A Simple Faith

Matthew 6:24-34

2/27/2011

‘No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

‘So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

Annie Dillard, in her wonderful book Teaching a Stone to Talk, tells about encountering a weasel one day in the woods. A weasel, she writes, bites his prey at the neck . . . and does not let go. And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton – once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?

We live, Dillard says, by choice, but a weasel lives by necessity. A weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of a single necessity.[1]

There is abundant evidence that we are overwhelmed by our choices. How many of you have gone to the store to buy cereal, or paper towels, or anything, and stood there in the aisle paralyzed by the hundreds of virtually identical items to choose from? Have you tried lately to decide what kind of car to buy? There is a story that when Bishop William Cannon was dean of Candler School of Theology in the 1960’s, he asked his best friend, Professor and later Bishop Mack Stokes, if Cannon gave him the money, to go downtown in Atlanta and buy him a new car. “Well, Bill,” Stokes replied, “that’s pretty unusual, but I’ll do that if you want. But what kind of car do you want me to buy?” Cannon thought a minute and answered, “Well, I guess a green one would be nice.”

We are overwhelmed by our choices. Michael Shut writes that Americans spend an average of 40 minutes per week playing with their children, but 6 hours a week shopping. The average annual pocket money for American children is more than the total annual income for a half-billion of the world’s poorest people. American couples spend an average of 12 minutes per day talking to each other. 30% of American adults report feeling high stress every day. The majority of Americans get 60 to 90 minutes less sleep per night than recommended for good health. We live in the richest country in the history of the world, but there is a growing sense that something is very, very wrong with the way we live. We are overwhelmed by the choices.

In the Sermon on the Mount, today’s Gospel reading, it seems to me that Jesus calls us, like weasels, to live by necessity rather than be paralyzed by choices. A faithful life doesn’t consist of worrying about the infinite varieties of food and shelter and clothing. Our lives should be centered on the one great necessity – the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness. The one necessary thing in life, Jesus tells us, is to love God and love our neighbor. Everything else flows from that. That’s the first priority, and when we make the main thing the main thing, then the other things begin to fall into their proper place.

Right, preacher. More easily said than done. How do I do that in the face of all the choices I have to make every day in my life. I don’t have time to consider the lilies or watch the sparrows. How can I move from my life of complex choices to a life of simple necessity?

Gerald May, on the faculty of Wesley Seminary and the Shalem Institute of Spiritual Formation, says there is a connection between the complexity of our lives and our lack of solitude. When we make space in our lives, when we spend extended time alone and in silence, we begin to realize what’s important and what’s not. Solitude and space put our consumerist culture in perspective. The consumer culture constantly tells us that more – of anything – will make us happy: more money, more people, more prestige, more food, more, more, more. And, because more doesn’t make us happy, we have to have more. It’s a great system, except that it kills the soul. So, instead of more, what would happen if we tried less: less busy, less frantic; fewer commitments, activities, possessions. What if we turned from lives of choice to lives of necessity, making space for Jesus to come?

May says there are two difficulties in making space in our lives. First, we are addicted – addicted to filling up every space we encounter, whether it be physical space – our homes, our offices; our emotional and spiritual space – with constant noise and music and activity; or our calendars. Like an addict, if it is quiet, we turn on some noise; if there is nothing to do, we do something; if our minds are empty, we find something to fill them. We will have to withdraw from that addiction, and that will take hard work.

The second difficulty in making space in our lives is our fear of what emptiness will reveal to us. We would rather be paralyzed by a thousand choices than face what’s really going on in us, revealed in silence and solitude. Our business, says May, weaves a harsh, desperate barrier against participation in love.[2]

How do we begin to live countercultural, simpler, more faithful lives, freed from the desperate and unhappy consumerism of our culture? How can we begin to live like weasels, living by necessity, and not by choice? First, says Gerald May, we have to look for the natural spaces in our lives. We all have them, if we will just pay attention. Maybe it’s when you have finished a job or a task, and you just relax for a moment. Could you stretch that a little? Maybe it’s a long, hot bath at the end of the day, a walk in the garden in the morning or the end of the day, a few minutes listening to music. Those moments that you usually fill by watching TV, or reading, or eating, that dulls you even though you call them recreation – could they just become empty space?

