Avdat

Sermon

Is This Only a Test?

June 29, 2008/Year A, Ordinary 13

Genesis 22: 1-14

 

 

            A lot of people read Genesis 22 and are appalled.  Just what kind of God would demand a human sacrifice?  This seems more in keeping with the character of some strange Aztec deity than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

            Not me.  By now I take this aspect of the story in stride.  Three times we have entrusted our firstborn son to the Almighty and to human hands wielding sharp objects.  Three times our firstborn son has been laid out--on a gurney, not an altar--only to receive him back.  We’ve learned that no sooner does God give us offspring than God demands them back.

            You’ve learned that lesson too, even if you’ve never darkened the door of a pediatric surgeon.  Remember last week’s epistle lesson?  “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” 

            That’s right. When you presented that preciously bald baby boy or girl for a drop or two of Presbyterian H2O on their smooth little heads, you handed them over to God, so that that person they might become if left to their own devices would be drowned.  You gave them back to God so that they wouldn’t merely grow up, but that, by the power of God, they would be raised up, to newness of life now, and eternal life in the age to come. 

            Eddie Money once sang, “Hold on loosely/But don’t let go/If you cling to tightly/You’re gonna lose control,” and Sting sang, “If you love somebody set them free,” and even Elvis had a hit titled “Return to Sender.”  Both the Word of God in this morning’s Old Testament reading and the Sacrament testify that no sooner do we hug them and wrap them up tight than we begin a lifelong practice letting them go, and entrusting them to God.  At this point I get that.

            What’s hard for me to get is that it’s this particular child that God wants returned.  “Go, and I will make a great nation of you.  To your offspring I will give this land.  In you all nations shall be blessed,” the Lord said to Abraham in Genesis 12.  It’s religion in its classic form.  If you obey my voice, there’s a reward in it for you, a reward only I can bestow.  Abram trusted the promise, and obeyed the word of the Lord.  And God in turn kept God’s promise.  His wife Sarah conceived and bore a son.  That was good news for Abraham and for every nation who would learn to call on his God by faith.  Because God was faithful, all peoples might find a blessing in Israel, this miraculous people of faithful obedience.

            Now God has said “Go” once again, but this time God’s command turns religion on its head.  “Go to Mount Moriah, and offer (your only son Isaac, whom you love) as a burnt offering.”  This time around God has pitted obedience and the reward against each other.  If Abraham obeys, the reward will be destroyed; God’s promise nullified.

            The dilemma in Genesis 22 is the same as the one Satan raises in his conversation with God about Job.  Does Abraham, like Job, serve God for naught?  Does Abraham trust in God’s promises more than God himself?  Does Abraham cherish the gifts more than the Giver?  God wants to know.  So God subjects Abraham to an awful test in order to find out.  What’s it going to be, Abraham?  Is obedience its own reward?  Or are you in it for the payoff?  Can I really trust you with this child and with this mission to bring a blessing to all nations?

            As one author has observed, it’s still an open question at this point.  Abraham has demonstrated a profound faith in uprooting himself and his family and making this journey to Canaan in the, some would say, wild hope that he at this late hour be given offspring enough to fill and possess it.  And, Abraham has demonstrated a profound recklessness too, giving his wife up to Pharaoh’s harem in order to save his own skin, concocting schemes to acquire children apart from trusting God to make both he and Sarah fertile, and at one and especially bitter point falling on his face in laughter at the prospect of becoming a father.  So God devises a test that asks, “Will the real Abraham please stand up?”

            How about you and me?  Why are we here Sunday in and Sunday out?  Is it fire insurance?  Is it because our friends are all here?  Is it habit?  God knows we’ve given the Almighty mixed messages.  God wants to know.  And God’s gonna find out.           

            And that’s what’s so troubling to me about this scripture.  I don’t know about you, but my service to the Lord is less than 100% pure.  Of all the parts of the Lord’s Prayer, maybe the one I pray most urgently is “Lead us not into temptation,” because I’d hate to be put in a situation like Abraham’s where I had to choose between God and God’s blessings.

            We are an older congregation, and God knows you’ve been tested before.  You’ve been off to war, and lived to tell about it.  You’ve been fired, laid off, and have had to lay to rest friends and loved ones before their time.  You’ve raised kids by yourself, and sat alone at the kitchen table, perplexed, worried, dumbfounded.  You deserve a break.  But I have to warn you by pointing out that Abraham was 100 years old when God subjected him to this test.  The biggest test of your life may be yet to come. 

            Teachers get their pupils ready for final exams by subjecting them to pop quizzes along the way.  Self-examination can do the same thing for us.  We test and try and subject ourselves to our own scrutiny and the scrutiny of others, so that secret faults can be detected and corrected, and blemishes touched up before they are subject to the light of day—that being The Day of the Lord. 

            Next week we are celebrating Holy Communion, and the Apostle Paul reminds us that gathering at the Lord’s Table is an opportunity to examine ourselves, both individually and corporately.  You who are on the outs with each other, take this week to be reconciled.  You who have left some important things unsaid, say them this week.

            Abraham passes the test.  He serves God for naught.  Our narrator records no anguished handwringing in the tent.  No tears shed.  No bargaining.  There is just a staccato string of verbs that testify to Abraham’s immediate and unequivocal response to the command.  He rose early in the morning.  He saddled his donkey.  He rounded up two servants.  He split some wood.  He rousted Isaac out of bed, and they headed for the hills around Mount Moriah. 

            And note his reply to his son’s poignant question, a reply that is more than an artful dodge, but is a stirring confession of faith and a dramatic turning of the tables.  “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.”  Abraham doesn’t know how this head-on collision between God’s command and God’s promise can be avoided, but he boldly confesses that God can and will do something about it.  And in making this confession, the onus is now on God to maintain the integrity of all God’s words, both the commandments and the promises.  This started out being a test of Abraham’s faith.  Now God is being tested.  Will God be as faithful as Abraham has been?

            The good news is Yes.  God is faithful.  God provides.  God stays Abraham’s hand and provides a lamb stuck in the thicket for a sacrifice.  Not only does God test, subjecting our lives to the fire that burns away the dross and lets what is precious shine through, God provides the way out of the testing so that we can endure it.  We may emerge from our encounters with God with singed eyebrows and sooty cheeks, but we emerge for the better, refined and purified. 

