It’s always interesting to me when we discover that doing the right thing is also doing the thing that works. In so many cases, it turns out that the idealistic path is also the practical one. For instance, Jesus told us that life was about loving our neighbor, even our enemies, and that only those who lose their lives for his sake and for the gospel will truly save them. The ideal he gave us is to love others selflessly.
In recent years, psychologists have applied rigorous study to the experience of human happiness and have found that happiness does not come from riches or entertainment - although a basic level of food, shelter, and comfort is still a must. Instead, happiness comes from human connections and from service in a greater cause. Loving service is not just the right thing to do, it is also the only pragmatic way to live with the deep happiness we long for. The ideal is what works.
Loving your enemy is often disregarded as naïve and unrealistic. The conventional wisdom these days is that we must wipe out our enemies, especially in a world in which terrorism is such a horrific threat. But Jesus preached a different way. He and his disciples practiced nonviolence, and later the church fathers created a “just war theory” in order to define the very narrow criteria under which the careful use of force could be justified as a necessary evil by preventing a greater violence. Two of the criteria are that the use of force may not cause more suffering than it is certain to prevent, and that force may never affect innocent civilian populations. You can tell right away that this theory comes from a century in which battles took place on battlefields far from civilian homes. The strict criteria for just war are meant to remind us that violence is tragic, even when we use it toward good. Many would argue that modern weaponry and warfare is, by definition, never justified, because it always involves civilians and collateral damage. It could never meet the criteria for a just war.
But all of that is just a nice ideal, right? It doesn’t work in the real world. Well, it turns out that it does. The RAND Corporation is a non-profit institution committed to researching public policy. It began during World War II, and is commissioned by government branches, including the Pentagon. RAND recently finished a study of terrorist groups since 1968, and found that most terrorist groups end because 1) they become incorporated into the local political process or 2) they are brought down by local police who arrest or kill key leaders. RAND further recommended that the concept of “war on terror” was not effective.
So it turns out that building political relationships or using force in a small-scale, specific way is not just the ideal recognized by Christian tradition. It’s also what works.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Sermon - Discerning the Will of God
Preached on August 24, 2008 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.
Exodus 1:8-20; Romans 12:1-8
The title of this sermon comes from our reading from Romans. We’re talking about the will of God. But let’s be clear from the start: doing the will of God is never, ever what it takes to earn God’s favor, love, and mercy. That’s not the message of Jesus. We don’t exist as a church in order to crack down on the world and force it to follow the will of God – or else! That’s a rule-based, bookkeeping religion: keeping track of our good and bad deeds to see if we measure up. That kind of religion has never been effective, and it has not made God happy.
We are here because God gives us life and loves us more than we can ever know. God loves us just as we are, whether we know even the first thing about what God’s will is. So I have to say all of that before we come in here today and think about this passage from the 12th chapter of Paul’s letter to Rome, which is, after all, over halfway through the letter, and only comes after a lot of stuff about how much God loves us, through Jesus Christ, just as we are.
So we’ve got to start with God’s grace, and maybe we should just preach about that every Sunday from now until the end of our lives because that simple message of God’s unconditional love has been so badly damaged in the history of the church. And even so, God still continues to get through to love us, and when we come to know the love of God, when we feel ourselves surrounded and made anew by the grace of God, then we find ourselves overflowing with this holy gratitude, with love that seeks to give back, that wants to live in God because no other kind of living seems nearly as compelling or as fulfilling. So then we become interested in discerning the will of God so that we might live more fully.
This is exactly the place where Paul is at the start of chapter 12 in his letter to the church in Rome. (Actually, chapter 12 is just what we call it; to Paul it was just a letter: no chapters or verses). The entire beginning of the letter is about the good news of God’s love for us, shown in Jesus Christ. That’s my summary. Paul tends to be a bit more complex, but that’s what he’s saying. Here’s a good excerpt from what we call chapter 8 (verses 38-39):
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That’s the first word about God and the most important word for the church. It is only after that word that Paul arrives at discerning the will of God. Listen again to his words we heard before.
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice…. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
When Paul writes “therefore, in view of the mercies of God” he’s telling us that following the will of God is not a test of our worth or the payment we must make to appease God, but is actually what we naturally seek after we experience God’s love and realize that a Godly life is the fullest and most compelling way to live.
I sometimes use Paul’s language when I lead the prayer for our offering during worship. I say “with eyes wide open to your mercies for us, to all that you have given us, we offer these gifts.” We don’t make an offering to earn God’s love but because God has already shown great love for us.
Paul tells the church in Rome to offer their bodies as living sacrifices in view of the mercies of God, which is a way of saying that what God wants more than any empty ritual is for us to live the way that way that Jesus lived, to live by the will of God. But what is the will of God? How do we answer that question about our own lives, about our major decisions or our priorities?
I won’t try to define point by point what the will of God is for us. I don’t think we can define it so much as we can point to what it looks like, as we do week by week here in worship. This morning we have clues in our scripture readings. Paul gives us an important clue when he writes “do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed. The writer Flannery O’Connor put it another way by paraphrasing the words of Jesus: “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.” That seems to be the way of Jesus, because when we enter the kingdom of God, it is different than the other kingdoms and it makes us different. Two quick examples: First, the followers of Jesus were not the only ones who were critical of the brutal occupation of the Roman Empire, but they were the odd ones who did not take up swords against it. Secondly, the followers of Jesus were odd because they welcomed gentiles and Jews and treated slaves as equals.