Second, May writes, set aside some regular time each day for just being, and not doing. Perhaps in the morning, take a few minutes not to read or listen to news or even read the Bible, but just to be still. At the end of the day, just sit quietly and recollect the day, and count your blessings. You will be amazed at how those spaces will begin to transform your sense of what is necessary and what is not.

Finally, May suggests we look for longer spaces. Plan a retreat, a silent day, become part of a prayer or meditation group. Not a talk-filled Bible study or conference filled with agenda, but an extended period to seek stillness and deepening alone or together. I know that if it were not for the annual silent retreat I enjoyed last week and every February with a dozen other clergy, I would not still be in the ministry. I might not even be a Christian. Vicki can tell you that while our spouses first complained about us leaving them for five days, now they look forward to the change in us after we have been quiet, rested, and in prayer for a week. If that sounds like something you’d like to do for a day, or a weekend, or maybe even a week, come and talk to me about that. I’d love to teach you how to experience that kind of space in your life as well. As addicts, we are more likely to break our addiction to choices if we do that together than if we try to do it separately. That’s what it means for us to be church – for us to support each other in breaking our addiction to the self-important busyness of the world.

We live trying to decide between a thousand choices, all of which promise to make us happy and healthy and whole. Jesus calls us to live like weasels, by necessity. Listen to how Annie Dillard phrases that life: I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.[3]

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[1] Dillard, Annie, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper Perennial, pp. 29-34

[2] May, Gerald, Simpler Living, Compassionate Life, Morehouse, p. 47

[3] Dillard, Annie, ibid., p.34

Matthew 5:27-37: Hard Core Faith

Epiphany 6A, 2011

2/13/2011

‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.

‘It was also said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.” But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

‘Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.” But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No”; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

Earlier this week I was having a discussion with our young adult group here at church about the classic move, The Wizard of Oz. We were talking about the moment when Dorothy and the farmhouse, carried aloft in the tornado, land in Oz on top of the Wicked Witch of the East. Dorothy, filmed in black and white, opens the farmhouse door, and suddenly the movie is in color. I was telling the young adults, all in their twenties, that for many years, watching the movie on TV as a child, I didn’t know about the change from black and white to color, because our TV was black and white. One young man stared at me, uncomprehending. “You mean, you watched it on VHS?” he asked. “No, that was long before video tape. All the televisions were black and white until the early 1960’s.” He continued to stare at me in utter bewilderment – I don’t think he’s ever seen a black and white television.

Not only did my generation grow up watching black and white TV, but all of our lives were black and white. I grew up in a white suburb, went to a white church, and went from grades one through twelve without a single person of color in my school except the janitors and one high school coach (who, by the way, was adored by the students and voted teacher of the year). Black people lived in downtown or East Baltimore, or places very far away like Little Rock or Birmingham or Tuscaloosa, and we watched them on the news at night as white people tried to prevent them from attending white schools and colleges and from riding in the front of city buses. I had no black friends. But at the dinner table, as we would talk about the sometimes literal burning issues of the day, my father would give his opinions about black people. He worked with black people every day on the construction site. The black people he knew were uneducated and literally dug ditches for him. So he did not have a high opinion of black people, because of the black people he knew, and he assumed that all black people were like the people he knew digging ditches for him every day.

It wasn’t until college that I made my first black friend, a student on my dormitory hall named Gordon Wichter. Gordon was brilliant, he was funny, and not like any of the things my father had said black people were like. Gordon started the Black Student Association at UVa in his dormitory room that first year. I got to know other students in the Association, and they weren’t like the people my father talked about, either. And I made my first Jewish friends, my first Asian friends, my first gay friends. And none of them were like the stories I had heard about them all my life.

