. To become whole and experience wholeness, midst the alienating mania that is metro DC. God’s calling to us: to be a Place for Healing.

Money serving God’s people, among and around us: People who want wellness and wholeness in their lives. Not us as a people serving the bottom line – all the while unhearing of our call.

Will you join me next Sunday in pledging generously for 2015? Let me be transparent about my own pledge. I intend it as no secret that each Sunday in 2014, I have been putting an $80 check in our Offering plate. I am saddened to say that is not a tithe – a tithe being 10% of income, what our scriptures mandate. But I am getting there. And toward that end: I plan to increase my pledge in 2015 to $90 a week. Because I have full faith this money will be used to serve others – beyond just ourselves. Because I have full faith we are serving an ever-present lover in whose abundance we invest, versus an absentee landlord in whose riches we divest.

This coming year, I will be increasing my pledge $10/week. Life’s circumstances permitting: Will you join me in increasing your pledge, as well? 

An Election Plea: "Fear Not!"

 

Worship Message: Sunday, November 2, 2014
Scriptures     Psalm 4 (canted) … Psalm 91

I. A man from ISIS who has contracted Ebola tries to immigrate across the Rio Grande in order to plea for free health insurance …

A ridiculous scenario? Not if we are to take seriously many election ads we have been hearing or have heard about recently.

A recent New York Times article about these ads opens with this line: “Darkness is enveloping American politics.”¹ For we are not safe – or so we are told. Again, and again, and ad nauseam again. And then we are tempted to fear fear itself. One Times op-ed contributor recently wrote a brilliant analytical piece on this phenomenon, titled, “A Climate of Fear.” And yet, in analyzing the climate, the author’s article projects – you guessed it – a climate of fear!²

Perhaps there is some truth to our felt lack of security: be it economic, homeland, or national. And so we are tempted to plead to a power greater than ourselves to protect us – to make us feel secure. Is it our government? Forget that! Our Lord and Savior?

Much scripture would lead to believe that God will keep us secure -- will protect us from all sorts of external threats that pass our way. And much scripture … indicates otherwise. (As an Old Testament professor of mine in seminary once sagely noted, “Consistency is not the hallmark of scripture!”)

Which scriptures do we listen to, when we lose a friend on 911 – or from a car accident – or to addiction, or to cancer, or – God forbid – we lose the ability to carry forward in life the way that we planned and dreamed we could carry forward?

Which scriptures do we affirm? Which message? The ones that suggest that our God is a God of security: external protection from harm? Or the ones that say, not so much – that our God instead may be short on security and protection, yet is certainly long on support? Long on … providence?

II. Reformation Day – All Hallows’ Eve – has just passed. Perhaps it is fitting – on the eve of Tuesday’s elections, and the fears that are driving it – to pause and celebrate Reformation Day. To embrace anew what is most hallowed about our faith that our Protestant forebears sought to reclaim many centuries past. In particular, to embrace anew what one of them, our Presbyterian forebear John Calvin, sought to convey about God. And that is this: Our God is a God of sovereignty … and of grace … and of providence.

Not a defensive God of security and protection. Not, at least, if we don’t wish to trivialize God, as well as our own responsibilities.

Our God of sovereignty and of grace and of providence is so much more than that. So much more than the shallow – the specious – the superficial – the patronizing and head-patting: “Be secure.” Our God will not be mocked in that way! Our God of sovereignty and of grace and of providence whispers to us something greater, something deeper, something richer: “Fear not!”

Not that we won’t have fears. We will; we are human.

But that when we have fears, we can hear a still, small voice, if you’d like, say to us, “Everything may not be okay. But you can become okay – with my help – in dealing with it.”

  So: “Fear not!”

III. Each of my six summers here in Bethesda, I have had the privilege of a weekend or week-long silent retreat to a Trappist monastery 90 minutes to the west.

Along the Shenandoah River, Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, VA provides me – it doesn’t protect me, it provides me – a shelter from the storm, a refuge from the mania that metro DC becomes for me. And I have been delighted, with adult chaperones from the church, to take two of our confirmation classes there for a few hours.

Every day of their lives, the dozen Trappist monks at Holy Cross Abbey gather for five services of chanted prayer focused almost exclusively on the Psalms. And over the course of every two weeks, they somehow cover each and every one of the 150 psalms in our Psalter.

