Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Names Matters

1 Timothy 2:8-15
September 26, 2010
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me.”
What a crock that is.
Jap. Raghead. Kyke. Nigger. Bitch. Dyke. Faggot. Chink.
Tell me again that names can never hurt. Tell me again that names don’t matter.
These slurs and derogatory names slip into our common language and eventually we don’t even realize it.
“Paddy wagon.” It’s the name of the police van that picks up the drunk Irishmen. I’m Scotch-Irish to the core, and I did not know my heritage was being slurred until I found myself in the back of a police wagon a couple of years ago.
We really do violate the image of God in others and in ourselves and sometimes we do it so casually that we are not even aware that we are doing it.
But names matter, and the matter of names and naming is profoundly important for an authentically progressive Christian faith. It is not a matter of political correctness; it is a matter of hospitality and it is a matter of justice.
We talk a whole lot here about hospitality, about the welcome of strangers, about honoring the outcast and the marginalized. Hospitality is one of our core values, and it is one of our central practices of Christian spirituality, and it is foundational for justice. Hospitality is less Martha Stewart and more Margaret Sanger; hospitality is first about making the table open to all and then about making it beautiful. Hospitality is about justice.
So how do we square that with the passage I just read? How can we be a place of authentic welcome when we are gathered around a text that commends such practiced and systemic exclusion?
Before I jump into the swamp of exegesis, I want to open it up for just a minute or two with this question: what do you recall about the very first time you saw or heard a woman leading worship?

So, again, how do we square these experiences with the passage I just read?
Well, we could just stick with the lectionary cycle of readings that conveniently skips over these words from 1 Timothy and the parallel passages elsewhere in the letters of Paul. That would be easy and certainly more comfortable.
But if we pick and choose what we like and don’t like about scripture then we really are no different from those who proof-text to support exclusions of gays and lesbians and, still in some churches, women from positions of leadership and authority. If we do that, we really are no different from those who proof-texted support for segregation and slavery before that. If we do that, we really are just another voluntary association of like-minded individuals, and that is not the church of Jesus Christ.
So we have to take the time and the care and the study to wrestle with these texts, and, through them, to wrestle with our own limited vision, our own conflicted and contested histories, our own idols, our own prejudices. In other words, when we wrestle honestly with these difficult texts, we wrestle also with ourselves.
That is why names matter. That is why, moreover, our names and images for God matter so much, and that is why such names and images remain such hotly contested terrain.
You think this stuff is settled just because Clarendon has a long history of women leaders? You think this stuff is settled just because Clarendon has been ordaining gay and lesbian leaders for 15 years? Our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers are even today holding a conference on ordaining women.
About the time Clarendon was ordaining the first out partnered gay elder in the Commonwealth of Virginia – take another bow Ron Bookbinder! – about that time, Cheryl and I were sitting in a worship service at our church in Lexington, Ky. It was the first Sunday of the new interim senior pastor, who was following a pastor whose voice was prophetic enough to drag me back to seminary. The interim began preaching, and before three minutes had passed Cheryl was poking me every time the man used a masculine pronoun in reference to God. You know how at baseball games fans will post banners with a “K” every time their team’s pitcher strikes out a batter? It was like that, minus the banners. Every image of God as male and people in the congregation were mentally posting banners.
Theological convictions aside, it was a profoundly inhospitable act and one that is so easy to avoid as to be laughable. I dare say that you rarely notice the way the Rev. Peg True or the Rev. John Green or I refer to God in worship here. I’ve been preaching here most every Sunday for more than seven years. I have never referred to God with masculine pronouns, and only use the “father God” image in the Lord’s prayer and when we occasionally sing, “This Is My Father’s World,” which, I confess, I put in worship about once a year because it reminds me of standing next to my dad in church when I was a little boy. He loved that song.
Obviously, there is nothing wrong with imagining God as the loving father running to welcome the prodigal home, but that is far from the only experience of the divine that human beings have, even human beings who understand the fullness of God through the story of the human man, Jesus of Nazareth.
The gospel story we heard a few minutes ago, Luke’s account of Easter, tells us that the first to proclaim the gospel, the good news, were the women who went to the tomb. If they had not testified to their own experience of Christ as risen maybe the entire enterprise would have died on the vine … or, better, on the cross.
Indeed, the gospels include numerous stories of Jesus in the company of women who are clearly practicing ministry, and Paul names at least two women, Prisca and Aquila, as coworkers in the mission field. If they’d kept their mouths shut some early churches would never have gotten off the ground, and who knows if we’d be gathered here this morning.