The will of God is life affirming and outward reaching, and this often does not conform to the world’s motives of power and fear. We see what this looks like in the passage we heard this morning from the book of Exodus.
A little background: Last week we heard about how the families Jacob’s twelve sons flourished in Egypt, thanks to their brother Joseph’s preparation for the great famine, which saved the Egypt from hunger. At the beginning of the story in Exodus, we move many generations into the future, and the families have grown to become a great people, a growing ethnic group in a foreign land, and a new king rises in Egypt who does not remember Joseph’s relationship to the old king, and Joseph’s great work on the Egypt’s behalf. This sets the stage for a timeless story, one that is tragically and horrifically made new in every century. One nation, two rival ethnic groups. It is the story of the Jews in Egypt, repeated in for the Jews under the German Third Reich and Hitler’s final solution. It is the story of Tutsis in Rwanda at the hand of the Hutus. It is the story of the Darfur region, where scarcity of water and fertile land has led to genocidal abuse and murder of one ethnic group by the other. In our own country, the sad history of the Native Americans and the Africans sold here in chains is a legacy to remind us of that the evil abuses of power are not exclusive to other people.
It’s important to read these old stories because they keep us from thinking: well it was all well and fine to do the will of God, love your enemies and all that back in Bible times. But we live in a different world where evil has to be attacked and defeated. That thinking doesn’t hold up when you realize that Bible times had their own genocide. In the time of Jesus, Rome was hanging its enemies on crosses by the thousands. The world of the Bible is our world. Pharaoh said “kill the Hebrew’s baby boys,” and the story is repeated over, and over, and over again.
The order was given to the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, since they were the ones present at the birth of children. The text does not tell us, but we can imagine the threat of dire consequences for those who disobeyed Pharaoh’s word. And yet they did disobey him, allowing the babies to live and cleverly claiming that the mothers gave birth too quickly for them to arrive one the scene.
These midwives are heroes, bold examples of living by the will of God, refusing to participate in violence, and working instead to give life. Most of us will never be asked to make such an obvious choice. Orders to kill are given in many parts of the world, but thank God, not in our neighborhoods. But we must ask ourselves another question: do we participate in systems of sin? Do we participate in injustice by our own fear, or in our silence, by which we condone realities like the imprisonment of vast numbers of men and women with mental illness and addiction, or a foreign policy that chooses investment in weapons over investment in diplomacy and human intelligence? Unlike the Hebrew midwives, no one will order us to take a life. Instead, they ask us quietly not to notice.
But what can we do about problems of such great scale? Our own lives are trials enough, aren’t they? What can we do that will make a difference? Shiphrah and Puah did it one birth at a time. One small act at a time – but what difference would that make? Well, what if each person, once a day, dropped one piece of paper on the ground? It’s only one piece. What difference would that make?
The will of God is done by those who follow an alternative way of living, one act at a time. It starts with speaking up in conversation when people are being put down. It starts with your one voice in the political system. It starts with your small act of generosity. It starts with your kindness to someone who is of a different race, class, or religion to counteract a history of fear and suspicion.
This is a great life, a compelling life. Living by the will of God releases us from fear and insecurity, although we will confront those feelings again and again. Living the will of God is something we seek because God’s love redeems us and frees us to love others because the love we received is overflowing. In view of God’s mercies, let us be transformed, that we may discern the will of God.
Exodus 1:8-20; Romans 12:1-8
The title of this sermon comes from our reading from Romans. We’re talking about the will of God. But let’s be clear from the start: doing the will of God is never, ever what it takes to earn God’s favor, love, and mercy. That’s not the message of Jesus. We don’t exist as a church in order to crack down on the world and force it to follow the will of God – or else! That’s a rule-based, bookkeeping religion: keeping track of our good and bad deeds to see if we measure up. That kind of religion has never been effective, and it has not made God happy.
We are here because God gives us life and loves us more than we can ever know. God loves us just as we are, whether we know even the first thing about what God’s will is. So I have to say all of that before we come in here today and think about this passage from the 12th chapter of Paul’s letter to Rome, which is, after all, over halfway through the letter, and only comes after a lot of stuff about how much God loves us, through Jesus Christ, just as we are.
So we’ve got to start with God’s grace, and maybe we should just preach about that every Sunday from now until the end of our lives because that simple message of God’s unconditional love has been so badly damaged in the history of the church. And even so, God still continues to get through to love us, and when we come to know the love of God, when we feel ourselves surrounded and made anew by the grace of God, then we find ourselves overflowing with this holy gratitude, with love that seeks to give back, that wants to live in God because no other kind of living seems nearly as compelling or as fulfilling. So then we become interested in discerning the will of God so that we might live more fully.
This is exactly the place where Paul is at the start of chapter 12 in his letter to the church in Rome. (Actually, chapter 12 is just what we call it; to Paul it was just a letter: no chapters or verses). The entire beginning of the letter is about the good news of God’s love for us, shown in Jesus Christ. That’s my summary. Paul tends to be a bit more complex, but that’s what he’s saying. Here’s a good excerpt from what we call chapter 8 (verses 38-39):
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That’s the first word about God and the most important word for the church. It is only after that word that Paul arrives at discerning the will of God. Listen again to his words we heard before.