What had happened was that I moved from thinking about people as things – whether black or white or gay or Asian or Jewish – to knowing them as real people who were amazing in their diversity and complexity and wonder. So, when I went home for the first time that first fall, and my father began to talk about such and such a group of people who act and think and do and believe in such and such a way, I reacted by telling him that I knew people in those groups, and that’s not the way they were at all. I now knew more than my father, which made him ever so happy. As the saying goes, you can always tell a college freshman, but you cannot tell him much.

In this morning’s lesson, Jesus gives us two concrete situations in which people are being treated as objects, and not as living, caring people. The first is in the case of lust. Lust is not an exclusively male problem, I’m sorry to say. In fact, it’s been my observation that especially among adolescents, girls are at least as often the aggressors as are the guys. So, let’s make Jesus’ words inclusive: anyone who looks at anyone with lust has already committed adultery.

On Super Bowl Sunday, many evangelical churches decided to talk about pornography. I don’t know why they decided to talk about porn on that Sunday, but I find the connection intriguing. Fox TV’s introduction to the Super Bowl, linking it with the Declaration of Independence, the sacrifice of soldiers, and the greatest generation was, I thought, if not pornographic at least obscene. The internet has made pornography easily and cheaply available to everyone, and it is a serious issue everywhere, including in church households.

The second, and connected, issue Jesus addresses is divorce. The issue of divorce in the first century was that Jewish law allowed a man to divorce his wife on the spot for the most trivial of causes – from a wart to bad cooking to talking too much. The husband could simply say in public, “I divorce you,” and the woman was left bereft of home and care. The link between lust and first-century divorce is that both treated people as objects – as things to be coveted or to be thrown away. Both situations treat people as property: I want that car, I want that dress, I want that person. I don’t want that car or that dress anymore – I don’t want that person anymore.

Not long ago a man came to me to talk about the struggles he continued to have into middle age with lust. Again, I don’t believe that’s an exclusively male issue. In fact, one of the flip sides of the women’s movement has been, in the words of a friend of mine, to now allow women to be as immature and irresponsible as men have long been. I told the struggling man that one of the things that really helped me was to separate appreciating beauty from the desire to possess. I can go to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art and admire a Monet or a Picasso painting without feeling like I need to have that painting on the wall of my house. In the same way, I have learned to look at people and say, “That person is beautiful” without the need to “have” that person. The world says that to like or to love means that we must possess. That’s a lie. The truth is that none of us ever really possess anything – as the John Ortberg book the Grace Davis class is studying says, “It all goes back into the box,” just as someday you and I have to go back into the box as well. When we begin to understand how to love without having to have, we are freed to love more than we ever dreamed possible.

People are not things, Jesus is telling us, to be coveted or to be thrown away. And, because people are not things but sacred and unique, each person is to be known and understood and loved not as a category – black, white, male, female, young, old, Christian, Muslim, Jew, liberal, conservative, Hokie, Wahoo . . . fill in your own blank . . . but, in the words of a song by John McCutcheon, as Moishe, Isabelle, Sipho, Mikael, Kim, Mohammed, Red Hawk, and Tim. At the hard-core heart of Christian faith is the conviction that God has made and loves every single human being deliberately and uniquely. That, by the way, is the fundamental connection between Christianity and democracy – that the individual is sacred and unique and therefore has just as much voice in the public square as does anyone else. To treat people as things is both anti-christian and anti-democratic.