So why the admonishment to women to keep silent that become so strident by the time of the Timothy correspondence, which comes decades after Paul though it is, in accordance with customs of the time, attributed to him?
In a word – and a decisive word – patriarchy.
The dominance of male power that held almost unquestioned sway in Western civilization well into the 20th century was the air that men and women in first century Palestine breathed. There was no other air. As the early church began to transition from a movement anticipating the imminent return of Jesus into an institution that would carry forth a tradition of worship and sacrament the church recapitulated institutional models of its culture. We must remember this as we read and interpret, not only because it helps us understand the context of scripture, but it helps us understand our own context in which we, too, recapitulate inherited institutional models.
“How,” you may ask, “have we, a progressive community certainly not bound by such sexist things, recapitulated institutional models of our culture?”
Look around this very room. You think the first church, the church of Prisca and Aquila, sat in rows of pews facing a preacher at a lectern? That is, in fact, pretty much a mid 20th century institutional frame – and one that clearly valued the central importance of a singular, male, voice, who stood on high to pronounce an authoritative word.
Even though we still gather like that mid 20th century church, we are not it. Thanks be to God, the father and mother of us all, the divine breath, the Creator in whose images we are created male and female, filled with that breath of God.
Why bother with this in 2010 – more than 50 years since the Presbyterian church first ordained women as ministers of the word?
In part to remember and honor the stories of those first women ministers, women like Peggy Howland who was one of the first and who still faithfully agitates the church through the Presbyterian Peacemaking Fellowship, on whose board she still serves; and women like Jeanne McKenzie, who was the first woman pastor in National Capital Presbytery and who still faithfully agitates the church through the board of More Light Presbyterians – which she helped found years ago; and women like Madeline Jervis and Peg True, who stood tall on the shoulders of their sisters.
This is living history, and it is not yet history secured because the same patriarchal power structure that scripture simply assumed – but did not bless – remains in place in far too much of the church and broader culture today.
Backsliding is not just a Baptist word, although the Southern Baptist Convention, with its contemporary advice that women be “gracefully submissive” to their husbands coming years after some of the same Baptists had ordained women pastors, has certainly raised backsliding to an art. It is, in fact, possible to go backwards. Hard-won gains can be lost in forgetting.
That’s why names, especially names for God, matter so much.
If the ultimate figure of authority is always and only imagined as male, then male authority is understood as normative. I don’t want to live in such a world, and I surely don’t want my sons and daughter to.
Almost 30 years ago, theologian Sallie McFague wrote:
The power of the patriarchal model is both its inclusiveness and its exclusiveness. It expands to include all of heaven and earth, and in so doing orders all of reality in a hierarchy in which women are always subordinate and invariably identified with the inferior or bodily dimensions of life. … But the model excludes women as well by not naming them, by refusing to include their functions and occupations as metaphors for God that will return to them as models for their own self-identity.
More succinctly, and a few years earlier, Mary Daly simply said, “If God is male then male is God.”
And then there is no place in the world for women doctors, lawyers, scientists, mathematicians, pastors, or, to follow the logic to its natural conclusion, no place for women beyond the carefully circumscribed roles of wife and mother.
That is the logical of patriarchy. It does not take much imagination to recognize the implications for every other marginalized population. If male is God then what names remain to be assigned to all those others?
Which brings us back to where we began with a list of names used to exclude and oppress.
But, if God birthed creation and nurtured it, if God includes the feminine divine, if God is the breath of Spirit, if God is wisdom incarnate, if that which is of God is reflected in human beings of every race and nation and gender and sexuality and age and ability, if all of that, then we need so many new names to use for God and we need to bury forever so many of the names we have used for each other.
Most all of this I learned from my mother, an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Amen.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Questions All Around

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13
September 19, 2010
Let’s begin this morning with questions that we bring to these texts; we’ll end with the questions the texts press upon us. So, let’s open it up: what questions do we have? What questions do you have concerning these readings? Let’s see what these ancient words stir up for us this morning.

Here are a couple of my own questions: do I have to pray for all who are in high positions? Does that include the likes of Kim Jung Il, President Ahmadinejad, Ken Cucinelli? And, if so, how should I pray for them? Dear Lord, “please let these men enjoy a return to private life?”
Or how about this question: what is up with the dishonest manager in Jesus’ parable? “Step right up and I’ll cut your debts in half!” And why can’t I find such a manager to be in charge of, say, my mortgage or my Visa bill? Clearly, this guy does not work on Wall Street.
