Category: Preachments
2 What Kind of Bedtime Story Do You Tell The Incarnate Deity?
Chalk this one down as Worst Sermon Ever.
I’ve already mentioned here before how my Advent and Christmas sermons are generally panned. The Advent ones for being too obscure. The Christmas ones for resisting sentimentality.
Here’s one I wrote based on the Book of Ruth. In case you don’t know, Ruth’s story finds its way into Jesus’ family tree in Matthew’s Gospel. I tried to imagine the Holy Family telling her story to the little Jesus.
It’s my favorite of the sermons I’ve written….but still everyone else votes ‘Worst Sermon Ever.’
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‘Your father and I read this story at our wedding,’ the young mother told her little boy. And when the boy asked why, his father told him that it was tradition. ‘It’s a love story,’ he said.
The lights from the menorah on the window sill made the boy’s dark room glow. The light of the candles danced off the colored Hanukah decorations. The smells of holiday food lingered in the house. Mary and Joseph were curled up with their little boy.
He’d taken the old, black family bible from its shelf in his room, and it now rested on his lap just as he sat on his mother’s lap. The bible was the kind with the thick, special paper in the front, the kind with gilt lines to fill in important dates: marriages, births, baptisms and, beneath those, lots of lines to sketch the family tree.
Mary had filled in the family tree before she was even properly married, before she started to show. At the time she’d been confused by a great many things, but she absolutely knew that one day it would be important for her boy to know: where he came from, who is ancestors were, and what kind of person they made him.
And so, every night before his parents’ kiss and lullaby, they would read him a story from the bible, a story about one of those names his mother had written on the front, cream-colored page of Joseph’s family bible.
He would point with his little boy finger at one of the names on the family tree. ‘Tell me a story about that one’ he would say. He was just a boy. He liked the adventure stories the best- the stories with action and danger, stories where God spoke like thunder or moved like fire and wind, stories like those of Abraham and Jacob and, of course, David- the boy who would be king.
But on this night the boy pointed to a different name, one he hadn’t pointed to before. ‘Tell me a story about that one.’ And his mother smiled and looked over at her husband. ‘We read this story at our wedding,’ she said. ‘It’s a love story.’ The boy looked skeptically at his mother as she began…
A long, long time ago, in the days when judges ruled… famine struck the whole land that God had promised his people. The stomachs of God’s people were grumbling and empty. Even in Bethlehem where you were born people went hungry.
There was a man on your father’s side of the family named Elimelech. Elimelech had a family and, like everyone else in the land, his family was starving.
‘What did he do?’ the little boy asked, ‘did God provide bread from heaven like in the story of Moses?’
And his mother said, no, not like that. Elimelech had to look out for his family so one night he and his wife and their two sons packed only what they could carry. In the cover of darkness, they snuck across the border and crossed through the muddy river into a new country, Moab.
Elimelech’s wife was a woman named Naomi. ‘Naomi means ‘sweetness,’ said the boy’s father, ‘but Naomi was anything but sweet.’
The little boy asked why that was and his father told him that no sooner did Elimelech’s family arrive in Moab than Elimelech died and Naomi was left alone with her two sons. A widow’s life is hard his mother explained. Don’t ever forget that.
At first things went well for Naomi. Her sons married two girls from Moab, Orpah and Ruth. They weren’t Jewish girls so their marriages would’ve been forbidden back in Bethlehem, but they were happy. Naomi’s boys were married happily for ten years. They had food and money and work. After ten years both of Naomi’s boys died. Just like that, no one knows why.
And poor Naomi, she always worried in the back of her mind that they died because God was punishing her for something, perhaps for letting her boys marry unbelievers.
‘But God doesn’t do things like that, does he?’ the boy asked. No, his mother said, God doesn’t do that and she kissed the top of his head.
But Naomi felt she was being punished. She was left with two daughters-in-law, in a country where she didn’t belong, in a man’s world with no man, no husband, no sons.
‘What does she do?’ the boy asked. Naomi decided to return home, to go back to Bethlehem. ‘All by her self?’ he asked. An uncertain future seemed better to her than what she could expect if she stayed in Moab. So she packed up her things- again just what she needed- along with a photo of her husband and boys, and after her sons were buried, numb with grief, she just started walking… towards home.
‘Is that the story?’ the boy wanted to know.
No, his mother said and looked at the lights in the window. You see, her sons’ wives followed behind her. At first Naomi simply thought they wanted to say goodbye, to wave to her as she disappeared over the horizon. When they got to the outskirts of town, though, Naomi realized they weren’t just seeing her off. Orpah and Ruth, she realized, intended to stay with her, to go with Naomi all the long way back to Israel, back to Bethlehem.
‘Well, did they?’ the boy wanted to know. Not exactly, his mother replied. First Naomi turned around and yelled at them. She yelled at Ruth and Orpah. She told them to turn around, to turn back, to go home to their own families.
They didn’t belong with her. In her country they’d just be foreigners. They wouldn’t be welcome. I’m very grateful for you, Naomi told Ruth and Orpah; I pray that God would give you happiness and husbands. But go.
Ruth and Orpah, they just stood there- stubborn. Naomi yelled at them again, but she was really yelling at God. When Naomi was done cursing, she fell down weeping, crying in the middle of the road with traffic going by.
That was when Orpah decided to do as her mother-in-law asked. She gave her dead husband’s mother a long embrace and picked up her bags and walked back into town.
But Ruth, your great….grandmother, she wouldn’t budge. She wouldn’t leave Naomi to fend for herself. She just planted her feet in the dirt and put her hands on her hips and told Naomi that wherever Naomi went Ruth would be going too, wherever Naomi lived Ruth would be living there too, and the place Naomi died would be where Ruth would die.
Ruth, your great…grandma, she was willing to leave behind her home, family, country, even her religion just to care for someone else.
And God never told Ruth to risk all this. She never had a special word of calling like Abraham, never a vision like Moses, no dream like Jacob.
‘God really speaks to people in their dreams?’ the boy asked. Yes, he does, said the boy’s father.
Ruth and Naomi walked the long walk to Bethlehem in silence. Naomi didn’t speak a word until she introduced herself to the people they met in Bethlehem, but she didn’t say that her name was Naomi. Call me ‘Mara’ she told people.
‘Why would she change her name?’ the little boy asked. Mara means bitterness; Naomi was convinced that her life was already over. Remember, a widow’s life is hard. God’s Kingdom should belong to them. Don’t ever forget that. ‘I won’t,’ the boy promised.
Ruth and Naomi found a place to live in Bethlehem. Nothing fancy, not even nice, but Ruth tried to make the best of it. Naomi though just sat in the dark corner of the apartment and stared blankly through her tears and through the window. Ruth had promised to take care of Naomi and she wasn’t about to quit.
They still had no food so, after they settled, Ruth went out to the fields to scavenge what the harvesters left behind. She didn’t know it at the time, but the fields belonged to a rich man named Boaz. Boaz was family to Naomi.
Every day Ruth left to scavenge for food and every day she came home to Naomi’s bitter quiet. But one day, everything started to change.
One day, the same as any other, Ruth was working the fields, looking for leftovers.
On that day, Boaz came out to look over his property and check on his workers. He said hello and thanked them. Then he saw someone he didn’t recognize bent over at the edge of the field, a woman. He pointed to Ruth out in the distance and he asked his foreman: ‘Who is she?’
And his foreman told him all about Ruth and how much Ruth loved her bitter mother-in-law and how Ruth had risked everything to care for her.
Boaz listened to the foreman’s story, and later that day he walked out to the edge of the field. He said hello to Ruth. Then he did a strange thing.
‘What?’ the boy asked. He urged Ruth to scavenge only in his fields. He promised her that his men would never bother her and that they would even leave extra grain behind for her. Ruth stood in the sun and listened to Boaz tell her all of this.
Now, for the first time since her husband had died, it was Ruth’s turn to cry. She fell down at Boaz’s feet and wept and she told him that she was just a foreigner, that she deserved rejection not kindness.
Boaz just smiled gently and he said softly: ‘May God reward the love you’ve shown Naomi.’
When Ruth returned home that day, she told Naomi everything that happened with Boaz.
For the first time, Naomi pulled her wistful eyes away from the window and she said, almost like she’d been holding her breath for a great long while: ‘Bless you!’
When she said it, Ruth didn’t know whether Naomi was talking to her or to God.
‘Is that it?’ the boy wondered aloud, thinking it not nearly as exciting a story as David and Goliath.
No, his mother said. Nothing else happened to Ruth or Naomi for a while. Then one morning Naomi burst into Ruth’s bedroom and she told her that that day Boaz would be winnowing barley with his workers. Its long work, Naomi explained.
The whole town will be there to help. It’s like a festival. There’ll be food and music and dancing and wine, lots of wine, she said with knowing eyes.
Ruth still looked puzzled so Naomi grabbed her by the shoulders and told Ruth to take off the black clothes she’d been wearing since her husband died. Go take a long shower, Naomi told her. And when you’re done anoint your whole body with perfume and then put on a nice dress. You need to look beautiful in every way.
And when Ruth asked why, Naomi told her what she was to do.
That night, after the day’s work and the evening’s party, Boaz wouldn’t be going home. Instead he’d be sleeping in his barn. You’re to go to him, Naomi told Ruth. Go to him and lie down next to him.
‘What did Ruth say?” asked the boy. ‘Probably something like: let it be with me according to your word,’ his mother answered. Whatever Ruth said, she did everything Naomi told her. When she snuck into the barn that night, the band was still playing outside and Boaz was already fast asleep in the hay.
Before Ruth lay down in the straw next to Boaz, she tried to take off his shoes for him. She woke him up. I imagine he was surprised, said the boy’s mother.
When Boaz startled awake, he asked Ruth what she was doing there. And Ruth blushed and panicked. Naomi had told her what to do, but not what to say.
‘What did she say?’ the boy asked.
Ruth told him that if he really wanted to care for her, if he really prayed that God would reward her kindness to Naomi, if he really wanted to help her care for Naomi, then he would marry her.
‘She asked him to marry her?’ the boy asked surprised.
Yes, and Boaz said yes. And he let Ruth sleep there next to him that night.
In the morning, before the sun came up or anyone else awoke, Boaz told Ruth to meet him that afternoon at the gateway that led into town. That’s where he would marry her.
And before Ruth left that early morning, Boaz gave her a gift of barley. He helped load the bag of barley onto her back. Your great-grandma Ruth, she always told people that that morning, helping her with the barley, was the first time they ever touched.
Mary could see that her boy was drifting asleep. So they married, she concluded. And they had a boy named Obed. And he became King David’s grandfather, and, without them, you might not be here with us…
Joseph crept up and blew out the lights on the menorah, and Mary tucked her little boy into bed. And with half open eyes, the little boy said that God wasn’t even in that story. God didn’t say anything or do anything or appear to anyone.
And Mary kissed the word made flesh on the forehead and she said that sometimes God’s love is revealed to us in our love for one another.
Sometimes God is in the person right in front of you. That’s what the story’s about, she said.
And of all the people in the world, only Mary knew just how true that was.
0 Can Male Preachers Preach Mary?
Every year at Advent, when the Mary scriptures come around, I compose what are generally received as terrible sermons. I don’t intend to but I’m also not surprised by the reaction. You see, Mary’s experience is so unique she is unlike any other character in scripture. It’s also the case that the Protestant Church generally does her a disservice by ignoring her outright. To address the former and remedy the latter, I always try to write sermons that privilege Mary’s voice. I avoid making her an illustration of a larger point. I avoid making her experience analogous to our own. I avoid distilling her narrative down into ‘points.’
Instead I just try to let her story speak for itself, which proves difficult because that requires a lack of explanation listeners can find puzzling or just downright confusing. Of course, with Mary, there’s also the tricky issue of yours truly, an obviously manly man, assuming the voice of a woman but that’s an issue for another day.
For all their failure as sermons, Mary has given me some of the best writing I’ve done (at least I think so.)
Case in point- and definitely in the Final Four for Worst Sermon Ever- is this sermon, ‘The Visitation,’ from a few years ago. The text was the visitation of Mary and Elizabeth in Luke. In it, I tried to narratively imagine Mary’s journey to Elizabeth’s house and the thoughts running through her head, having just been visited by the angel Gabriel. In doing so, I also attempted to weave into the text the many Old Testament narratives Mary’s story hearkens back to- something only bible nerds were able to notice because, again, I refused to stop and explain what I was doing.
