Preached on March 8, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Psalm 22:23-31 Mark 8:31-38
Dedicated to all who have loved and lost; and always to the glory of God.
C.S. Lewis, who wrote the chronicles of Narnia and many books of theology and of other stories, was married late in life to Joy Gresham. The movie Shadowlands tells the unlikely story of their relationship before she died of cancer. Although Lewis finds great happiness, great joy, in their marriage, it also brings him great pain to see her suffer. At one point he wishes that he could take away her pain by suffering it himself, as I’m sure so many of you have wished on behalf of a spouse, parent, friend, or child. Finally, there is the pain of grief. The experience of pain causes him, and us, to wrestle with questions: Why must there be pain in the world? Why would God allow it? But most perplexing is this: why would you or I, who usually seek to avoid pain and minimize suffering, ever make a choice that will bring us more pain? That’s the question I hear in the argument between Jesus and Peter in the gospel reading. Why would we ever choose something that brings us into pain? C.S. Lewis put it this way, after the death of his wife:
“Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.”
The reality that Jesus helps us to face is this: When we love, we open ourselves to pain. When we seek good for others, we become vulnerable to suffering. But as Lewis said: that’s the deal. The only way to keep ourselves from being hurt is to turn inward, to become protectionist in a self-centered isolation. Don’t love anyone, because you will lose them, or they will let you down. Don’t offer assistance, because you might be giving away something that you will one day need. Better to guard yourself, keep what’s yours and keep your tender heart out of sight. We might think that we are saving our lives, Jesus says, only to find that we have lost them.
I think of Ebenezer Scrooge, from A Christmas Carol. He kept his life safe. He didn’t care for anyone, and that way he didn’t mind if no one cared for him. He looked out for his own interests. But when the spirit of Christmas Past comes to visit, we discover that he once loved others, as a child and as a young man. But his love had brought him pain, and his response was to close the walls around his money and around his heart. He thought that he was saving himself from pain, saving his life, but any child who hears that story knows that he had lost his life, and only found it in the end.
The argument between Jesus and Peter begins when Jesus starts to tell his disciples that what he is doing will lead to his suffering and death. Peter rebukes Jesus – which is a stronger word than perhaps it sounds – and then Jesus rebukes Peter, calling him Satan, which is the word for one who is arguing against God.
To hear this the way the disciples heard it, we need to remember everything that they have seen, back to the beginning of Mark’s gospel. At the beginning of his ministry, after he was baptized and spent his forty days in the wilderness, Jesus came back to town and began to proclaim his message: “The kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” And what did the kingdom of God look like? Well, if you were following Jesus around the Sea of Galilee back them, it quickly becomes clear that the kingdom of God is where everything broken is made whole. In the kingdom of God, people find that their illness is met with healing, their hunger is met with food, their isolation is met with community, and their sin is met with forgiveness.
The gospel of Mark tells in quick succession how Jesus healed leprosy, fever, internal bleeding, blindness, deafness, a withered hand, the guy they kept chained up in the cemetery because he had a legion of demons inside of him, and even a girl who had died. Along the way, he shared meals with people whose sins made them outcasts and fed large and hungry crowds with a few loaves and fish, making it clear that no one is to be kept away from the table. This is what the kingdom of God looks like. The kingdom of God restores us to health, restores us to community, and restores us to God. You might say that the kingdom of God is where we get to be our true selves, perhaps for the first time.
The way of Jesus is to make the kingdom of God a present reality, where the love of God meets the broken world and makes it whole. But now there is a hard reality to face. Until the time when God remakes heaven and earth, there are forces that work against the kingdom of God, both outside us and within us. There are kingdoms built on power, and the injustice that inevitably follow self-interest. There is suffering, and there is death. Jesus knows that to meet the world with love is also to meet the pain of the world. We can’t love without the pain. That’s the deal.
That is why the ministry of Jesus leads to the cross, and why our season of Lent leads to Good Friday, that dark day when it seemed as if the kingdom of God has been snuffed out. Only it hadn’t. Easter tells us that the kingdom of God will ultimately prevail, that finally, all that is broken will be restored. The one who gave his life in love is risen.