The last issue Jesus addresses in this morning’s Gospel is whether there are degrees of truth or not. Comedian Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness, which was named the Word of the Year in 2006 by Merriam-Webster. Truthiness is a "truth" that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.[1] It appears every night on our TV screens, and every day in conversations private and public. It’s truth that we wish were true – like my father’s declarations about what black people are like – despite what the real facts may be. Jesus addresses this by instructing his followers not to swear – not swear as in say bad words, but to make a distinction between official truth, sworn on a Bible or on our mother’s grave or Scout’s Honor, and any other kind of truth. Let your Yes be Yes, and your No a No, because anything else comes from the evil one. Why? Because way back in the Garden of Eden, the snake was trying to convince Eve that God had different levels of truth: You will not die – God knows if you eat that fruit you will be like God, knowing good and evil. But Adam and Eve did die when they disobeyed – their communion with God and with each other died. It’s no accident that the first point of the Scout Law, on this Scout Sunday, is . . . trustworthy. Don’t tell the truth you wish were true – tell it like it is.

It’s ever so much easier to tell the truth we want to be true. It’s ever so much easier to treat people as things to be coveted and to be cast away. Telling the truth that is true may be simpler in the long run, but it’s usually ever so much harder. And being in a relationship with separate and unique individuals is incredibly harder than treating people as categories and objects. Following Jesus is hard work, requiring hard core faith. But Jesus treats every single one of us as absolutely unique and precious, and loves us in all our weirdness. If we’re going to follow Jesus, don’t we have to do the same?

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness

Jesus and the Law

Epiphany 5A, 2011

Matthew 5:13-20

2/6/2011

‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

‘You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

For those of you who may not know, before I was appointed to Providence I was the Senior Pastor at Shady Grove church in Mechanicsville, and before that I was the Superintendent of the Ashland District, which includes both Shady Grove and Providence. Early in my tenure as Superintendent of the district’s sixty churches, I was asked by the leadership of one of the churches on the district – not this one – to meet with them because of issues they were having with their pastor. I went out to meet with the church leaders and the pastor. Now, the pastor was a very intelligent, creative, and hard-working person. He was a good preacher, a good administrator, he visited the sick and the shut-in faithfully, taught small groups, and did everything in the job description well. But the congregation did not like him, resisted his leadership, and wanted him to leave.

I couldn’t figure it out. Almost always when a congregation wants to divorce their pastor, it’s because there’s been a failure in one or more aspects of that ministry. The pastor can’t preach, doesn’t visit, won’t lead, or, in a few cases, there’s been a serious moral failure by the pastor. None of these were the case in this situation. But as I listened to the congregation more, it became clear that the congregation didn’t feel that the pastor loved them. He did all the things he was supposed to do, but because they were the things he was supposed to do. In fact, he thought they were a bunch of ignorant and stubborn rednecks, and he was doing his best to lead them, despite their supposed stupidity, into the light. The congregation was dead on target – their pastor didn’t love them.

That same year, another pastor came to me and told me he needed to move, because, he said, his congregation needed a better preacher. I went to hear him, and he was right. He was terrible. He had gone to preaching workshops and had coaching, but he was terrible in the pulpit. But his congregation adored him, and was terribly upset at the thought of him leaving. The difference between this second pastor and the first was that in the second case, even though there were several things, especially preaching, that the pastor didn’t do well, the congregation felt deeply loved by their pastor. And it was true. He loved them so much that he engaged an outside preacher to come in once a month so the congregation could here a good sermon monthly. And finally this pastor decided that wasn’t enough, and that he needed to leave so I could send them a competent preacher.

The first pastor kept all the rules, and did so with great competence, but it wasn’t enough. The second pastor couldn’t fulfill all the rules, but it was more than enough. The difference between the two was love.

That’s what Jesus is telling his listeners in today’s gospel lesson. All the rules still apply. But the rules – whether a job description or the commandments – are descriptions of what faithfulness looks like. The Pharisees, despite what you may have learned in Sunday School, were actually a group of liberal reformers who wanted Jews to get back to obeying the law, because they believed that if they were obedient, then the Messiah would return. They turned the law, which was meant to describe a community faithful to God and to each other, into a prescription for holiness. Holiness consists of doing these things.