            Let me say a little bit about my own experience of testing and provision.  For a while now, God has been saying to me “Go,” maybe not as clearly as God said to Abraham, “Go,” because it was easy to chalk up my desire to pursue graduate studies to nostalgia for school that blows in with the first cold front of the fall.  But this past year the word “Go” was harder to ignore. 

            So while Abraham rose in the morning, saddled his donkey, and split wood, I took the GRE.  I researched graduate schools.  And we were drawn to Union Seminary in Richmond because it’s Presbyterian, and because the community seemed to have some unique opportunities for educating both of our boys.  I applied, and I was accepted.

            And then the test began.  The financial aid package was less than I hoped for.  Some of the educational opportunities for our sons fell through.  Leads I had on part-time ministry evaporated.  All this right before I went to Iona.  It was a lousy time to leave the country, with our future up in the air.

            But it was providential.  It takes a full 24 hours to reach Iona.  An overnight flight to Glasgow, a three hour train ride from Glasgow to Oban, a 45 minute ferry ride from Oban to the island of Mull, a 45 minute bus ride across Mull (which I doubled because I got on the wrong bus and went to the other end of the island), and finally a ten minute ferry from Mull to Iona.  By the time I was seated in the abbey church for evening worship, I was exhausted.

            Sitting there, surrounded by these large, old stone walls, I remembered another story from the book of Genesis, about Abraham’s grandson Jacob, who, fleeing from the wrath of his brother Esau, took a stone for a pillow and went to sleep one night.  I thought to myself, “I’d love to put my head against one of these stones and go to sleep too,” but then I remembered the rest of the story, about how Jacob dreamed he saw a ladder to heaven, and heard God’s promise to be with him on his journey, and how Jacob awoke in fear, saying, “God was in this place and I did not know it!”  And I sat bolt upright in my chair, because it seemed like for me too, God was in this place, this abbey church on the island of Iona, and I’d almost missed it.

            The rest of the week, it seemed as though every prayer, every sermon, and every responsive reading in every worship service was literally screaming at me the words, “Do not be afraid.”  We went on a pilgrimage around the island, a seven mile hike across rock strewn hills, and by the shore, and our guides would stop periodically and read little devotional pieces to us, and they were all about the journey into the unknown that is discipleship.  I had a short conversation with a man named Dan, from Finland, who out of the blue said, “If you’re at a crossroads in life, coming to Iona gives you the courage to make the changes you otherwise wouldn’t make.”  By the end of the week I’d gotten the point. 

            Abraham and Jacob were both great hagglers and didn’t shrink from bargaining with God.  Jacob said, “If you keep me safe on this journey, then I will serve you and give you a tithe.”  So by the end of the week I said, “OK, God.  I’ll do this for you, provided you provide for me and my family.” 

            God tests and God provides.  Making this change in my life at this time makes no real financial or logistical sense for us.  That’s the test.  But God has provided.  God gave me courage to do this on my journey to Iona.  As for food, clothing, shelter and education, I like Father Abraham, can only say, “The Lord will provide,” although I think it’s a bit easier to say that to a little boy than it is to your in-laws.  “You’re going to do what with my daughter and my grandchildren?”  They haven’t said it, but I can see the question floating in their eyes.

            But you can’t squirrel away the provision prior to the test.  You submit to the test, you set out on the journey, and only then do you discover how God can provide.

            God not only provides for me; God provides for you as well.  At the end of our Old Testament lesson, Abraham sacrifices the ram that God has provided.  In the end, we come to God empty-handed.  No sacrifice we make can make us one with God.  No offering we can provide, apart from our faithful obedience, is worthy in God’s sight.  So God must provide the means by which we can worship God and be reconciled to God.

            And God does that in Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ is the Word of God in human form.  He is God’s command to us in flesh and blood.  He is a living and breathing summons to follow him in faithful obedience to the God of Abraham.  And, he is also God’s provision for us.  He is the sacrifice that makes us one with God, and he is the living hope of what we might all become in God’s good time.

            You have questions and anxieties about what happens after the end of July.  Change always raises questions and stirs anxieties.  But while ministers change and times change and brothers and sisters come and go, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.  He stands among us, as he always had and will continue to do so, inviting us to step out in obedient faith, and providing the means by which we can stand before God.

Sermon from the other day

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” With these words Jesus seems to strike a blow at one of our most cherished beliefs as Presbyterian Christians. We confess that we are saved by faith in Jesus Christ, and not by our good works. We didn't make that up.  We ripped it straight from the pages of today's epistle lesson.  And yet with this statement, Jesus seems to pit faith in him against working for him, and comes down on the side of obedience. How do we resolve this?

The conflict here between faith and works may be more apparent than real. True faith is an obedient, working faith, not mere lip service to our Lord. To illustrate the difference between a dead belief in Jesus, and a living, active, trusting faith, bear with me for a moment as I repeat a story about a French acrobat and his exploits at Niagara Falls:

There was a tightrope walker, who did incredible aerial feats. All over Paris, he would do tightrope acts at tremendously scary heights. Then he had succeeding acts; he would do it blindfolded, then he would go across the tightrope, blindfolded, pushing a wheelbarrow.

An American promoter read about this in the papers and wrote a letter to the tightrope walker, saying, "Tightrope, I don't believe you can do it, but I'm willing to make you an offer. For a very substantial sum of money, besides all your transportation fees, I would like to challenge you to do your act over Niagara Falls."

Now, Tightrope wrote back, "Sir, although I've never been to America and seen the Falls, I'd love to come." Well, after a lot of promotion and setting the whole thing up, many people came to see the event.

Tightrope was to start on the Canadian side and come to the American side. Drums roll, and he comes across the rope which is suspended over the treacherous part of the falls -- blindfolded!! And he makes it across easily.

The crowds go wild, and he comes to the promoter and says, "Well, Mr. Promoter, now do you believe I can do it?"

"Well of course I do. I mean, I just saw you do it."

"No," said Tightrope, "do you really believe I can do it?"

"Well of course I do, you just did it." "No, no, no," said Tightrope, "do you believe I can do it?"

"Yes," said Mr. Promoter, "I believe you can do it." "Good," said Tightrope, "then you get in the wheel barrow."

Now there was a French acrobat named Blondin who successfully crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope in 1859. I don’t know if this is a “true” story about him, but if not literally true, then it’s true in the way that parables are true. The faith that saves is not merely confessing with the lips, but is stepping out over the abyss, trusting that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ can get us safely to the other side.