So, terrible sermon but decent piece of writing for Advent.
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Her hands kept shaking even after he departed from her.
She gasped and only then realized sheʼd been holding her breath, waiting to see if heʼd reappear as suddenly as heʼd intruded upon her life. His words had lodged in her mind just as something new was supposedly lodged inside her.
He mustʼve seen how terrified she was. ʻDonʼt be afraid,ʼ heʼd said to her.
In those moments after he departed, she just stood there, looking around her bedroom. The posters on the wall, the books on the shelf, the homework on the desk, the dirty laundry on the floor in the corner- in the aftermath of an angelʼs glow, it all seemed very ordinary.
It was an unlikely place for a ʻvisitation.ʼ There wasnʼt anything there in her bedroom to confuse it for a holy place. It was just ordinary.
Looking around her room, she caught a glance of her reflection in the mirror. And so was she: ordinary, not anyone that anyone else should ever remember or notice, not someone youʼd pick out like a single star in all the sky.
Yet, thatʼs just what heʼd told her.
Sheʼd been chosen. Somehow, in the days ahead of her or already right now, God would come to exist in her belly.
The thought made her shake again.
She looked out her window, up at the multitude of stars in the night sky.
ʻDo not be afraid,ʼ heʼd told her.
Those same words, she knew, had been spoken long ago to Abraham.
Do not be afraid, Abraham had been told in the moments before God pointed
to the stars in the sky and dared Abraham to count them, dared Abraham to imagine and believe that for as many stars as there were in the sky so his descendants would be.
She liked the thought, as unbelievable as it sounded, that through her and her baby the whole world would be blessed.
Still, she knew enough scripture to know that the angelʼs words, ʻDo not be afraid,ʼ were auspicious words. She knew the child promised by God to Abraham and Sarah was the same child whose sacrifice God later required.
She knew the story- it was the sort of story you canʼt forget even if youʼd like to- how God one day told Abraham that the promised son would have to suffer and be sacrificed on top of a mountain. How the son obeyed and followed his fatherʼs will all the way up the mount, carrying wood. How they built an offering place up there. How the son was spared only when it was clear how far the father would go.
She used to wonder how God could ask anyone to give up something so precious.
But now, looking out at the stars and rubbing her belly, she wondered about Sarah, Abrahamʼs wife, the boyʼs mother, and what Sarah would have done if God had asked her to follow her boy to his death.
The wondering made her shake again. ʻDonʼt be afraidʼ she whispered to herself.
As the late night turned to early morning she resolved to leave home.
A part of her wanted to see for herself the truth of the angelʼs words growing inside Elizabeth.
A still bigger part of her knew the angelʼs news would make her a stranger now in her own home, perhaps a stranger forever.
Nazareth was a small town; in a town that size thereʼs no room to hide.
And she didnʼt want to be at home when her body started to change, when the neighbors started whispering questions about legitimacy.
And she didnʼt want to remain at home and face her fiance, not yet. The angel could say nothing is impossible but she knew, chances were, everyone would suspect the worst about her before theyʼd believe the truth.
With haste, she packed her belongings into a duffel.
She folded her jeans and some blouses and wondered how long sheʼd fit into them. She zipped her bag shut and sadly glanced at the wedding dress hanging in her closet. Seeing it, she knew it would be too small on her wedding day, should that day ever come.
ʻFavored one,ʼ thatʼs what heʼd called her. Favored one. But now, hurrying before anyone else in the house awoke, it seemed more burden than blessing.
ʻFavored one.ʼ
She hadnʼt known what to make of such a greeting when she first heard it.
ʻFavored one.ʼ
Hannah had received that same greeting. Hannah, who hadnʼt let the gray in her hair or the crowʼs feet around her eyes stop her from praying ceaselessly for God to fill her barren womb with a child.
Eli, the haggard priest, had called Hannah ʻfavored oneʼ just before he spilled the news of her answered prayer.
But packing the last of her things and clicking off the bedroom lights she recalled that even for Hannah a blessing from God wasnʼt so simple. Even for Hannah the blessing was also a summons.
Hannah had prayed holes in the rug for a child but as soon as Hannah weaned her son, God called her to give her boy to Eli, the priest. Hannahʼs boy was to be consecrated.
Tiptoeing through the dark hallway, she wondered how Hannah had explained that to her husband. She wondered what it had been like for Hannah, who lost out on all the memories a mother counts on: his first words, learning to walk, the first day of school, homecoming and his wedding day.
Everything Hannah had wanted when sheʼd wanted a child sacrificed for the purpose God had for her boy.
Hannah- sheʼd been called ʻfavored oneʼ too.
Leaving her house in the cold moonlight, she thought that Godʼs favor was also a kind of humiliation, that Godʼs call was also a call to suffer.
ʻLet it be with me according to your word,ʼ sheʼd told him when she could think of nothing else to say. But if she prayed now for God to let this cup pass from her, would he?
ʻLet it be with me according to your word,ʼ sheʼd said.
Standing out under the streetlight and looking back at the house where sheʼd grown up, she realized it wasnʼt that simple.
Things would never be simple again.
Elizabeth lived in the country outside Jerusalem, several days journey from Nazareth. Sheʼd stop in villages along the way to draw water from their wells.
She knew what others must have thought: a young girl, a single woman, resting at a well all by herself raised eyebrows.
It was in those moments with men and women staring at her, making assumptions and passing judgments, she wondered if the angel knew what sort of family her baby would be grafted onto.
Names like Rahab and Ruth leapt out, a prostitute and a foreigner. Not the sort of family youʼd expect to be chosen.
She wondered what that said God.
And what her boy would one day make of it.
At night she camped out in the fields along the road where the only noise came from the shepherds and their flocks.
She got sick for the first time out there in the fields.
It was then she began to wonder about the stranger she would bring into the
world. Who will this be? she thought. Here is something that is most profoundly me, my flesh and my blood, the sheer stuff of me, depending on me and vulnerable to me. And yet not me, strange to me, impenetrable to me.
Sheʼd asked him there in the room how it would happen. She hadnʼt gotten much in the way of explanation.
“The power of the most high will overshadow youʼ is how heʼd answered. ʻOvershadowʼ was the word heʼd used. She was sure of it.
She still didnʼt know how that worked exactly. She hadnʼt felt anything. But she knew that word, ʻovershadow.ʼ
Itʼs what God did with the ark of the covenant when David brought the ark to Jerusalem with dancing and jubilation and not a little bit of fear. The power of the most high overshadowed the ark.
And before that when God delivered Israel from bondage and led them to freedom through the wilderness, in the tabernacle, the presence and power of God overshadowed.
Now, the most high had overshadowed her, and, if the angel could be believed, God was about to deliver on an even bigger scale.
Sleep came hard those nights on the road. Sheʼd look up at the sky and rub her nauseous belly. It made her dizzy trying to comprehend it: how she could carry within her the sign and the seal of the covenant, as though her womb was an ark; how the hands and feet sheʼd soon feel pushing and kicking inside her were actually the promises of God.
Made flesh.
As soon as she saw Elizabeth in the distance she knew it was true. All of it.
Seeing Elizabeth, it hit her how they were immeasurably different.
Elizabethʼs child will be seen by all as a blessing from God. Elizabeth will be praised, the stigma of her barrenness finally lifted.
But for Mary, as soon as she started to show, it would be different.
A young girl, engaged, suddenly pregnant, with no ring on her finger, no father in sight and her fiance none the wiser? That invited more than just a stigma. She could be stoned to death.
She could see from the end of the road the beautiful contradiction that was Elizabeth: the gray wiry hair, the wrinkled face and stooped back, and the 6 month pregnant belly.
To be sure, Elizabeth was a miracle but it was not unheard of. Sarah, Hannah…Mary had grown up hearing stories of women like Elizabeth.
Mary knew: hers was different.
An unexpected, miraculous birth wasnʼt the same thing as a virgin birth.
With Mary, it was as if the angelʼs message- Godʼs words- alone had flicked a light in the darkness of her womb.
Life from nothing- that was the difference. Not from Joseph or anyone else.
From nothing God created life.
Inside her.
From nothing.
The same way, she thought, God created the heavens and the earth: from nothing.
The same way God created the sun and the sea and the stars. The same way God created Adam and Eve.
From nothing.
As though what she carried within her was creation itself.
The start of a new beginning.
To everything.
A Genesis and an ultimate reversal all in one.
As she walked up Elizabethʼs driveway, she considered the costs that might lie ahead, and with her hand on her stomach she whispered to herself: “The Lord has done great things for me.”
1 The Christmas Gospel (In Chairs)
Sermon for 1st Advent based on 2 Corinthians 5.16-20 (my favorite scripture).
I used two chairs as props in this sermon to illustrate my point. A white folding chair (God) and a black folding chair (humanity). I’ve included the blocking cues for this to make sense in the text.
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On my blog last week I solicited questions that people have about Jesus’ birth. I promised that the best questions- at least as they’re judged by yours truly- would make their way into our sermons during Advent.
I’ve received all sorts of questions.
Some questions were from church members but many were not.
Some questions were anonymous and others were not.
One question- it wasn’t anonymous, not exactly.
The email wasn’t signed. I don’t know who it was from but the email address identified the writer as ‘emmasmommy@.com
The email said:
‘I suppose you can chalk this up to ‘kids ask the darndest questions.’ Tuesday afternoon I was driving home from Target with my daughter who’s a first grader.
We were listening to Christmas music on the Christian radio station when out of the blue my daughter asked me: ‘Why do we celebrate Christmas?’
I was about to say to her ‘Because Christmas is Jesus’ birthday,’ which is true obviously, but I stopped myself because all of a sudden that struck me as a not very meaningful answer. Think about all the Christmas carols there are- seems silly if ‘Happy Birthday to you; Happy Birthday dear Jesus’ will do the job.
So instead I said to her: ‘We celebrate Christmas because Jesus is the one who saves us.’
I should’ve known better because she came right back and asked me: ‘How does Jesus save us?’
And I answered: ‘He dies on the cross.’
That’s when I started wishing I’d just gone with the birthday answer because naturally, being a child, she had more questions.
‘Why does Jesus have to die?’ she asked me.
‘So God can forgive us’ I said, confidently, hoping that would be the end of it.
But no.
She must’ve seen me in the rearview mirror and known I was out of my depth because she pressed me: ‘Why does Jesus have to die? Why can’t God just forgive us?’
‘Because that’s just the way it works’ I told her, which by the way is the same answer I gave her when she asked me how gas makes the car go: because that’s just the way it works.
She chewed on that for a while and then she said, like she was tattling on a bully at school: ‘God doesn’t sound very nice.’
Here’s what I did not have the courage to tell her: ‘I agree.’
I should’ve just stuck with the ‘Christmas = Jesus’ Birthday’ bit, because the alternative makes Christmas seem awfully dark and it makes God seem that way too.
So there’s my Christmas question: Why Christmas? Why can’t God just forgive our sins and be done with it? Why is Jesus born just to die?
I don’t know if ‘emmasmommy’ goes to this church or not.
Even if she does, I don’t know if she’s here today.
But emmasmommy’s question is an A+ question.
In fact, I think it gets at the most important question.
But before I can answer emmasmommy’s question I need to unpack two different versions of the Gospel for you.
So what I want to do today is offer you a presentation of the Gospel in two different versions. I want to present to you the Modern, Western, Judicial version of the Gospel- the version that most of us in North America assume is the only version.
Some of you will want to argue with me that there is no other version; and you if you do, you will be wrong and I will be right 🙂
And then I want to present to you a version of the Gospel that is more ancient.
It’s the Patristic understanding of Salvation, meaning it comes from the early Church Fathers.
So what I want to do is contrast the Legal-Judicial understanding of Salvation with the Patristic understanding of Salvation, and I want to do it with chairs.
Already I can see some of you tensing up. I got this idea from a colleague who’s an Orthodox priest.
First, the Legal-Judicial understanding of Salvation. It goes like this:
In the beginning, God created man in God’s image to reflect God’s glory and to enjoy fellowship with God [chairs face each other].
But man in the Garden sinned [turn black chair away from white chair].
And as a result, man became sinful, and God, because God is holy and righteous, cannot look upon man in his sin.