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice…. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
When Paul writes “therefore, in view of the mercies of God” he’s telling us that following the will of God is not a test of our worth or the payment we must make to appease God, but is actually what we naturally seek after we experience God’s love and realize that a Godly life is the fullest and most compelling way to live.
I sometimes use Paul’s language when I lead the prayer for our offering during worship. I say “with eyes wide open to your mercies for us, to all that you have given us, we offer these gifts.” We don’t make an offering to earn God’s love but because God has already shown great love for us.
Paul tells the church in Rome to offer their bodies as living sacrifices in view of the mercies of God, which is a way of saying that what God wants more than any empty ritual is for us to live the way that way that Jesus lived, to live by the will of God. But what is the will of God? How do we answer that question about our own lives, about our major decisions or our priorities?
I won’t try to define point by point what the will of God is for us. I don’t think we can define it so much as we can point to what it looks like, as we do week by week here in worship. This morning we have clues in our scripture readings. Paul gives us an important clue when he writes “do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed. The writer Flannery O’Connor put it another way by paraphrasing the words of Jesus: “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.” That seems to be the way of Jesus, because when we enter the kingdom of God, it is different than the other kingdoms and it makes us different. Two quick examples: First, the followers of Jesus were not the only ones who were critical of the brutal occupation of the Roman Empire, but they were the odd ones who did not take up swords against it. Secondly, the followers of Jesus were odd because they welcomed gentiles and Jews and treated slaves as equals.
The will of God is life affirming and outward reaching, and this often does not conform to the world’s motives of power and fear. We see what this looks like in the passage we heard this morning from the book of Exodus.
A little background: Last week we heard about how the families Jacob’s twelve sons flourished in Egypt, thanks to their brother Joseph’s preparation for the great famine, which saved the Egypt from hunger. At the beginning of the story in Exodus, we move many generations into the future, and the families have grown to become a great people, a growing ethnic group in a foreign land, and a new king rises in Egypt who does not remember Joseph’s relationship to the old king, and Joseph’s great work on the Egypt’s behalf. This sets the stage for a timeless story, one that is tragically and horrifically made new in every century. One nation, two rival ethnic groups. It is the story of the Jews in Egypt, repeated in for the Jews under the German Third Reich and Hitler’s final solution. It is the story of Tutsis in Rwanda at the hand of the Hutus. It is the story of the Darfur region, where scarcity of water and fertile land has led to genocidal abuse and murder of one ethnic group by the other. In our own country, the sad history of the Native Americans and the Africans sold here in chains is a legacy to remind us of that the evil abuses of power are not exclusive to other people.
It’s important to read these old stories because they keep us from thinking: well it was all well and fine to do the will of God, love your enemies and all that back in Bible times. But we live in a different world where evil has to be attacked and defeated. That thinking doesn’t hold up when you realize that Bible times had their own genocide. In the time of Jesus, Rome was hanging its enemies on crosses by the thousands. The world of the Bible is our world. Pharaoh said “kill the Hebrew’s baby boys,” and the story is repeated over, and over, and over again.
The order was given to the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, since they were the ones present at the birth of children. The text does not tell us, but we can imagine the threat of dire consequences for those who disobeyed Pharaoh’s word. And yet they did disobey him, allowing the babies to live and cleverly claiming that the mothers gave birth too quickly for them to arrive one the scene.
These midwives are heroes, bold examples of living by the will of God, refusing to participate in violence, and working instead to give life. Most of us will never be asked to make such an obvious choice. Orders to kill are given in many parts of the world, but thank God, not in our neighborhoods. But we must ask ourselves another question: do we participate in systems of sin? Do we participate in injustice by our own fear, or in our silence, by which we condone realities like the imprisonment of vast numbers of men and women with mental illness and addiction, or a foreign policy that chooses investment in weapons over investment in diplomacy and human intelligence? Unlike the Hebrew midwives, no one will order us to take a life. Instead, they ask us quietly not to notice.
But what can we do about problems of such great scale? Our own lives are trials enough, aren’t they? What can we do that will make a difference? Shiphrah and Puah did it one birth at a time. One small act at a time – but what difference would that make? Well, what if each person, once a day, dropped one piece of paper on the ground? It’s only one piece. What difference would that make?
The will of God is done by those who follow an alternative way of living, one act at a time. It starts with speaking up in conversation when people are being put down. It starts with your one voice in the political system. It starts with your small act of generosity. It starts with your kindness to someone who is of a different race, class, or religion to counteract a history of fear and suspicion.
This is a great life, a compelling life. Living by the will of God releases us from fear and insecurity, although we will confront those feelings again and again. Living the will of God is something we seek because God’s love redeems us and frees us to love others because the love we received is overflowing. In view of God’s mercies, let us be transformed, that we may discern the will of God.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Sermon - The Mystery of the Incarnation
Preached on July 27, 2008 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC, a day when we celebrated "Christmas in July”
John 1:1-14 Luke 2:8-20
Dedicated to this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
While John Shea was writing a book about the meaning of Christmas, and all of the cultural stories and legends that have grown up around it, he went one day to the library to look for the classic Dr. Seuss book about Christmas. It was July, and here is how he describes his experience:
The stacks in the children’s section have two shelves and are only three feet high. I am six feet, three inches high. The special Christmas shelf was the bottom shelf. As I was crawling around, a boy of about five, barely taller than the stacks, said, “What are you doing in here, Mister?”