Jesus is summing up his Sermon on the Mount here in Matthew 7, and the Sermon amply demonstrates what a dangerous high-wire act faithful obedience to him really is. We live in a violent world.  The streets of Bagdhad are deadly, and even some of the streets here in Salisbury are unsafe.  Yet, Jesus invites us to return love for hatred, to pray for our enemies, and to do good to those who mistreat us. Put your life here, in the wheelbarrow of my resurrection, he says and trust me when I say that I alone can deliver you safely to the far shore.

We live in a religious world, where wearing your faith on your sleeve is a way to accrue political power and climb the social ladder.  Yet Jesus urges us to pray in secret, to give anonymously, and to disguise our discomfort when fasting. Again, he asks us to trust that there will be a reward for us on the far side of the raging river. If we believe that, why stay put on this side of the bank, enjoying the accolades that the world can bestow on us?

We live in a materialistic world.  We all know that.  Yet Jesus teaches his disciples that what money is there for is to do good in the here and now, rather than hoarding in the hope of gaining comforts in the future. Again he invites us to get in the wheelbarrow by letting go of worldly wealth and putting our future in his hands, like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field do.

Living by faith can be a terrifying experience at times, as terrifying as walking on a tightrope across Niagara Falls. But it can also be a thrilling, liberating experience. Imagine a life free from the compulsion to avenge ourselves, our hearts and souls cleansed of the corrosive power of old grudges and new resentments. Imagine a life lived under the blessing and favor or the eternal God, and not hankering after the fickle praise of friends or bosses or society or whoever. Imagine living today in joy and praise, and not anxiously paying off the trouble you’ve borrowed from tomorrow. It’s scary to take a walk on the high wire of faith, but its freeing at the same time. Out there, in the everlasting arms of Jesus, nobody can reach you.

Now we are ordaining and installing elders today. Talk about a tightrope act! That’d be serving on the Session, or answering a call to ordained ministry. Elders have many tasks in the Presbyterian Church, setting the budget, establishing policies, checking on the sick, the elderly and the oppressed. But what every congregation needs most of all is inspiration. So elders, both new and returning, be an example to the flock by stepping out in faith in your life, trusting in Jesus Christ to lead you, guide you and direct you. Because when you take that step, everything else will come in due season.

Now we depart from Niagara Falls and head for other watery venues as Jesus rounds out his sermon with a parable that illustrates the wisdom of obeying him and the folly of dismissing his words. There were two guys, homebuilders. One laid a foundation on bedrock, the other in a sandy place. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds beat upon both houses. The house build on rock withstood the tempest; but the house built on sand fell, and how great a fall it was!

That’s the difference between taking my words to heart, says Jesus, and dismissing them. Just as site selection makes all the difference in the housing industry, so founding one’s life on the teachings of Jesus makes all the difference when the storms of life hit. And believe me they will. It might be sunny today. But sooner or later it’s gonna rain.

One scholar remarked that Jesus’ audience would have instantly gotten the difference between the two homes. In the semi-arid hills of the Holy Land, the wadi is a fixture of the landscape. Wadis are gullies or valleys that are bone dry in spring, summer and fall, but when the winter rains come, they fill with water and can turn, temporarily, into raging rivers. The crowds that heard Jesus would have known better than to construct a home in a sandy, dry creek bed.

Perhaps that accounts for a bit of their astonishment at the end of the sermon. They might have found Jesus’s teaching provocative, entertaining, offensive or containing a kernel of truth, but would disregarding it really be as crazy as developing a subdivision in a floodplain?  Does Jesus really take himself that seriously?  Do he expect us to take him that seriously?

It’s June 1, the official beginning of hurricane season. There are iconic images associated with these monster storms: palm branches flapping in the wind, residents of New Orleans huddled on rooftops, crazy Weather Channel meteorologists reporting live from where the waves are crashing against the breakwater.

But what I think of in relation to Jesus’ parable are the images of the homes built on stilts, standing in the surf after the storm passes. Once there were sand dunes between the home and the ocean. Once a driveway connected the home to the shoreline drive. But the storm surge ate it all away. The home, in some sense, still looks nice. Maybe all its windows are intact. Maybe only a couple of shingles blew away. It was well-built. But it’s literally on its last legs. Soon the wet sand that supports those pilings will be eaten away, and great will be the fall of that house!

That’s what a life of getting a good education, of hard work and savings, of the cultivation of virtue and business contacts looks like when it is not founded on Christ, and on his words. It’s a life that, no matter how well constructed, is doomed, because it’s built on an unstable foundation that cannot withstand the blast of God’s righteous judgment.

Jesus’ words are hard, and at times when we read what he has to say in the Bible, it’s as if the Holy Spirit has dropped a ton of bricks on our head. But those hard words are the bedrock upon which we can build a life that is truly stable and secure. When we as individuals and as a congregation forgive and when we share, saying yes to peace and quiet trust, and no to vengeance, greed and anxiety, we shall not be moved.

You deserve a break today

My United Methodist colleages have Annual Conference next week.  Do yourselves a favor, my Wesleyan brethren.  Depart early for Lake Junaluska, and just leave this John Wesley sermon in the hands of a layperson to read from your pulpits.  It's based on the gospel lesson for this Sunday and is not bad at all, if I do say so myself.

With apologies to Schleiermacher

Sunday's sermon...

Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers

April 27, 2008/Year A, Easter 6

Acts 17: 16-34

Lots of people covet jobs that provide opportunities to travel. If you’re one of these people, you must be a little bit jealous of the Apostle Paul. Set aside for a moment the riots, beatings, stonings, imprisonments and eventual beheading—being a missionary to the Gentiles must have been exhilarating work. Rome! Jerusalem! Athens! Imagine seeing these jewels of antiquity in all their glory.

Yet here we find Paul in the cradle of Western Civilization, but Saint Luke reports that he was greatly distressed--because of all the idols. Was it all that religious piety and artistic imagination in the service of lies rather than The Truth that got him down? Was it fear for what would happen to these poor lost sheep when, after a futile life of worshipping statues or blocks of wood, they fall into the hands of the Living God? Probably a bit of both, and more.

At any rate, Paul cannot keep quiet in the face of such outrages. So he openly proclaims the Good News in every nook and cranny of the city. Those who hear him are both confused and intrigued, so they bring him to what in Latin is called Mars Hill, the place where court was convened and where philosophers debated the important philosophical and political issues of the day.

