Passion Community

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 22:14 - 23:56
Every week is holy week.
Nothing could be more trite than that observation. After all, the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein, so all time and space, all of creation is hallowed. Every week is holy week.
Every week has its moments of celebration – hosannas shouted to the highest heaven. Every week has its passion – people suffer and die each and every day whether or not we are aware.
And every week is witness to resurrection – to new life arising in often unexpected places in startling moments.
Every week is holy week.
But we who are supposed to be witnesses to the living Christ in our midst: how are we to live such that our lives reflect the holiness of Christ? Every day of every week?
Each year the season of Lent provides an opportunity for each of us to answer that question for ourselves once again. To be sure, we cannot answer it completely, but many of us commit to discovering one small part of the answer during these 40 days.
So, how has Lent been for you? Have you learned anything about yourself, about the faith you proclaim, about the Jesus whom we try to follow?
Reading the texts from this morning as I reflected on the journey of Lent I was reminded that the faith we proclaim is, first of all, brutally honest about the human condition. We know that there is no easy walk to the promised land – however we construe it and no matter when we undertake the journey.
As Walter Brueggemann observed, Christian life moves according to “the pattern and sequence of Jesus’ own life, an embrace of suffering that comes with obedience, which comes inevitably when our lives are at odds with dominant social values.”
We are a suffering community. We are a passion community.
This is not suffering for the sake of suffering, or martyrdom sought for the sake of pain. It is simply the suffering that comes when the shape of the community, its warp and woof, rubs so much against the grain of the broader culture in which it exists.
Consider, for example, our community. Lord knows we’re far from perfect as individuals or as a collective, but we do try to live out the love and justice of the gospel and we understand that to mean that everyone is welcome here. And, again, Lord knows that is simply not the case in so much of the rest of the world – whether we are talking about a global church that has more sex hang-ups than a Woody Allen flick or those large parts of the world in which it still seems ago to leaders to make a capital crime – literally – out of certain people’s sex lives. When we rub against that grain sometimes we get splinters.
But it’s not the splinters that matter. It’s how we respond to one another in the midst of the suffering that marks the measure of a true passion community. Do we bear one another’s burdens? Do we bind one another up? Do we love one another always?
When I tell people about my church – about you – I answer those questions in the affirmative. Yes, we do.
Oh, to be sure, we don’t do any of that perfectly, and we always have work to do. But, yes, we do, bear one another’s burdens, bind one another up, and love one another; and insofar as we do, we are a community of passion.
But why should this way of living cause offense to anyone anywhere?
You’d think it would be celebrated. You’d think its leaders would be greeted everywhere by shouts of “hosanna!” You’d think people would throw us a parade!
But Palm Sunday slips so quickly into the drama of passion.
If we look carefully and honestly at the story itself it’s actually not that hard to see how and why it happened then, and, perhaps, how and why it happens today.
To begin with, Jesus set out to rub against the grain on that first Palm Sunday. Riding into town on a donkey was a bit of Biblically based political street theater designed to inspire his supporters and deride his detractors. Kings and conquering heroes rode into town to great fanfare, often borne on the shoulders of their soldiers, to be met and celebrated by the well-connected and the powerful. They did not ride in on humble donkeys, surrounded by a rabble of the poor.
What Mary predicted before Jesus’ birth, “he will bring down the rulers from their thrones and exalt the humble,” is fulfilled in this joyous, ridiculous parade.
Don’t lose sight of the ridiculousness of the scene. Jesus almost always gets portrayed as serious, even somber. I included the “clown Jesus” from Godspell in the bulletin this morning as a reminder that Jesus understood the power of the jester as well. The entire Palm Sunday story is great jest – and the butt of the joke is the empire and those who collude with it. That is to say, the butt of the joke and the targets of Jesus’ anger and his call to transformation are precisely the ones who see power in the most traditional and violent terms, and who side always with the unjust status quo that gives them their status.
Or, as John Crossan says, “It was a protest from the legal and prophetic heart of Judaism against Jewish religious cooperation with Roman imperial control.”
Jesus’ target is twofold: Roman imperial violence, which was the context of everyday life for the Jews of Jesus’ time, and the cooperation with Rome by Jewish religious leaders.
What is the message in this for us? First, let’s note with clarity what the message is not. This is not about Judaism, and the short distance from palms to passion is not to be covered by way of the ancient hatreds of anti-Semitism. Indeed, such ancient hatred, and the violence that institutionalizes it are precisely what Jesus calls into question and condemns.
If nothing else comes from the low comedy of Palm Sunday and the high drama of Good Friday, it should be clear that Jesus here condemns violence. The pivot point of all of this comes over the shared meal of Thursday evening and the solitude of the garden afterward.
At table, where Jesus can so often be found, he articulates the Great Commandment: love one another as I have loved you. By this they shall know that you are my followers, that you love one another.
And then, in the garden, when Peter draws the sword to protect his master Jesus says simply, once and for all, “no more of this.”
The sword is the way of the empire. It is the way of all empires. It is the way of our empire.
The story of Palm and Passion Sunday demands a choice of the passion community. For what will we suffer? To whom do we owe our ultimate allegiance? Shall we follow the way of the sword … or the way of the cross? Choose this day whom you shall serve, as it says elsewhere in scripture.
As for me and my household, we shall serve the Lord of love, the prince of peace: Jesus, the Christ.
How are we, who would be followers of the crucified One, supposed to lead lives that reflect the holiness of Christ? By this they shall know us: that we love one another – no matter what the cost.
Amen.