The fifth and final service every day – seven days a week, 365 days a year – is a 20-minute service known as Compline. As opposed to the other four daily services, the substance of Compline never, ever changes. Its focus: The same two Psalms before us today.

Psalms of comfort. Psalms of care. Psalms of refuge. Psalms of safety – not in terms of protection ex cathedra, but in terms of the protection of care. Of having a God who provides an escort along life’s treacherous journey.³  

Psalms 4 and 91. The last words these monks sing, or say, every day of their lives before they retire for the evening. Words undoubtedly stamped on the backs of their eyeballs and ingrained in their hearing.

Here are selected verses from these two psalms:  

  “I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O Lord, make me life down in safety.”

  “My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.” A mighty fortress is our God …
 
  “You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday.”

  “When they call to me, I will answer them; I will be with them in trouble.”

Parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, all guardians and caregivers of young children: Listen up! Perhaps it is best to put away shallow bedtime rhymes such as: “Now I lay me down to sleep …” Read instead to the children Psalms 4 and 91!

IV. And so we draw the curtain close on these eight Sundays with the Psalms. The Washington Redskins have their playbook; this is our “praybook”. This is our liturgy. This is our story. This is our story that gives us our identity, our grounding, our true sense of home: Coming home (Promised Land) … Leaving home (Exile) … and Going home (Exodus). Our story … Our home.

The great Reformers – Luther, Calvin, et. al. – got it ... they really did. Many of them concluded that our 150 psalms articulate the whole gospel in a nutshell. They were driven in their spiritual passion precisely by their use and study of the psalms.

Maybe – just maybe – we could learn today from such a focus. Maybe – just maybe – we can learn to stay open, stay surprised, and “fear not.”

In his wonderful book The Message of the Psalms, Walter Brueggemann writes, “(Our) dominant culture is … resistant to genuine awareness and real surprise. It is curious but true, that surprise is as unwelcome as is loss. And our culture is organized to prevent the experience of both.”

Surprise and loss. Can’t avoid them, when a member of our congregation offers in her public prayer last week these words for our newest member: “Interesting things will happen to you here.”

  Surprise and loss. Can’t avoid them, when I pray each and every Sunday before Worship these words: “Lord, let something happen today that’s not in our bulletin!” 

  Surprise and loss. Can’t avoid them, when a choir member gets lost in the notes and suddenly springs alive with the sheer emotion of what is being sung.

  Surprise and loss. Can’t avoid them, when we read – when we study – when we meditate over the psalms.

And so our job is to let go – to simply let go. Let go of the controls. Let go, and let God speak. Speak to your story, through these wonderful sung prayers known as the Psalms.

Fear not. That is the psalmist’s election plea to us all. For faith begins not by knowing what the future holds. Faith begins by knowing who holds the future.
 

¹Jeremy W. Peters, “Cry of GOP in Campaign: All Is Dismal,” New York Times, October 9, 2014.

 

²Roger Cohen, “A Climate of Fear,” New York Times, October 27, 2014.

³Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 157.

 

 

An Inside Job

Message for Sunday, February 9, 2014

 

  

Scripture   Matthew 5:13-16

Dear Jesus:

In John’s gospel we hear you testify: “I am the light of the world.”

And now we hear you say of us in Matthew’s gospel: “You are the light of the world.” 

  Now tell us, dear Jesus: Which should we believe?

Take a step back, you say? Okay: We will. For what’s this you say about a Gospel of Thomas? …

 

How many of us have heard of the so-called Gospel of Thomas? It’s not in our biblical canon, of course – and yet it’s a recent find I think we all need to know about. A little background, if I may; this is important, and at the risk of sounding dry …

The Thomas manuscript was discovered in Egypt in 1945. Many scholars believe it provides invaluable insight into the oral traditions that gave rise to our four standard gospels. There are no narratives in the Gospel of Thomas. It consists only of sayings attributed to Jesus.

The reason I share all this: Many of Jesus’ sayings here are found later in remarkably similar fashion in Matthew and Luke’s gospels. One of those sayings forms the basis for Jesus’ words we hear to his disciples today: “You are the light of the world.” 