Let’s look a bit closer at Paul’s speech at Mars Hill. Saint Luke records many of the apostles’ sermons in the Book of Acts, but this one is distinct. There’s no mention of any events in Jewish history. No attempts to try to prove that Jesus fulfills Old Testament prophecy. That’s because Paul is preaching to Athenian philosophers who’ve never read the Jewish scriptures. Lesson number one: in witnessing to unbelievers, you can’t use the Bible to prove the Bible, especially if they’ve never read the dang thing. Eventually, of course, you want them to get around to picking it up and reading it. But with people who are completely outside the faith, you have to start somewhere else.

Here’s where Paul starts. “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” Now this is a delightfully ambiguous statement. Given Paul’s distress at Athenian idolatry he might well have mean it as an insult, all the while knowing that they would take it as a compliment. Maybe it’s Paul’s way of establishing good rapport with his hearers while maintaining his own integrity. Lesson number two: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. At least at the outset. The time will come for hard truths to be said in love, but at the beginning, better to err on the side of love.

“For as I went through the city… I found… an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’” For one preacher, Paul’s observation called to mind a car in which she recently sat. A rabbit’s foot hung from the rear-view mirror. A Darwin fish with feet plastered to the bumper. And a bobble head Buddha sat on the dashboard. When it comes to religion, some people like to cover all their bases. An altar to an unknown god is one way to do just that.

What Paul recognizes and acknowledges here is people’s searching and groping for an encounter with the divine. We human beings seem to have an incurable need to worship. We may worship many false gods rather than the True Lord of Heaven and Earth. Or these days, we may substitute awe in the face of nature’s complexity for reverence for the Creator, but there seems to be something in us that drives us to our knees. For a people hungry for a more meaningful life, Paul has the bread of life. For a people who are eager to bend the knee, Paul wants to coach them on where and to whom to bend it.

Lesson three: whatever strange ideas we think other people have, and however disordered the lives of those we seek to reach may be, it’s important to acknowledge that legitimate hunger and thirst that may be driving their behavior. We begin to witness to others by feeding them with the manna from heaven and quenching their thirst with living water, not with picking a fight with them over doctrine or morals.

Indeed, Paul thinks that this pagan bumping about in the dark is to a certain extent God’s will. “From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth… so that they would search for God and grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each of us.” It’s as if God and humanity agreed on a game of Hide ‘n’ Seek. Only, either God hid too well, or the kids went off looking in the wrong places, or just decided to quit and go inside play video games instead. At any rate, the game has gone on long enough. So in the testimony of Paul, and in your testimony and mine, God has come out of hiding and says to the world, “Look! Here I am! Come and get me!”

From this point on in the sermon the audience at Mars Hill starts to hear more and more of the Truth. That said, we must observe that they get to hear it in a language that they understand. Paul’s polemic against idolatry is standard Jewish fare. Psalm 50 and the second half of the Book of Isaiah contain many of the same arguments. God created us; we didn’t create God. It’s the creature, not the Creator, who needs a house to dwell in and food for its belly. Worshipping the things we make makes no sense, but worshipping our maker makes all the sense in the world. But Paul doesn’t quote the scriptures. He quotes two pagan philosophers to make his point.

So the next lesson we learn in how to witness to Christ is this: It is imperative to translate the gospel into a language that unbelievers understand. And it can be done without compromising the message.

This means more than the traditional Protestant insistence on translating the scriptures from Greek and Hebrew into English or German or Swahili or Mandarin Chinese or whatever. It means translating the gospel into new cultural idioms and intellectual disciplines. Can the language of evolutionary biology, which speaks about the survival of the fittest, praise the Creator of heaven and earth whose providence watches over world history? Can the language of economics, which speaks about competition and scarcity, say something about the abundant life that Jesus Christ offers to us all? Can the language of politics, which speaks about a balance of power between competing interests, say something about the suffering servant who is now crowned Lord of all? Can God be praised in the rhythms of hip hop as well as Bach fugues or those old favorites from tent revivals long ago?

Paul shows us that the answer to all those questions is Yes. In order for the mission of the Church to go forward in the 21st century, we don’t need to reject the insights of the arts and sciences as anti-gospel. Nor do we need to live divided lives, with a foot in two worlds, refusing to bring Christian faith into conversation with the arts and sciences and culture. We need to learn the languages of the world in order to transform the world with the Good News.

Paul saves the hardest aspect of his message for last: It is necessary that people and societies repent. Why? Because all people and societies stand under God’s judgment. And the judge is a man whom God has raised from the dead.

Why would this be so hard to accept? Because for centuries, Athens had been a seat of economic power and intellectual inquiry. While there’s always room for improvement, among the Athenian elite, it was taken for granted that it was other societies that stood most in need of improvement. For Athenians, improving meant becoming like us. Saying out loud that there was something rotten at the core of Athenian society would have defied the conventional wisdom and incited outrage. Sound familiar?

Even more than make a break with the past, Paul was asking the crowd to break with their concept of time. Some of the philosophers held that there was literally nothing new under the sun, that history repeated itself in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. But Paul saw human history proceeding along a straight line until judgment day. Something new was coming, and Paul was warning them that they’d better get ready for it.

Lastly, the notion of the resurrection of the dead was perhaps the hardest to swallow. The Epicureans didn’t believe in an afterlife of any kind. The Stoics believed in a vague form of existence after death in which the soul merged with the vast cosmos, like a raindrop that falls in the mountains and finds its way to the ocean. These are still popular notions about human destiny.

But Paul said that our destiny is life after death, and an embodied life after death in which we retain our former identity, although we are indeed changed. At this, some in the crowd openly jeered the apostle.

Nobody likes to be publically humiliated, but all things considered, Paul got off easy. At his last gig, in the city of Bereoa, Paul had to be smuggled out the city, lest a mob tear him limb from limb. But with academics, it’s different. They may stab you in the back, but not literally.

The reason is that, at least with this group of academics, there’s nothing worth killing for, much less dying for. Earlier in the passage Luke observes, “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.” All the important things in life--to them it’s just a game. Who can make the cleverest argument; who connects with the most artful putdown—they remind me of the pundits you see on the cable TV talk shows who never get around to talking about how laws, public policy and ideas affect real people’s lives, but only about how it plays in Peoria, how well it’s spun, who’s up and down in the latest polls. These are very intelligent but deeply unserious people. They’d never riot over an idea. They’d just dismiss it with a world weary sigh or a cynical grin.