And so God turns away from man [turn white chair away from black chair].
But God in his love for humanity sends his Son to occupy our place [bring black chair around to face white chair].
Jesus Christ lives as one of us, lives as we were intended to live, lives in full relationship with the Father, never turns away from the Father, trusts the Father at every juncture of his life, alway does the Father’s will.
And at the end of his life, Jesus is put to death.
In that moment, the Father does the unthinkable. He takes our sin- our personal and collective sin- and he puts it on Jesus; so that, Jesus becomes sinful and guilty [turn black chair away from white chair].
As Paul writes, ‘God made him to be sin who no sin.’
And God, because God is holy and righteous, cannot look upon sin, and so God turns away from his Son [turn white chair away from black chair].
When Jesus cries out on the cross: ‘My God, why have you forsaken me,’ in this understanding of salvation, that’s Jesus experiencing the full wrath of God.
Now, if we sinners believe that God has done this and that Jesus has born the wrath of God that we deserve then we’re protected from the wrath of God. It’s like we’re born all over again and we receive the righteousness of Christ as our own [move black chair to face white chair].
As Martin Luther said: ‘We are like snow-covered crap,’ which maybe sounds better in German I don’t know.
Or, as modern preachers have put it: ‘Christ becomes our asbestos suit to protect us from the white, hot wrath of God against sinners.
Now that’s if we believe this.
If we don’t believe that Jesus has done this for us, then we remain in our sin [turn black chair away from white chair].
And God’s wrath remains against us and we remain alienated from God and eventually the sinner is condemned to everlasting Hell [turn white chair away from black chair].
Merry Christmas!
That’s the Legal or Judicial understanding of salvation.
And it’s the version assumed in the question from emmasmommy because emmasmommy assumed the problem Jesus is born to solve is our guilt and the punishment required for God to forgive us.
It’s a modern understanding in the sense that it only became a common way of thinking about salvation more than a thousand years after Jesus.
It’s sometimes called the Satisfaction understanding of salvation because it’s Jesus’ suffering and death that ‘satisfies’ God’s wrath towards us.
[turn chairs back to face listeners]
Now the Patristic version is the more ancient understanding; it’s how the early Christians understood salvation.
It’s also how John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Movement, thought about salvation.
It goes like this:
In the beginning, God created man in his image [turn black chair to face white chair].
To reflect his love and to share in the fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit. But in the Garden man sinned and turned away from God [turn black chair away from white chair].
As a result- pay attention, this is important- having turned away from God, we’re no longer fully who God created us to be.
Genesis says, literally, God created Adam and Eve to be ‘eikons’ of God, and when we turn away from God, it’s like those ‘eikons’ get cracked.
So the problem Jesus comes to solve is not our guilt and God’s wrath towards us.
Because sin isn’t so much something we’re guilty of and need to be punished for.
Sin is primarily something we’re afflicted with. By.
John Wesley said that sin is like a disease that impairs every part of our lives and only a restored relationship with God can heal us.
That’s the problem the Gospel addresses.
Now, because God loves humanity and refuses to turn his back on the creatures that turned their backs on him, God takes takes flesh. God becomes one of us.
[move white chair to face black chair].
God comes as Jesus not to judge but to restore.
And so, imagine a woman who, because she’s cracked ‘eikon’ of God, she’s gone from man to man, marriage to marriage [turn black chair away].
She’s been married five times and now she’s living with a sixth and still doesn’t have the love that she longs for.
And what happens?
[move white chair to face black chair]
God comes.
God comes and sits down beside her at a well and says ‘I am the Water of Life. I will love you.’
Picture a man [gesture to black chair].
Because he’s a cracked ‘eikon’ of God, for the sake of greed and ambition has become a tax collector, that is, he colludes with the Roman occupation. He articipates in the oppression of his own people [turn black chair away from white chair].
As a result, he’s ostracized by his people. He’s alienated from society. No one will have anything to do with him.
But what happens?
God comes [turn white around to face black chair].
God comes and sees this tax collector up in a tree and God says ‘Zaccheus, I’ll eat with you. I’ll come to your house.’
And in that moment, God says: ‘Salvation has come to this house.’
Imagine a woman [gesture to black chair].
She’s been caught in adultery. She’s guilty. She’s another cracked ‘eikon’ of God [turn black chair away from white chair].
The religious establishment has condemned her and now they want to stone her.
But what happens?
God comes [bring white chair around to face black chair].
God comes and when this woman is brought before God and thrown down at his feet, God kneels down beside her and says: ‘Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.’
And then he says to the woman: ‘I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more.’
Here is a young man, who because he’s a broken ‘eikon,’ out of greed and resentment, wishes his father dead [turn black chair away from white chair].
He demands his inheritance. And the young man takes the money and leaves to spend his father’s fortune.
But what happens?
When that man’s broke and desperate and returns home, his father does what no fathers in the ancient world ever did [bring white chair around to face black chair].
His father runs up to him and embraces him and throws a feast to welcome him home.
And God says: ‘That’s what I’m like.’
And when humanity [turn black chair away from white chair] is driven by fear and power, takes God and betrays him and spits upon him and scourges him and mocks him and condemns him and crucifies him, what does God say?
[bring white chair around to face black chair]
‘I forgive you.’
And when humanity falls away into death to be forever separated from God [lay black chair down on the floor].
God says: ‘Love is greater than the grave and stronger than Death and, though you make your bed in Sheol, I am there.’
And God joins humanity in Death [lay white chair down on the floor beside black chair].
In his pursuit of restoring relationship with us, God is willing to go all the way down in to Death.
But God also says ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life. I died and am alive for evermore and I hold the keys of Hell and Death. Because I live so shall you live.’
[pick up both chairs so that they’re facing each other]
To those who respond to God’s love with love then God’s love is experienced as a radiant Light and over time as we live in God’s grace we’re restored to who God intended us to be from the very beginning.
We’re saved, healed.
That’s what the word ‘salvation’ means in Greek: healing.
John Wesley said that as our relationship with God is restored and we grow in grace we really do recover the image God intended for us; we can become perfect in love- as Jesus was.
St Athanasius put it this way: God became like us so that we might become like God.
But to those who reject God’s love, who refuse fellowship with God, then that same Light feels unbearable and is experienced as wrath [turn black chair away from white chair].
You see, it’s not that God is angry and wrathful.
Rather that’s what we experience and perceive when we turn our backs on God.
As Paul said, to someone who rejects God’s love, God’s love feels like burning coals upon his head, but it doesn’t mean God’s love is not upon him.
All he ever has to do is turn to God and say: ‘I will love you’ and what had felt like a torment will feel like grace.
That’s the Patristic understanding of salvation.
That’s what you need to have in mind for my reply to emmasmommy to make sense.
Dear Emma’s Mommy,
Thanks for your questions.
As far as answers go, first, keep in mind two core convictions of Christianity:
1) God is immutable, which means God doesn’t change. Ever.
2) God is perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ.
That’s the incarnation. That’s Christmas.
Jesus does not come at Christmas in order to change how the Father feels about us.
God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus.
There’s never been a time when God wasn’t like Jesus.
That’s what’s revealed to us at Christmas.
The Apostle Paul says: ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.’
He doesn’t say: God was in Christ reconciling himself to the world.
It’s not the Father who needed to be reconciled to the world; it’s the world that needed to be restored to the Father.
And so the problem isn’t how God feels about us.
The problem is how we feel about God. We turn our backs on God. All the time.
And that can be like an illness that impairs everything about our lives.
That’s what we call sin.
To your second question, forgiveness doesn’t just begin with the cross.
It begins at Christmas.
In fact, you could say it starts the second Adam and Eve step out of the Garden. Because God never turns away from us.
Like I said, God is perfectly revealed in Jesus.
When do you ever see Jesus turning away from a sinner and saying ‘I am too holy to have anything to do with you?’
Jesus never did anything like that. The Pharisees did.
And maybe it sounds simple and obvious, but I think we can get confused at Christmastime and so I’ll just say it: God is like Jesus not like a Pharisee.
The Pharisees weren’t very nice. But tell your daughter that God is nice because Jesus is.
Lastly, I have no idea how to explain this to a first-grader so that parts up to you, but here goes:
‘Salvation’ isn’t just something that happens on the cross.
And it definitely isn’t just something that happened once upon a time.
In the Gospels, salvation means ‘healing.’
To be saved means to be healed, restored to who God created us to be.
And our relationship with God- that’s the medicine that makes that healing possible.
And that’s why its such a big deal, it’s such good news, that at Christmas we realize that even though we are determined to live our lives without God, God is determined not to be God with out us.
Merry Christmas!
Jason
0 Tamed Cynic Now Available in the iTunes Store
You can now download sermons free from the iTunes store as well receive future ones as automatic downloads. Just search ‘Tamed Cynic’ in the iTunes Store.
0 My Afternoon of Biblical Ignorance
Sermon based on Nehemiah 8.13-17
*For those non-church members out there, ‘Dennis Perry’ is the Sr Pastor of Aldersgate. Senior = Old
—————————————————————–
A few weeks ago Dennis threw a lot of numbers at you, data, from the recent Pew Trust Survey on Religion, the one that found that 20% of Americans now identify themselves as ‘unaffiliated’ with any religion.
But for me it’s a different Pew Trust Survey that’s gotten stuck in my craw: The Pew Trust Survey of Religious Knowledge. It’s from 2010 and contains 16 multiple choice questions.
You can still take the survey online. For the record, I got a perfect score.
Here’s what the survey found:
40% of Americans can correctly identify Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as books called Gospels. Not too bad, right?
Even better, 72% correctly answered that someone named Moses led the Israelites through the Red Sea.
However, 55% of Americans- presumably not in Alabama- think the Golden Rule (Do unto others…) is one of the 10 Commandments.
But here’s the better-pay-attention-now number:
16%, only 16% of Americans know that Christians believe ‘salvation comes to us by faith alone’ not by anything we have to do or prove or be.
Just 16%
I scored higher than that in People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive Survey.
16%
More people follow Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Ashton Kutcher on Twitter than know the basic claim of the Gospel:
that a gracious God died in your place and the only way you participate in that salvation is through faith that changes you from the inside out.
16%
It’s a scary number.
And so this week I decided to test out how accurate that number really is; I decided to conduct my own little ‘experiment.’
Like previous ‘experiments,’ my wife call it a bad, jerky idea.
You might call it shamelessly trolling for sermon material.
I just like to call it ministry.
Friday afternoon I decided to take a guided tour of the National Cathedral, posing as one of the 84% who apparently don’t know our Story.
After paying my ‘suggested donation’ of $10, I walked into the sanctuary to the Docent’s desk where I waited for the next tour to begin.
Waiting with me was a slim couple in their 40‘s, speaking what sounded like Swedish to each other, along with 4 other couples, with sullen preteens in tow. They were all wearing sweatshirts and t-shirts and hats that said ‘DC’ or ‘FBI’ on them. So obviously they were from somewhere else.
A man in a crewcut and an Ohio State Buckeyes sweater looked at me and said: ‘My name’s Gary.’
Then he just stared at me, waiting for me to introduce myself.
So I said: ‘Dennis. My name’s Dennis Perry.’
‘You from around here?’ Gary asked.
‘No’ I said, ‘I’m from Harrisonburg, Va.’
At the top of the hour, the docent arrived and using her ‘inside voice’ gathered us together. She had silver rimmed glasses and long, silver hair.
She was wearing a purple choir robe, for some reason, and a floppy satin hat she’d apparently stolen from Henry the 8th.
Maybe it was the silliness of her outfit or the stone confines of the church but it felt like we were all at Hogwarts and she was Professor Maganachacallit, showing us to our respective houses.
She began by telling us how much the largest stone weighed: 55 tons. She told us the original cost of all that brick and mortar: 65 million. She told us the number of stained glass windows: 231.
What she didn’t tell us, I noticed, was anything about why the church was there in the first place.
As the walking tour began so did my “experiment” in which I, Dennis Wayne Perry, pretended to be a complete ignoramus.
Fortunately, it’s a character I know well and can pull off convincingly.
For example, at the famous Space Window, the stained glass window containing a piece of lunar rock, I said loudly: ‘I didn’t know the moon landing was in the bible.’
Gary from Ohio squinted and said with authority: ‘I think it’s predicted in the bible, you know, like a prophecy.’