Interestingly, there seems to have been an ancient clash between the “You are the light of the world” Jesus in Thomas and the “I am the light of the world” Jesus in John. Parallels between the two suggest that Thomas' work preceded John's work, and that John then issued a point-by-point rejoinder to Thomas.

 

Case-in-point: John’s foil we know as Doubting Thomas. You may recall that in John’s Gospel, when the resurrected Jesus appears to the other disciples,  Thomas did not believe what they told him: “We have seen the risen Lord!” He needed visual proof. When the risen Christ gave it to him, he shouted out that great confessional oath: “My Lord and my God!” One can almost hear John in the narrative background: “Gotcha, Thomas! The light is Jesus, and not in you! You’ve come around!”

In Thomas’ work – which again directly influenced Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount – resurrection is not mentioned as an external Jesus-centered event. Resurrection of one’s life is experienced through personal epiphany, teased out from us by Jesus: “You are the light of the world!” John’s gospel, however, has Thomas – again, his foil – experiencing only Jesus’ resurrection, and in so doing confessing John’s core truth: Only Jesus can be the true light and the true Lord.

 

So, friends – in the words of the late folk singer Pete Seeger: Which side are you on? The recently-discovered Gospel of Thomas, reflected by Matthew’s Jesus today: Jesus says, “You are the light of the world?” Or, do you side with the Gospel of John: Jesus says, “‘I am the light of the world.’”?

Joe Bunker has been helpful to me here. At 66 years and counting, Joe is our longest active member in our congregation. Going back to the first post-World War II years, Joe has seen a lot here – and has many stories to share.

And one story Joe has shared with me I share with you now with his permission. It seems that in the mid-1980s, Joe was approached in a restaurant by another member of this church. This was a time when our pastor was the late Tal Haynes, and there was a great controversy swirling: Tal had divorced his wife and one year later, with nary an announcement, married the church organist. Add that to the fact that Tal labored in the great Carl Pritchett’s shadow, and you can see where this was going: Some defended Tal, some wanted him out. Our church was divided; in a handful of years, we lost over half of our membership.

Back to Joe’s restaurant encounter. His friend approached him and asked, “Which side are you on?” Joe reports that he responded, “I’m not on anybody’s side!”

Guess who remains faithful to this church to this day. “I’m not on anybody’s side.”

Guess how God might want us to remain faithful today to the gospels passed down in our scriptures to us. Which side are you? Not anybody’s side – really. Regardless of what Jesus may or may not have said, I find it can be a faithful stance today to embrace the words found in Matthew and the ones found in John: “Jesus said, ‘You are the light of the world,’ and “Jesus said, ‘I am the light of the world.’”

Let me suggest we embrace both. That we move beyond the search for discrepancy to discover integrity, from reveling in that Thomas-and-John conflict to enjoying our scripture’s harmony. Let me suggest we lay stake to this claim: God’s Epiphany light cannot be quenched however it shines – through Christ, or through us as in Christ. That God’s Epiphany light is found by Jesus through us, and found by us “in Christ”, as the Apostle Paul liked to put it. John and Matthew – Matthew borrowing from Thomas – are both “right”.

 

Now, saying that … it’s the words of Matthew’s Jesus we encounter today, and not John’s Jesus. So let me preach on these for just a little while!

Jesus says to us today, “You are the light of the world” – and he says to us as well, “You are the salt of the earth.” These are bold claims. Claims I find sorely need to be heard in this day and time by a mainline Protestant church such as ours.

For we mainline Protestants are no longer the Church of the Promised Land: when Time magazine loved us, Presidents cozied up to us, and governments on all levels took their moral cues from us. Today, we mainline Protestants are more of a Church of the Exile, if not the Exodus: holy remnants, if you will, either exiled by contemporary worship and megachurch interests, or wandering in our religious desert of an exodus while movements calling themselves “spiritual” sprout up all about us.

In this Exile-and-Exodus context, then, let us hear Jesus’ words afresh: “You are the light of the world … You are the salt of the earth!” For this is a day and age when the Christ-God of the Gospel of John – long emphasized by our Protestant forebears – no longer serves us well alone. This is a day and age we need take our cues from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well. That Jesus does not just work outside-in for us: “I am the light of the world – pouring down on you, laminating your Promised Land power!” We need to be reminded today that – lo and behold! – Jesus empowers us by pointing out what’s already inside and about each of us. What’s already inside and about us, that we might not only survive but thrive in an increasingly barren land.