But some of them believed! Some of them felt the Holy Spirit’s tug in Paul’s earnest words that Whom you worship and how you live is not just a debating society topic, but is a matter of life and death. Damaris, Dionysius the Areopagite and a few others, in godly fear of the judgment to come, and in hope of sharing in Christ’s resurrection, broke with the past in order to prepare for a future they never thought possible. When that happens, the world takes a step closer to the Kingdom, the Church is built up, and the Risen Christ is glorified.

Other works cited:

Dunham, Robert.  Interpretation 60:2.  April, 2006.  pp. 202-4.

Flemming, Dean.  "Contextualizing the gospel in Athens."  Missiology 30:2.  April 2002.

Second Sunday in Eastertide sermon

Gospel Parallels

March 30, 2008/Year A, Easter 2

John 20: 19-31

Once the date was set for the Amadeus Youth Chorus to sing here at John Calvin, Sarah emailed me with a question. “Is there some way we could tie the story of Joseph into the service?” “Sure!” I replied, but to be honest, I had no idea how. If the chorus were singing Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar it would have been a lot easier to establish links between that music and the appearance of the Resurrected Christ to his disciples the week after Easter. But Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is in the wrong testament, set in the country, with the wrong cast of characters. It seemed a stretch.

Until closer examination. Joseph and his eleven brothers were the fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel. In the New Testament Jesus selects 12 men to be his disciples. The number is symbolic. Jesus intends that his movement be a reconstituted Israel.

Both Jesus and Joseph are falsely accused; Joseph, by the wife of Potipher, who alleged attempted rape, and Jesus by the religious leaders who put him on trial for blasphemy, and by the Romans, who crucified him for sedition. “The King of the Jews” read the inscription above his head.

Both Jesus and Joseph were betrayed by their closest associates. Now it’s true that Joseph, the youngest of 12, was spoiled rotten, but did he deserve what his brothers did to him? In a jealous fit they thought about murdering him, but finally decided on selling him into slavery in order to be rid of him.

So too Jesus was betrayed by that sell-out Judas, denied not once, not twice, but three times by his disciple Peter, and abandoned by all the rest. No one, save the women, kept watch with him as he breathed his last.

In the gospel lesson, we find the disciples huddling together behind locked doors, "for fear of the Jews," says the scripture. They had a right to be afraid. If this is how they deal with the Teacher, who knows what they’ll subject his pupils to!

And perhaps they had other fears, unstated by the gospel writer. Jesus had foretold both his death and resurrection. One had come to pass. What about the other? If he were alive, would that be Good News or bad? Just how would the Risen Lord deal with those who’d behaved so faithlessly when the chips were down? One thinks of the image of Jesus Mel Gibson gives us at the conclusion of The Passion of the Christ. Light streaming through the holes in his hands, his face set like flint, Jesus strides out of the tomb looking like a man ready to settle old scores. And he might just start with those knuckle-headed disciples who threw him under the bus only three days before!

And in the Old Testament, after the 11 brothers of Joseph encounter difficulty obtaining bread down in Egypt, they conclude that their checkered past is finally catching up to them. “Alas, we are paying the penalty for what we did to our brother; we saw his anguish when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen. That is why this anguish has come upon us.”

Yup. What comes around goes around. You reap what you sow. How many times have we tormented ourselves with such dark interpretations of our own life stories!

But to the astonishment and relief of both the eleven brothers of Joseph and the eleven remaining disciples of Jesus, this encounter is not an occasion for vengeance but for reconciliation. Joseph, raised up to be the Prime Minister of Egypt, boldly and magnanimously reinterprets the injustices done to him by his brothers. “Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and Lord of all his house.” Joseph finds the silver lining in the dark clouds that have hung over his life, and offers it as a tie to bind himself to his alienated brothers.

Likewise, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth are, “Peace be with you.” Then he showed them his hands and his side. Gazing at the one who had been unjustly put to death, but was now raised up to glory, the disciples realized that God had bent to the good all the evil that they, the religious authorities and even Rome itself could do to Jesus. What appeared to be a crushing defeat was in fact a victory. God in the body of Jesus made satisfaction for our sins in order that we might forever live to God’s glory and for the love of our neighbor. In short, just as God permitted Joseph to go down to Egypt as a slave in order to save the lives of his brothers, God permitted Jesus to go to the cross to save the entire human family.

A moment ago we sang the hymn We Walk By Faith and Not By Sight. Part of walking by faith is not only laying hold of truths that cannot be proved by modern methods of scientific testing, but also trusting, in the midst of life’s adversities and failures, that all things do work together for good for those who love God and are called according to God’s purpose.

Sight often comes as hindsight. In retrospect, we can see how a particularly difficult trial in our lives contained for us a hidden blessing. But at the moment we must bear the cross, we have to walk by faith, trusting that whatever burden we are bearing is not so great as to separate us from the love of God.

Now these two stories, which at first glance had nothing to do with each other, do have many parallels, both with each other and with our life stories. Their story is our story. Through faith in Jesus Christ, we become his disciples and children of this dysfunctional family, the twelve tribes of Israel. If we’re honest, we have to admit that we have sold out our Lord, and turned our backs on neighbors near and far too many times to count.

And yet, all is forgiven.

That said, such forgiveness is not a blank check. We are forgiven in order that we may become a forgiving community. When Joseph sends his brothers back to their father Jacob in the land of Canaan, he dismisses them with some fatherly sounding advice, “Do not quarrel along the way.”

Likewise Jesus sends the disciples out into the world with the Holy Spirit and with a commission. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” In other words, peace with God is meant to reconcile us to our neighbor. The mission of the Church is to be a peaceful community, not by being a community where everybody looks alike and thinks alike—that’s a cheap and easy and false peace--but rather where all differences and hurts are eventually healed with the words, “Please forgive me,” and, “I accept your apology.”

“If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” I take this difficult sentence to mean this: in a world where the rule is “Do unto others before they do unto you,” the Church is called to live by different principles, to be a community of mercy, of second chances, of speaking the truth in love, of reconciliation. If the Church fails in this mission, then there will be no forgiveness in the world. The world will have no other way of knowing how to live other than by the cruel logic of what comes around goes around.