And now we can hear the most important part of what Jesus says to his disciples. After he has predicted his own suffering, after Peter has rebuked him, Jesus tells the disciples that all those who want to follow him must deny themselves and take up the cross. He has already sent he diciples out in pairs to do the work of the kingdom. They had been out in the towns proclaiming that the kingdom of God was near, healing the sick and welcoming the sinners. Now Jesus tells them that this way of the kingdom of God, this way of love, will bring pain with it.
Jesus sends us in the same way to heal, to feed, to forgive and welcome. We work in medicine; we support missionaries; we give food; we prepare meals; we welcome each other from far and wide to this place of worship, fellowship, and growing faith. But the more we give ourselves to the way of Jesus, the more we open ourselves to the pain of this world.
Be careful not to hear Jesus the wrong way. When he says that we must deny ourselves, and lose our lives, it isn’t a call for us to allow ourselves to be walked all over or used up and burnt out. Too often this teaching has been abused. In the name of Christ, people have said that other races should resign themselves to hardship, that the poor should resign themselves to danger and oppression, that good Christians should put up with domestic violence, all in the name of love, all with the promise that they would be rewarded later. That is not what Jesus said. Remember that his entire ministry has been to restore what is broken, so giving our lives does not mean giving up our lives, allowing them to be degraded.
What Jesus calls us to give is our full, strong, and vibrant lives. We give our best lives, and to do so we must overcome that which harms us and breaks us in the name of the love of God. Sometimes people misuse this teaching, saying “that’s just my cross to bear” about the wrong things. We need to be careful that naming something as your cross to bear is not simply an excuse because we don’t want the trouble of confronting an unhealthy relationship, or doing the hard work to make ourselves healthy and strong.
The cross we bear has to with where we decide to direct our strength. Do we seek to protect our own interests, or are we moved to love those besides ourselves, to love those outside our families, our tribe, our nation? We know that loving them will involve suffering. When we seek to restore health, we will have to know the faces of illness and injury. When we seek to restore peace, we will have to face the violence of war and conflict, and our own participation in the root conflicts. When we seek to restore justice, we may find ourselves in holy confrontation with injustice. In some cases, our care for others will cause us to sacrifice something we had held dear. Sometimes, we will suffer simply because we lose the ones we have come to love. But let none of these stop us. The pain is a part of the joy of living in the kingdom of God, of being restored to wholeness by God, and of offering that same love to this wonderful world.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The Present
During the season of Lent, I am seeking times of stillness, focus, and prayer that is more about listening than speaking. I’m trying to sit still, to remember how to focus on one thing at a time. People are getting better and better at multitasking, but I fear that we are getting worse at giving our full attention to one thing, to one person. Years ago I read a story called “The Precious Present.” It was about a young boy who loved to spend time with the old man who was his neighbor. The old man always seemed happy and content, no matter his circumstances. The man explained to the boy that his happiness was the result of the precious present, and the boy spent hours trying to guess what kind of present could be so great as to impart such sustained joy. At the end of the story, the boy discovers that the precious present is not a gift, wrapped in a box, but the present time. The old man is content because he has learned to give his full attention to the precious present moment, and so he is not worried about the future or caught up in the past.
Technology has made us good at multitasking, but it has also distracted us. It used to be that there was one time of day to receive mail, sort it, and respond to it as necessary. Now we receive email (or texts, or twitter – whatever that is) at all hours, sometimes even when we are out at the grocery store, or at dinner with friends. It used to be that we learned about the news of the world, sports scores, and local happenings by reading the newspaper with a glass of orange juice or coffee, or by watching the evening news at 6:00 PM. Now we are hit with 24 hour news networks, headlines on our computers, and sports scores on our cell phones.
We need to relearn how to be still. We need to remember the ancient teachers. Here is what they say: First, sit down and sit still. Sit as comfortably and as stably as you can: feet flat on the floor, arms lightly laid on arm rest or lap, eyes gently closed. When the body learns stillness, the mind can be still. Quiet your mind by focusing on your breath. The Biblical words for breath also mean spirit, so this focus on the breath is a way to remember the gift of the Holy Spirit. Breathe in, breathe out, and listen. This stillness is prayer, even if you don’t say a word. If you want to use words, there is a tradition from the Russian church to say a simple prayer while you breathe. As you breathe in, say “Jesus Christ, Son of God,” and as you breathe out, say “have mercy on me.” Be still. Receive the precious present.