Light, salt, dare I say joy – all of this, Jesus is teaching us today: we, a church in cultural exile and exodus.

All of this, we are learning anew, is an inside job.

An inside job intimately connected with Jesus' central Good News claim -- which is not and is never Jesus, himself! I invite each of us to hear in these bold words -- "You are the light of the world, You are the salt of the earth" -- familiar echoes of Jesus' Good News: the kingdom of God, among and within us!

If our Good News which is God’s kingdom – some would say “kin-dom” – is to be shared, we must let it shine anew, from within ourselves. Let us look from within – not from without -- and not from an illusion of being without. Let us forget institutional identity – what the preacher says or how the preacher says it – and let us forget Christ from on-high if you have to: Jesus is calling us to emanate saltiness from within – caught more than it is taught. Jesus is inspiring us to glow all about – not reflect and refract him in the stained glass, all around us.

I love Bette Midler -- and I have an issue with one of her most popular songs. Its refrain means a lot to some; this perspective is mine alone. Midler’s refrain: “God is watching us from a distance.”

Friends, our transcendent experience in this transcendent sanctuary need not be a removed experience – removed from God or one another. The light of the season of Epiphany may have begun with its emanation and illumination from this distant star over Bethlehem. And yet Matthew’s Jesus five short Sundays later – and three short chapters later – now has it radiating from a radically different and intimate place: the lampstand of our lives, with the lampshade removed.

Salt, light – the joy of the gospel:  We cannot give it to ourselves or even give it to the world. From Jesus to the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we are told: the salt, the light, the joy are a given – already present, in ourselves!

Picking up from Thomas’ cues -- Matthew’s Jesus, like Mark’s and Luke’s, teaches us this, and teaches us well: The Good News of God’s kingdom is an inside job. And our task is to evoke that from inside others, as well.

 

The story goes that three men from the East – the evil triplets of the magi of the Epiphany – took from humanity the crown of life: the thing that would make us the most joyful. They said to each other, “Now that we’ve taken the crown of life away from the humans, where are we going to hide it?”

“I know!” the first of the three said. “We will take it up to the highest crevice on the highest mountain and we’ll hide it there!” “No way,” the other two said, “You know how humans are. They’ll hunt, and they’ll search, and they’ll eventually find it there.” The second one said, “I know what we’ll do! We will take it to the deepest, darkest crevice of the deepest, darkest ocean and hide it there – they’ll never think about looking for it there.” The other two shook their heads: “You know how they are – these humans: They’ll hunt, and they’ll search, and they’ll eventually find it there.”

They pondered some more. Finally, the third came up with the solution they all could agree upon: “We’ll hide the crown of life – this thing that will make them most joyful – and put it inside of them. They’ll never think to look for it there!”

The Beatitudes: "Arise!"

Message for Sunday, February 2, 2014



Scripture    Matthew 5:1-12

In his final book A Man Without a Country, the late Kurt Vonnegut noted that some Christians want the Ten Commandments posted in public places, but none seem to want to do the same with the Beatitudes: “ ‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom?” he wrote. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”¹

Let’s bring it back home: How about posting the Beatitudes in our church? Any church?

The Sermon on the Mount is making a comeback these days . Among many recent offerings on the subject, Hans Dieter Betz of the University of Chicago has written this massive tome – all this, on three chapters of scripture! In his 88-page introduction, Betz writes: “The conflict between the authority attributed to the Sermon on the Mount … and the realities of common church life and history has never escaped astute observers inside and outside the church.”

Which may explain why the church institutional in the twentieth century largely ignored these three chapters of collected teachings. For example: the three-year Sunday biblical guide for many, if not most, mainline Protestant pastors – known as the Revised Common Lectionary – only stretches through the first of the three Sermon on the Mount chapters in its triennial cycle. And then only if the cycles of the moon dictate a late Easter, which means a late Lent, which means a longer Epiphany season. And it’s only with a longer Epiphany that Matthew 5 is added as “filler”. Luke’s shorter, and probably earlier, version – known as Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain – suffers a similar fate.