My hero, the 16^th century German reformer Martin Luther, had a very helpful way of understanding the relationship between faith and the law. Luther said the law does three things:

First, the law describes what God expects of us. God expects us to love God alone, to keep Sabbath, to honor the elders, to not murder or covet, to tell the truth. But if we’re honest – which, after all, is a commandment -- none of us keep all the rules. We have divided loyalties. We murder or lust after people in our hearts, we want other people’s stuff, we sass our parents, because, after all, they are the stupidest people who ever walked the face of the earth until we have children of our own and suddenly our parents look pretty smart. So, it turns out, God has impossible expectations of us. It’s not fair!

Which is the second use of the law: it kills us. We can’t keep it. So, there are two things we can do in response to this impossible command. We can throw a tantrum for the rest of our lives like some overgrown three year old and rebel against God and life and the universe, which is what most people do; or we can surrender, throw ourselves at God’s feet and beg for mercy because we can’t make it on our own, at which point God says, Well, it’s about time. Now, let me help you do what you can’t do on your own.

Now, third, the law describes what a life lived depending on God looks like. We trust in God alone, we live in harmony with each other, we keep Sabbath because the world doesn’t depend on us, we tell the truth, and we honor the wisdom of the elders.

Jesus’ problem with the scribes and the Pharisees was that they thought that if they just tried, really, really hard, then God would love them and answer their prayers for deliverance. They had it backwards: first, we throw ourselves on the grace of God and beg for help, and God answers because God already loves us. Then, with God’s help, and only with God’s help, we begin, out of love, to look like the picture painted by the rules.

Remember those two preachers I talked about? The second went to a little church that was unloved and dying, and now they feel adored because they are. Their pastor still can’t preach his way out of a wet paper bag, but they don’t care. The first pastor has moved in and out of the pastorate, and from one church to another. What he does he does very well, except he still doesn’t love his people. Which is why he keeps moving, and moving, and moving.

Blessed Foolishness

Epiphany 4A, 2011

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Matthew 5:1-13 1/30/2011

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ 
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

A young man, so the story goes, went to his Roman Catholic priest to ask that his name be removed from the membership rolls of the parish. When asked why, the young man replied, “Because I don’t believe any of this. I don’t believe in God, I don’t think Jesus was God’s Son, I don’t believe in heaven or in hell or in the church or any of this nonsense. I want you to take my name off the rolls, because I am not a Christian and I never will be one.” The priest thought a moment, and said, “Well, if that’s what you want, I’ll do it. I need to go get the parish membership rolls so I can take your name off. But before I do that, there’s one thing you have to do.” “Anything,” answered the young atheist. “I just want out.” “While I’m getting the membership books,” said the priest, “I want you to go into the sanctuary, walk up to the front, and say to Jesus, hanging there on the cross, ‘You did this for me, and I don’t care.’ Then come back, and I’ll take your name off the parish rolls.”

The young man strode confidently into the sanctuary, walked to the chancel, looked up at the figure of Jesus in agony on the cross, and announced with a loud voice, “You did this for me and I don’t . . . You did this for me and I . . . You did this for me and . . . You. . . did this . . . for me . . .”

We would be hard pressed to act out that story here at Providence, because all our crosses are bare. In fact, I couldn’t find a single public image of Jesus on the cross in our entire building except for the icon I have on the wall in my office. Mind you, this is not a Providence Church problem – this issue is ubiquitous in Protestant church facilities. Protestants like to tell each other that they have empty crosses instead of crucifixes because they believe in the resurrected Jesus. Methinks we doth protest too much. My experience has been that Protestants like to move quickly from Maundy Thursday to Easter Sunday, passing over (pun intended) the messy horror of Good Friday to the much happier picture of eggs, bunnies, marshmallow peeps, and, oh yes, an empty tomb. And, when something terrible happens in our lives, we console each other with well-intended but utterly unhelpful aphorisms like “Well, they’re in a better place” . . . “God has a special purpose in all this” . . . or, in the case this week of a wonderful young woman not from around here whose marriage has imploded, “Remember there’s only one perfect man, Jesus, and just trust in his perfect love for you.” All those things are true, but they’re so, so unhelpful. And, when spoken by well-meaning Christians, they miss the much more helpful and much more deeply true message of God’s love for us in Jesus, on the cross.