Technology has made us good at multitasking, but it has also distracted us. It used to be that there was one time of day to receive mail, sort it, and respond to it as necessary. Now we receive email (or texts, or twitter – whatever that is) at all hours, sometimes even when we are out at the grocery store, or at dinner with friends. It used to be that we learned about the news of the world, sports scores, and local happenings by reading the newspaper with a glass of orange juice or coffee, or by watching the evening news at 6:00 PM. Now we are hit with 24 hour news networks, headlines on our computers, and sports scores on our cell phones.
We need to relearn how to be still. We need to remember the ancient teachers. Here is what they say: First, sit down and sit still. Sit as comfortably and as stably as you can: feet flat on the floor, arms lightly laid on arm rest or lap, eyes gently closed. When the body learns stillness, the mind can be still. Quiet your mind by focusing on your breath. The Biblical words for breath also mean spirit, so this focus on the breath is a way to remember the gift of the Holy Spirit. Breathe in, breathe out, and listen. This stillness is prayer, even if you don’t say a word. If you want to use words, there is a tradition from the Russian church to say a simple prayer while you breathe. As you breathe in, say “Jesus Christ, Son of God,” and as you breathe out, say “have mercy on me.” Be still. Receive the precious present.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Sermon - Everything is God's
Preached on February 1, 2009 at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.
I Corinthians 8:1-13
Dedicated to Madison Russ, on the day of her baptism; and always to the glory of God.
Everything is God’s. God created everything. It is a part of our creed, a central tenant of our faith. Genesis starts with the words “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth,” and the gospel of John starts this way: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God...all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” Paul reminds the church in Corinth that everything comes from Christ. So everything is God’s.
Let’s think for a minute about what that means. For one thing, it means that we don’t have to worry about the idea of competing Gods working in the universe. When we discover the beauty of the Muslim poet Rumi, when we see the majesty of a Buddhist shrine, or when we see the loving devotion of Hindi men and women who care for the poor, our faith tells us that these examples of skill and artistry and compassion are all gifts from God, given through the one we know as Jesus Christ.
But this is about more than whether or not are other Gods at work. This is also about the things that we make into our gods, looking to them for meaning and transcendence. For instance, our culture and the church have too often made the mistake of thinking that we must choose between the truth of science and the truth of religion, as if science is a competing version of truth and meaning. But this is a false choice. Since everything is God’s, then all truth comes from God. In that light, we can acknowledge scientific truth as God’s truth, discovered by human intelligence and perseverance, which are also gifts from God. Our knowledge of evolution does not cancel out faith and the witness of scripture, but rather adds to our knowledge of the wonder and glory of God’s deeds.
We also sometimes make the mistake of arguing about whether spirituality exists inside organized religion or is to be found more purely in nature, in that sense of balance and harmony one finds whether hiking in the woods, strolling on the water’s edge, or walking a golf course. I say that those experiences are gifts of God. Those are some of the things we gather in worship to give thanks for, in this religion of ours, which is not really as organized as its critics suggest. Our faith gives thanks for all these good things. There is a Jewish saying that after we die we will be held to account for all the good things in life that we failed to enjoy. Joy is a serious calling, and it binds us together.
Sometimes we have the experience of feeling bound together and a sense of belonging most powerfully in the cheering crowd, when the stadium erupts in shared applause, and the hair stands up on your neck, or at a concert, when you feel that the music lifts your spirit to a place where you feel joined to every soul in the concert hall. Those experiences are a gift from God. Anytime we feel a sense of belonging, of oneness to others, it is a glimpse of the truth that we are bound together in God.
Everything is God’s. This is why Paul told the people of Corinth that there was no theological problem with eating food that had been offered to other gods in the temples of the Roman world. That food is a gift from God, known to us in Jesus Christ, and eating it will not by any magical religious ritual pull you away from the God from whom all blessings flow. That food comes from God, so there is nothing unfaithful about eating it, Paul tells them.
Then he tells them not to eat it.
What was that? Paul, you’re saying that we are right about this food being okay to eat, that these other people who complain that eating food offered to idols is wrong don’t know what they’re talking about, but that we shouldn’t eat it, anyway?
What Paul means is that there are two sides to the truth that everything is God’s. On the one hand, it gives us freedom. We are free to claim goodness and beauty and truth wherever we find it. On the other hand, if everything is God’s, then we have a responsibility to care for it all, which calls for compassion and patience.