And an interesting fate this is, for teachings so universally influential that spiritual thinkers from Tolstoy to Gandhi, from Christian mystics to Islamic scholars, have extolled all three chapters of its ethical riches. Words that Betz identifies as the “epitome” of Christ’ teachings.²

Why this lectionary oversight? Why this conflict – this discomfort – this dis-ease – between Sermon on the Mount and the church?

Maybe it’s not so much our conflict over or discomfort with the Sermon on the Mount that prompts us to cast these teachings to the discipleship sidelines. A recent nationwide poll of Christians from many denominations revealed that nearly three out of four of us who know what the Sermon on the Mount is about consider it to have very little relevance to our contemporary life.³

The Sermon on the Mount: It’s been seen as irrelevant. Even though churches for nearly twenty centuries used this carefully-defined unit of teaching as a reliable guide for church membership preparation. Even though it is beautifully designed for catechetical instruction, and “studied more intensively, quoted more frequently” over time than any other text in Matthew.

 

And yet our last hundred years of world history seem to have swept its relevance away. What with two world wars around a great worldwide depression, and a Cold War and all its satellite “hot” wars, the promise of the progressive movement in the North Atlantic world at the beginning of the last century proved both utopian and naïve to many. Worldwide, more persons perished as a result of warfare in the 1900s than in all previous human history combined. Starvation, beyond compare and imagination. A Holocaust. Worse: Stalin’s Great Purge. Ethnic cleansing.

So much for the hubris of Protestants millions a century ago, planning to “win the world for Christ by 2000” – an ideal swept away by realpolitik and total war. For with the sowing of the first bullets of World War I, and the reaping of national enmities that followed, a famine of interest in the Sermon on the Mount’s concept of a divine kingdom “on earth, as it is in heaven” swept over the face of Christendom. While amidst this kingdom famine sprang forth the tender first shoots of postmodernism, grafted to astonishing theories of relativity, convincing us out of war’s rubble that there was no ultimate objective truth…

But wait: There is ultimate, objective truth. Not that we might ever arrive at that truth – not in this lifetime. But the Sermon on the Mount presents us with a road-map for that truth that beckons us: Come along on the journey! As one wag puts it, it may seem all relative – but, then again, we are all related!

And so along this journey we go! Gathering at Jesus’ feet with his disciples now, those we are told who “came to him” to hear him. Beginning to listen to this epitome of Jesus’ teachings, metaphorically spoken from a mountain: the place ancients considered the “navel” of the universe between heaven and earth. Listening to Jesus instructing, in Matthew’s context, Jewish and Gentile Christians both how to live among each other, and among the world.

The Sermon on the Mount. It all begins with today’s series of blessings and promises known as the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit … those who mourn … the meek (i.e., the powerless) … Blessed are the merciful … the pure in heart … the peacemakers … the persecuted …” And he’s blessing “you” – you plural. He’s speaking to a community of disciples, here.

 

“Blessed are … Blessed are … Blessed are …” – What to make of all these blessed “blesseds”?

Some of you might recall the Good News Bible, so popular in the 1970s. “Blessed” came to us in that translation as “Happy.” A feel-good word, for a feel-good generation.

And yet, Jesus spoke in a Semitic context, and Matthew, the most Jewish Christian of all the gospel writers, understood this well. And in the Semitic context – conveyed well by our Hebrew scriptures – the concept of righteousness is key to blessedness. As in this Beatitude: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” Righteousness: meaning, doing right by God by doing right by others.

The Greek makarios – translated “Blessed” – does not convey well the active and righteous Semitic understanding behind it. Elias Chacour, who knows Jesus’ Semitic vernacular – Aramaic – suggests a more active verb.

Chacour is an Eastern Orthodox priest from Galilee – and now archbishop of areas that include his home region. He has worked tirelessly for justice for his fellow Palestinians and reconciliation with the Jewish people in Israel.

We come closest to the true meaning of the Beatitudes, Chacour states, when we understand the active, righteousness-laden Aramaic equivalent of the Greek word translated “blessed”. For in Jesus’ native language of Aramaic, Chacour notes, to be blessed is to wake up – or get up – or stand up. To ... Arise! As in, “Get up, arise, you poor in spirit … Arise, you who mourn … Arise, you who are meek …” Participatory words, rather than being blessed as a spectator.