“I’m looking for a book.”
“What book?”
“How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“It’s not Christmas time.”
“I know that,” I said. Then I added defensively, “I’m writing a book.”[1]
There is almost a rule that you can’t do Christmas things at the wrong time. Doesn’t it feel odd to you to be singing Christmas carols today? It feels strange to me, but I think that there is value in the unfamiliar if it gets us to look at something important with new eyes, and to hear with new ears. Here’s how I have been thinking about this Christmas in July. Think about the moment in a wedding when the bride and groom share their vows. They come to that moment surrounded by family and friends, with their close friends or relatives standing here next to them, and all looking as good as ever. They come to this spot with beautiful music, flowers, and all the traditions behind them, and all of that adds to the meaning of those words: I promise to love you, to be faithful to you, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.
That is a wonderful, holy moment. But how important it also is to think about the meaning of those words before the wedding day, and in the years after. That is our purpose in celebrating Christmas in July. The celebration of the birth of Jesus is central to our Christian faith. We proclaim Jesus as Lord and God, who was born in lowly circumstances to join our human condition and to share our common lot.
The Catholic theologian Ron Rolheiser suggests that “the central mystery within all Christianity, undergirding everything else, is the mystery of the incarnation. Unfortunately, it is also the mystery that is the most misunderstood or, more accurately, to coin a phrase, under-understood.”[2] And that is why we are centering this day on the birth of Jesus. We seek to move away from misunderstandings or under-understandings, and allow this mystery to give us life, because it is, as the angel said, “good news, which shall be for all people.”
Incarnation comes from the Latin word carnus, which means physical flesh, as in carnal or carnivore. Incarnation means that God took on human flesh. Rolheiser boils it down like this: “The mystery of the incarnation, simply stated, is the mystery of God taking on human flesh and dealing with human beings in a visible, tangible way.” Or as we heard in the gospel of John: the word, which is God, became flesh, and dwelt among us. Or, for a more direct translation of the Greek, “the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”
Incarnation is one of those churchy, theological words that gets used to describe a doctrine, or central concept of the church. I like the way that Rob Bell, a minister in Michigan, talks about doctrine.[3] He says that there are two ways to think about doctrine, one is helpful but the other is not. Sometimes we treat our doctrines like bricks. With bricks, we build a solid wall, brick by brick, of all the things one needs to believe in order to have a secure faith. Faith is seen as something vulnerable to protect, but the brick wall ends up trapping us.
Bell says that faith is more like a trampoline. The point of a trampoline is to jump, to play, to live! Doctrines are the springs in the trampoline that help us to jump. The point of religion is not our doctrines, not the springs themselves, but our doctrines do help us to live and to rise to new heights! If you are a child and you see another child jumping on a trampoline, it is almost impossible for you to not want to join in. That’s what Christian faith should look like. What an invitation!
The doctrine of the incarnation is not a test of how strong our belief is. It is a spring for our lives because it tells us that God is not distant and unconcerned; God has moved into the neighborhood. God draws close to us. That’s the God we worship. So great is God’s love for us that God comes to be with us, to live life as we live it, to be with us in even the most difficult, most painful moments of our lives. That’s what the incarnation means. Sometimes people get the idea that God sits way out there, absent from our lives except to look down and keep track of our balance of good and bad acts, to send on us reward or punishment accordingly. That’s what Job’s friends all said when his life fell apart. But Job knew better, and now we know better, because Jesus came as an answer for God’s bad reputation. We celebrate the birth of Jesus because it is in Jesus that we know God, in Jesus that we see God’s extravagant love, and in Jesus that we hear God’s passionate call for justice and mercy, for the lifting up of people who are down.
The birth of Jesus is good news, for all people, because Jesus shows us God. That is how the incarnation is mainly understood. But remember that I told you before that the incarnation is under-understood, and the part that we usually overlook is the human side of the incarnation. The mystery of the incarnation is that Jesus is both fully God and fully human. So we have in Jesus a clear way of seeing what God is like, but it also means that in Jesus we can clearly see what human beings are, or at least, what we can be. In human history we have always had the sense that we were not living up to our potential. In Jesus, we see what a fully realized human life can be, we see what the quality of our lives can be.
Wasn’t Jesus always inviting us to live as he did? He said take up your cross. He said abide in me; I am the vine and you are the branches. greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for a friend. He said I give you the keys to the kingdom: whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Jesus didn’t expect us just to see him as God and worship him. He expected us to see him as human and follow him.
Do I mean that anyone could be just like Jesus? No, I do believe that Jesus was the definitive revelation of God in human form. But we should not think that Jesus was so different from us, either. Sure, none of us will be Jesus, but none of us will be Mozart, either. We won’t think like Albert Einstein or write like Jane Austen, but we look to them to show us the human potential. Yes, Jesus shows us what God is, but he also shows us what human is. For us to live with the compassion of Jesus, with the strength and humility of Jesus would not mean that we were becoming God, but that we were becoming fully human, that we were living our lives at full force and greatest depth.