A prayer on the 30th anniversary of Romero's martyrdom It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

Amen.

(Prayer written by Bishop Ken Untener,

Called to Hope

March 21, 2010
Psalm 27
There are some weeks that you’d just as soon forget. We’ve all had them. Oh, I don’t mean the weeks that are truly tragic – horrific accident, deadly storm, death in the family. We don’t want to forget those, in truth. We honor them with our memories.
No, I’m talking about weeks in which the day to day just doesn’t go the way it should. Say you have a case of the sniffles. Or maybe your laptop suffers some bizarre malady that resists all efforts to cure. Maybe you sprain an ankle. Or, for a really forgettable week, maybe you hit that trifecta and, as a result, spend the entire week about three steps behind.
It was that kind of week in my little corner of Lake Wobegone.
There’s nothing at all unusual about that. We all have such weeks, and worse.
What keeps you going? Especially if week after week is like that? Especially when those weeks are mere prelude to those weeks of real tragedy?
What keeps the dull pain from becoming despair? What keeps the cares and burdens from breeding cynicism?
What keeps hope alive?
We are called to hope, but that call does not come with any promise of ease. Indeed, the gospel makes it quite clear that rather than ease, following the call of Christ to live into hope entails picking up the cross and carrying it.
What is the ground of hope?
It’s certainly not something that we will up on our own. It’s not the laptop or even the upgrade. It’s not playing basketball – as much joy as that may bring. It’s not the new car, though we may enjoy it a lot. It’s not the trip to the beach, as much as standing at the ocean brings me awe and wonder at the grandeur of God’s good creation.
It’s not something that we can find or manufacture on our own, because on our own we are too fearful to hope.
Think for a moment about the things that you are afraid of. I don’t mean things that go bump in the night. I mean things that are out in the bright light of day, and things that haunt us in the wee hours of the night. Fear that work might not work out. Fear that we are living up to parental expectations. Fear that we’re not living up to our own expectations. Fear that we might fail. Fear that we are not loved.
Fear that others might find out that we are afraid.
So we cover over our fear with false bravado or with deep cynicism – both of which serve to cover our fearfulness from … well, from ourselves.
And into the midst of the fear comes the call to follow Jesus to Jerusalem – to pick up our cross and follow – to give away what we have worked so hard to accumulate, and follow.
How is that the supposed to help us in our fearfulness?
Jesus understood fear. Certainly he felt it along the way as he was challenged, threatened and then face the full weight of the empire that killed him.
And he also understood that the way out of our own fear is through the suffering of others and in the solidarity of the suffering community. Picking up your own cross means precisely that. It is not ever a call to suffering for suffering’s sake, but rather a call to join your life with the lives of others who are also broken just as we are.
That is a profoundly difficult challenge, especially in a culture that would have you believe that self-reliance is the highest value, and that suffering can be overcome through consumption – if you purchase the right products you will buy happiness. We don’t usually put it so baldly, but that is the message. After all, every commercial is a salvation story.
But the salvation story of Jesus is completely different. Salvation comes through the patience, through sacrifice of self, through solidarity with the suffering of others, through trust in the one who promises to be with us always, and it comes as we walk through the valley of our own fearfulness rather than around it knowing that we do not walk alone.
The happiest people I’ve ever known – and I don’t mean surface happiness but rather a deep sense of being blessed – the happiest people I’ve ever known are the ones I’ve encountered along the way who have given their lives in service and who live in authentic, simple solidarity with others. They are relentlessly hopeful, though never in a Pollyahha-ish way, because their hope does not rest in the promise of their own work. They understand that their life’s work will continue long after this life is over, and they are at rest with that trusting the future to hands other than their own.
People like Harry Knox, who was with us last Sunday, who’s given his life to working for GLBT justice. Or Rick Ufford-Chase, who has been with us several times, who has given his life to peacemaking. Or Noah Baker Merril, a young Quaker friend, who has given his life to working with Iraqi war refugees.
I think of them, and others like them, who have answered the call to follow Jesus. When I consider their lives, I understand that Jesus’ call to pick up the cross and follow him is a call to hope. So as we follow the story of Jesus through Holy Week and to the cross, remember that the cross of Christ is finally a sign of hope. Lift high the cross; life into hope.

