Passions
October 28, 2007
Joel 2:23-29; Luke 19:41-48
I was sitting at the kitchen table working on a sermon this week – perfectly appropriate on this Reformation Sunday, given that among Martin Luther’s best-known works were the teachings gathered under the title, Table Talk, in which Luther offered these words that shall guide our morning: “I would not have preachers torment their hearers, and detain them with long and tedious preaching, for the delight of hearing vanishes therewith, and the preachers hurt themselves.”
In any case, as I was sitting at my table, the door bell rang and my writing was interrupted by two extraordinarily clean-scrubbed young Mormon boys who wanted to tell me about the truth of Joseph Smith, God’s prophet and apostle.
All of which got me to wondering: how do we know who speaks for God? That is certainly among the questions I’d like answers to, and, thus, it is one of the problems I wrestle with from time to time – when I’m not shooing Mormons off the porch.
There are slips of paper tucked into your bulletins this morning. On one side it reads, “passions,” on the other it reads “problems.”
I want to take a couple of minutes together this morning to name some of our passions and problems. Let’s begin by jotting down, on the side that says “problems,” three questions you’d like to ask God.
I’ve named one of mine – how do we know who speaks for God?, and here’s another example: I have a friend who says the one question she’d like to ask God is “why do we teeth?” That, of course, is a question that only the mother of a teething toddler would ask, but it points to the problem of human suffering, and underscores the tendency we have to ask questions first out of our own experience. So, take about two minutes and write down three questions that you’d like to pose to God.
We’ll come back to these in a couple of minutes, but first I want to try to give this conversation a bit of a frame and see how our texts for this morning might inform it. When we say we’d like to pose some questions to God, the kind of questions we pose say something about what we assume about the nature of God.
Who is this God to whom we turn with the questions of our hearts?
Joel tells us that God is the one of infinite mercy, who hears the cries of the suffering and acts to relieve that suffering. Joel tells us that God is alive and active in history. Joel tells us that God’s spirit pours out on all flesh, and that our visions of a future otherwise come from that gift of spirit, that calling of God.
One imagines that Martin Luther, trusting just such a God, asked “O God, what would you have me to do about a screwed up church?”
So, what are some of the questions that we have for God?
Now, on the flip side of the paper, where it says, “passions,” I want you to write down three issues that you are passionate about. Another way of framing the question is, “what makes you angry?” Still another way of asking it: “what would you like to see changed?” Think locally or beyond the local – wherever your passion lies. Again, we’ll take about two minutes to write down three concerns about which you have some passion.
We’ll come back to these in a couple of minutes, but first I want to try to give this conversation a bit of a frame, as well.
When we ask, as Christians, what makes us angry, it’s instructive to ask, at the same time, what made Jesus angry? The stories this morning from Luke – the lament over Jerusalem and then the cleansing of the temple – tell us that Jesus had no patience for degraded and corrupt religious practices. The gospel accounts suggest that the money changing that so angered Jesus was just one more social structure that took particular advantage of the poor and those least able to defend themselves.
It’s appropriate to recall his anger on the Sunday when we celebrate the Reformation – a movement begun with Martin Luther’s disgust with degraded and corrupt religious practices. The money changing in the temple was probably on Luther’s mind as he considered the selling of indulgences in the medieval church. In both cases, the religious practices were part of a larger social-economic system that kept the powerful in their places of privilege, and kept the poor in their place.
What made Jesus mad? Any blessing of an unjust status quo, any practice that marginalized the poor, any barrier to God’s love, any barrier to this table. What was Jesus passionate about? The poor who were marginalized, the outcasts who faced barriers to the welcome table, the small community he gathered together to resist the social and religious powers and principalities that profited from unjust systems and structures be they temple or empire.
Jesus’ anger, his passion, provides powerful guidance and a healthy measure of agitation as we consider our own anger and passion.
So, what are some of the things that tick you off?
It is important and instructive to name the things that anger us, but if we merely wallow in the anger, it festers. On the psychological level, unexpressed anger is one definition of depression. On an institutional level, anger that cannot be channeled into constructive action becomes the source for deep discontent.
Five centuries ago, Luther tapped a broad and deep anger at the degradation of the church and channeled it into a movement that we know as the Reformation.
We are the children of that movement – a people called to be reformed and always open to being reformed according to the movement of the spirit of God.
It’s that spirit – of hope, of love, of reconciliation – that spirit makes possible our own move from anger into transformation.
So, in the next few weeks and months, as we think together about our own practices, our own way of being the church here at Clarendon, let’s gather together our questions, let’s name our passions, and let’s be open to the spirit moving amidst us anew and afresh that we might build on what has been planted here and grow a renewed community, reformed and always open to being reformed according to the word of God and the movement of God’s spirit in our midst.
Before we close, what other word should we hear from the Joel or Luke passages, or from the Psalm this morning?
Let’s close this morning with prayer. I’ll close us with the well-known serenity prayer. In many 12-step circles, it is prayed as, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Lovely words, to be sure. But the prayer’s original words, as written by Reinhold Neibuhr, stress not that we change what we can, but that we change what should be changed – in other words, that we act on our anger, that we engage our passion, that we work to change the things that should be changed. Let us pray, God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Amen.