The reason Paul tells the Corinthians not to eat food that had been offered to other idols is out of love for their fellow Christians, who may have only recently been members of the local cult where that food was sacrificed. Now they have come to know God through Jesus Christ; now they know Christ as creator of everything and Lord of all. So they may know that all food comes from God, in an intellectual way. But the thought of eating food that had been offered to an idol brings back all their former beliefs about the Roman pantheon of competing Gods. Paul says that if it causes unnecessary struggling for others for you to eat that food, then eat some other food.
I wonder how this message translates for our lives? Where do we lean too heavily on the freedom to enjoy good things, and not enough of the responsibility to love and care for all that is God’s creation? Where do the good gifts of God lead us not into greater thanksgiving, but into harm of ourselves and others.
When I think of good gifts taken too far, I think of movie and television. I think that the stories that are told on these screens are great gifts. Whether they are reported or fictional, they can widen our knowledge and appreciation for the world, move us to laughter and tears, and allow us to rest from our worries. There is great truth that is told in these stories, and you have heard Dr. John and me refer to movies often in our sermons to illustrate the truth of God’s word that we are seeking to share. But when movies and television is used as a sedative, to distract us and fill the empty hours, and when celebrity actors or reality shows become more important news than the suffering of the world that can be met with the grace of God, we are in trouble.
Sports are also a wonderful gift from God. Our bodies are gifts, and in the thrill of play, the feeling of a runner’s high, is a glimpse of God’s transcendence. When we cheer for teams we are joined to a community with a shared tradition and a commitment to excellence. That’s why I get goose bumps when the Buckeyes take the field, or when the Tuba player dots the i in script Ohio. The unity we find in a shared cheer should point us to the oneness we have in God, but too often, the team mentality leads us to feel real anger toward the opponents, to say ugly things about each other, and to wallow in bitterness after a loss. When the team mentality takes hold in a nation, it can lead to great violence that spreads from our borders.
In fact, every good gift of God can become an idol. Love of family should strengthen our love for strangers, but sometimes it motivates us to wall off others in order to keep our own safe and secure. Love of food and drink should lead us to thanksgiving, service for the hungry, and a deeper experience of God’s love in the communion table, but sometimes food and drink become idols, and there’s never enough of a substitute to make us full.
Everything is God’s, so claim it with freedom, wherever it is found. Take joy in it, because we were created for joy by God. Grow and learn from God’s truth, beauty, and goodness, and don’t settle for cheap imitations. Everything is God’s, so treat these gifts with love and care, so that our love for the gifts leads us always to thanksgiving, and a greater love still for the giver.
I Corinthians 8:1-13
Dedicated to Madison Russ, on the day of her baptism; and always to the glory of God.
Everything is God’s. God created everything. It is a part of our creed, a central tenant of our faith. Genesis starts with the words “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth,” and the gospel of John starts this way: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God...all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” Paul reminds the church in Corinth that everything comes from Christ. So everything is God’s.
Let’s think for a minute about what that means. For one thing, it means that we don’t have to worry about the idea of competing Gods working in the universe. When we discover the beauty of the Muslim poet Rumi, when we see the majesty of a Buddhist shrine, or when we see the loving devotion of Hindi men and women who care for the poor, our faith tells us that these examples of skill and artistry and compassion are all gifts from God, given through the one we know as Jesus Christ.
But this is about more than whether or not are other Gods at work. This is also about the things that we make into our gods, looking to them for meaning and transcendence. For instance, our culture and the church have too often made the mistake of thinking that we must choose between the truth of science and the truth of religion, as if science is a competing version of truth and meaning. But this is a false choice. Since everything is God’s, then all truth comes from God. In that light, we can acknowledge scientific truth as God’s truth, discovered by human intelligence and perseverance, which are also gifts from God. Our knowledge of evolution does not cancel out faith and the witness of scripture, but rather adds to our knowledge of the wonder and glory of God’s deeds.
We also sometimes make the mistake of arguing about whether spirituality exists inside organized religion or is to be found more purely in nature, in that sense of balance and harmony one finds whether hiking in the woods, strolling on the water’s edge, or walking a golf course. I say that those experiences are gifts of God. Those are some of the things we gather in worship to give thanks for, in this religion of ours, which is not really as organized as its critics suggest. Our faith gives thanks for all these good things. There is a Jewish saying that after we die we will be held to account for all the good things in life that we failed to enjoy. Joy is a serious calling, and it binds us together.