And when we were standing near a window showing Moses holding the 10 Commandments, I pointed at the window and said: ‘Wait, who’s that guy holding those tablet thingeys?
Sure enough the Pew Survey must be accurate because about 3/4 of our group all mumbled: ‘Moses.’
But Gary from Ohio whispered to me: ‘It’s Jesus. Gotta be Jesus.’
The tour continued and all along the way Dennis Perry, ignoramus extraordinaire, kept asking questions.
And while it’s true no one in the group necessarily thought that, say, Abraham’s sacrificial son was named Steve, as I speculated aloud, it’s also true no one in the group had enough confidence in their own answers to argue with me.
In the Bethlehem Chapel, I asked why Jesus is born in Bethlehem, to which the only response I got was from one of the sullen seventh graders: ‘Because otherwise we’d have to celebrate Hanukkah and Hannakah means less presents.’
Fair enough, I thought.
But standing in front of a gold crucifix, I pointed and asked innocently: ‘Who’s that?’
Several murmured ‘Jesus.’
But it wasn’t clear whether by ‘Jesus’ they were identifying the carpenter on the cross or the idiot named Dennis.
‘I don’t get it,’ I said, ‘why’s he on that cross?’
A middle-aged woman clicked a picture and said ‘He got crucified because he wanted us to love one another.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone kill someone for that?’ I said.
She just shrugged her shoulders and said ‘Dunno, that’s what I’d always heard.’
Gary from Ohio said: ‘He died so we can go to heaven, Dennis.’
‘Really? How’s that supposed to work?’ I asked.
And while the docent pointed upwards at the scaffolding and construction, Gary from Ohio blushed: ‘I’m not sure.’
After 50 years of God’s People suffering captivity in Babylon, Nehemiah returns to the Promised Land armed with a vision to rebuild the city walls which Babylon had laid to waste.
The work took several months.
But it wasn’t until the wall was complete that it sunk in:
God had delivered them from captivity.
Even though they hadn’t deserved it.
God had redeemed them.
And they’d taken him for granted.
That’s why, not long after the last bit of mortar is spread and the trowels are put away, the people- all the people- with no goading or prompting from Nehemiah or Ezra or any of the priests, the people flash mob Jerusalem.
They realized what they needed more than anything else- more even than the bricks and mortar they’d just finished- was God.
So the people gather at the Water Gate and the prophet Ezra reads the Word of God to them.
While listening at the Water Gate they hear Ezra read about a festival, a holy day, that God had commanded them to keep: Booths.
The Festival of Booths was meant to remind Israel of their deliverance from slavery in Egypt and how God had provided for them every step of the way.
God commanded them to construct Booths once a year to remind them of the tents they lived in as they were making their journey from slavery to freedom.
The booths were meant to be a visible, tangible reminder of a salvation they did nothing to earn or deserve. That (the booth) was meant to function just like that (the cross).
Did you catch the end of our passage?
Nehemiah says Israel had not celebrated Booths since the days of Joshua.
In case you don’t know your bible, Joshua’s the one who picked up where Moses left off and led the people into the Promised Land.
Hundreds of years before Nehemiah.
This good news of salvation. Their core story of redemption.
They’d forgotten it. What’s more, they didn’t realize they’d forgotten it.
And you know what’s scary for us?
What’s scary for us is that that means, for generations, God’s People had said their prayers, and done their rituals, and built their sanctuaries, and they’d even worked against injustice and poverty.
For generations they’d done religion
Without celebrating their core story, their Gospel.
“Not since the days of Joshua” means that for a long time they’d just been going through the motions without having their hearts changed by this story of a gracious God who had saved them and asked only for faith in return.
This is from Jamie, a colleague, who’s recently returned from serving as a missionary:
“I always think it’s interesting when people pat us on the back for being missionaries to Latin America. Perhaps they think we were doing something difficult because they don’t know that in Latin America there’s a bleeding-Jesus-in-a-crown-of-thorns bumper sticker on every bus, taxi, and pizza delivery scooter.
You can easily engage nearly every person you cross paths with in a conversation about God or Jesus or Faith or whatever. It’s really not hard.
In Latin America, “Jesus” is generally a familiar and comfortable word – not an instant conversation killer.
I’ve been back in the NorCal suburbs for a whole three months now, and all I can say is that ministry is way harder here than it ever was in Latin America.
Being an agent for Love and Grace in a place where people truly don’t recognize their own need is really tough.
I believe Jesus has competition in the American suburbs like no place else on Earth. Everyone here is surrounded by so much shiny new stuff, it’s hard to see the Light.
Here, depravity is hidden behind tall double doors, and the things that separate us from God often come gleaming, right out of the box. The contrast between Dark and Light has been cleverly obscured by the polish of materialism and vanity.
This place is overflowing with people who have full closets, full bank accounts, full bellies… and empty hearts. Here, poverty is internal, hunger is spiritual, and need feels non-existent.
But it’s there.
Behind the facade of perfection in suburban America, past the fake boobs and fancy cars and fat paychecks, and at the bottom of aaalll thoooose wine glasses, there’s a need so desperate, a loneliness so great, and a brokenness so crushing that you can practically hear the collective cry for Redemption.
I’ve only just returned from Latin America, and now for the first time in my life, I feel like maybe I’m supposed to be a missionary…”
As our Cathedral tour ended, the docent encouraged us to sign the guest book. I couldn’t resist so I did.
Under ‘name,’ I signed Dennis W Perry.
Under ‘from,’ I put Harrisonburg, Va.
And under ‘comments,’ I wrote:
“You treat this place like a museum when you’re surrounded by a mission field”
The thing is- that’s a comment I could leave in any church in the country.
This week I sent you all a mass email, saying our theme this weekend would highlight our mission and service ministries.
And probably many of you came here this morning expecting me to tell you about what we’re doing in Guatemala and the difference we’re making in hundreds of lives there and how we can do more.
Or maybe you expected me to tell you about how our church serves the poor along Route One and how we can do more.
And we can
do more.
But if the term ‘mission field’ only refers to places like Guatemala or homeless shelters, we’re not really clear about what our mission is as Church.
The fact is- the poverty that can be fought with food drives is NOT the only poverty Jesus cares about.
As Mike Crane told me this week: “Aldersgate’s doing a great job serving the poor here and around the world but there are thousands who are spiritually poor, who don’t even realize what they’re lacking. And, just like the song says, Mike said, they’re not too far from here.
Some are as close as these pews. Some have been doing religion for years but haven’t yet let the Gospel into their hearts and let it change them from the inside out.
And that’s a kind of poverty.
These last few weeks we’ve been throwing a lot of numbers at you.
Data.
20%
16%
Here’s another number I want to grab you: 63%
That’s the percentage of people in a 10-mile radius of Fort Belvoir who currently are not a part of any church.
63%- I want that to change.
So listen up.
Here’s the God-Sized-Ante-Up-Let’s-Stop-Playing-Church-And-Find-Out-If-We-Really-Believe-in-the-Holy-Spirit-Vision:
Our bishop has asked us, as in, us, to consider planting a second congregation- a satellite congregation- in the Ft Belvoir region in the next 18 months.
Because every study shows- and the Book of Acts shows- the best way to make new Christians is to start new churches.
But I’m not talking about bricks and mortar; I’m talking about extending the ministry of this church, south.
I’m talking about people from here willing to imagine new ways to reach people there with the Gospel.
I’m not talking about starting yet another church for church people.
I’m talking about creating a worshipping community to reach the kinds of people who might need a different kind of church in order to meet Jesus.
Nehemiah says, when the people make booths and rediscover this God who saves us sinners, Nehemiah says they rejoice.
They’re changed. That’s what we’re about. That’s what I want.
For you. For my kids.
For the 84% who don’t know the Story behind that (the cross).
And for the 63% not too far from here.
If we do this, if we discern that this is where God is calling us, then it can’t just be owned me or Dennis.
It’s going to take all of us.
And specifically, we’re going to need a team of 40-50 of you to commit yourselves to it.
The how/when/where/what/who questions are still down the road.
And you’ll be hearing more about.
But the first step?
The first step is probably for us to build ourselves some booths and rediscover the Gospel for ourselves.
2 Why We Should Stop Baptizing Children and Babies
A sermon for All Saints based on Ezra 3
On Thursday afternoon this week, I found myself in what you might describe as a ‘sour mood.’ Or, as my wife likes to put it, I was ‘man-strating.’
First, early on Thursday I received an email from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named here in the congregation, my own personal Caiphus. For some reason, he felt the need to email me to dispute Dennis’ sermon from last Sunday.
You know, the sermon that was written by and preached by NOT ME. I mean if I’m going to start getting blamed for Dennis’ sermons too then he’s got to step up his game. Specifically, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named wanted to dismiss the Pew Trust statistics Dennis shared with you, about the percentage of people in their 40’s and 30’s and 20’s for whom church is not relevant to their lives at all.
His email was succinct: “I come to church every Sunday. If other people don’t that’s not my problem.”
That’s when I started manstrating.
Right after reading his email, I got in my car where I discovered that every single radio station was playing a campaign commercial, the kind explaining how this Tuesday is the most critical date in the history of human civilization and unless Barack Obama/Mitt Romney wins the earth will stop spinning, America will cease to exist, and the Death Star will reach full operational capacity.
Driving in my car, my mood worsened.
When I got home Thursday afternoon, my phone rang. And rang. And rang…don’t you love phone calls this time of year? Barack Obama’s campaign called me 3 times, asking for my vote and my money. Mitt Romney’s campaign called me 2 times, asking for my vote and my money. George Allen and Tim Kaine followed with robo-calls of their own, asking for my vote and my money.
So when my phone rang for the 8th time, I was full-on manstrating.
‘Is Jason Micheli there?’ the voice on the other end inquired.
‘No, he’s not here,’ I lied, ‘can I take a message?’
‘My name’s Matt. I’m calling from Princeton Seminary.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘this is Jason.’
‘But I thought you said…’
‘Never mind what I said. How can I help you?’
He then explained that he was a seminary student and that he was calling on behalf of the Bicentennial Campaign, soliciting gifts…and testimonials from alumni.
He tried to grease the sale by telling me all the new things going on at my alma mater, and then he asked if I would make a gift to the campaign.
I said sure. He said great. I said okay. He asked how much. I told him.
And he said: ‘Times are tough, huh?’
That’s when my mood turned truly foul.
‘Look kid, maybe no one’s told you yet what you can expect to make as a pastor but I’m not Bill Gates. Besides, you should’ve called earlier. I’ve already given money to Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, George Allen, Tim Kaine, NPR and the Rebel Alliance.’
He sounded confused.
‘Well, um, would you like to share any thoughts about how your seminary education prepared you for ministry? We’d like to compile these and publish them in the alumni magazine.’
And instantly my mind went to that email from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, sitting in my inbox, still waiting for a reply.
And I knew this was one of those moments where a grown-up could choose to bite his tongue and not resort to petty sarcasm. But I’m not one of those grown-ups.
‘Sure, Matt, I’d love to share my thoughts. Here goes: Princeton Seminary prepared me exceedingly well…to maintain a church for church people.’
I could hear him typing my response.
‘In fact, Matt, why don’t you suggest to the trustees that they can slow down, delay the Bicentennial for several decades, because based on how Princeton taught me to do ministry it must still be 1950.’
‘That’s not the kind of feedback we were looking for’ Matt said.
‘Of course not, but its what you need to hear.
Princeton Seminary taught me to pray the kinds of prayers church people like, to preach the kinds of sermons church people like, to plan the kind worship services that church people like, to manage the kind of church that church people like.
But seminary didn’t teach me how to do any of those things in a way that makes church relevant and life-changing to an unchurched person.
And that’s the future, Matt. And the clock’s ticking. It’s ticking faster than any one in church wants to believe.’
Those Pew statistics Dennis shared with you last week- about how with each new generation the church plays an ever-shrinking role- those aren’t just numbers.
They’re people with names and stories. People God loves.
That’s why this week I sent our youth director, Teer Hardy, out into Alexandria and DC, to find some those people behind the numbers and hear their side of the story.
I wish I could show you the video he shot. If we were in the National Cathedral, I could show you the video. But since we’re in this sanctuary, you’re just going to have to listen. Here’s one of the responses (Cue Audio)
My name is ___________________.
I’m 33. I’m married and have a 1 year old boy. I work full-time.