St. Paul was writing a deeply divided church in Corinth. It comforts me, in a perverse way, to read how utterly screwed up the Christian churches of the first century were within a few years of their founding. Every letter in the New Testament is a letter written to solve a problem in the church. Any problem we face in the church today is nothing new: youth in the first century were sitting on the back row texting each other, too, but minus the cell phones.

So Paul wanted to establish the basis for any conversation between Christians. In Corinth, they wanted to talk about spiritual gifts, and who had the better ones. No, Paul said, everything we do proceeds from the cross – not the empty cross that we’ve turned into pretty gold jewelry, but the instrument of torture and public execution on which Jesus died. We can’t bypass that on the way to Easter: no one is there for Easter Sunday who wasn’t there for Good Friday. Everything hinges on the broken body of the Son of God on the cross.

That’s a problem, Paul said, for both Jews and gentiles. It was a problem for Jews because they wanted a sign of God’s power over evil, like the Exodus. If the heavens had split and God had rescued Jesus from the cross and destroyed all the Romans, then they would have believed. The notion that God would reveal himself in weakness, death, and failure was inconceivable.

For non-Jews, the idea that the execution of an obscure Jewish carpenter could save the world from its chaos made no sense whatsoever. The notion that life could only come from death, that love was displayed in suffering, that strength came from weakness was irrational. God, the Greeks knew, was the essence of reasonableness, and nothing about this Passover horror story is reasonable.

The problem, Paul said, was that God had shown power over and over and over, and people still didn’t believe. Miracles are only good as long as the people who saw them are still around, if that long. In Exodus, it only takes a month and a half after the miracle at the Red Sea for the Hebrews to start second-guessing Moses and to suggest they were better off in Egypt. Jesus knew that the memory of the miracles wouldn’t last past his arrest in Gethsemane. As for the Gentiles, reason is a fickle mistress always in service to baser motives. It is reasonable to believe in this god or that depending on what’s good for me. When I was in high school, I suddenly discovered how much more sense it made to start attending the Presbyterian Church when I started dating a Presbyterian girl. But what sense does it make to follow a Messiah who calls you to be crucified, too?

God gave signs, and they didn’t work. God made complete sense, but that didn’t work either. So, Paul said, God decided to turn the values of this world upside down. Instead of power, God appeared in weakness on the cross. Why? Because very few people know what it’s like to be powerful. But every single person who has ever lived knows what it means to be weak, to be sick, to be hurt, or be helpless. Sooner or later, every single on of us will know what it’s like to die. So, if you want to make your love present to every creature in Creation, do you do it in power and miracle, or in pain and suffering and death?

In the same way, few of us know very much about what it is to be wise and smart and rational, especially myself. An ongoing argument I’ve had for years with my dear Baptist friends is about what some of them call “the age of accountability” or “the age of reason,” when children are eligible for conversion and baptism and church membership, because they are capable of understanding the gospel. What’s the IQ number for that, I ask? What do you do with mentally challenged people? What do you do with children who are dying? Do you completely “understand” baptism, or communion, or grace, or love, or the cross, or resurrection, or faith? Paul said it: we now see as in a dim mirror, but someday we shall see face to face; now we know in part, someday we shall know in full, even as we are fully known. If my salvation is dependent on my reason, my comprehension, my intelligence, my understanding, then I am doomed to hell. Very few of us know what it’s like to be brilliant, but every person whose ever lived knows what it’s like to be confused and lost and misunderstood. In seminary, I worked for a semester on a ward of profoundly challenged children. None of them would ever understand St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God, but every one of them knew what it meant to be held and bathed and changed and fed. If you’re going to reveal your love to the world, do you do it with a sublime philosophical treatise, or with an act of consuming love?