Sometimes we have the experience of feeling bound together and a sense of belonging most powerfully in the cheering crowd, when the stadium erupts in shared applause, and the hair stands up on your neck, or at a concert, when you feel that the music lifts your spirit to a place where you feel joined to every soul in the concert hall. Those experiences are a gift from God. Anytime we feel a sense of belonging, of oneness to others, it is a glimpse of the truth that we are bound together in God.
Everything is God’s. This is why Paul told the people of Corinth that there was no theological problem with eating food that had been offered to other gods in the temples of the Roman world. That food is a gift from God, known to us in Jesus Christ, and eating it will not by any magical religious ritual pull you away from the God from whom all blessings flow. That food comes from God, so there is nothing unfaithful about eating it, Paul tells them.
Then he tells them not to eat it.
What was that? Paul, you’re saying that we are right about this food being okay to eat, that these other people who complain that eating food offered to idols is wrong don’t know what they’re talking about, but that we shouldn’t eat it, anyway?
What Paul means is that there are two sides to the truth that everything is God’s. On the one hand, it gives us freedom. We are free to claim goodness and beauty and truth wherever we find it. On the other hand, if everything is God’s, then we have a responsibility to care for it all, which calls for compassion and patience.
The reason Paul tells the Corinthians not to eat food that had been offered to other idols is out of love for their fellow Christians, who may have only recently been members of the local cult where that food was sacrificed. Now they have come to know God through Jesus Christ; now they know Christ as creator of everything and Lord of all. So they may know that all food comes from God, in an intellectual way. But the thought of eating food that had been offered to an idol brings back all their former beliefs about the Roman pantheon of competing Gods. Paul says that if it causes unnecessary struggling for others for you to eat that food, then eat some other food.
I wonder how this message translates for our lives? Where do we lean too heavily on the freedom to enjoy good things, and not enough of the responsibility to love and care for all that is God’s creation? Where do the good gifts of God lead us not into greater thanksgiving, but into harm of ourselves and others.
When I think of good gifts taken too far, I think of movie and television. I think that the stories that are told on these screens are great gifts. Whether they are reported or fictional, they can widen our knowledge and appreciation for the world, move us to laughter and tears, and allow us to rest from our worries. There is great truth that is told in these stories, and you have heard Dr. John and me refer to movies often in our sermons to illustrate the truth of God’s word that we are seeking to share. But when movies and television is used as a sedative, to distract us and fill the empty hours, and when celebrity actors or reality shows become more important news than the suffering of the world that can be met with the grace of God, we are in trouble.
Sports are also a wonderful gift from God. Our bodies are gifts, and in the thrill of play, the feeling of a runner’s high, is a glimpse of God’s transcendence. When we cheer for teams we are joined to a community with a shared tradition and a commitment to excellence. That’s why I get goose bumps when the Buckeyes take the field, or when the Tuba player dots the i in script Ohio. The unity we find in a shared cheer should point us to the oneness we have in God, but too often, the team mentality leads us to feel real anger toward the opponents, to say ugly things about each other, and to wallow in bitterness after a loss. When the team mentality takes hold in a nation, it can lead to great violence that spreads from our borders.
In fact, every good gift of God can become an idol. Love of family should strengthen our love for strangers, but sometimes it motivates us to wall off others in order to keep our own safe and secure. Love of food and drink should lead us to thanksgiving, service for the hungry, and a deeper experience of God’s love in the communion table, but sometimes food and drink become idols, and there’s never enough of a substitute to make us full.
Everything is God’s, so claim it with freedom, wherever it is found. Take joy in it, because we were created for joy by God. Grow and learn from God’s truth, beauty, and goodness, and don’t settle for cheap imitations. Everything is God’s, so treat these gifts with love and care, so that our love for the gifts leads us always to thanksgiving, and a greater love still for the giver.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Sermon - A New Message
Preached on January 11, 2008, Baptism of our Lord, at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.
Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 9:1-7
Dedicated to aid workers in Gaza, as the territory is under siege; and always to the glory of God.