As a 30-something, how relevant is the Church to you in your life?
At this moment, not very much. I guess it’s been almost five years since I worshipped in a church, besides a few weddings. Some of my earliest memories are of going to church during Advent.
I miss that element in my weekly life, of worshiping and belonging to a community. Part of me would like to have that resonance of faith in my daily life, but most churches don’t seem to have someone like me, someone my age, in mind. Your question could easily be turned around, couldn’t it? How relevant is someone like me to your church?
When you hear the word ‘worship’ what comes to your mind?
The word ‘worship’ doesn’t immediately lead me to think of institutional religious practices.
To worship, to me, is to reframe my attention away from everything I typically pay attention to as a full-time working mother, and turn to God, experience awe, gratitude, connection to other humans. I could attend a formal church service and never experience any of those things, but I do experience them in other ways and places.
What assumptions or habits do churches have that are an obstacle to someone your age?
I think there is a risk of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction. I think churches sometimes try to pander and make themselves appear relevant to a young audience. People my age and younger are a lot savvier now. We’re marketed to all the time; we can tell the difference between a sales pitch and a genuine interest in us.
This is someone who grew up in church and is open to being a part of another one.
But did you hear what she said?
People like her won’t return to what they left if it’s the same exact thing they left before.
Now it’s easy to write people like her off. You can say ‘it’s not my problem.’
I could steer you towards plenty of people who would agree with you.
You know where they’re all at this morning? That’s right, in dying churches.
And Methodism’s got plenty of those. Churches who love their way of doing things more than they love their mission to reach new people.
Churches where perpetuating how they do things is their mission. Churches who feel no urgency until the day comes they can no longer pay the bills.
But, just in case there’s still some of you who want to dismiss the statistics and not be bothered about the strangers in the street who don’t think Jesus can change their lives, we solicited some other interviews too.
Cue Audio:
My name’s _____________________. I’m 24 and work full-time.
What about how churches do worship fails to resonate with you?
I think everyone is at a different place in their lives and everyone has a different perspective. I know that my ideas and opinions about things have changed, and I would be amazed if they didn’t change again. Sometimes it feels like churches want new and younger people so long as we don’t come with our own opinions and needs. We’re expected to sign on to exactly how they like to do worship. In that sense, it’s not much different than children’s church when I was a kid.
It’s difficult for me to accept someone else’s preferences if I don’t get the feeling that they’re open to someone else’s way of doing things too.
This other response come to me by way of Facebook:
My name’s ____________________. I’m a Graduate Student.
I think my faith is in a transitional phase. In college, I found Christian groups to be radical and extreme and it made me doubt the beliefs I had learned my whole life in church and youth group. It left me feeling that the Church just isn’t all that relevant to real life.
Worship sometimes feels like a passive ritual to me. You show up, listen, then go home. It doesn’t impact my day to day life.
Those two people. Guess where they came from?
They grew up here at Aldersgate. They’re ours. Yours.
So, even if you think we don’t have a responsibility to reach as many new people as we can, at the very least you should agree that we have an obligation to people like these two.
After all, you’ve made promises to them.
Remember? When they were baptized- you promised to do whatever it takes to nurture their faith.
If we’re not willing to create the kind of church that will be relevant to them when they grow up, then, frankly, we should stop baptizing them when they’re babies.
If we’re not willing to adapt how we do church, we should stop baptizing children.
Because every time we baptize, we vow to do everything it takes to make them a saint.
Shirley Pitts can tell you- John Wesley understood this.
Remembering the saints is something we do. Once a year.
Producing saints, Sunday after Sunday, day in and day out- that’s our Christ-given great commission.
This is what you need to remember.
Dennis and I- one of our three goals for the coming 18 months is to raise the number of people in worship by 10%.
Round it up to 100 people if you want.
Before you nod your heads and say ‘that’s a great idea!’ remember the Ezra chapter 3 catch:
We can’t say we’re going to build a new temple and think we can do so by replicating how we’ve always done things before.
Because how we do things now will net us what we have.
Now.
We’re making worship our number one focus this year and our goal is 10% more people worshipping God with us.
To get to that goal, we’re going to have to be creative, take risks, value people over preferences, we’re going to have to examine all our assumptions, we’re going to have to get more basic/more essential, and change.
And if you think I’m talking about worship style or music style, you’re missing the point. For example:
Most of you would be very reluctant to invite an unchurched friend to worship with you. I understand that reluctance, but it’s got to change.
Many of you can’t talk about Jesus or use religious language in a normal conversation with your peers. I was like that; I understand that, and we’ve got to change that.
Many of our members are involved in all kinds of activities in the church without ever worshipping with us. I understand that’s an ingrained part of the church culture, but it’s a part of the culture that’s got to change.
Other than acolytes, we don’t have our children or youth involved in worship, serving communion, reading scripture, helping to plan, leading prayer or ushering. I understand that might sound chaotic. It’s still gotta change.
Many of you don’t know the names of the people you sit near in church every Sunday. I DON’T understand that and it’s definitely got to change.
Many of you think worship is something Dennis or I or Andreas or Jason or the band or the choir offer you, and you receive- rather than something we collectively offer our larger community on behalf of God.
And more than anything, that mindset has to change.
Look, I know change bothers people.
I’ve been at this long enough to have habits I’m afraid to change.
I understand.
But what I want to bother you more, what I wish I got emails complaining about, what I wish I got emails complaining about, is how our community is filled with lost coins, lost sheep, lost children and how we’re not laser-beam focused on getting them here so they can embrace a Father who’s waiting for them.
I want that to bother you because Jesus made it very clear: it bothers God.
I was still on the phone with Matt from Princeton when another call beeped in.
It was probably another campaign calling me for my vote and my money.
But at least it snapped me out of my rant and Matt said:
‘That’s a good point Mr Micheli, but transitioning a church into the future- don’t you think that’s your congregation’s responsibility too? Don’t you trust that God can equip your people with the necessary gifts?’
I told him he must get very good grades in seminary, and he chuckled gently.
And then the little jerk asked me for more money.
But he was right.
Building on our foundation for a new future is a gigantic, God-sized calling. And it belongs to all of us. Together.
Ezra says the leaders who build the new Temple after the exile are the grandkids of the ones who remember how things used to be.
Ezra says, at first, everyone thinks their idea to build a new Temple is a great idea.
But Ezra says some have a change of heart when they realize the new Temple won’t be the same as the old.
Some refuse to give their money to it, Ezra says.
Others opt out Ezra says.
But others, those who are old enough to remember what was 50 years ago, Ezra says they weep.
They weep, but they’re still there. They’re still there when the new Temple is dedicated. They’re still committed. They’re still contributing. Because of what God did for them in the past, they’re still invested in the future of what God’s doing.
And sure when the new Temple is dedicated, Ezra says you can’t distinguish the sound of celebration from the sound of grief.
But that’s okay.
Because as messy as it is, that’s what it sounds like- celebration and grief, that’s what it sounds like- when God’s People take the next faithful step.
4 What to Say When There’s Nothing to Say
Here’s this weekend’s sermon on Job. Two notes so this makes sense. I’ve always thought the beautiful poetry of the Book of Job hides the scandal of Job’s emotions and masks the piety of his friends. For that reason, in this sermon, I rewrote the friends’ dialogue to make it sound more contemporary. Additionally, I asked two actors to reenact the dialogues during the course of the sermon. Thanks to Bailey and Elliott!
—————————————————–
Many months ago, around supper time, I was in the Emergency Room, standing behind the paper curtain, holding a mother, who wasn’t much older than me, as she held her dead little boy, who wasn’t much older than my boys.
She wasn’t crying so much as gasping like you do when you’ve sunk all the way to the bottom of the deep end and have just come up for air.
She was smoothing her boy’s cow lick with her hand.
Every so often she would shush him, as though if she could just calm him down she might convince him to come back.
It was Opening Day. That afternoon my boys and I had gone to see the Nats lose to the Braves.
I still had my hat on and popcorn crumbs in my sweater and mustard stains on my pants. I didn’t look like pastor or a priest.
So when the mother got up and went into the hallway to try and get a hold of her husband and left me with her boy and when the chaplain stepped in to the room and saw the hat on my head and the mustard stains on my clothes and the tears in my eyes, she didn’t think I was a pastor or a priest.
She just thought I was part of the boy’s family.
She put her hand on my shoulder and, after a few moments, she said to me: ‘It’s going to be alright.’
‘What?’ I said, stunned.
I’ve been a pastor for 11 years.
And in that time I can’t tell you how many ER’s and funeral homes I’ve been in, how many hospital bedsides and gravesides I’ve stood at and heard well-meaning Christians say things they thought were comforting but were actually the opposite.
Even destructive.
I know people in this congregation who’ve been told- by other people in this congregation- that God must’ve given them cancer as punishment or to bring them closer to God.
I know people here who’ve been told by well-intentioned Christians that their spouse’s or their child’s death must be part of God’s plan.
I know people who’ve written God off entirely because some Christian tried to console them with talk of ‘God’s will.’
Most of us- we don’t know what to say when there’s nothing to say.
Job loses every one of his children. He loses his health, his last dime and maybe even his marriage.
For days Job is mute with disbelief.
But when Job finally does speak, his friends aren’t ready for the pain he voices. They can’t go there.
Job:
“God, I wish to Hell I’d never been born! My life would’ve been better if I’d died in my mother’s womb. Why did God give knees for me to rest on or a mother to nurse me if God was just going to do this to me now?”
Anger is almost always what follows grief’s numbed silence.
Yet, ironically, anger is probably the most taboo emotion among Christians.
Because anger doesn’t just claim that this situation is painful, anger claims that this situation isn’t right– that what has happened should not have happened.
That kind of anger can be frightening because it calls our assumptions about God into question.
So when we’re confronted by that kind of raw, righteous anger very often our reflex is to make it stop. To silence it.
That’s how Eliphaz reacts to Job.
Eliphaz:
“I’ve been praying for what to say to you, and the Lord finally put the right words on my heart.
Have you forgotten everything you used to tell others?
You were the one to encourage people in grief. You’re the one who talked about comfort and hope. But now it’s your turn, now you’re the victim, and…what?
That’s not you. Where’s your faith?
I know you think you’re a good person and you don’t deserve what’s happened to you, but remember what scripture says: ‘we’re all sinners and fall short of the glory of God.’
I understand how you feel, but this isn’t like you: to be angry at God. Have you listened in on God’s calls and come away with his plans? What do you know that we don’t?
You know what scripture says: “God’s ways are not our ways.”
God works in mysterious ways. We can’t understand why God took them from you; we can only take comfort in knowing your kids are with him right now in heaven.
Remember what Jesus says: ‘I go to prepare a place for you in my Father’s house.’ Maybe…maybe it was just their time to go home to HIM.
Don’t throw away your faith now when it could really help you.
If I were you- I’d put that anger into prayer instead. Throw yourself at God’s mercy. Look to him for help and he’ll answer all your prayers. I know it.“
Job: “If my sorrow were put on a scale, it would outweigh the sands of the ocean. And now you have turned against me too.
My anguish frightens you. But show me how my feelings, MY feelings, can be wrong? Can’t I tell right from wrong? If I’d sinned, if I’d done something to deserve this, wouldn’t I know it?
God has broken my heart and now I can’t even speak honestly with my friend.
You’d rather argue away my despair. I’ve heard enough of your ‘consolations.’
Eliphaz is genuinely concerned for Job, but at the heart of what he says is fear. He’s afraid not just of what’s happened to Job; he’s afraid of Job.
Part of what’s troubling about Eliphaz is how it’s not clear at all who he’s trying to comfort: Job or himself.
Anyone who’s been with someone whose grief is raw and immediate, whose despair seems to open onto an abyss, anyone who’s been in that situation, knows the temptation to put a lid on it.
Because Eliphaz is so uncomfortable with what Job says, he presumes to speak for Job. He puts words in Job’s mouth and tells himself he’s just helping Job find his true voice.
Eliphaz reminds Job of who Job used to be, the beliefs Job used to have, so that Eliphaz doesn’t have to deal with who Job is right now.
The words he puts in Job’s mouth are cliches. Platitudes.
Whatever your intentions, when you speak in one-size-fits-all platitudes, when you say:
God has a plan.
God’s ways are not our ways.