And so we come to the full mystery of the incarnation, and it is this: The incarnation is not over. The incarnation is not just a past event, lasting for the 33 years between the birth of Jesus and his ascension to heaven. The incarnation did not end; it just changed form. Jesus showed us how to be human and then he trusted us to be the incarnation of God to others. Remember how Rolheiser defined incarnation as “God taking on human flesh and dealing with human beings in a visible, tangible way.” Now that happens with us. When we listen and offer prayers, when we host a meal or take food to someone’s home, when we help a neighbor with a repair or work on a home in Kentucky, when we offer forgiveness for someone who has hurt us, and acceptance for someone who has been left out. When we do any of these things for a fellow person, we show God in our very lives. We are a part of the incarnation.
The word of God becomes flesh and dwells among us. This is good news, and it shall be for all people. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace. Amen.
[1] Shea, John, Starlight: Beholding the Christmas Miracle All Year Long, page
[2] Rolheiser, Ron. The Holy Longing. Page 75.
[3] Bell, Rob. Velvet Elvis.
John 1:1-14 Luke 2:8-20
Dedicated to this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
While John Shea was writing a book about the meaning of Christmas, and all of the cultural stories and legends that have grown up around it, he went one day to the library to look for the classic Dr. Seuss book about Christmas. It was July, and here is how he describes his experience:
The stacks in the children’s section have two shelves and are only three feet high. I am six feet, three inches high. The special Christmas shelf was the bottom shelf. As I was crawling around, a boy of about five, barely taller than the stacks, said, “What are you doing in here, Mister?”
“I’m looking for a book.”
“What book?”
“How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“It’s not Christmas time.”
“I know that,” I said. Then I added defensively, “I’m writing a book.”[1]
There is almost a rule that you can’t do Christmas things at the wrong time. Doesn’t it feel odd to you to be singing Christmas carols today? It feels strange to me, but I think that there is value in the unfamiliar if it gets us to look at something important with new eyes, and to hear with new ears. Here’s how I have been thinking about this Christmas in July. Think about the moment in a wedding when the bride and groom share their vows. They come to that moment surrounded by family and friends, with their close friends or relatives standing here next to them, and all looking as good as ever. They come to this spot with beautiful music, flowers, and all the traditions behind them, and all of that adds to the meaning of those words: I promise to love you, to be faithful to you, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.
That is a wonderful, holy moment. But how important it also is to think about the meaning of those words before the wedding day, and in the years after. That is our purpose in celebrating Christmas in July. The celebration of the birth of Jesus is central to our Christian faith. We proclaim Jesus as Lord and God, who was born in lowly circumstances to join our human condition and to share our common lot.
The Catholic theologian Ron Rolheiser suggests that “the central mystery within all Christianity, undergirding everything else, is the mystery of the incarnation. Unfortunately, it is also the mystery that is the most misunderstood or, more accurately, to coin a phrase, under-understood.”[2] And that is why we are centering this day on the birth of Jesus. We seek to move away from misunderstandings or under-understandings, and allow this mystery to give us life, because it is, as the angel said, “good news, which shall be for all people.”
Incarnation comes from the Latin word carnus, which means physical flesh, as in carnal or carnivore. Incarnation means that God took on human flesh. Rolheiser boils it down like this: “The mystery of the incarnation, simply stated, is the mystery of God taking on human flesh and dealing with human beings in a visible, tangible way.” Or as we heard in the gospel of John: the word, which is God, became flesh, and dwelt among us. Or, for a more direct translation of the Greek, “the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”
Incarnation is one of those churchy, theological words that gets used to describe a doctrine, or central concept of the church. I like the way that Rob Bell, a minister in Michigan, talks about doctrine.[3] He says that there are two ways to think about doctrine, one is helpful but the other is not. Sometimes we treat our doctrines like bricks. With bricks, we build a solid wall, brick by brick, of all the things one needs to believe in order to have a secure faith. Faith is seen as something vulnerable to protect, but the brick wall ends up trapping us.
Bell says that faith is more like a trampoline. The point of a trampoline is to jump, to play, to live! Doctrines are the springs in the trampoline that help us to jump. The point of religion is not our doctrines, not the springs themselves, but our doctrines do help us to live and to rise to new heights! If you are a child and you see another child jumping on a trampoline, it is almost impossible for you to not want to join in. That’s what Christian faith should look like. What an invitation!
The doctrine of the incarnation is not a test of how strong our belief is. It is a spring for our lives because it tells us that God is not distant and unconcerned; God has moved into the neighborhood. God draws close to us. That’s the God we worship. So great is God’s love for us that God comes to be with us, to live life as we live it, to be with us in even the most difficult, most painful moments of our lives. That’s what the incarnation means. Sometimes people get the idea that God sits way out there, absent from our lives except to look down and keep track of our balance of good and bad acts, to send on us reward or punishment accordingly. That’s what Job’s friends all said when his life fell apart. But Job knew better, and now we know better, because Jesus came as an answer for God’s bad reputation. We celebrate the birth of Jesus because it is in Jesus that we know God, in Jesus that we see God’s extravagant love, and in Jesus that we hear God’s passionate call for justice and mercy, for the lifting up of people who are down.