Joel 2:23-29; Luke 19:41-48
I was sitting at the kitchen table working on a sermon this week – perfectly appropriate on this Reformation Sunday, given that among Martin Luther’s best-known works were the teachings gathered under the title, Table Talk, in which Luther offered these words that shall guide our morning: “I would not have preachers torment their hearers, and detain them with long and tedious preaching, for the delight of hearing vanishes therewith, and the preachers hurt themselves.”
In any case, as I was sitting at my table, the door bell rang and my writing was interrupted by two extraordinarily clean-scrubbed young Mormon boys who wanted to tell me about the truth of Joseph Smith, God’s prophet and apostle.
All of which got me to wondering: how do we know who speaks for God? That is certainly among the questions I’d like answers to, and, thus, it is one of the problems I wrestle with from time to time – when I’m not shooing Mormons off the porch.
There are slips of paper tucked into your bulletins this morning. On one side it reads, “passions,” on the other it reads “problems.”
I want to take a couple of minutes together this morning to name some of our passions and problems. Let’s begin by jotting down, on the side that says “problems,” three questions you’d like to ask God.
I’ve named one of mine – how do we know who speaks for God?, and here’s another example: I have a friend who says the one question she’d like to ask God is “why do we teeth?” That, of course, is a question that only the mother of a teething toddler would ask, but it points to the problem of human suffering, and underscores the tendency we have to ask questions first out of our own experience. So, take about two minutes and write down three questions that you’d like to pose to God.
We’ll come back to these in a couple of minutes, but first I want to try to give this conversation a bit of a frame and see how our texts for this morning might inform it. When we say we’d like to pose some questions to God, the kind of questions we pose say something about what we assume about the nature of God.
Who is this God to whom we turn with the questions of our hearts?
Joel tells us that God is the one of infinite mercy, who hears the cries of the suffering and acts to relieve that suffering. Joel tells us that God is alive and active in history. Joel tells us that God’s spirit pours out on all flesh, and that our visions of a future otherwise come from that gift of spirit, that calling of God.
One imagines that Martin Luther, trusting just such a God, asked “O God, what would you have me to do about a screwed up church?”
So, what are some of the questions that we have for God?
Now, on the flip side of the paper, where it says, “passions,” I want you to write down three issues that you are passionate about. Another way of framing the question is, “what makes you angry?” Still another way of asking it: “what would you like to see changed?” Think locally or beyond the local – wherever your passion lies. Again, we’ll take about two minutes to write down three concerns about which you have some passion.
We’ll come back to these in a couple of minutes, but first I want to try to give this conversation a bit of a frame, as well.
When we ask, as Christians, what makes us angry, it’s instructive to ask, at the same time, what made Jesus angry? The stories this morning from Luke – the lament over Jerusalem and then the cleansing of the temple – tell us that Jesus had no patience for degraded and corrupt religious practices. The gospel accounts suggest that the money changing that so angered Jesus was just one more social structure that took particular advantage of the poor and those least able to defend themselves.
It’s appropriate to recall his anger on the Sunday when we celebrate the Reformation – a movement begun with Martin Luther’s disgust with degraded and corrupt religious practices. The money changing in the temple was probably on Luther’s mind as he considered the selling of indulgences in the medieval church. In both cases, the religious practices were part of a larger social-economic system that kept the powerful in their places of privilege, and kept the poor in their place.
What made Jesus mad? Any blessing of an unjust status quo, any practice that marginalized the poor, any barrier to God’s love, any barrier to this table. What was Jesus passionate about? The poor who were marginalized, the outcasts who faced barriers to the welcome table, the small community he gathered together to resist the social and religious powers and principalities that profited from unjust systems and structures be they temple or empire.
Jesus’ anger, his passion, provides powerful guidance and a healthy measure of agitation as we consider our own anger and passion.
So, what are some of the things that tick you off?
It is important and instructive to name the things that anger us, but if we merely wallow in the anger, it festers. On the psychological level, unexpressed anger is one definition of depression. On an institutional level, anger that cannot be channeled into constructive action becomes the source for deep discontent.
Five centuries ago, Luther tapped a broad and deep anger at the degradation of the church and channeled it into a movement that we know as the Reformation.
We are the children of that movement – a people called to be reformed and always open to being reformed according to the movement of the spirit of God.
It’s that spirit – of hope, of love, of reconciliation – that spirit makes possible our own move from anger into transformation.
So, in the next few weeks and months, as we think together about our own practices, our own way of being the church here at Clarendon, let’s gather together our questions, let’s name our passions, and let’s be open to the spirit moving amidst us anew and afresh that we might build on what has been planted here and grow a renewed community, reformed and always open to being reformed according to the word of God and the movement of God’s spirit in our midst.
Before we close, what other word should we hear from the Joel or Luke passages, or from the Psalm this morning?
Let’s close this morning with prayer. I’ll close us with the well-known serenity prayer. In many 12-step circles, it is prayed as, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Lovely words, to be sure. But the prayer’s original words, as written by Reinhold Neibuhr, stress not that we change what we can, but that we change what should be changed – in other words, that we act on our anger, that we engage our passion, that we work to change the things that should be changed. Let us pray, God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
11:29 AM
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