God never gives us more than we can handle.
With God all things are possible.
God must’ve needed him or her in heaven.
It’s going to be alright.
When you speak like that to someone who’s suffering, what you’re really doing is signaling to them what’s out of bounds:
what they can say and what they cannot say
what feelings they can express and what they absolutely must not express.
You censor their grief, and you make it worse.
And so when there’s nothing else to say, do not resort to one-size-fits-all platitudes. Because just like one-size-fits-all clothes, they never fit.
Bildad, Job’s second friend, is less concerned about finding words that fit Job’s situation and more concerned with fitting Job into his belief system.
Job:
“God, I wish to Hell I’d never been born!
Bildad:
“Be sensible. Stop. Stop ranting and stop filling our ears with this nonsense.
Should the laws of creation- the laws of God– all be changed for your sake?
God protects the righteous and punishes the wicked. The bible said it; I believe it, and that’s that. Maybe you are innocent. Maybe you don’t deserve the pain you’re in, but can you really be sure that your kids didn’t do anything to deserve what they got?
Look, I know it’s terrible now. But if you just give it over to the Lord, commit yourself to HIM, you will get over this. God never gives us more than we can handle.
In fact, you should use this as an opportunity for the Lord to teach you something. It’s like the bible says: ‘we should rejoice in our sufferings, because suffering produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope.’
See this as a chance to grow closer to God. That’s what will get you through this- not shaking your fist at the sky.”
Job:
How kind you are to me! How considerate of my pain! What would I do without a friend like you? And the good advice you’ve given me?
Who made you so tactful? And inspired you with such compassionate words?
I know: God’s workings are mysterious. But don’t make my suffering worse with your beliefs.
Tell me, who’s done this to me if not God? Why do you have to hurt me now too with your answers?
You honestly think I’ll get over this? I’ll get past this?
You want to know what really makes me shudder? That you don’t understand me at all and aren’t willing to try.
You can say whatever you want to excuse God, but I will never agree with you.
It’s easy to write Bildad off as insensitive.
But we’re kidding ourselves if we think Bildad is the only person to believe that there’s a reason behind our suffering.
We’re kidding ourselves if we think Bildad’s the only person to assume that God causes our suffering to teach us a lesson or to punish us.
And Bildad is hardly the only person who would back that up with scripture, chapter and verse.
But hear me: to think God causes suffering to punish you for your sin does in a very profound way nullify the cross.
Because in Jesus Christ we see that the way God punishes sin is to suffer it in our place.
It’s true that you can learn and grow from suffering but that is not the same thing as saying God makes you suffer to teach you a lesson.
When St Paul writes that “suffering produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope” that’s Paul reflecting on his own experience.
That’s different than taking Paul’s words and imposing them on someone else’s experience.
For Bildad there’s a disconnect between what he thinks he knows about God and how Job describes his experience.
So Bildad feels the need to correct Job’s experience, to explain and give answers for it.
But if love, as Jesus says, is laying down your life for another, then that also means love is a willingness to lay down your assumptions for a friend- to care more about them than your understanding of how God or the world works.
What do you say when there’s nothing to say?
Instead of saying ‘God must be teaching you a lesson’ how about saying ‘You have something to teach me. Tell me what you’re going through. I want to learn what you’re feeling. There’s nothing you could say that will frighten or offend me.’
Zophar, Job’s final friend, has a certainty that masks a possibility too frightening to consider.
Job:
“God, I wish to Hell I’d never been born!
Zophar:
“I’ve heard enough.
How can you be so blind? You say you’re innocent. You don’t deserve this, but how can you understand God or fathom HIS wisdom?
We’re finite and HE’s infinite. We can’t see things the way God can see them.
I know how you feel now. But you’ve got to believe God has a plan, a plan for every one of us.
I know it can be hard to see now, but everything happens for a reason. God’s behind everything. Nothing’s accidental. Nothing’s random.
If I were you, I’d open my heart to God and trust that one day you’ll understand why God’s done this.”
Job:
“It seems you know everything. It must make you feel better for there to be an answer for everything.
But I’m not an idiot. Who doesn’t know such things?
Even a child knows that the whole world is in God’s hands.
But your comfort is hollow. Would you say anything to get God off the hook? Is your piety more important than your friend?
Don’t think God won’t judge you for your empty lies.
If God has a reason for what’s happened to me then I deserve to know it. God may kill me for my words but at least I’m speaking the truth.”
I’d bet 3/4 of you at some time or another have said something like: ‘God has a plan for____________.’
And even if you’re never uttered that at the wrong time, you believe it. You think it’s true- that God has a plan for each of us.
Notice, both Job and Zophar think its true.
Both of them believe Job’s suffering is a part of God’s larger plan. Zophar just assumes that means Job deserves what’s happened to him and Job knows that he doesn’t.
But both of them assume a world of tight causality, a world without randomness, a world where everything is the outworking of God’s will.
And maybe Job and Zophar (and you and me)- maybe we assume that because the opposite is too frightening.
Maybe it’s frightening to think that our lives are every bit as vulnerable and fragile as they can sometimes feel.
Maybe it’s too frightening to think that the question ‘Why?’ has no answer.
Maybe it’s too scary to admit that things can happen to us with out warning, for no reason and from which no good will ever come.
It’s understandable that we’d want there to be a plan for each of us, (as though we were characters on Lost) but the logical outcome to that way of thinking makes God a monster.
Pay attention. Write this down.
God doesn’t have a plan for your life.
You’re not just an actor in a life that’s already been scripted.
God does not will suffering in your life because it fits into his cosmic blueprints for you.
No.
Because God’s Plan, what God Wills, is for you in freedom to choose to love God and with your life give him glory- which you could never do if every moment of your life was predetermined and micromanaged.
What do you say when there’s nothing to say?
For God’s sake, don’t say God has a plan.
Try saying ‘there’s no way God wants this for you any more than I do.’
The chaplain in the ER lifted her hand from my shoulder when I glared at her and said: ‘What?’
She blushed and apologized. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say’ she said.
But I wasn’t in the mood for sorry. I wiped my eyes and said: ‘When his mother comes back in here, don’t. say. anything.’
At first Job’s friends do the exact right thing. They just sit in silence with their friend and grieve with him. The trouble starts when they open their mouths.
And the scary thing for us?
What’s scary is that at the end of the Book of Job, 38 chapters later, after Job has cursed the day he was born, cursed God, questioned God’s justice, complained about God’s absence, accused God of abuse, and indicted God for being no better than a criminal on trial- at the end of the book, when God finally shows up and speaks, Job isn’t the one God condemns.
It’s Job’s well-meaning, religious friends.
I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that in our attempts to comfort and answer and explain sometimes we push people away from God.
And I’ve stood at enough gravesides and bedsides to know: that the only thing worse than suffering with no reason, no explanation, is suffering without God.
And for that reason, here’s my last piece of advice: when there’s nothing to say, say nothing.
5 A God More Interesting Than Creationism
A Sermon on Genesis 1
June 9, 1993:
The first date. My first date with the new girl on the swim team, who would eventually become my wife.
6/9/93: The opening date of Steven Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park film.
The first movie in which Ali and I held hands.
At the point in the movie when the guy who played Newman on Seinfeld gets his face eaten by a whatever-raptor- at that point in the movie on June 9, 1993 I leaned over and whispered into Ali’s ear: ‘Of course, it’s all a hoax. Dinosaurs never actually existed.’
Of course, Ali had only just met me. She didn’t know I was being sarcastic, and I could tell by the look in her eyes that what I’d just said might disqualify me as a future boyfriend.
When it comes to the Book of Genesis, when it comes to creation, it seems like dates are always at the heart of the matter.
Dates like November 24, 1859:
The date Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species and threw the bible-believing world for a Copernican loop.
Dates like July 21, 1925:
The date a jury in Dayton, Tennessee found high school teacher, John Scopes, guilty of violating the Butler Act, the state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools.
When it comes to how and when it all began and how that beginning squares with the beginning of scripture, it seems like the debate’s always about dates.
Dates like 4.5 Billion:
The number of years ago, according to scientific consensus, the earth was born with a bang.
Dates like 2.5 Billion:
The best scientific guesstimate for when life first opened its eyes in the primordial ooze.
It’s always about dates.
Dates like 6,000:
The date that creationists say God first flicked on the lights and started it all according to the step-by-step sequence in scripture.
Dates like May 28, 2007:
The date that the $27 million Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky, a museum where visitors can find a life-sized T-Rex, who apparently forgot he was a carnivore, cavorting in the Garden with Adam and Eve.
It’s all about dates.
Dates like September 24, 2012:
As in, tomorrow. The date I’ll likely get a handful of emails angry at me for lacing my comments about that museum with sarcasm.
Dates are everything.
Dates like April 1992:
The date I portrayed William Jennings Bryan in the Governor’s School production of Inherit the Wind, the stage version of the Scopes Monkey Trial.
April 1992– that was almost exactly 3 years before I became a Christian. Playing William Jennings Bryan, the famed biblical literalist, I had to learn to say:
Yes, I believed Joshua literally commanded the sun to stop.
Yes, I believed there literally was morning and evening before God created the sun on the 4th Day,
Yes, I believed the Earth was literally only thousands of years old not millions or billions.
April 1992, 3 years before I became a Christian, that was the date I became convinced that in order to invite Jesus into your heart you literally had to check your brain at the door.
That believing in God required you also to believe that centuries of science were all a deliberate hoax.
Or, worse, God deliberately deceives us.
And in April 1992 I decided that such a God literally wouldn’t be worth believing in.
When it comes to the Book of Genesis, when it comes to how and when it all began and who or what was behind it, it seems like dates are always at the heart of the matter.
Which is funny.
Because there’s one date that seldom gets mentioned: 1849– 10 years before Charles Darwin spoiled everyone’s fun.
1849:
That’s the date Austen Henry Layard excavated the ruined Library of Ashurbanipal in Mosul, Iraq. In the ruins of that library, Austen Henry Layard discovered the original creation story.
Maybe you know it.
It goes like this:
In the beginning, when the earth was without form and chaos and dark waters covered the face of the deep, god brought forth life.
On the first day, there was light. Light that emanated from god and god separated the light from the darkness.
On the second day, god created the firmament; god created a dome to push back the waters and god called it sky.
On the third day, god gathered the waters in one place so that dry land could appear.
On the fourth day, god created the sun and the moon and the stars in the sky and named them.
And day six god created humankind to do god’s work and on day seven god rested and exalted in celebration for what he done.
Sound familiar?
And this work of creation- it all begins, when Marduk, a young warrior god, slays his mother, Tiamat, the goddess of chaos, with weapons of wind, lightening and thunder.
And with one half of Tiamat’s carcass, Marduk creates land. With the other half of her body, Marduk fashions the heavens.
And then Marduk declares:
“Blood I will mass and cause bones to be.”
And then from the blood of a slain god, Markduk creates man and woman.
To be his slaves.
As he reigns in Babylon.
When it comes to how and when it all began, it’s all about dates.
Dates like 2,000 BC:
The date this creation story, this Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish, was first written down, and probably it was spoken long before that.
2,000 BC: which is, roughly, 1500 years before our creation story in Genesis.
Take a guess where we got our story.
When it comes to the Book of Genesis it’s all about dates.
Dates are everything. But can be easy to forget.
So pay attention, here’s another date for you: 587 BC.
587 BC:
The date that’s the 9/11 of the Bible.
587 BC:
That’s the year Babylon invaded Israel, destroyed the Temple, and left the Promised Land in smoldering ruins and carried God’s People back to Babylon in chains.
587 BC:
The first year of the Babylonian Captivity. The first year Babylon tried to do what any captors do to their captives:
Convince them that there’s no plan or purpose or point to life.
And thus there’s no hope for yours.
Convince them that this world is a dark, violent, eye-for-a-tooth place.
And thus it’s naive to expect anything but suffering to come your way.
Convince them that its written into the fabric of creation:
That we’re made from the blood of victims.
Thus, don’t be surprised if someone makes you their victim.
The world is the way it is because the gods are who they are.
It’s all about dates.
Dates like 586 BC and 585 BC and 584 BC and every year for the next 50 years.
Those are all the years of their captivity that Israel didn’t give up faith.
Those are the dates that Israel, despite their suffering, refused to worship Babylon’s gods.