Lacking the good fortune to find such a manager of my debt, I do want to ask of Jeremiah, “is there, in fact, a balm in Gilead, or is it really just a bunch of tree sap?”
These are, indeed, three strange texts, and our questions have only skimmed the surface of their strangeness.
Take the Luke passage: commentators have spilled barrels of ink over the years puzzling out the story of the dishonest manager and Jesus’ praise for his scheming. For good middle class Protestant Americans who bring their children to church to be steeped in the old-fashioned verities and values of honest business dealings this parable is a serious dash of cold water. Jesus just doesn’t care about that.
Or take the section from First Timothy: almost as much wrestling has taken place over, especially, the call to pray for those in power. Does it mean that we must support whoever is in power? Must we pray for the success of their program even if we think it’s nuts? Not only that, but the strain of universalism hinted at in the text has caused a lot of theological tempests as well. So, does God desire the salvation of all of human kind? If so, does God get what God wants over the long arc of history, or not? That question may not trouble nice middle class generally liberal-minded folks, but it sure does cause a stew among serious Reformed theologians who err always on the side of the sovereignty of God. Indeed, it makes one want to ask, along with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “who is this God fellow anyway?”
Clearly, from our own questions and all of the voluminous commentary on these brief passages, the only thing that is clear is that, in fact, not much is clear at all in these texts. Nevertheless, as I wrestled with them last week it seemed to me that the word of the Lord for us this week was not a declarative word but rather an interrogative one. In other words, just as we, and thousands of others, have asked countless questions of these texts, the texts themselves ask us more questions than we ask them.
For example, if God, in Jeremiah, is weeping over injustice in the land how can we not also weep? When in the richest land in the history of the world more people are living in poverty than at any time in more than 50 years, why do we not weep? When one in five children in the country lives in poverty, how can we keep from weeping?
I don’t mean to be a downer this morning, and I promise it was not my idea to create these conditions or announce them, but, really, which one in five of the kids of this congregation would we choose?
The text itself demands our response, if for no other reason than Jesus’ stark clarity that, when it comes to matters of money, we can, we must, in fact we do choose this and every day whom we will serve: God or money. So which one shall it be? The text itself asks this question. This question is, indeed, the word of the Lord.
The strange parable of the dishonest manager does not offer an easy way out of this demand, but it does point toward a horizon of hope. It seems clear to me that Jesus really does not care about the bottom line in any traditional sense, but he does care about justice. And in this story – as throughout scripture – the Biblical meaning of justice amounts to this: sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it.
By any conventional measure, the middle management guy in this story is not giving what he owes to his boss – that is, honest business dealings. Instead, he practices what can best be described here as jubilee debt relief, because economic Sabbath, liberation from crushing debt is what belongs to human beings.
The specific debts named in this story are all overwhelming. These folks found themselves in mortgages that were upside down and way under water. Indeed, for the poor people who were Jesus’ first audience, the crushing system of debt that kept them virtually enslaved to the powers that be was the most soul-killing aspect of life.
“Forgive us our debts,” was not an accidental line in the prayer Jesus taught.
The hope here, the good news in this story, lies in what happens next, the untold part of the story. Forgiveness of debt evened the playing field so that balanced relationships could be restored or reconstructed. In other words, establishing economic justice created space for establishing authentic community.
So the inquiry of the text to us – whom do you serve, God or money – is, in fact, an invitation to live lives of joyous and generous service to God such that we, too, might create and construct bonds of authentic community right here and right now.
The invitation to live such lives could not come on a more appropriate Sunday than the one before the International Day of Prayers for Peace. For authentic community is the only foundation upon which to build just and lasting peace.
May this good news find life in our midst. Amen.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The Table of Grace

The Table of Grace
1 Timothy 1:12-16; Luke 15:1-10
Sept. 12, 2010
There is a fire burning in the center of the table of grace.
Whether it is a candle lighting up the darkness or a bonfire threatening a consuming conflagration is entirely up to those of us who gather at the table.
It is easy, too easy, in fact, to point here toward the September 11 anniversary-marking book burning threatened by certain Christians in Florida, but they are not the only ones playing with fire these days.
Indeed, as the ancient Hebrew word, ruah, that we receive as “spirit,” reminds us, spirit is flame, spirit enflames, and spiritual matters can quickly become too hot to handle. The Pentecost story of the disciples receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit as tongues of flame underscores the connection. Spiritual matters can be dangerous. The fire that lights and warms can quickly become the fire that burns and destroys.