So, Paul says, God has turned the values of this world upside down. Isn’t that what the Beatitudes – these declarations from the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel lesson – are all about? Who is really blessed? The people in People Magazine, or on our TV screens night after night? The rich, the beautiful, the powerful, the famous? No, Jesus says, it’s the poor, the meek, the mourning, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. The others don’t need good news. They’ve got their money and their power and their machines of war and their success to keep them warm. But God has come to be with the unwashed masses who don’t have anything else to bless them. And if God is with the poor, the suffering, the dying, those whose lives and families and health and hopes have imploded, then God must be with us always. That’s the good news from the cross.

I’d love to see us hang some images of the dying Jesus on our church walls. Maybe, if we discovered that God reveals himself in suffering, we’d be more open with ourselves, and with each other, about the wounds and struggles in our own lives. Maybe, if we began focusing on the crucified Jesus, we’d spend less of our time and energies and attentions on what this world thinks is powerful and sensible, and discover Jesus among the poor and the suffering and the dying people all around us. Maybe if we prayed less to the glorified Jesus on his throne and more to the bleeding Jesus on the cross, we’d begin to see how we live and how we act and what we think is important in a whole new light. Maybe it wouldn’t take a 9/11 or a family crisis or an economic meltdown or a tragedy in the church or community to make us rethink our lives in some pretty radical ways. Because we all, you see, stand at the feet of the crucified Jesus every day, saying, “You did all this for me, and I don’t care.”

Fishing For People

Epiphany 3A, 2011

1/23/2011

Matthew 4:12-23

Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the lake, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: 
‘Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles — 
the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.’ 
From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the lake—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

Last Sunday, we read the story in John’s gospel about how Andrew had been introduced to Jesus by John the baptizer. Andrew had spent a day talking to Jesus, and then went and found his brother, Simon, and brought him to meet this amazing new friend. I asked you to write on your bulletin the names of people you knew who needed to be introduced to Jesus. They are your Simons, I said, and God is calling you to be their Andrew.

I was asked this week about the difference between the call stories in John and in today’s lesson in Matthew. Sometimes its difficult to reconcile the chronologies of the different gospels – especially the differences between the Gospel of John and the other three. Most scholars believe John was written later, and is trying to give us a different picture of Jesus – one that is less an account of what Jesus did than what Jesus meant. That’s why sometimes, in John, it’s not clear whether it’s Jesus speaking or the author, John, commenting on what Jesus has said.

I like to think that the reason Simon and Andrew left their boats so easily when Jesus came walking by was because they already knew who he was. The brothers had met him back by the Jordan River, as Matthew said. Then they went back north to fish for a while. They talked, as they fished, about what Jesus had said, and who he might be. Maybe they had just said to each other, “You know, if Jesus ever asked me to be one of his disciples, I’d drop everything and do it,” when Jesus came walking by. And maybe they had told their neighbors James and John about Jesus, too.

Follow me, and I will make you fish for people. There must have been something in that invitation that spoke to a passion, a hunger, a dream in Simon and Andrew. Has that ever happened to you? Five and a half years ago, Vicki and I were shopping for a house. We had been with our real estate agent to about a half-dozen houses. A good agent, like ours, listens carefully to what you like and don’t like as you visit different homes. She asked us to look at an internet listing of a house, and I wasn’t particularly impressed. “I really think you need to look at this house,” she insisted. “Fine,” I responded, “I’ve got a meeting, but you can show it to Vicki.” Vicki walked through the door of our home and said the house spoke to her: “Please buy me.” Sometimes it’s not so much that we choose, but that we are chosen.

Maybe you fell in love with another person that way – something in that person called something deep within you. Most of us who have fallen in love (isn’t the term significant – falling?) discovered that the person we loved didn’t fit the description we would have written. Instead, that person was a surprise ever so much better than anything we would have designed for ourselves.