Because Israel already knew who God was: the one, true God.
That God had heard their cries when they were slaves in Egypt.
Israel already knew the capital G God.
And so in 586 and 585 and 584 and for years after that, they didn’t bow down to Babylon’s story.
They co-opted it.
They took it and they changed it.
To stick it in the eye of their captors.
Because they knew:
There’s only one God.
There was nothing before creation but God.
God created from nothing.
And because God created out of nothing, this world: it’s gift.
You and I: gift.
Everything around us, every living thing, your neighbor, even your enemy.
Gift. All of it. It’s all good.
It’s all given just so God can share his life with us.
Israel Babylon’s story and made it their own.
Because they already knew:
You and I- we’re not made from the blood of victims.
We’re not made to fight and struggle with each other.
We’re made to reflect this God. We’re made in God’s image.
We’re made to give and to love and to listen and to forgive.
And to share our life with God.
And if we’re made to share God’s life
Then you can’t say life is pointless.
Because it couldn’t have a bigger POINT.
God’s people took Babylon’s story and they made it their own.
Genesis 1-
It’s not an explanation of how it all began.
It’s good news to captives.
It’s not a step-by-step description of how it all happened.
It’s a prophetic profession of faith. It’s a slave song.
It’s a defiant declaration that no matter how things seem now our God is good and what he’s made is very good. So don’t give up hope that one day soon he will reconcile whatever is broken in this world.
Dates are always key.
Dates like September 2003.
That’s the date of the first local clergy meeting I ever attended.
There’s lot things seminary doesn’t teach you. ‘Don’t ever go to local clergy meetings’ tops that list. At this meeting, it was all middle-aged fundamentalists and me.
We met for lunch at a BBQ joint. At the beginning of the meeting, the chair, a Brethren pastor ironically named Christian, passed around a petition to the local school board to teach creation science (whatever that is) in the schools.
It wasn’t even a matter of discussion. Christian just assumed we’d all sign it.
And all of them did.
When the petition got to me, I said: ‘Uh…yeah, I’m not signing that.’
‘Why not?’ Christian asked.
‘Because it’s…umm…stupid.’ I said.
‘You don’t believe in evolution do you?’ he asked.
And I replied, in love: ‘Well, I used to believe in evolution but you seem to have successfully remained in the stone age so who knows.’
He frowned and told me I’d never make it in ministry by being sarcastic.
‘We’ll see about that’ I said.
I handed Christian the petition, sans my John Hancock.
And he said: ‘You know, Jason, if a literal reading of Genesis falls away so does the entire faith.’
And the thing is- I knew he was wrong.
And I could prove it because I knew the date.
I love dates. I’ve always been good with dates.
So I gave him the date: 1313 BC, maybe the most important date.
1,313 BC (approximately):
That’s the date of the Exodus. The date God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt. The date Israel started reciting their Credo: ‘The Lord heard our voice and brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm…’
1313:
That’s the date, about 700 years before Israel found themselves slaves in Babylon co-opting a creation story.
1313 vs. 587:
In other words, Israel’s faith in God the Deliverer preceded their faith in God the Creator.
Just because it’s first in your bibles doesn’t mean it was first in Israel’s life with God.
Their Exodus experience is older than the Genesis story.
Their exodus was their genesis.
You can’t say a literal reading of Genesis 1 is necessary for faith because the Jews believed in and had a relationship with and worshipped this God before they ever had this story.
Israel didn’t need a literal creation story to prove that God existed. How silly is that?
They already knew God existed.
Because they knew God.
Because God had delivered them.
Here’s one last date: September 6, 2012.
A couple Thursdays ago. That’s the date I sat in my office and spoke to a woman here in the congregation. A woman who could barely get the words out.
A woman who described her life as pointless, trapped.
A woman who told me she couldn’t swallow that God loved her because she couldn’t like herself.
Here’s the dirty little secret every pastor knows: she’s not alone.
I can name more people like her than not like her.
So hear the good news:
It’s not about dates, not at all. It’s about deliverance.
So if you think your life has no purpose
If you think you have no value
If you feel trapped in a relationship that will never change
If you’re convinced you’re a captive to your past
If you don’t like the person that stares back at you in the mirror
If you’ve had your hopes exiled and are on the downward side of happiness
If you get out of bed every day thinking today won’t be as good as yesterday
And tomorrow will be worse
I want you to know:
No matter how things seem.
Our God is good and what he’s made, everything, is gift.
And that means you’re given to this world as a gift too.
And that means:
The way things are isn’t the way things have to be.
Isn’t the way things always will be.
Because from the very genesis of our faith-
Our God is in the habit of rescuing our present
And redeeming our past
And delivering us into a new future.
Because our God is good
And he won’t rest until things are ‘very good’ again.
0 My Grocery Store Freakout
The Way Up is the Way Down- Philippians 2.1-11
It might surprise some of you to hear that, as gentle and considerate as I appear to be, I have a tendency to be contrary.
And while I wouldn’t say that I have a short fuse exactly, I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes I can be cranky, maybe even a little confrontational.
For example-
There was the recent ‘episode’ that has since come to be known in my house as ‘Daddy’s Grocery Store Freakout.’
And before I tell you about ‘Daddy’s Grocery Store Freakout’ I should say first that, as a responsible preacher, I try hard, whenever sharing personal stories, never to present myself in a heroic light.
I try hard to avoid stories in which I appear to be the wise or faithful one. I usually avoid any anecdotes where I’m the good example or where I do the right thing.
You can take that as my disclaimer that ‘Daddy’s Grocery Store Freakout’ is an exception to that rule. In this instance, it’s the other guy who’s the idiot.
A couple of Sundays ago I fell asleep on the sofa watching Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince with the boys. I woke up from my nap to Gabriel staring at me, nose-tip to nose-tip, and saying ‘Daddy, it’s almost time for dinner.’
With just a yawn and a stretch, I headed to the grocery store. As I pushed my shopping cart through the entrance I caught my reflection in the glass.
My bed-head hair was mussed every which way.
My undershirt was covered with tomato sauce stains from lunch that looked a little like blood. My eyes were heavy and bloodshot.
And I had what looked like a scar across my face from the zipper of the pillow I’d been sleeping against.
In sum: I looked like a crazy person.
After picking up a few odds and ends, I stood in the produce section staring aimlessly at the bare Sunday shelves and wondering what on earth I could make with just japanese eggplant, jalepenos, and Italian parsley.
And I swear- it’s because I was trying to think of a recipe NOT because I was eavesdropping that I overheard him.
One of the store employees was sitting against the refrigerator, where the cabbage normally goes. Three other, younger, employees were huddled around him.
To protect the identities of the innocent and the idiotic, I won’t go into names or descriptions. I’ll just tell you what I heard.
“My best advice is for you guys to stay completely away from her’ the one leaning against the cabbage section said to the three.
And he nodded with his chin in the direction of ‘her.’
And again, I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop but I couldn’t help it. When he nodded in ‘her’ direction, like gravity was pulling me, I looked over my shoulder to see who the ‘her’ was he had in mind.
‘She’ was near the other side of the store, working a cash register.
‘She’ was a teenager it looked like. She couldn’t have been more than 18.
And ‘she,’ I could tell from the scarf wrapped around her head, was a Muslim.
That’s when I decided to eavesdrop.
‘How do we stay away from her?‘ one of Produce Guy’s three disciples asked.
‘Don’t talk to her. Period.‘ He said without equivocation. ‘Pretend she’s not there. If she says something to you, act like you didn’t hear her. If she needs help with something, tell her you’re busy with something else. If a manager tells you to work with her, say you’re in the middle of something.‘
His three disciples all nodded like receivers watching a quarterback draw up a play.
What I heard shocked me, but I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything until I heard him say: ‘Remember, she worships a false god. That’s a sin, and God doesn’t want you associating with sinners. God hates sinners.‘
Thus began what’s come to be known as ‘Daddy’s Grocery Store Freakout.‘
I left my cart and stepped over to their huddle and said, in love: ‘Excuse me, it sounds to me like you don’t know what the blank you’re talking about and maybe you should just shut your mouth.‘
It was his turn to be shocked.
He stood up from the cabbage section and held up his hands as if to say ‘no harm, no foul‘ and said: ‘There must be a misunderstanding; we were just having a religious conversation.‘
And that’s when I lost it:
‘Misunderstanding? I’ll say. You’re telling these poor idiots that God doesn’t want them helping someone else?
That God wants them to deliberately ignore someone else?
That God wants them to treat someone like they’re not even a person?
You’re telling them that God hates sinners?
And you call yourself a Christian?
You’ve completely lost the plot.
If you really believed in Jesus Christ none of those words would ever come out of your mouth.‘
And that’s when I realized I’d been poking him in the chest with my Japanese eggplant.
He gave me a patronizing smile, like I was the one who didn’t get it.
‘Do you go to church?‘ he asked. ‘Maybe if you went to church you’d understand…‘
‘Yeah, I go to church‘ I said. ‘In fact, I go every Sunday. I’m there all the time. Aldersgate United Methodist Church. We’d love to have you visit us sometime.‘
And that’s when I realized that all the other customers in the produce section were motionless, as though suspended in time, staring in shock at me.
And for a brief, sobering moment I was able to see myself as they must’ve seen me: a man with red, bloodshot eyes, wild hair, and what looked like a scar across his face and blood splatter on his shirt, screaming about God near the cabbages, with an eggplant in his hand.
Don’t let the pretty poetry and lofty language fool you.
This song, which Paul cuts and pastes into his letter here in Philippians chapter 2, it’s meant to shock you.
Because those last few lines of the song:
9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend…
11 and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Those last few lines aren’t original- not to Paul, not to any other Christian, not to anyone in Philippi.
They’re lifted straight from the Old Testament, from Isaiah 45- which, in case you don’t know it, is one of the Bible’s fiercest statements against idolatry, against worshipping any other god but the one with a capital G.
And what does Paul do with this song from Isaiah?
Paul, a lifelong Jew, who for his entire life at least twice a day would’ve recited in prayer: ‘The Lord our God the Lord is One.’
Paul, a Pharisee, an expert in the Law who you can bet knew that the very first law, the law of all laws, was ‘You shall have no other gods besides me.’
What does Paul do with Isaiah’s song?
He sticks Jesus in the middle of it.
He says that:
Because Jesus knew power and might aren’t things to be grasped at but given up.
Because Jesus emptied himself of heaven.
Because Jesus made himself poor even though he was rich.
Because he exchanged his royal robes for a servant’s towel.
Because Jesus stooped down from eternity and humbled himself.
Because he forgave 70 times 7.
Because he blessed those who cursed him.
Because he went the extra mile for those who cared not for him.
Because he put away the sword and turned the other cheek and loved his enemies.
Because Jesus remained faithful no matter it cost him, no matter where it led him, no matter how it ended.
Because he did that,
God exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name.
And that’s the shock.
Because the name that is above every name…is Yahweh.
The name that is above every name is ‘I am who I am.’
The name that is above every name is the name that was revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush, the name that was too holy to be spoken aloud or written down.
That’s why, in its place, the ancient manuscripts always used the word ‘Kyrios’ instead: ‘Lord.’
The same word Paul attaches to Jesus here in the middle of Isaiah’s song.
It’s meant to shock you- that this God who appeared in a burning bush and spoke in a still, small voice, this God- the one and only God- comes to us fully and in the flesh as Jesus Christ.
It’s intended to shock you- that Mary’s son is as much of God the Father as we could ever hope to see.
I was in the middle of ‘Daddy’s Grocery Store Freakout’ when I realized all the eyes of the produce section were on me, looking like they were waiting for someone- anyone- to taser me and put me back in my straight jacket.
So I looked up and smiled and it must’ve seemed more creepy than conciliatory because just like that all the shoppers scurried away to safety. So did Produce Guy’s three disciples, who went back to work.
But Produce Guy wasn’t ready to let me leave without proving how I was wrong and he wasn’t.
‘You must be one of those Christians who think we all just worship the same god’ he said dismissively.
‘No’ I said, and just like that I was shouting again.
‘You don’t get it. You don’t get it at all. I
believe our God couldn’t be moredifferent.
I believe our God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
That means you can’t say anything about God that you can’t also say about Jesus Christ.