Journey to Myself

Genesis 22:1-14
Well, if Lent is supposed to be about self-denial then I must be in the spirit of things, because I’ve denied myself a simple sermon text. The strange story of Abraham and Isaac has to be among the most difficult and challenging texts in scripture. And it is not the lectionary reading for this morning.
In fact, throughout Lent, I won’t be preaching from the lectionary. Instead, each Sunday we will hear one of our members discuss some aspect of mission, and I will follow with a reflection on some aspect of God’s calling. The two are intimately related.
If I had to sum up in a single phrase what the Bible is all about, I’d say it is the story of God calling humankind into deeper relationship with God and with one another, and God’s promise to be faithful to the relationship. It’s a long, complex, multi-layered and multi-voiced story of call and response, and the calling has a particular, identifiable content: love.
That calling is the foundation for all mission work that we engage.
And it all starts with the call of Abraham, without whom there is no story to tell. Perhaps more to the point of the reading this morning, without Isaac there is no story to tell, either.
God calls forth a people, and begins, for some reason, with a wandering Aramean. Remarkably enough, when God calls Abraham always responds the same way, “El Emunah: Hineini
God of faith, here I am, I am ready.”
My friend, Noah Budin, used that phrase to frame a song, and his “Edge of the Ocean” stands for me as one of the clearest responses to this inscrutable text.
God says, “Abraham, leave your home and go to a place that I will show you.” And Abraham says, “God of faith, here I am; I am ready.”
God says, “Abraham, you and your ancient wife, Sarah, are going to have child.” And Abraham says, “God of faith, here I am; I am ready.”
God says, “Take that child and sacrifice him.” And Abraham says, “God of faith, here I am; I am ready.”
The text presents us with three fundamental questions: What are we to make of this relationship between God and Abraham? What are we to make of this God who would make such outlandish promises and such outrageous demands? And what are we to make of this man that he should trust the promise and say, “yes” to the demand?
Beyond the text we should certainly also ask what has any of this to do with us?
To begin with we can confess our ignorance in the face of this story, and acknowledge that gallons of ink and thousands of pages have been devoted to it or inspired by it and even if we are well informed by all of that we remain ignorant nonetheless.
Some says this story represents the repudiation, in ancient Israel, of human sacrifice, perhaps in the same way that some argue that Jesus’ call to “love your enemies” – which comes in the form of, “you have heard it said ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say to you, ‘love your enemies’ – is a repudiation of the practice of capital punishment.
In such a reading, this difficult text becomes simply one more part of the explanatory mythology of ancient Israel that distinguishes it from its neighbors. And, as such, it really has nothing to say to us. It becomes merely a cultural artifact. We can read it that way, and there may be some truth to it, but it is not a truth worth meditating on unless you are considering reinstating human sacrifice.
So let’s take the text more seriously, own up to our ignorance in its face, and explore the questions the text insists upon.
Who is this God who calls? And, moreover, why would God call one of us in the first place?
Think about that. If God is, as some would say, “eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, invisible; one in substance and yet distinct in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” then why would such a God be in need of relationship with human beings?
Perhaps there is a clue in the heart of our Trinitarian theology. If God is named at all accurately in the traditional, orthodox affirmation of “Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” then whatever else we may make of that naming, one thing is clear: at the very heart of God is a relationship. The essence of God is relational. God desires relationship. Just as the Psalmist sings, “my heart longs for God,” and as Augustine said, “my heart is restless till it rests in thee,” God’s heart is also restless and longing for companionship.
Imagine that! God wants to be in relationship with you! And, in particular, wants to be in a relationship marked by trust, and God desires relationship with the authentic you.
All of which I take to define faith, and to describe faith as a journey to yourself, your authentic self created by God for God.
In that sense we Christians, like our Jewish sisters and brothers, are children of a wandering Aramaen.
Who is this wandering Aramaen, this Abraham?
While Jesus is, as the book of Hebrews says, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, Abraham is in this sense its father figure. Abraham shows what it means to live into a trusting relationship with the Holy One, into faithfulness, in other words.
As such, Abraham also takes the first journey of faith, and makes that for all time the best description of a life of faith. Along the way he finds himself, takes on a new name even, and discerns his calling to be the father of a great nation. His is a journey unto himself.
And along the way his faith is put to the test time and time again, never more so than when God demands Isaac.
The demand is at once a double inquiry to Abraham: who are you and to whom do you belong?
Put slightly differently, are you trusting and in whom do you place that trust?
The text speaks this same demand to us: who are we, and to whom do we belong?
Are we trusting, and in whom do we place our trust?
Walter Brueggemann puts it this way, “The life of Abraham” – and I would say our lives as well – “is set by this text in the midst of the contradiction between the testing of God and the providing of God; between the sovereign freedom which requires complete obedience and the gracious faithfulness which gives good gifts; between the command and the promise; and between the word of death which takes away and the word of life which gives.”
If we resist the temptation to domesticate the text it remains scandalous in its insistence that God remains beyond every human effort to grasp. In other words, if we let the text stand it witnesses to a God who will not be domesticated, who will not be put to use for our purposes but who demands instead that we bend our lives to God’s purposes even when they are inexplicable to us.
For it is only when Abraham follows God’s call completely that we understand what this testing is all about. It is not, after all is said and done, the faith of Abraham that is tested here. It is the faithfulness of God.
As Brueggemann concludes, “It is the same God who tempts and provides. The connection is that God is faithful. In the end, our narrative is perhaps not about Abraham being found faithful. It is about God being found faithful” (195).
Abraham responds to God by saying, “here I am.”
God, whose presence is revealed in the calling, in the vocation, responds to Abraham’s moment of extremity by saying the same thing, “here I am.”
And in this call and response, Abraham discovers who he is and to whom his life and that of his long history of progeny belong. You and I: we belong to God.
We discover this belonging again and again, on its most intimate terms, when we respond to God’s call to risk, trust God provision for the journey, and take a step out on the journey to ourselves.