We Christians are certainly not the only ones who have spiritual lives, and thus we are not the only ones who dance delicately with this fire, but we American Christians do have a particular responsibility as those who are culturally dominate in the most powerful nation on earth.
We feel the weight of this responsibility all the more so when others, acting in the name of spirit, engulf a building in our own city in flames, as religiously motivated fanatics did nine years ago yesterday. In the face of such horror the temptation to fight fire with fire was more than we could, collectively, overcome, and the last long years of war and death and destruction stand as still flaming reminders of that fact.
Continued sporadic threats and deadly actions by extremists who claim some affinity for Mohamed cloud our horizons like the smoke from the forest fires in Colorado last week.
Do we react to this, as the infamous General William Boykin did a few years back, and declare that our God is bigger than their God, and thus draw our sacred texts out as religious flamethrowers? Do we get crazy like “Pastor” Jones in Florida and use fire more literally? Do we fight fire with fire?
We could easily respond like Saul of Tarsus and persecute those who approach the Sacred differently than we do. After all, the apostle whose writings gave voice to the first theological understanding of Jesus started his career persecuting Jesus’ first followers all because they felt the fire of the spirit in Jesus’ life and not even his death on a cross could extinguish the flame.
In his first letter to the young church at Corinth, the once proud persecutor Paul says that we followers of Jesus are “stewards of the mysteries of God.” Perhaps he might have called us “keepers of the flame.”
Unfortunately, the 2,000 year old story of we Christian flame keepers is loaded with instances of flame throwing and burnings at stakes, and the anti-Moslem rhetoric flowing from so many so-called Christians these days is but the latest flashfire.
So, what should we do? What can we do to use the fire of the holy for purposes that are holy?
The story of Paul is instructive here, and the words from First Timothy in particular: “I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly ... a persecutor, and a man of violence. … But … I received mercy.”
“I received mercy,” Paul says, and that is what made him an example. In other words, mercy made him worth looking at and a blinding flash of grace allowed him to see himself. Grace also allowed others to see God at work in him. Grace lit the darkness for him and for others.
The great turning of Paul’s life is the great turning of the world writ small, and it does not come as a result of Paul’s burning passion but simply as a gift of forgiveness and an invitation to sit at the table of grace and be warmed by the fire that burns there for all who gather in its light.
It is, however, all too easy to imagine that once we have experienced the light of mercy, grace and forgiveness that we possess the light and control it. Once we have experienced our own liberation, it is easy to imagine that we hold the keys for everyone else. Altogether too often, though, we forget the keys and, instead, use the red-hot flame of the spirit to forge chains for all those who do not see things the same way we do.
September 11 marks the anniversary of what happens when that logic extends to its own violent conclusion – a world chained to spiritual violence becomes a world engulfed in flame.
Such spiritual violence – using of sacred texts as weapons, taking their words and twisting them into instruments of death and destruction – was precisely what Jesus was warning against with the scribes and Pharisees who did not like the company he kept. So he told them a story:
“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’”
The crazy thing about this story lies in its extravagance. Do the math. Would you risk losing 99 percent of your business to rescue one failed percent, or would you just write off the loss? And, really, would you throw a party to celebrate the one percent if it succeeded? Probably not, but in the great economy, the economy of the kingdom of God, the one counts just as much as the many, because it is never a zero sum game.
So, for example, the one Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, is worth God’s time, God’s grace, God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, and God’s love, even though he was surely lost, burning with the flames of his own spiritual violence.
I say, “if it’s good enough for Paul, it’s good enough for us! If Paul – who persecuted the disciples to death, literally – if Paul is worth God’s time and attention and love, then so are you. So am I. So is that annoying coworker and that whiny child. So is the irritating neighbor and the guy who’s been running that jackhammer all week. So is the aged and increasingly clueless grandpa, and so is the newborn baby girl. So is the homeless guy who stands at the intersection over in Balston. So is the drag queen getting her drag on. So is the substitute teacher, the math geek, the guidance counselor, the potheads, the poets and the freaks. So is the baseball player making millions and so is the peanut guy making peanuts. So is the Catholic and so is the Hindu, so is the atheist and so is the Jew. So is the imam building the community center in New York, and so is Glen Beck who demonizes him. So is Jon Stewart who makes me laugh at the pitiable Pastor Jones, and so is Pastor Jones. So is Nancy Pelosi and so is Sarah Pallin. So is the self-righteous, theologically challenged General Boykin, and so is the Somali warlord with whom he squared off. So are the families of all those who died on September 11, and so are the families of those who did the killing on that day. So is President Obama and President Bush before him and, yes, so is Osama bin Laden whom they both want to kill.