When Jesus called Simon and Andrew to fish for people, there must have been a hunger deep within the two fishermen that responded to the call. There was a hole in their souls that needed filling, and Jesus called them to the banquet.

There’s a hole in the soul of every single person who has ever lived. It’s there because God made us that way. Just as we were made with empty stomachs, there is a hole in the soul that needs filling.

John Caldwell was a merchant seaman in the Australian navy during World War II. At the end of the war he found himself stranded in Panama, with no way to get home to his wife in Sydney. He decided to buy an old sailboat and, even though he had never sailed before, cross the Pacific before typhoon season set in. He didn’t make it, and was caught in a terrible storm east of Fiji. His boat was wrecked, his food was ruined, and he drifted westward for weeks before washing ashore on an island in the Fiji chain. He was so hungry that he was reduced to drinking the burned motor oil from his engine. He was so desperate to have something – anything – in his stomach that he devoured whatever was at hand.

Now, you’ve probably never been so hungry that you’ve drunk motor oil. But how often have you stopped at Fas Mart or McDonalds or wherever to put a mass of high calorie, high fat, highly salted garbage in the hole in your belly? How many of us, this afternoon, watching the playoffs, will be eating broccoli and carrots and celery, and how many of us will be wolfing down the cheese and chili covered nachos? We do it all the time – we are so desperate for something to fill us that we’ll swallow anything.

And so it is with the hole in our souls. We fill that hole with high fat, high calorie, high salt spiritual junk, and are still starving. So, what can fill that hole?

There’s a clue in the current CarMax commercials running on TV. I love CarMax. We’ve bought four cars from them. But the commercial they’re running shows happy people getting in and out of cars in the CarMax parking lot to the tune of the Ingrid Michaelson song, Everybody. The lyrics are:

Everybody, everybody wants to love

Everybody wants to be loved

oh, oh, oh

CarMax is telling us that when you find the car you love, you will be loved. Or the house, or the boat, or the person, or the beer, or the team, or whatever. The purpose of commercial advertising is to convince you to buy something you don’t really need, because that thing will fulfill your life and make you happy forever. But the song under the commercial has it right, even though the full song is about a lost human lover: Everybody, everybody wants to love; everybody, everybody wants to be loved. That’s it, folks. That’s the hole in everybody’s soul. We are made to love, and to be loved.

But all earthly loves, even the love of family and friends, are temporary and imperfect. The love of family and friends is meant to shape us and point us to a perfect love that lasts forever. That’s why no matter how loving our family and friends are, we’re still looking for something else. We’re looking for a perfect love that loves us for the terrible messes only we know we really are.

Simon and Andrew heard something in Jesus’ call that sounded like perfect and forever love. We know from the gospel story that Jesus loved them in all their cluelessness, all their unfaithfulness and betrayal, all their sin and messiness. And he loved them forever, more than life, even after death. Only God can love like that.

So when Jesus called Simon and Andrew to come fish for people, love was the bait. Simon and Andrew and James and John just wanted to love, and wanted to be loved. The wanted to love more than their jobs and their lives and their families, and be loved by more than the same. There was a hole in their souls, a hole just like yours and mine. They were tired of spiritual junk food.

Brothers and sisters, every day you and I live, work, meet, and go to school with people who are so hungry for perfect and eternal love they’re killing themselves drinking motor oil. And, when they look at you and at me, they see the same attempt to fill the holes in our lives with garbage, so there’s not much about our affirmation of faith in Jesus they find very attractive.

Let’s stop living as if our self-important busyness, or the fate of our favorite team, or the size of our bank account, or the newest toy from whatever store is the answer to our eternal hunger. What would happen if we started living as if the love of God in Jesus Christπ really were what life is all about?

That’s the bait, folks. It’s what you and I are hungry for. Nothing else will do. Let’s start living like that, so other people will see something in us they’re missing. Then, all we have to do is tell our starving friends where we’ve discovered a banquet.