“Did you receive the Holy Spirit?”[1] This is Paul’s question to these twelve people he finds when he gets to Ephesus who have already been baptized. Did you receive the Holy Spirit? This is a strange passage for us in the Congregationalist tradition, because Paul kind of sounds like he’s a Pentecostal preacher in a traveling tent revival. Did you receive the Holy Spirit?
But this is long before Christianity separated into different styles and denominations. He asks them because he wants to know if they understand that Christ meant for baptism to be much more than a means of membership in a group. What he means is that God will dwell with us, that God will be active in our very being and shown to others by our lives. The Holy Spirit is the spiritual presence of God with us, as close as our breath. I mean that literally, about our breath, but we’ll get to that later.
Paul says “did you receive the Holy Spirit?” And his face must have just fallen when they reply “No, we have not even heard that there was a Holy Spirit.”
Tom Steagald, a minister down in North Carolina, writes that this reminds him all too well of times in his own church when he has found that life-long Christians are sometimes just as stumped as those Ephesians about the basics of Christian faith. He wonders “who was preaching to them before I got here?” and his opinion of his predecessors becomes pretty low.[2]
If Paul was having similar thoughts, he doesn’t show it. He just calmly takes a step back to learn where they are coming from: “into what then were you baptized?” he says, which is his a way of asking “how did you understand your baptism? What did it mean? What was it for?”
Those are good questions for us on this day, on which we celebrate the baptism of young Aiden, and remember our own baptism, the sacrament by which everyone comes into the family of the Christian church. When we dedicated the new Atrium, we each added a bit of water to the fountain, and we blessed it, and now it reminds us of our baptism every time we enter the doors of the church. So our question today is “into what were we baptized? What did it mean? What was it for?”
The twelve Ephesians said that they were baptized into John’s baptism. That’s John the Baptist, who stood out in the Jordan river proclaiming a baptism of repentance. Repent means to turn around, to turn away from whatever it is that has become the center of our lives and return to God who is our true center, our true home. In our search for a life that we can live with, we turn to all kinds of things that are substitutes for God, and they are hollow centers. Sometimes these empty centers are obvious and widely recognized. But we also need to talk about the hollow centers of entertainment diversion, success, and security. When they become the center, many things begin to act like drugs to distract us and dull our attention to caring for ourselves, for our relationships, and for our neighbors. For substance abuse, there are recovery groups and the support of culture to turn around. In contrast, our culture praises entertainers, the ambitious, and the successful above all others, even as these pursuits just lead us farther and farther away from our true center in God.
John the Baptist called for repentance, to turn away from all of that, which is why people could only hear him out in the wilderness, where he could be heard above the noise of our distractions. So what is wrong with the baptism of repentance? Why does Paul think that the twelve Ephesians need more than John’s baptism? Because repentance is important as a first step. As John himself says “I baptize you with water, but the one who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”[3]
Here’s the basic difference. John called people to repent because God was coming. Jesus announced that the kingdom of God is here. He preached a new message. But just like those twelve that Paul met, we often get stuck in the old message. Too often, we think that Christianity is about showing our faith in God, being baptized for repentance, acting nice, and then waiting for the kingdom of God to come and change things. We’ve done our part, now let’s wait for God to shower us with blessings and ease our pain. Our faith too often treats God like a divine ATM. We put in the right code and wait for the goods to be dispensed.
Jesus said that God is here, the kingdom of God is among you, God’s Holy Spirit is in you. You can live in the kingdom of God right now. It won’t change your circumstances like magic - faith is not a makeover reality show. Our baptism is to put us into God’s kingdom right now. Instead of fasting like John had done, waiting for God to do something, Jesus feasted, because he wasn’t trying to earn God’s response, he was celebrating God’s grace already given. When will we give up trying to earn God’s grace and start celebrating that we already have it? Jesus lived and feasted in the kingdom of God with his disciples, with the poor and ill and hungry, and notorious sinners like the tax collectors, those Jews who took jobs with the empire, who were protected by Roman soldiers, and got rich by collecting and pocketing more than the amount that was due to Rome. The tax collectors had thought they could center their lives on great wealth and the security of the Roman army, but finally realized that all these were empty centers.