So unless it makes sense to you to say ‘Jesus hates sinners; Jesus doesn’t want you to serve that person; Jesus wants you to treat that person like they’re not a person; unless it makes sense to you to say that about Jesus, then you should just shut your mouth.’
I said, in love.
But he didn’t follow.
He just squinted at me and said: ‘Maybe you should talk this over with your pastor. Maybe he could help you understand.’
‘Yeah, maybe. I’ll ask him about it.’
I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that when it comes to the Trinity, our belief that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, most of you think it’s a hustle.
You think it’s some philosophical shell game that couldn’t have less to do with your everyday life.
But pay attention-
That’s not how Paul speaks of the Trinity here.
Paul’s not interested in philosophy or abstraction.
Paul’s concerned with your mindset. With your attitude. With your love.
The Philippians weren’t locked in any doctrinal disputes or theological debates.
They were just at every day odds with each other.
And so Paul sends them these words about the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
For Paul, the Trinity isn’t about intellectual games.
For Paul, the Trinity’s more like grammar that governs our God-talk.
Trinity keeps us from saying whatever we like about God, doing whatever we want in the name of God, believing whatever we wish under the umbrella of a generic god.
Trinity is Paul’s way of making sure that we can’t say ‘God’ without also saying ‘Jesus’
I mean, think about it-
Think about how many people you’ve heard, after a natural disaster or a tragic death or the diagnosis of disease, say something like: ‘It’s God’s will.’
Trinity means that for that to be a true statement you have to be able to remove ‘God’ and replace it with ‘Jesus.’
Trinity means that it’s not a true statement unless you’re able to say:
‘My mom’s cancer was Jesus’ will.’
‘Hurricane Katrina was Jesus’ will.’
‘9/11 was Jesus’ will.’
For Paul, Trinity functions not as a philosophical concept but as a grammatical rule. Trinity binds us to the character and story of Jesus.
We can’t say or think or act like God hates ‘sinners’ because we know Jesus didn’t.
We can’t say or think or act like God doesn’t care about the poor because we know Jesus did.
We can’t say or think or act as if God is against our enemies because we know Jesus loved them.
We can’t scratch our heads and wonder if we need to forgive that person in our lives because know what Jesus said about it.
And the doctrine of the Trinity refuses to let you forget that his words aren’t the words of any ordinary human teacher.
Teachers can be dismissed.
But his words are 100%, 3-in-1, the Word of God.
When Jesus says to the woman about to be stoned for adultery ‘I don’t condemn you’ that’s God speaking.
And when Jesus offers living water to the woman at the well, who has about 5 too many men in her life, that’s God’s grace.
And when Jesus says to Zaccheus, a villain and a traitor and a sinner, ‘Tonight I’m eating at your house’ Trinity makes sure we remember that that’s an invitation stamped with the seal of heaven.
For Paul, the fact that this God couldn’t be more different- it couldn’t be more practical.
I don’t freak out on people all that often.
But that’s not to say that I don’t run into people every day whose behavior doesn’t square with their beliefs, whose opinions are dearer to them than the mind of Christ, who are so set in their ways they refuse to conform to the Way.
And so if you want to make me less cranky.
If you want to make your pastor happy.
If you want to make my joy complete.
Give don’t grasp.
Serve don’t single out.
Don’t puff yourselves up with conceit.
Don’t fill yourselves up with ambition.
Don’t act out of selfishness.
Empty yourselves of the need to be right.
Regard anyone as better than yourself.
Pour yourselves out overtime for others.
Stay faithful to the Son’s words because that Son’s the fullness of the Father, and his name is inseparable from the name that is above every name.
And if that’s true then the way up in this world is by stooping down.
1 God Survey
This week’s scripture is the famous hymn/poem/creed from Philippians 2. A thick passage to say the least. Here’s my last attempt at it from a couple of years ago.
Just two weeks ago, USA Today featured a story about perceptions of God in America, and how a person’s perception of God influences their opinions on issues of the day. The research can be found in a book by two sociologists at Baylor, the Baptist University in Texas. Their book’s entitled: America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God and What that Says about Us.
The researchers identify four primary characteristics of God. They are: Authoritative, Benevolent, Critical and Distant. Based on surveys, they have come up with percentages of what American people believe about God:
Authoritative 28%:
According to the authors, people who hold this view of God divide the world along good and evil and they tend to be people who are worried, concerned and scared. They respond to a powerful, sovereign God guiding this country.
Distant 24%:
These are people who identify more with the spiritual and speak of finding the mysterious, unknowable God in creation or through contemplation or in elegant mathematical theorems.
Critical 21%:
The researchers describe people who perceive a God who keeps a critical eye on this world but only delivers justice in the next.
Benevolent 22%:
According to the researchers, their God is a “positive influence” who cares for all people, weeps at all conflicts and will comfort all.
Benevolent. Distant. Critical. Authoritative.
Along the way, their research nets some curious findings.
For instance, if your parents spanked you when you were a child, then you’re more likely to subscribe to an Authoritative God view. If you’re European, then in all likelihood you have a Distant view of God. If you’re poor then, odds are, you fall into the Critical view. United Methodists meanwhile- proving we can’t make up our minds about anything- tend to be evenly distributed among the four characteristic views.
The book is several years old now so I was surprised to discover that the sociologists’ survey is still up and running online. As people take the survey, the percentages change.
You might be interested to hear that right now the Distant God is now pulling ahead in the polls, as the Authoritative God falls behind, and the Benevolent God gains a few points.
When I discovered the website last week, I decided to take the survey, all twenty questions of it. I was asked to rate whether or not the term “loving” described God very well, somewhat well, undecided, not very well, or not at all. Other attributes in the twenty survey questions were “critical, punishing, severe, wrathful, distant, ever present.”
I was asked if I thought God was angered by human sin and angered by my sin. I was asked if God was concerned with my personal well being and then with the well being of the world.
In order to capture my understanding of and belief in God, according to my watch, the survey took all of two minutes and thirty-five seconds. After I finished, I was told what percentage of people in my demographic shared my view of God (college educated men under age 35). You may be interested to know, but no doubt not surprised, that the survey says that your pastor maintains a perception of a Benevolent God.
It was only after I answered all the questions, only after I saw my results, only after I saw how I measured up against other respondents….only then did it strike me how the Baylor survey never asked me about Jesus.
The survey asked me to choose if I thought God was Authoritative or Distant or Critical or Benevolent, but it never asked me, it was never given as an option, if I thought God was Incarnate- in the flesh, among us, as one of us.
I’m no sociologist. Presumably, ‘Do you believe that God, though being in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself taking the form of a slave being born in human likeness and being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on the cross…’ is a lousy survey question.
Even still, it struck me that I’d just taken a supposedly thorough survey about my belief in God, and Jesus was not in any of the questions and he was never a possible answer.
Now, I’ve been accused in the past of being prejudiced against both Texans and Baptists so it should surprise no one when I say that I think the Baylor survey is a bunch of crap.
I even tried to go back and undo, invalidate my responses but it wouldn’t let me. I even emailed the Baylor sociologist to say I to tell him what I thought of his survey .
The problem with the survey is that, whether I like it or not, God’s not someone I get to pick with just the click of a mouse. We don’t get to define God instead God has come to us in a way that confounds and overturns all our definitions.
The problem with the survey is that I don’t believe God is Authoritative, Distant, Critical or Benevolent.
I believe Jesus is God.
Christians are peculiar. Maybe it takes a survey to point that out.
When we say God, we mean Jesus.
And when we say Jesus, we mean the God who emptied himself, the God who traded divinity for poverty, power for weakness, the God who came down among us and stooped down to serve the lowliest of us.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, said that if God had wanted to God could’ve been Sovereign. If God had wanted to God could’ve been All-Powerful or All-Knowing. If God had wanted to God could’ve been Holy or Righteous.
But instead, said Wesley, God chose to be Jesus.
You see- it’s not that God’s power and glory and divinity are somehow concealed behind Jesus‘ human life. It’s not that in Jesus God masquerades as someone he’s not already. The incarnation isn’t a temporary time-out in which God gets to pretend he’s a different person.
Rather, when we see Jesus in the wilderness saying no to the world’s ways of power, when we see Jesus- the Great High Priest- embracing lepers and eating with sinners, when we see Jesus stoop down to wash our dirty feet, when we see Jesus freely choose death rather than retaliation, when we see Jesus pour himself out, empty himself, humble and humiliate himself we’re seeing as much of God as there is to see.
After I completed the Baylor survey, in less than three minutes, a window popped up on the screen to tell me, conclusively, that I had a perception of a Benevolent God.
For me, the survey said, God is a positive influence on people. I suppose that means God is like Joel Osteen or Dr. Phil. The survey results also explained how my particular perception of God likely impacted my worldview, in other words, how my belief in God played out in my positions on contemporary issues.
But the survey never said anything about a way of life. The survey never mentioned a community. According to the survey I’m just an individual person who has a certain perception of God and that perception influences my opinions on political issues.
I told you it was a terrible survey.
Last Thursday, the same day I discovered and completed that survey, we celebrated in this sanctuary a funeral service for a church member- a man who died much too young and much too suddenly, leaving behind his two nine year old twins.
During the sermon and all through the eulogies, if I’m honest, I only half-listened. And instead I sat up here at the altar table and I peeked around the specially-ordered flowers and I looked at the deceased’s fourth grade son, slumped in the pew and sitting in the crook of his mother’s arm.
And I watched him again after the funeral service during the reception in the fellowship hall. He looked tired and red-eyed and comprehending.
I watched him. And I thought about the questions he must have, the questions he will undoubtedly have as he gets older. I thought about the burden of grief he will carry. I thought about the anger that will come over him.
And maybe it’s because I’d just filled out that silly survey in the morning but as I watched him I thought about what sort of God it is that I want him to know.
I thought about what sort of God it is that makes it possible to mark his father’s death with worship. I thought about what sort of God it is that produces a community of people who can be the love and presence of God to a boy who’d just lost his Dad.
What sort of God is that?
Authoritative? Distant? Critical? Benevolent?
Or is it the God who trades away his divinity so that he might win us?
Is it the God who takes flesh and shares in the grief and joy and pain of our lives in order to redeem our them?
Is it the God who stoops down to serve us so that we might learn how to serve one another?
Is it the God who gets his hands dirty so that we might be made clean?
Who judges us by suffering in our place? Whose mercy is as wide as a cross and as deep as the grave?
Later that afternoon, after the funeral service, I emailed the Baylor sociologist responsible for the survey:
Dear Dr. Bader,
I’m a United Methodist pastor in Alexandria, Virginia. Having read about your book and your research in USA Today, I just completed your survey online Since I was unable to cancel or otherwise invalidate my responses I felt I should share a few comments with you.
First, let me take issue with the four views of God that you group responses into. I don’t deny there is a diversity of religious belief in America. It’s just that, as a Christian, I was surprised to find that the God whom I worship isn’t to be found in any of your questions or categories. I believe Jesus of Nazareth is as much of God as there to see. Authoritative, Distant, Critical, or Benevolent therefore are not sufficient categories to describe the God who empties himself of divinity, takes flesh, lives the life of a servant and turns the other cheek all the way to a cross. Perhaps you think my definition of God is too specific. The trouble is in Jesus of Nazareth God couldn’t have been more specific.
Second, your survey suggests that believing in God is primarily a matter of having a particular worldview that then influences one’s opinions on issues. I can’t speak for other religions, but as a Christian I can say that Jesus doesn’t seem interested in giving us a worldview. He instead gives us a ministry.
Since we believe Jesus is the fullest expression of God we believe Jesus’ life then becomes to pattern for our own lives. So, you see, Dr. Bader, Jesus expects a lot more from us than having the right positions on issues.
Finally, I just came from a funeral service for a fourth grader’s father. And during the funeral it occurred to me. In all of your questions on your survey, you never asked if I believed that God loved me. Postulating a loving God in the abstract isn’t the same thing as believing that God loves me, ME, no matter what. You never asked that question, and that’s the most important question. For that little boy’s sake, and for his Dad’s, I thank God that in Jesus Christ the answer is yes.
No doubt the harsh tone of my email will lead you to conclude that I score in the ‘Authoritative God’ category. Not so, even though my mother did spank me as a child. No, I rate solidly in the ‘Benevolent God’ category. So I hope you will believe it’s in a spirit of benevolence when I say, for lack of a better expression, I think your survey is crap.
Blessings…