"Arise!" It is a joyful, uplifting word –midst reminders of the world’s brokenness all around us. “Arise – Arise – Arise!” Take action! As in Jesus’ very active words subsequent to the Beatitudes we will hear next week: Be salty! Let your light shine! Don’t keep it under a bushel! Don’t just say, as a people of hospitality, “Here we sit – y’all come!” Shout out to the world, “Here we stand – y’all come!” Be a people of conviction: teaching and preaching and encouraging those most vulnerable to arise!

Here’s to Jesus the Jew, teaching his audience anew, the weepers, the persecuted, the approximately one-half of the Roman Empire world at that time suffering in debt slavery, that they – that we – are all created in God’s image, and we can therefore stand up – arise – for the sake of basic human dignity! A dignity that transforms persons and communities and churches anew, bringing us alive!

Beginning with the right to worship freely. Beginning with the right to speak freely. And then continuing with freedoms we seldom discuss, so central to Jesus’ ideas of blessings: The right to eat. The right to be clothed. The right to have adequate shelter. The right to have quality and affordable health care. These are, indeed, rights – and we have a responsibility as Christians to ensure those rights.

Enslaved, ensnared, entrapped at times as we may feel today, in the midst of violence and vulnerabilities and social stratifications of endless varieties, we can take heart in the empowerment these Beatitudes provide. Not that our lives might become more orderly. But that our lives, and the lives of those around us, might become more just.

  Dare we long for God’s kingdom: the freedom to be loved?

  Dare we pray for God’s kingdom: the freedom to be heard?

  Dare we work for God’s kingdom: the freedom to be fed?

 

With these holy rights come – as ever – holy responsibilities, so others may enjoy them as well. We shall hear of some of those responsibilities in next Sunday’s message: Sermon on the Mount, Part 2.

Until next week, then: Arise! You mournful, meek, and merciful – you poor, pure, peacemakers, and persecuted: Arise! For it’s you who shall be loved. For it’s you who shall be heard. For it’s you who shall be fed. You: the salt and light of the world.

  You – Yes, You: Arise!

 

¹Kurt Vonnegut, quoting Eugene V. Debs, in A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories Press, 1995), p. 81.

²Hans Dieter Betz, The Sermon on the Mount (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 1.

³Personal notes from a workshop with the Rev. Dr. David Buttrick on the Sermon on the Mount, Houghton Lake, MI, June 2004.
 

Christmas Joy: By-Product of a Journey

Pastor Chuck's Message for Sunday, December 15, 2013

Scripture   Isaiah 35:1-10

It was good to see a dozen of our number braving the elements last night for our annual Christmas Caroling at Springhouse of Bethesda. In the audience were about 30 residents. Dorothy Saporta could have been one of them.

Dorothy is a 92-years-young woman who I learned from a Facebook friend this past week has suffered much in her later years. She lost her husband a few years ago, and she has lost her sight. She was forced to move into a retirement community recently that is just – shall we say – a bit substandard.

And yet, those who know Dorothy Saporta say you wouldn’t know her pain by meeting her. She is a joyful woman. When asked the secret of her joy, she cited five rules I later found on several Google listings – with that familiar source known to us all as “Anonymous” or “Author Unknown”.

So I will cite Dorothy as my source. Here they are, then: Dorothy Saporta’s Five Rules of Joy:

 

  Hate Less.

  Worry Less.

  Expect Less.

  Live Simply.

  Give More.

Contrary to the seasonal expectations permeating our December air: For Dorothy Saporta, joy is not dependent on getting what we want. It is not presented to us.

Joy is a by-product of Journey. An Advent journey. A season – like Lent is to Easter – of cleaning spiritual house.

Four of Dorothy’s Five Rules of Joy are about cleaning house. They are about divestment, not investment. They are not about adding Xmas more. They are about freeing self from.

  Hate Less. 

  Worry Less.

  Expect Less.

  Live Simply.  

Wish someone would have shared these rules of joy with Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, while he was busy soliciting votes for last week’s municipal elections.