I wonder if the tax collectors are a warning for our country? How is it that we can live in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world and be so filled with unhappiness, discontent, and fear? I heard this week about a study of the way we breathe in America. Healthy breathing takes about six breaths per minute, and they are deep, from the abdomen, all the way into the lungs. Let’s try some healthy breathing for one minute, six deep breaths.
Breathe in (five seconds). Breathe out (five seconds)….
Six breaths in one minute. On average, Americans take 20 breaths per minute, so that must have felt way too slow to you. We are absolutely out of control. It turns out that fast breathing is shallow and we miss as much as 70% of the energy and strength we should be getting just from our breath. There is a whole world of energy right around us that we are missing because we are moving so quickly to the next thing, because we are reacting to our worries, because we are distracted by the hollow centers that we create in our lives.
So these tax collectors who have been ruining their lives in the quest for wealth and security are among the first to respond to Jesus and begin living in the kingdom of God right now. They receive the holy spirit, and they not only give up their positions of privilege and pay back those they have cheated, they become disciples, creating a new way of living and treating one another. In other words, they not only repent, they expand the kingdom of God to more people. That’s because they were found by the Holy Spirit and they began to breathe easier. Did you know that the Hebrew word for Spirit, “ruah,” also means wind and it means breath? Just like real breathing, the Holy Spirit is a great source of strength and energy that is available to us that we so often don’t even know.
We get caught at the point of John’s baptism. We realize that something is wrong with the world, wrong with our lives, and we want a change. So then we do our ritual, our deal making, and we wait for God to make a change. But that is not our baptism. Our baptism was into the Christian faith that is no longer waiting, but is already creating the kingdom of God right here in the midst of all that is wrong in the world. This baptism means that when we encounter anger, despair, fear, and hatred, we have something to offer, a strength that is as close as our breath, because God is ready to be at work in us right now. If something isn’t right in the world, then live differently. You won’t have to rely on your strength alone. That is the good news we share. That is the work that is done with feasting and laughter and the celebration that we are already living in the kingdom of God.
[1] Acts 19:2
[2] “Blogging Toward Sunday: Let’s Step Back.” January 5, 2009 on Theolog.org, a blog for The Christian Century.
[3] Mark 1:8
Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 9:1-7
Dedicated to aid workers in Gaza, as the territory is under siege; and always to the glory of God.
“Did you receive the Holy Spirit?”[1] This is Paul’s question to these twelve people he finds when he gets to Ephesus who have already been baptized. Did you receive the Holy Spirit? This is a strange passage for us in the Congregationalist tradition, because Paul kind of sounds like he’s a Pentecostal preacher in a traveling tent revival. Did you receive the Holy Spirit?
But this is long before Christianity separated into different styles and denominations. He asks them because he wants to know if they understand that Christ meant for baptism to be much more than a means of membership in a group. What he means is that God will dwell with us, that God will be active in our very being and shown to others by our lives. The Holy Spirit is the spiritual presence of God with us, as close as our breath. I mean that literally, about our breath, but we’ll get to that later.
Paul says “did you receive the Holy Spirit?” And his face must have just fallen when they reply “No, we have not even heard that there was a Holy Spirit.”
Tom Steagald, a minister down in North Carolina, writes that this reminds him all too well of times in his own church when he has found that life-long Christians are sometimes just as stumped as those Ephesians about the basics of Christian faith. He wonders “who was preaching to them before I got here?” and his opinion of his predecessors becomes pretty low.[2]
If Paul was having similar thoughts, he doesn’t show it. He just calmly takes a step back to learn where they are coming from: “into what then were you baptized?” he says, which is his a way of asking “how did you understand your baptism? What did it mean? What was it for?”
Those are good questions for us on this day, on which we celebrate the baptism of young Aiden, and remember our own baptism, the sacrament by which everyone comes into the family of the Christian church. When we dedicated the new Atrium, we each added a bit of water to the fountain, and we blessed it, and now it reminds us of our baptism every time we enter the doors of the church. So our question today is “into what were we baptized? What did it mean? What was it for?”