The birth of Jesus is good news, for all people, because Jesus shows us God. That is how the incarnation is mainly understood. But remember that I told you before that the incarnation is under-understood, and the part that we usually overlook is the human side of the incarnation. The mystery of the incarnation is that Jesus is both fully God and fully human. So we have in Jesus a clear way of seeing what God is like, but it also means that in Jesus we can clearly see what human beings are, or at least, what we can be. In human history we have always had the sense that we were not living up to our potential. In Jesus, we see what a fully realized human life can be, we see what the quality of our lives can be.
Wasn’t Jesus always inviting us to live as he did? He said take up your cross. He said abide in me; I am the vine and you are the branches. greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for a friend. He said I give you the keys to the kingdom: whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Jesus didn’t expect us just to see him as God and worship him. He expected us to see him as human and follow him.
Do I mean that anyone could be just like Jesus? No, I do believe that Jesus was the definitive revelation of God in human form. But we should not think that Jesus was so different from us, either. Sure, none of us will be Jesus, but none of us will be Mozart, either. We won’t think like Albert Einstein or write like Jane Austen, but we look to them to show us the human potential. Yes, Jesus shows us what God is, but he also shows us what human is. For us to live with the compassion of Jesus, with the strength and humility of Jesus would not mean that we were becoming God, but that we were becoming fully human, that we were living our lives at full force and greatest depth.
And so we come to the full mystery of the incarnation, and it is this: The incarnation is not over. The incarnation is not just a past event, lasting for the 33 years between the birth of Jesus and his ascension to heaven. The incarnation did not end; it just changed form. Jesus showed us how to be human and then he trusted us to be the incarnation of God to others. Remember how Rolheiser defined incarnation as “God taking on human flesh and dealing with human beings in a visible, tangible way.” Now that happens with us. When we listen and offer prayers, when we host a meal or take food to someone’s home, when we help a neighbor with a repair or work on a home in Kentucky, when we offer forgiveness for someone who has hurt us, and acceptance for someone who has been left out. When we do any of these things for a fellow person, we show God in our very lives. We are a part of the incarnation.
The word of God becomes flesh and dwells among us. This is good news, and it shall be for all people. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace. Amen.
[1] Shea, John, Starlight: Beholding the Christmas Miracle All Year Long, page
[2] Rolheiser, Ron. The Holy Longing. Page 75.
[3] Bell, Rob. Velvet Elvis.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Sermon - Be humble and bold
Originally preached on July 20, 2008 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.
Genesis 28:10-19 Matthew 13:24-30
Dedicated to Gavin Scott Davis and Finley June Getch, on the day of their baptisms; and always to the glory of God.
When Betsy and I moved into a new home a few years ago, we knew that the previous owners had been great gardeners, and that there was in particular one large bed of perennial flowers in the back yard. But we moved into the house in February, so we weren’t sure just what to expect. In addition, I admit that I don’t know my way around the identification of plants, and there are a lot of different flowers in this large bed. Some bloom early, some bloom late, some bloom for a long time and others come in short-lived bursts.
Perhaps you see the problem. It happens every year. Plants start to grow in that bed, and I don’t know the difference between the ones that will bloom with beautiful flowers that I should allow to grow and the weeds that I should take out. So I let them all grow until I’m sure, and that can take awhile.
There’s another, related problem. Sometimes you are certain about which ones are the weeds and need to be taken out. You have no question. Years ago I heard a minister who was a grandfather talk about the weeds that were growing all along the back fence line of his yard. He’d been meaning to tear them all out, but you know how these things go; something always gets in the way. Finally he was ready to pull them all up one morning but a visit from his young granddaughter took precedence. They talked and played for a while, and then she went to play in the yard while he fixed some lunch. A few minutes later, she came inside, proudly bearing a bouquet of flowers as a gift to her grandpa for the lunch table. He found that she had picked every single one from weeds he had been planning to pull, and he was so glad he’d let them stand. So even when you think you know what needs to go, maybe you don’t.
Religion gets dangerous when we think we know enough to pass final judgment on others, because just like the weeds in my backyard, or the things that we might assume are weeds but to someone else might be valuable, God knows we don’t know enough about anyone else to pass a final judgment on them. God knows we don’t know enough to proclaim anyone beyond God’s love, beyond being good, beyond hope of redemption. Whenever we think we do, we don’t.
The parable Jesus told concerns a wheat field planted by the farmer, which is then also planted with weeds, sometimes translated as tares or most literally as darnel, which was actually a type of weed that looked very similar to wheat, and so was probably a common problem for farmers in Jesus’ time. The impulse, of course, is to go take it out, but Jesus has the farmer tell them no, because in doing so, they will also take out some wheat. When we assume a judgmental attitude toward people, we might be partly right, but we risk passing judgment on the good that is within them.
When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned under the apartheid regime of South Africa, he began to try negotiating with his oppressors. His colleagues in the movement criticized him, saying that negotiations with the enemy were out of the question, and that it was fundamentally wrong to offer any dialogue while being held in prison. Mandela disagreed. He clearly saw the evil of his oppressors, but he knew that in passing complete judgment on them, he would never be able to appeal to them good. He would be digging up the wheat along with the weeds. Mandela led a peaceful resolution to a brutal rule because he saw that good and evil lived side by side.