Saying God loves us all does not mean that everything that each one does is OK; it does not mean that we suspend judgment. It does not mean that there is not darkness in the world. It does not mean that God was just fine with Saul persecuting the early church. That God loves Pastor Jones does not make Pastor Jones right; it doesn’t even mean that the man is not, well, at least a little bit nuts. It does, however, mean that we are called to love him, too, and to pray for him, and it means to avoid inflammatory name-calling even as we condemn his actions – otherwise we are playing loose with the same fire that he’s threatening to unleash. If we fall into the same darkness then we are all stumbling blind.
That God loves all of us, even the worst of us, also means that we who know that we are beloved are called to show forth that love – and that baseline theological conviction that we share here that God is love. It means that we are called to show forth that love in specific, practical, hands-on and public ways, so that others will see the light of God’s love shining forth through us and, in that light, know that they, too, are loved.
This is why we bag groceries at AFAC. This is why we feed the hungry with A-SPAN. This is why we rebuild houses together. This is why we work together to end wars. This is why we witness in the public square for marriage equality. This is why we are who we are.
A friend and colleague posted this comment on Facebook last week inviting the media to stop paying attention to people such as Pastor Jones. She wrote,
Your attention implies to the rest of the world that he represents a larger group. Instead, find the pastors who are busy every day feeding the poor, caring for the community, participating in interfaith dialogue, working for peace and nurturing a gospel of love
I would add only this: check out their congregations as well – millions of people in thousands of communities who are putting their time and their talents and treasures to work to feed the hungry, to do justice, to make peace. Millions of people gathering at the table of grace, trying only to reflect to the world a bit of the light that they find there.
It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, and we who know the love of God, are called to share the light of that love, the fire of the spirit, with the world in love. May we do so this year at Clarendon. Amen.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

The Potter’s House

Jeremiah 18:1-11
Sept. 5, 2010
It’s tempting, and maybe even appropriate, to read this passage from Jeremiah and note the obvious metaphor of God as potter, of humankind as clay in the potter’s hands, and then to point out the cry against injustice and oppression that is at the heart of Jeremiah’s prophetic vision.
It is tempting, and not inappropriate, to seek some contemporary meaning in the words here attributed to the Creator – “At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it.”
It is tempting, and certainly within our understanding of the preacher’s job, to point out the ways our nation might be implicated in Jeremiah’s jeremiad.
And it is tempting, and well within the bounds of a Reformed theological understanding of the theological task of preaching, to speculate on what God is here saying about God’s own nature, what with the evident delight in God’s freedom to change God’s own mind on full display here.
Any one of those approaches to this text would be appropriate, perhaps enlightening, and surely worthy of a Sunday sermon, and thus each is tempting. But while I pondered each perspective while wrestling with this text, one image kept coming back to me and leading me in an entirely other direction. So, I’m first acknowledging in passing the many possible readings of this text that I’m setting aside in favor of one image: the actual potter, the artisan who lives and works at the potter’s house.
Have you ever been in a potter’s workshop? What words come to mind as descriptions of such a place?
I thought of dusty and musty, in a rich kind of way.
All of these possible descriptions – a place with jars of clay, a potter’s wheel, an oven for firing pots, tools for shaping and so forth – have in common the clear understanding that we are talking about a place of work.
When you consider your own place of work what words come to mind as descriptors?
I could reduce the description of my work place to Karl Barth’s famous dictum that one should preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Barth overlooked one thing: good coffee!
Seriously, any place with books and tools for research, reflection and writing is a good beginning for me and if there’s a pot of good coffee, well all the better. But that is only a beginning, because my workplace must also be filled, some of the time, with each of you else none of it is worth doing.
We all have places of work, and, ultimately, that work touches the lives of other people or it’s not worth our time.
What strikes me about the potter’s house, however, is the apparent ready ease with which Jeremiah is able to sense the presence of God. God is in the potter’s house. The potter’s work lends itself readily to Jeremiah’s understanding of God, and that understanding also shapes the way the potter’s work is understood. God is in the potter’s house, and in the potter’s work.
On this Sunday of the Labor Day weekend, a weekend when we celebrate work by taking a day off from it, it’s good and right and appropriate to ask ourselves where we see God in our own work. Do we feel called by God into the particular work we do? Do we sense God’s presence in the work itself? Does our work further God’s purposes in the world?
The singer Charlie King has a wonderful line in one of his old songs: our life is more than our work and our work is more than our jobs.
How would you answer these questions with respect to your job? With respect to your work? With respect to your life?