And Yes, we mean for the world to learn something from us. We mean for the structures of society to be leavened by the yeast in the words, “I’m sorry,” and “I forgive you.” Our Sunday ritual of confession, assurance of pardon, and passing the peace is meant to be imitated outside of church, in break rooms, board rooms, and even in the unlikeliest of venues, courthouses and the halls of Congress. Notice that when Joseph pardons his brothers, he is not just acting as an individual who decides to bury the hatchet and end a long-standing family feud, he is also acting as the Prime Minister of Egypt who enacts reconciliation on an international scale by allowing these starving foreigners to settle in the land he governs.

Because Jesus has paid it all, we, individually and collectively, are freed from the compulsion to obtain that pound of flesh that life or our enemies owe us. Having been forgiven, we are free to forgive others, and to seek a new future that’s not determined by painful memories of the past.

And yet we as a society have largely spurned this freedom. And everywhere we look we see the cost of making people pay for what they’ve done. We see it in our prisons that are filled to overflowing, and in neighborhoods emptied of young adult men. We see it across the street in the increasingly crowded hallways of the VA Medical Center and in the rapidly filing up cemetery behind the VA, to say nothing of the scenes of carnage and grief from around the world on our TV screens every evening.

Now the world is not yet a place where the wolf and the lamb can lie down together. In this predawn time in human history between resurrection and second coming, the weak still need to be protected from the strong, and those who sin do need to be corrected, only in a spirit of gentleness.

But there is no more need for avenging ourselves. The wounds of Jesus are evidence to that. And now, with the resurrection, God presents us with tantalizing possibilities of forgiveness, reconciliation, and a new future where strangers are made friends and enemies lay aside their grievances and cooperate together to make a better world. There is yet hope, even at this late hour, for our dysfunctional families, conflicted congregations, societies torn by the divisions of race and class, and a world at war, for Jesus can pass through the locked doors of our hardened hearts and through those secure passageways in the bowels of the Pentagon and in the penthouses of corporate headquarters, saying “Peace be with you.” As we lay hold of that hope more and more, the world out there will take notice, and darkness shall give way to noonday brightness.

Easter Sermon

It was a quiet assignment: night watchmen in the cemetery just outside the city limits. It was certainly quieter than their usual assignment of providing security in the Temple compound. In the Temple one had to contend with jostling crowds, the bleating of sheep being dragged off to slaughter, the occasional fight to break up, pick pockets to chase down, and of course keeping a careful eye on the lock boxes at the money changing table. But in the graveyard there had been no crowds to control. Just a few teenagers killing a case of Bud Light—these were promptly chased off and the beer confiscated, along with a can of spray paint. You know what was coming next, once they’d been sufficiently fortified with alcohol. These kids today!

And in terms of treasure to guard, well, the boss had posted them with strict orders to deter any grave robbers that might come poking around, but this was no Egyptian Pharaoh laid to rest in a gold-plated sarcophagus. Wasn’t he one of the pilgrims from Galilee? The one who shot his mouth off and wound up getting himself nailed to a cross? They couldn’t imagine why anyone would plunder this tomb, but who were they to question the boss’ orders? It was easy money, and the boss did pay well.

Then it happened. Just when the inky black sky gave way, ever so grudgingly to a hint of indigo blue in the east, just when one of the security guards had just decided to wander over and warn away two women who were getting a tad too close, the earth heaved. The quaking ground knocked him off his feet, and cast his fellow watchmen here, there and everywhere, while the stone that they had been resting against rolled away from the entrance to the tomb. And where there was had been darkness with only the slightest brush of dawn, now light blazed. A fierce, blindingly white light, too bright to look at. And a voice! “Not here. Come and see. He’s been raised. You will see him in Galilee.”

They had known fear before. Their lives had been threatened on numerous occasions, and they’d lived to tell about it. But nothing like this dread in the presence of the holy. They froze, their faces to the ground, and begged God for it to be over.

And then it was. No light. No voice. No aftershocks to unsteady their feet. Just a brightening Sunday morning sky, the old moon sinking below the horizon. And no body in the tomb. Dread gives way to anger, frustration and that sense of doom we all experience when we’ve been given a job to do, and we’ve blown it.

Well, there ain’t nothing left but to tell the boss. He’s a religious man. He’ll understand. Even if he don’t, it’s his problem now.

And so it was that the first people, aside from the Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, to hear the news that Jesus had been raised were the very people who had him handed over to be crucified. How’d they take it?

Well, in order to anticipate an answer, let’s talk about the kind of men they were. They were humorless men. And not too terribly self-aware. Those two character traits go hand in hand. Jesus had been telling stories in the Temple courtyard all week, parables, he called them. They usually involved a joke, a pun, or a rhetorical twist, always at the expense of the powers-that-be, the priests who presided in the sanctuary. His disciples, dim-witted fishermen, were so dense that the point he was making frequently went over their heads, but these priests were sharp men, educated men, sharp enough to know that they were the butt of Jesus’ jokes, but not reflective enough to wonder if they deserved it. So they decided to get rid of him.

They were men for whom the ends justified the means. Matthew writes that at the trial of Jesus they were eagerly looking for false testimony to convict him. These are men who will not be bothered with the facts. These are men who will stop at nothing. And they had the means to do it. I don’t know if silver was trading as high then as it is now in this new inflationary age, but they were willing to part with thirty pieces of it to be shed of Jesus.

These men of authority were the shepherds of the flock, entrusted with feeding the sheep and protecting them from danger, yet they feared and loathed the very people whom they were supposed to serve. And they jealously guarded their own authority over them. Jesus was the darling of the crowds, so he had to be eliminated, but it had to be done right. By night. And by stealth, lest the crowds riot.

And so what would such men do when their worst fears were realized? Their judgment overturned? Repent?

You know what they did, because you know them personally. They aren’t just characters in an old story. You pay taxes to them. You enrich them when you buy the goods their companies manufacture. Perhaps they supervise you at work. Perhaps you even have to live with them. These aren't people who got where they are by saying "I'm sorry." 

They went into damage control mode. They had paid dearly to put Jesus in the tomb, and they would pay even more to keep him there with spin, rumors and innuendos. The boss went surprisingly easy on the guards. All he asked of them was to say, “We guzzled that Bud Lite we took from those kids, and slept right through the grave being robbed. Sickos. What’d they want with that body anyway?” And, he asked them to put up with the inevitable ribbing that such a story would bring down on their heads. But the boss paid well. It was worth it.