The genius of his parable is that Jesus recognizes that there is evil in the world. He doesn’t ask us to pull the wool over our eyes and just pretend that everything is happy. Allowing the weeds to grow does not mean pretending that everything is wheat, that everything in the world is just fine. Jesus recognizes evil in the world. At that time, his audience probably interpreted the weeds to be the oppression of the Roman Empire in the midst of the Hebrew people. Indeed, there were many zealots in Palestine (even some of the disciples) who wanted to go to war to throw the Romans out of their land. Talk about weeding your field. In generations since, we have found different ways of interpreting the weeds that grow among us. Jesus does not pretend that there isn’t evil interfering with good. But he cautions us to be humble in our judgment, and to leave final judgment to God. It is sadly too common for attempts to rid the world of evil to do great damage to life in the process.
This is why Jesus did not go along with plans to take up arms against the Roman Empire. When a Roman soldier forced you to carry a load one mile, Jesus said to carry it a second mile, just to show him that love was more powerful than oppression. When someone slapped you on the cheek, Jesus said to turn the other one as well, to show that love is stronger than fear. The importance of love for our enemies in the new testament is not just a naïve ideal, it is actually the only way to avoid the escalation of violence.
Jesus tells us to let the whole field grow, wheat and weeds. When it comes to judgment, be humble. You never know which Roman centurion will join your cause.
Jacob’s nighttime dream teaches the same lesson. On a journey far from home Jacob goes to sleep one night and receives a message from God, a promise, in fact, that was given to Abraham and to Isaac, and now to Jacob himself. When he awakes, he says “God was in this place and I did not know.” What a remarkable statement. God was at work in a place that I did not know. So before we become judgmental about a person, about a nation, or about another religion, let us wonder if we could be like Jacob, not realizing that God is at work in places we don’t know. Think of that in terms of the middle east, or in terms of the person at work or in your neighborhood who has been the thorn in your side.
The title of this sermon is “be humble and bold,” but so far I’ve only given reasons for our humility. If we are to be humble in our judgment people, then when are we to be bold?
I want to tell you a story about the boldness of the early church. This is recorded in the book of Acts, which tells of the early apostles and the issues that they wrestled with in the first generation after Christ. One of the big issues in Acts, which also shows up in some of Paul’s letters, is what to do about all of the non-Jews who are becoming Christians. The very first followers of Jesus were practicing Jews. They observed the Jewish rituals, they ate kosher, and they had faith in Jesus. That’s what the early church looked like at the very first. But then all these non-Jews, called Gentiles, started to become Christian, and they had to decide whether all Christians should start to observe all the Jewish practices. There was nothing in the scripture to prepare them for this. In fact, there was nothing in the scripture to prepare them for the idea of sharing a common faith with gentiles. Their scripture was actually fairly opposed to including gentiles. So what should they do?
In the fifteenth chapter of Acts, it says that all the apostles discussed this matter greatly and prayed about it, and finally decided that gentile converts did not need to follow all the Jewish observances, but simply needed to refrain from meals sacrificed to other gods. And here is the message they sent out. They said “it seemed good to the holy spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following” (Acts 15:28). Did you catch that? It seemed good. That’s how they put it. They had enough humility to know that they might not always make the right judgments, but they also knew they had to decide something, so they were bold in their welcome for gentile Christians.
They didn’t prove their claim by quoting scripture, or act as if they alone were the ultimate authority. But they did boldly say that the outsider gentile were welcome just as they were. They didn’t need to be just the same. The apostles trusted that God’s holy spirit helping them to see something good, and to boldly call it good based on their judgment.
When it comes to the weeds, be humble; don’t pass judgment, because you may do more harm than good. And you may be wrong. But when it comes to the wheat, be bold! Celebrate goodness wherever you find it, because all goodness and all truth comes from God. Be bold in proclaiming God’s love that extends farther than we ever realized. Then perhaps we will one day look back and say, along with Jacob, God was in this place, and I did not know. And we will give thanks.
Genesis 28:10-19 Matthew 13:24-30
Dedicated to Gavin Scott Davis and Finley June Getch, on the day of their baptisms; and always to the glory of God.
When Betsy and I moved into a new home a few years ago, we knew that the previous owners had been great gardeners, and that there was in particular one large bed of perennial flowers in the back yard. But we moved into the house in February, so we weren’t sure just what to expect. In addition, I admit that I don’t know my way around the identification of plants, and there are a lot of different flowers in this large bed. Some bloom early, some bloom late, some bloom for a long time and others come in short-lived bursts.
Perhaps you see the problem. It happens every year. Plants start to grow in that bed, and I don’t know the difference between the ones that will bloom with beautiful flowers that I should allow to grow and the weeds that I should take out. So I let them all grow until I’m sure, and that can take awhile.
There’s another, related problem. Sometimes you are certain about which ones are the weeds and need to be taken out. You have no question. Years ago I heard a minister who was a grandfather talk about the weeds that were growing all along the back fence line of his yard. He’d been meaning to tear them all out, but you know how these things go; something always gets in the way. Finally he was ready to pull them all up one morning but a visit from his young granddaughter took precedence. They talked and played for a while, and then she went to play in the yard while he fixed some lunch. A few minutes later, she came inside, proudly bearing a bouquet of flowers as a gift to her grandpa for the lunch table. He found that she had picked every single one from weeds he had been planning to pull, and he was so glad he’d let them stand. So even when you think you know what needs to go, maybe you don’t.