On November 2, Maduro announced the official arrival in his country of “early Christmas.” He said all workers would receive the first two-thirds of their bonuses and pensions November 10-11. (And yes, his party won most of those municipal elections.) That same day, Maduro lit the Nativity lights at the presidential palace. He announced, “Merry Christmas 2013. Christmas (has come) early, (with) early happiness for the whole family.” Later, he added, “We wanted to declare the arrival of Christmas because we want happiness for everyone.”

That surprising announcement came a week after Maduro had created a new cabinet post: Deputy Minister of Supreme Happiness.

  I am not making this up.

  And we laugh.

But now that our Black Friday has dipped its claws into the Thanksgiving gravy, what digits have we left to wag at Maduro? “Early Christmas,” “(supreme) happiness for everyone”: He’s singing our song!

And then, midst this Hallelujah Chorus, we hear Dorothy Saporta speak:

  Hate less.

  Worry Less.

  Expect Less.

  Live Simply.

The path to true joy. Joy the by-product of less, not more. Not crowding our spaces with consumer trampling. But making room in our inn for God’s grace abounding.

The prophet Isaiah today envisions a desert where flowers unfold and waters spring. All originating from his people’s spaces of emptiness. All from his people’s places of less. All to a people scattered – lost – in their fragmented and fractured world of exile.

Only a people laid bare by the horrors of their Babylonian abduction could take such joy from their God of justice restoring them to their Zion home. For here, we read – among other lilting verse – “Then the lame shall leap like a deer,/and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy … the burning sand shall become a pool … the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp.”

After reading Isaiah, I no longer wonder why Gandhi smiled so much. After hearing him cry, “Glory!” I no longer wonder why Mandela beamed.

Prophets know joy! And their joy is always a by-product of a journey. “A highway shall be there,” Isaiah writes today, “and it shall be called the Holy Way.” A highway home. “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return … everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.” Everlasting joy that the first Christians understood – calling themselves not Christians, but The Way. Simply … The Way.

Prophets know joy! And they know the basis for their people’s joy.  Joy found not in getting or being given Xmas more, but found in their journey of Advent less:

  Hate less.

  Worry less.

  Expect less.

  Live simply.

… and, oh yes: One “more.” One more: the fifth of Dorothy Saporta’s Five Rules of Joy:

  Give more.

Rabindranath Tagore was a great Bengali polymath: a poet, a dramatist, a musician, an artist, a humanist … and more. Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore once wrote this – and I feel like this each Christmas “season”: “I slept and dreamed that life was happiness. I awoke and saw that life was service. I served and found that in service happiness was found.”

Friends in Christ: I invite you to wake up with me from our ‘Tis the Season stupor. Lulled into commercial slumber, visions of sugar plum innocence dancing in our heads, we are told that in order to be happy, we simply turn aside from the world’s injustices and go back to shopping.

Wake up with me and discover the life that is service. Wake up with me, and partake of this table of sacrifice. Wake up, to where happiness – joy – is then to be found.

Wake up with me, and maybe – just maybe – give gifts this season as my older brother Tom insists gifts are to be given: for a redemptive cause, chosen by the gift’s recipient.

Wake up, and hear our Lord and Savior, saying: Join me – like Isaiah – on this justice journey. Join me in partaking of the sacrifice I have made. Let the brokenness of the world and the cup of my redemption be your journey, too.

Live a life of less: hate, worry, expectation, things. Let your bread of self be broken into less, that your cup may runneth over with God’s pools of grace.

Be a pool of healing for God’s longsuffering, “early Christmas” world.

Join me on this journey, Jesus says: to the joy that cannot be attained without one!

 

Humility: We Need Each Other

December 8, 2013

Scripture   Isaiah 11:1-10

I. I have served as an ordained pastor now for nearly two decades – and three church staff positions before that.

And unlike the gentleman holding the “I Am Humble” sign at the top of our bulletin today, I would say that thanks to my pastoral experience, my sign reads, “I Have Been Humbled.”

And I have been humbled. I have been humbled by the experience of standing up in Worship one day and exclaiming, “Something’s wrong with my microphone.” And the congregation responded as one, “And also with you!”

And I have been humbled by the sign I found on the warm air hand-blower in the men’s restroom at my last church: “Press Here for a Message from Your Pastor.”