Lord and Savior

Feb. 7, 2010
Isaiah 6:1-8; Luke 5:1-11
Where does God speak? Where does God speak to you? Through whom does God speak? What mediates the divine for you? How do you hear the divine voice? What is God calling you to do? And, then, how do you respond?
All of these questions are at stake in our readings for this morning. The prophet Isaiah hears God calling him to speak a prophetic word. He hears that call in the Temple. In other words, Isaiah hears God speak through worship. He goes to church and God speaks to him.
The first disciples hear God calling through Jesus, and they hear a call to fish for people. It’s early in the morning. They are on the water, at the end of a long night of work when God speaks to them.
And in both cases, Isaiah and, at least, Peter, do not feel worthy of the calling to which they are called.
“I am a man of unclean lips and I live with people who are every bit as unworthy,” says Isaiah.
“Go away from me, lord, for I am a sinful man,” says Peter.
“We’re not worthy. We’re not worthy. We’re not worthy,” they say. It’s as if God has called Wayne and Garth – that’s your pop-culture age test for the morning.
Scripturally speaking, there is nothing remotely unusual about any of this. The Bible is full of call stories, and full of characters who do not feel up to the task, who do not feel worthy or able to respond to what God calls them into.
Abraham – too old to father a great nation.
Joseph – too young to lead any nation.
Moses – a murderer with a stutter.
The prophets – a mixed bag to be sure.
The disciples – an even more mixed bag.
Perhaps the take away is that God has strange taste and low standards! Or, like Garth Brooks, friends in low places – to toss out another pop culture age test for you.
Which brings it all back home for me, and, perhaps for you as well.
I have never felt “worthy” of the calling to which I am called, nor have I ever felt that I fully understand it. Sometimes I am far from certain that I wish to accept it, and occasionally I prefer to pretend that I am not what I, in fact, am.
I don’t believe that is at all unusual.
I was chatting with someone just the other day who asked me whether I thought it was more difficult to come out as gay or as Christian. I said that obviously I couldn’t really compare, but that I do understand how it sometimes seems incredibly difficult to “come out” as a Christian.
Please don’t take this as part of the “attack on Christmas” paranoia of certain fundamentalists who believe that godless socialists – or, worse, homosexuals – are lurking in every shadow.
It’s not that at all. But because of the religious loud in America it has become decidedly uncomfortable in many social circles to calls one’s self a follower of Jesus.
Oddly enough, that makes joining the church of Jesus Christ a courageous act.
Oh, to be sure, it’s not a courageous act on the same scale that it was in the church’s earliest days when Christians were persecuted and often martyred for their faith.
But it is far more courageous today than at the height of Christian establishment and the WASPy power structure of mid 20th century America. It does take an honesty of purpose and courage of one’s convictions to join your voice to the ancient profession of faith that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior.
Why should this be so? And, more to the point, what is it about that profession that can still speak to us today?
Part of the challenge is that for far too long a smug self-righteousness has hung about the church, and we have pretended that somehow, within the club of the saved, we no longer have the all too human problems that plague the rest of the world. The attitude is such that, in some churches, a man of unclean lips would find no home nor would one who says, “go away lord for I am a sinful man.”
Would we save a seat for Moses, knowing that he killed a man? For Matthew, knowing that he collaborated with the other side?
Well, more to the point, would we save a seat for ourselves? Knowing what we know about who we really are? And, moreover, can we be honest enough with ourselves and with one another to own up to who we really are and find the strength to forgive – ourselves and one another?
In our Reformed tradition of worship, we begin our gatherings in honesty of confession not to say, as the youth group at our Cleveland church put it, “we suck,” but rather to say that God is great – and able to make of us more than we are on our own.