And so the rumor spread, and it is told to this very day, says Saint Matthew. Like that email forward that says not to flash your headlights at the car whose high beams are on, lest the Bloods or Crips in that car come after you and put a bullet in your head, the body snatching of Jesus by his disciples is an urban legend that can’t be knocked down.

I don’t know about you, but when I get one of these forwards I wonder, where did all this start? Who was the one who sat at the keyboard and composed this fairy tale? Where this particular urban legend started was with a wrong turn and the wrong audience. Go and tell, said the angel, but the guards went the wrong way and told the wrong people and a rumor arose to compete with the Good News. Unlike the women, who head for Galilee, where Jesus’ ministry began, the Temple police re-entered the city, the so-called Holy City that stones the prophets and tried to end Jesus’ ministry. Unlike Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, they do not report to the disciples who maybe even now in the midst of the shame and fear and humiliation hope against hope in resurrection. Rather they report to those bosses who have no need for resurrection because they’d rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. And because they made a wrong turn seeking an audience with the wrong people, they failed to see the resurrected Jesus.

Saint Matthew, who alone among the gospel writers places guards at the tomb along with the women, is perhaps the most perceptive about what it takes to believe. A skeptical age wants proof of the Resurrection before committing to the Church and following Jesus Christ. Would that Wayne had been there with his camera on Easter morning, and Chris and Sarah had been there as well with their notepads and pencils! And yet, as Matthew tells it, even angels, earthquakes and a body that can pass through solid rock were not enough to kindle the flame of faith in those who looked to the rulers of the present age to butter their bread.

The proof in the pudding is in the eating. We cannot wait for proof before deciding whether or not to follow. It is only in setting out on the path of discipleship, a path that knows no shortcuts around the cross, that Jesus greets us, and we discover that he is not just a one of many martyrs offered on the altar of history, but the Living Lord of heaven and earth . It is only when we seek the fellowship of those who so imperfectly loved him, that we discover he is worthy of our admittedly imperfect love.

If you’re on the fence this Easter Sunday, know that there’s no sign or wonder great enough to get you off the fence. Just go ahead and hop off. Follow Jesus. Seek out the fellowship of those who are already following him. True, they aren’t perfect. They’ve (we’ve) denied him many times. But if you don’t get off the fence, and head down the path of discipleship, there’s always the chance that you might fall off on the wrong side, and into the hands of those humorless, ruthless guardians of the present age.

On this path, in the company of the saints and sinners who’ve gone before us, we learn to rightly divide the Word of Truth, to separate fact from fiction, sanity from spin. We discover a treasure more precious than gold, or the thirty or so pieces of silver that those who lord it over us would buy us off with. We learn not to be intimidated by their threats, or to fear what they fear. We accept what they reject, God’s judgment on our sin, God’s call to serve rather than be served, and in accepting that, we receive so much more back, our very lives and very selves, no longer subject to sin and to death. With fear and great joy, that is, not the fear of death that tempts us to distract ourselves with worldly pleasures, or postpone the inevitable with worldly power, but with a reverent awe for the power of God, we make our way in this world, not surprised but grateful when angels appear to direct us, and looking for the darkness that’s already given way to the dawn to further yield to noonday brightness.

Palm Sunday sermon

Do You Have a Permit for This Parade?

March 16, 2008/Year A, Palm Sunday

Psalm 118, Matthew 21: 1-11

On the ninth day of our pilgrimage to the Holy Land we finally arrived in the Holy City. Our bus took us through Jerusalem up to an overlook on the Mount of Olives. From there we walked down a narrow street to the Dominus Flevit, a Roman Catholic church built on the site where it is believed that Jesus paused and wept over the city as he approached it on Palm Sunday.

The courtyard of the church has a nice view of the Old City. From there we looked across the Kidron Valley, through which today runs a four lane highway, to behold the Dome of the Rock glowing in the afternoon sun. The third most holy site in all Islam, built on the site of the ancient Jewish temple. Beyond it, and the rest of the Old City that sits astride Mount Zion, on a higher ridge, tower cranes in modern West Jerusalem brushed the sky.

It was here that our tour guide called our attention to the wall that surrounds the Old City, and some of its gates. One, called the Golden Gate, is no longer open. When the Ottoman Emperor Sulieman the Magnificent conquered the Holy Land in the 16th century, he learned that the Jews of Jerusalem were praying for the coming of the Messiah. They looked for his arrival at the Golden Gate, which opens east to the Mount of Olives. He also learned that the Christians of the city, who were also praying for the Messiah to come, believed that he had come once before, descending the Mount of Olives and entering the Holy City through the Golden Gate.

Sulieman, a Muslim, said, “Well. This is my city now. Ain’t no stinking Messiah gonna come take this city away from me.” So he bricked in the Golden Gate. And as a second line of defense, he established a Muslim cemetery outside the Gate in the erroneous belief that a Jewish Messiah couldn’t be contaminated by passing among the dead. A Messianic minefield, this Muslim graveyard. With that, his city was secure.

Now we laugh at Sulieman’s ignorance of what a Messiah really is, but this long dead Turkish ruler is symbolic of us. There’s something within us that doesn’t excitedly wave palm branches when the Messiah approaches. There’s something within us that wants to ask the revelers if they’ve got a permit for this ragtag parade. Ride on, ride on in majesty? There’s something within us that wishes Jesus had never rode into our lives.

Astride that colt, Jesus enacts an old, obscure prophecy, and signals his claim to the throne. Now it is kings who are seated on thrones, and kings are authority figures. To King Jesus we owe our obedience and our loyalty. Yet, like Sulieman of old who jealously guarded his city, we jealously guard our lives and our possessions. We are slow to hand them over to a higher authority. To paraphrase the crowd on Good Friday, we have no king but ourselves. Henley’s poem Invictus speaks for us more than the shouts of “Hosanna” from the crowd. “I am the master of my fate/the captain of my soul.” Something within us says, Stay out, Jesus. I’m doing just fine, Thank you very much.

Certainly the people of Jerusalem were ambivalent, at best, about his arrival. At the cries of “Son of David” at the Golden Gate, the city was thrown into an uproar. The noun form of the Greek word for “uproar” is “seismos.” The heart of the city quaked when they heard those cries at the gate.