Religion gets dangerous when we think we know enough to pass final judgment on others, because just like the weeds in my backyard, or the things that we might assume are weeds but to someone else might be valuable, God knows we don’t know enough about anyone else to pass a final judgment on them. God knows we don’t know enough to proclaim anyone beyond God’s love, beyond being good, beyond hope of redemption. Whenever we think we do, we don’t.
The parable Jesus told concerns a wheat field planted by the farmer, which is then also planted with weeds, sometimes translated as tares or most literally as darnel, which was actually a type of weed that looked very similar to wheat, and so was probably a common problem for farmers in Jesus’ time. The impulse, of course, is to go take it out, but Jesus has the farmer tell them no, because in doing so, they will also take out some wheat. When we assume a judgmental attitude toward people, we might be partly right, but we risk passing judgment on the good that is within them.
When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned under the apartheid regime of South Africa, he began to try negotiating with his oppressors. His colleagues in the movement criticized him, saying that negotiations with the enemy were out of the question, and that it was fundamentally wrong to offer any dialogue while being held in prison. Mandela disagreed. He clearly saw the evil of his oppressors, but he knew that in passing complete judgment on them, he would never be able to appeal to them good. He would be digging up the wheat along with the weeds. Mandela led a peaceful resolution to a brutal rule because he saw that good and evil lived side by side.
The genius of his parable is that Jesus recognizes that there is evil in the world. He doesn’t ask us to pull the wool over our eyes and just pretend that everything is happy. Allowing the weeds to grow does not mean pretending that everything is wheat, that everything in the world is just fine. Jesus recognizes evil in the world. At that time, his audience probably interpreted the weeds to be the oppression of the Roman Empire in the midst of the Hebrew people. Indeed, there were many zealots in Palestine (even some of the disciples) who wanted to go to war to throw the Romans out of their land. Talk about weeding your field. In generations since, we have found different ways of interpreting the weeds that grow among us. Jesus does not pretend that there isn’t evil interfering with good. But he cautions us to be humble in our judgment, and to leave final judgment to God. It is sadly too common for attempts to rid the world of evil to do great damage to life in the process.
This is why Jesus did not go along with plans to take up arms against the Roman Empire. When a Roman soldier forced you to carry a load one mile, Jesus said to carry it a second mile, just to show him that love was more powerful than oppression. When someone slapped you on the cheek, Jesus said to turn the other one as well, to show that love is stronger than fear. The importance of love for our enemies in the new testament is not just a naïve ideal, it is actually the only way to avoid the escalation of violence.
Jesus tells us to let the whole field grow, wheat and weeds. When it comes to judgment, be humble. You never know which Roman centurion will join your cause.
Jacob’s nighttime dream teaches the same lesson. On a journey far from home Jacob goes to sleep one night and receives a message from God, a promise, in fact, that was given to Abraham and to Isaac, and now to Jacob himself. When he awakes, he says “God was in this place and I did not know.” What a remarkable statement. God was at work in a place that I did not know. So before we become judgmental about a person, about a nation, or about another religion, let us wonder if we could be like Jacob, not realizing that God is at work in places we don’t know. Think of that in terms of the middle east, or in terms of the person at work or in your neighborhood who has been the thorn in your side.
The title of this sermon is “be humble and bold,” but so far I’ve only given reasons for our humility. If we are to be humble in our judgment people, then when are we to be bold?
I want to tell you a story about the boldness of the early church. This is recorded in the book of Acts, which tells of the early apostles and the issues that they wrestled with in the first generation after Christ. One of the big issues in Acts, which also shows up in some of Paul’s letters, is what to do about all of the non-Jews who are becoming Christians. The very first followers of Jesus were practicing Jews. They observed the Jewish rituals, they ate kosher, and they had faith in Jesus. That’s what the early church looked like at the very first. But then all these non-Jews, called Gentiles, started to become Christian, and they had to decide whether all Christians should start to observe all the Jewish practices. There was nothing in the scripture to prepare them for this. In fact, there was nothing in the scripture to prepare them for the idea of sharing a common faith with gentiles. Their scripture was actually fairly opposed to including gentiles. So what should they do?
In the fifteenth chapter of Acts, it says that all the apostles discussed this matter greatly and prayed about it, and finally decided that gentile converts did not need to follow all the Jewish observances, but simply needed to refrain from meals sacrificed to other gods. And here is the message they sent out. They said “it seemed good to the holy spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following” (Acts 15:28). Did you catch that? It seemed good. That’s how they put it. They had enough humility to know that they might not always make the right judgments, but they also knew they had to decide something, so they were bold in their welcome for gentile Christians.
They didn’t prove their claim by quoting scripture, or act as if they alone were the ultimate authority. But they did boldly say that the outsider gentile were welcome just as they were. They didn’t need to be just the same. The apostles trusted that God’s holy spirit helping them to see something good, and to boldly call it good based on their judgment.
When it comes to the weeds, be humble; don’t pass judgment, because you may do more harm than good. And you may be wrong. But when it comes to the wheat, be bold! Celebrate goodness wherever you find it, because all goodness and all truth comes from God. Be bold in proclaiming God’s love that extends farther than we ever realized. Then perhaps we will one day look back and say, along with Jacob, God was in this place, and I did not know. And we will give thanks.
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