That moment of confession is the initial opening to understand Christ as savior, because we trust that we can become more than who we are as we follow the way of Jesus. That is a profoundly countercultural proposition, and profoundly so whether or not you are speaking of conservative parts of the culture or progressive ones. To confess that we, on our own accord, as ruggedly individual, independent, self-motivated, all American boys and girls cannot make it, is, well, down right un-American.
To set aside the American dream of self reliance and confess our deep need for relationship with God and with the community of faith runs counter to both conservative and liberal notions of individualism, and on that ground alone – before any of the issues of the so-called culture wars arise – on that fundamental level, coming out as Christian is often uncomfortable and socially challenging.
You want to kill the buzz of a party these days start a conversation with the phrase, “well, at church last Sunday …”
Professing faith in Christ is not easy.
We don’t make it any easier in the church by clinging to affirmations of faith developed almost 2,000 years ago in the midst of the Roman Empire, and translated gradually toward our own tongue through the context of feudalism. That is to say, the phrase “lord and savior” carries for us none of the meanings that were resonant for the first Christians or for the first millennia of Christianity.
We just don’t have lords anymore, and we are so far removed from the resistance to empire pronounced in the phrase “Christ is lord” that we have completely forgotten how countercultural the confession was from its first utterance.
To begin with the phrase Christos Kurios, which comes down to us as Christ is lord, was a direct responses to the pledge of loyalty required of Roman citizens as Caesar Kurios, or Caesar is lord. The word itself, kurios, is a Greek term that originally meant strong or authoritative and became a standard reference originally to landowners and gradually to anyone who exercised control or authority over land, animals or other people. In parallel the word also became a common reference to God or gods, and about the time of Jesus began to be inscribed, along with the emperor’s face, on Roman coins as part of the phrase Caesar Kurios. Can you hear the tension inherent in the counterclaim Christos Kurios?
But, of course, we’ve lost all that, and perhaps all the more so through translation into the English lord which had resonance in a feudal society of lords and serfs but is a linguistic relic in the age of capitalism and democracy.
So how can we make the claim Christ is lord and savior with any resonance and relevance to our own ears?
Remarkably enough, these English words have Latin or old English roots that have, for me, given our basic ancient affirmation of faith new power. Salvation – to which savior is connected both linguistically and in terms of meaning – has roots in the word salus, in which you might hear salud, which you might say when someone sneezes. It refers to health and healing, and to wholeness. It is not unlike the Hebrew word shalom. In that sense, when I reaffirm my faith in Christ as savior I am saying that in trying to follow the way of Jesus I find wholeness and healing for my life and the life of the world. That is a faith I am proud to proclaim.
Likewise, the word lord has roots in old English that, through a different shoot, as it were, come to us also as loaf, as in “a loaf of bread.” The word was used in feudal society to refer to the lord of the manor as the “keeper of the loaf.” In other words, the lord was the one who guaranteed that you would eat.
As a community that has been, from its earliest days, obsessed with the breaking of bread, we affirm in confessing Christ as lord that we are fed in and through our faith. When I reaffirm my faith in Christ as lord I am reminding myself that in the breaking of bread I am made known to God and to myself, and that God is made known to me. That, too, is a faith I am proud to proclaim.
It is a faith that welcomes everyone, and that can find a place for Peter, for Matthew, for you and for me. So as we welcome new members to this community of faith, let us reaffirm together our faith in Christ as lord and savior, and as we gather at table as one community may we be reminded that in Christ we are made whole, and at his table we are fed. Amen.