Perhaps they were remembering another scare years before. Strangers, Wise Men from the east, perhaps entering the city through the Golden Gate, inquired at King Herod’s palace, “Where is he who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and have come to worship him.” The question troubled King Herod and all Jerusalem with him, for though the crib room in Herod’s palace was empty, the stars foretold the birth of a King.

The temple priests and royal advisors feared and quaked at the coming of Jesus like bureaucrats fear an election year, like employees of a company fear its sale. There’s nothing they hate more than regime change. Instability at the top. The devil you know is always better than the devil you don’t know. A new King, a new administration, a new owner means new procedures, new goals and objectives, and maybe demotions, layoffs, reassignments. Who needs the hassle?

And that’s what Jesus brings when he rides into our lives. A new set of priorities. And with that, instability. Uncertainty. Pain. Suffering. He’s bought us. Not with cash or stock options, but with his own precious blood. And things must be different now. And we hate it.

Or maybe we’d welcome a change at the top, if it were the right kind of change. But it wasn’t clear to the residents of Jerusalem, or to we who make pilgrimage to today’s sanctuaries if Jesus represents the kind of change we want to see. He fancies himself a King, but look at him, riding that donkey. He can’t even afford a real saddle. Any self-respecting King would have thundered into town on a warhorse. Power, we respect. Ruthlessness, we grudgingly admire, certainly in our leaders and even in our foes, once they’re vanquished. But humility? Shall we bend the knee to that, like those ridiculous-looking guys in turbans prostrating themselves before a baby in a manger? It’s a paradox, but there’s something about defenseless love that arouses our greatest fear and loathing.

“Hosanna! Save us, lord! Give us success!” we pray. Ah, success. Some translations read "prosperity."  That’s what we want for ourselves, because that’s what our parents wanted us to be.  We'll vote in November for a leader who we think can guarantee us the most success.  But this Messiah invites us to take up a cross and follow him, hoping that somehow at the end of that long and winding road, we might obtain the resurrection from the dead. Is resurrection a suitable substitute for success? Is that a journey we want to set out on? Does that set us to saddling our donkeys and following Christ in hot pursuit?

Maybe it’s not the Messiah himself, but the company he keeps. His storms the city with an army of the immoral, the disabled and the outcast. The blind beggars he healed in Jericho are right at his heels. The women, some demon-possessed, others of ill repute, who funded his ministry in Galilee, are in and amongst the crowd surging through the Golden Gate. Kids, snotty nosed, whining, jumping in every mud puddle they can find along the way, at his feet. Do we really want to live in a world where Jesus reigns, for in that world the meek might finally receive their promised inheritance. What will become of us who, in the present age, proudly possess the earth’s choicest real estate? The very thought is cause for indigestion, both in Jerusalem of old and Salisbury of today.

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” says the psalmist. I imagine that, where those tower cranes pierced the sky in West Jerusalem, underneath sat rusted and beat up dumpsters into which was thrown splintered wood, chunks of concrete, leftover gravel, strips of wiring and God knows what else that didn’t make it into the building, all of it destined for the landfill, just like construction sites here in the U.S.

That’s what we did with the Messiah. We came out to the parade, sized him up, and by the end of the week we’d decided he just wouldn’t do. Like a stone with a fissure running through it, or like the bad soil the contractor discovered out here that had to be hauled away and replaced with gravel before the new fellowship hall could go up, we, for the reasons we’ve mentioned earlier, and for our own reasons, decided that we wouldn’t build a life on this foundation. Golgotha, the little hill on the far side of the Old City from our vantage point on the Mount of Olives, was the landfill for Jerusalem, where rotten food, splintered wood, crushed stone, and worn out Messianic pretenders were heaped together into a pile.

Sometimes some pretty good stuff winds up in the landfill. Dan Gobble is the pastor of Providence United Methodist Church on Bringle Ferry Road. He was telling me on Wednesday how his grandfather, John Henry Gobble, built an entire house out of what he recovered from the dumpster at a TVA site he worked on in Tennessee. Those were the days in the construction industry when speed was at a premium and there was no market for recycled products, so if it didn’t get nailed down or welded into the building it got promptly bulldozed and hauled to the dump. But John Henry went dumpster diving after work every day, rescuing forlorn 2x4s, salvaging rebar, scavenging copper pipe, and out of that rejected material constructed his own, personal castle.

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” says the psalmist. God the Father, like John Henry Gobble, goes sifting through our cast-offs, finds Jesus and says, Yes. You’ll more than do. The time to rebuild has come, and I will lay you as the foundation.

“This is the day that the Lord has made,” says the Psalmist. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Centuries of Christian interpreters have heard in these words a prophecy of Easter. Indeed, this Palm Sunday is a kind of Easter Sunday because on a Sunday long ago God raised Jesus from the dead. He has ascended on high, higher in the sky than tower cranes or space shuttles can penetrate, and He is Lord over all, from you and me to Sulieman the Magnificant, even over those who handed him over and denied him clemency.

Only let us remember that, in the words of one scholar, the Risen Christ is not the acceptable Christ. The one whom God chose is the one we kicked to the curb, the one whose coming still generates an uproar in our hearts and in our communities. Let us take care, lest we stumble over the cornerstone God laid. Let us build on him, and not wall him out.

Today's sermon

The How and Why of “Love Thy Neighbor”

March 2, 2008/Year A, Lent 4

Leviticus 19: 17-18; Ephesians 2: 1-10; Matthew 5: 13-20

            Today’s worship theme is good works.  We begin in the Old Testament with one of the most famous commands in all of scripture:  You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  Now you think you know what’s coming next.  Why, in order to love others, we must first love ourselves.  From there we proceed to a sermon on how good self-esteem is the font from which neighborly love springs.

            Now I know that it’s flying in the face of pop psychology, and no small amount of public school curriculum, but I think that good self-esteem is way overrated.  So do the social scientists.  A few years ago the New York Times surveyed the latest studies on self-esteem.[1]  They showed that while bad self-esteem is a good predictor of suicide and eating disorders, people with good self-esteem tend to drive drunk and commit hate crimes.  Pick your poison.  One study of inmates in

California

and

Massachusetts

prisons found no difference in self-esteem levels between them and adult males of the same age out of prison.  So the men weren’t over-compensating for innate self-loathing by doing harm to others.  But where the inmates did differ was in the area of narc