And I have been humbled by the woman who approached me after Worship today and said, “Pastor Chuck, I so enjoy your sermons. They are always better than the next one.”

And I have been humbled by the same woman who then asked me when I was going to publish my sermons. “Well,” I said, flattered, “I am thinking about setting aside a few of my favorites and having them published posthumously.” “Oh,” she replied, “That can’t happen too soon!”

Even after all these humbling experiences: I have never awakened one morning and convincingly said, “I Am Humble.” Humility is not part of my individual emotional make-up.

Nor do I think humility is a part of anyone's emotional make-up. For I believe humility is intrinsically relational. It is something I receive in relationship with others, and with God’s universe. It’s not a virtue I have acquired or can acquire unto myself. It’s a result of what I learn from being alive.

Humility is intrinsically relational. Humility is learning over and over and over again that I have more sources from which to receive than from which to give. Humility for me is – in one word – teachability.

Humility means we need each other.

II. The prophet Isaiah today offers his longsuffering people a vision of the renewal of God's promise at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. The Captivity occurred in the sixth century BCE when the Hebrew leaders of Judah were captured and deported hundreds of miles east to Babylon.

Humbled they were, these captured leaders. And humbled we are, the presumed leaders of the free world, when we realize – captive or free – that we cannot make any hard journey alone.

We need help. Each of us needs help.

And yet, we deny it. For I have discovered there are three words I rarely hear church people say. Three words I believe are words of true humility: “I … need … help!”

Oh, we love to help – we church people. We need to be needed. Instead, we are so afraid of being seen as needy.

And yet, to need help doesn’t mean we are needy. To need help means we are human. (And we must be human to be humane.) To openly express our need for help means we have given up being godly or playing God – at least for the moment.

Humility: We need each other.

Can you say it with me? Let’s say it together: “I … Need … Help!”

In the words of Mister Rogers: "There. I knew you could!"

I knew you could – we all could – be humbled.

III. And so many of us can be humbled – needing each other’s help – as we approach one of the most difficult seasons for more people than any other.

“Oh, it’s the most wonderful time of the yearrrr”, we hear – for so many! And because our culture preaches and teaches and reaches out to tell us, every caroling moment of every Christmasy day, that it should be that way for all of us  … more and more and more, we buy into these unrealistic expectations which are nothing but resentments waiting to happen.

Or, if you are like many I know: You never bought into those expectations to begin with. You are instead tempted into the sadness of being reminded once again that the Christmas cheer of some nostalgic past will not be re-created. That Christ child innocence will be with you no more.

Which is why we’re having our first-ever Blue Christmas service two Saturdays hence. A time of meditative Worship at 5 pm – immediately following the falling of the sun on the Winter Solstice – when many of us can come together in this transept of the sanctuary with carols, candles, prayers, and the memory of a loved one – which we may wish to share, and will have the opportunity to share. This Longest Night service – December 21 – will honor the grief of the holiday season for many. BPC – this Place for Healing – will offer healing and hope to those who desire it: your family – your friends – it could even be you.

A time not when we can be humble, but when we can practice humility. Leaning on each other. Needing each other. Saying in the presence of our sisters and brothers, in the cacophony of God’s compassion – in the whisper of the Spirit – in the stillness and presence and hearing of one another – three simple words: “I … need … help.”

It’s not a Christmas gift we need to be given. Not yet, at least.

It’s an Advent gift, on the other side of Hope: The gift of Humility. Needing each other. Hearing others say – hearing ourselves say – “I … need … help.”

IV. It’s the Advent hope and humility from a prophet today who envisions fraternal shoots from national stumps … and spiritual branches from religious roots.

And it’s the fraternal spirit – versus the national religiosity – of reaching out that grows faith community in the most surprising and grace-full ways … if we but “shoot” and “branch” ourselves just a little this season.

Not to give just the right gift. Not to catch just the right spirit. To extend ourselves – our presence – to one another. We church people need each other – and need to reach others – in a Xmas culture gone Xmas mad. We church people need each other – and need to reach others – with an open heart and tender soul that says to one another: “Do you need help? Well: I need help, too!”

Help we receive when we approach this Lord’s Table with an open heart – and an open mind – and a willing and welcoming spirit this day …