The twelve Ephesians said that they were baptized into John’s baptism. That’s John the Baptist, who stood out in the Jordan river proclaiming a baptism of repentance. Repent means to turn around, to turn away from whatever it is that has become the center of our lives and return to God who is our true center, our true home. In our search for a life that we can live with, we turn to all kinds of things that are substitutes for God, and they are hollow centers. Sometimes these empty centers are obvious and widely recognized. But we also need to talk about the hollow centers of entertainment diversion, success, and security. When they become the center, many things begin to act like drugs to distract us and dull our attention to caring for ourselves, for our relationships, and for our neighbors. For substance abuse, there are recovery groups and the support of culture to turn around. In contrast, our culture praises entertainers, the ambitious, and the successful above all others, even as these pursuits just lead us farther and farther away from our true center in God.
John the Baptist called for repentance, to turn away from all of that, which is why people could only hear him out in the wilderness, where he could be heard above the noise of our distractions. So what is wrong with the baptism of repentance? Why does Paul think that the twelve Ephesians need more than John’s baptism? Because repentance is important as a first step. As John himself says “I baptize you with water, but the one who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”[3]
Here’s the basic difference. John called people to repent because God was coming. Jesus announced that the kingdom of God is here. He preached a new message. But just like those twelve that Paul met, we often get stuck in the old message. Too often, we think that Christianity is about showing our faith in God, being baptized for repentance, acting nice, and then waiting for the kingdom of God to come and change things. We’ve done our part, now let’s wait for God to shower us with blessings and ease our pain. Our faith too often treats God like a divine ATM. We put in the right code and wait for the goods to be dispensed.
Jesus said that God is here, the kingdom of God is among you, God’s Holy Spirit is in you. You can live in the kingdom of God right now. It won’t change your circumstances like magic - faith is not a makeover reality show. Our baptism is to put us into God’s kingdom right now. Instead of fasting like John had done, waiting for God to do something, Jesus feasted, because he wasn’t trying to earn God’s response, he was celebrating God’s grace already given. When will we give up trying to earn God’s grace and start celebrating that we already have it? Jesus lived and feasted in the kingdom of God with his disciples, with the poor and ill and hungry, and notorious sinners like the tax collectors, those Jews who took jobs with the empire, who were protected by Roman soldiers, and got rich by collecting and pocketing more than the amount that was due to Rome. The tax collectors had thought they could center their lives on great wealth and the security of the Roman army, but finally realized that all these were empty centers.
I wonder if the tax collectors are a warning for our country? How is it that we can live in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world and be so filled with unhappiness, discontent, and fear? I heard this week about a study of the way we breathe in America. Healthy breathing takes about six breaths per minute, and they are deep, from the abdomen, all the way into the lungs. Let’s try some healthy breathing for one minute, six deep breaths.
Breathe in (five seconds). Breathe out (five seconds)….
Six breaths in one minute. On average, Americans take 20 breaths per minute, so that must have felt way too slow to you. We are absolutely out of control. It turns out that fast breathing is shallow and we miss as much as 70% of the energy and strength we should be getting just from our breath. There is a whole world of energy right around us that we are missing because we are moving so quickly to the next thing, because we are reacting to our worries, because we are distracted by the hollow centers that we create in our lives.
So these tax collectors who have been ruining their lives in the quest for wealth and security are among the first to respond to Jesus and begin living in the kingdom of God right now. They receive the holy spirit, and they not only give up their positions of privilege and pay back those they have cheated, they become disciples, creating a new way of living and treating one another. In other words, they not only repent, they expand the kingdom of God to more people. That’s because they were found by the Holy Spirit and they began to breathe easier. Did you know that the Hebrew word for Spirit, “ruah,” also means wind and it means breath? Just like real breathing, the Holy Spirit is a great source of strength and energy that is available to us that we so often don’t even know.
We get caught at the point of John’s baptism. We realize that something is wrong with the world, wrong with our lives, and we want a change. So then we do our ritual, our deal making, and we wait for God to make a change. But that is not our baptism. Our baptism was into the Christian faith that is no longer waiting, but is already creating the kingdom of God right here in the midst of all that is wrong in the world. This baptism means that when we encounter anger, despair, fear, and hatred, we have something to offer, a strength that is as close as our breath, because God is ready to be at work in us right now. If something isn’t right in the world, then live differently. You won’t have to rely on your strength alone. That is the good news we share. That is the work that is done with feasting and laughter and the celebration that we are already living in the kingdom of God.
[1] Acts 19:2
[2] “Blogging Toward Sunday: Let’s Step Back.” January 5, 2009 on Theolog.org, a blog for The Christian Century.
[3] Mark 1:8
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