Gratitude and Terror

1 Corinthians 12:14-31

November 18, 2012

Last week we talked about the body of Christ, that is to say, the church, and, specifically, what the body is for, what its purpose is in the world, and what it means to be a member of the body. We lifted up the “marks of membership” that are named in the Book of Order, the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and talked about what resonated in that list, what questions the list raised for us, what surprises it held.

For your reference, the list is printed again this week in the bulletin. As we noted in conversation last Sunday, this list does not name what is required of every person at every moment of every day. We are, together, the body of Christ, and, as Paul noted in his letter to the church at Corinth, we have different gifts and different callings at different moments in our lives. As we also noted, these marks of membership do not name merely the things that we do together as the church, but also how we live out our lives every day in the wider world.

This morning, I want to talk together about what gets in the way, and about how we can organize our lives and the practices that mark the measure of our lives such that we overcome what gets in the way of living out faithfully our callings to be members of the body.

We’ve been doing this together long enough that y’all can no doubt anticipate what I’m going to say here: what most often for most of us stands in the way of faithful living is simply fear.

The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is not disbelief, it is not wrong belief. The opposite of faith is fear.

You can see this quite clearly when you look at the “marks of membership.”

Take the very first one on the list: What stands in the way of proclaiming the good news in word and in deed?

I cannot tell you how many times I have conveniently avoided “outing” myself as a pastor in a variety of secular settings because I was, at rock bottom, afraid of the response I’d get and of the demands that response would place on me. Oh, I have all kinds of ways of deceiving myself about the motivations for not bringing up that central biographical fact of my life, but when I am honest it’s pretty simple: fear.

Sometimes I’m afraid of the potential for conflict and old argument, especially when I’m in progressive political circles, and I tell myself that I’m just being polite and not derailing the larger agenda. Sometimes I’m afraid that I don’t have enough to share, especially when I encounter someone on the street with a hand out, and I tell myself that I have more urgent priorities. Sometimes I’m afraid of taking on someone else’s burdens and baggage, especially when a stranger shares a problem in non-church social settings – and, yes, I do experience those every once in a while! – and I tell myself that I’m just too tired.

And all of my excuses have the singular benefit of being true: sometimes I am trying to be polite because I know what’s about to happen; sometimes I do have more urgent priorities; sometimes I am just tired. But, when I can be honest with myself, I know that I am also often simply too fearful to push beyond my own concerns and comfort zone to get to that place where I can proclaim good news in word and in deed. Sometimes I am simply too timid to share the simple conviction that God loves each of us – that’s the gospel, the good news. But I am too fearful to say that I have experienced that love in my own life most powerfully in following the way of Jesus in the world through the body of Christ that is the church.

All that bundle of fearfulness, and I haven’t even gotten past the first “mark of membership” in my own life! It is “all this simple … and all this hard!”

So, how about you? As you look again at the list of these marks of membership, where does fear get in the way for you?

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I suspect we could go mark by mark, as it were, through this whole list and find pretty quickly places that fear gets in the way of our faithful living. We’d probably also discover new fears along the way!

I got a new take on an old fear this fall when the book group read Tim Beal’s Rise and Fall of the Bible. The fourth “mark” on the list calls us to study scripture, and Tim’s book underscored an interesting contradiction that resides within many of us. The vast majority of Americans own at least one, and often several Bibles. It remains the best-selling book in the world. Yet the vast majority of Bible owners are not Bible readers. In his book, Tim lifted up a fear at the heart of that contradiction: we come to the Bible – and perhaps to many aspects of church life – knowing what it is supposed to say to us, what it is supposed to be like, yet the actual experience is extraordinarily more complex and contradictory than the simple, supposedly Biblical truths that we have been taught to expect.

Tim repeats the old joke about a preacher in the “time with young people” portion of worship saying, “I’m thinking of something that is small and furry and eats nuts. What do you suppose it is?” To which one child answers, “well, I know the answer is supposed to be Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel.”

We know, or think we know, what the Bible is going to tell us, but when we actually read the text we discover all kinds of things that we did not expect. We think we know what church is going to be like, but when we actually dive into we discover all kinds of things we did not expect.

When the text itself contradicts our expectations many of us are afraid that we are simply not getting it. We fear our own inadequacy as readers of this book that our tradition lifts up as central to the faith, and that is especially true when the book has been used as a weapon against us.

I suspect that we could find similar points of fearfulness with respect to other marks. Some of us fear that we will not have enough, so we are afraid to give. Others of us are afraid of change, so demonstrating a new quality of life is a fearful prospect. Some of us fear that we have too little time or not enough experience and so we are afraid to participate in the governing of the church.

So we huddle under our blankets too timid and afraid to face the terror of everyday faithful living.

We watched The Sound of Music again a few weekends back, and that’s probably why I’ve got Julie Andrews singing in my head about her “favorite things.” When I’m feeling afraid I remember my favorite things and then I don’t feel so bad.

That’s another way of saying “practice gratitude.” Remembering the things we have for which we are so grateful open our hearts when they had been clenched in fear.

I find that my gratitude only overcomes my fear when I put legs on it, that is to say, when I put it into action, and, all the more so, when I put it into action that has some risk. That’s not surprising given the life of the one we say we want to follow. Indeed, the church and the gospel it proclaims ought to entail risk. No. That’s not quite right. The church and the gospel we proclaim must entail risk.

In the words of late Archbishop Oscar Romero – who was assassinated as he presided over the table of our Lord – “a church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of society in which it is being proclaimed – what gospel is that? Very nice, pious considerations that don’t bother anyone, that’s the way many would like preaching to be. Those preachers who avoid every thorny matter so as not to be harassed, so as not to have conflicts and difficulties, do not light up the world they live in.”

We are the only More Light Presbyterian congregation in Virginia. If we do not light up the world that we live in then who will?

If we let our own insecurities get in the way of lifting one another up in prayer, mutual concern and active support, then who will light up the world we live in?

If we let our own anxieties get in the way of responding to God’s activity in the world through service to others, then who will light up the world we live in?

If we let our own fear stand in the way of working in the world for peace, justice, freedom and human fulfillment, then who will light up the world we live in?

Jesus said, “you are the light of the world!” No one lights a lamp and places it under a basket, but instead they place is high on a lampstand so that it gives light to the whole house. Let your light so shine that it gives light to all, and glory to the God who created and loves you and all upon whom your light shines. Amen.

What is the Body For?

November 11, 2012 1 Corinthians 12:4-12

I was struck, in the wee hours of last Wednesday morning, by the invitation implicit but clear in President Obama’s acceptance speech to think deeply about what it means to be American, about what it means to be part of the body politic in this nation, and about what that body is for.

It struck me, in particular, because in various contexts and conversations this fall I have been hearing over and over the same kinds of questions with regard to the church. What does it mean to be a Christian, to be part of the body of Christ, and what is that body for?

I mention the president’s speech here not simply to acknowledge the obvious news of the week, but more importantly, to situate what might seem, at first blush, an “inside baseball” kind of churchy conversation in a broader cultural context. Doing so, I want to underscore that how we choose to be the body of Christ – the church – has a profound impact on how we choose to live as the body politic, that is to say, as citizens.

I’ve heard some deep concerns recently about the meaning of membership in a congregation. These concerns keep rising up to the surface in conversations about things as varied as politics, peacemaking and basic participation in fellowship gatherings. So this month of concern with stewardship – with basic support of the mission and ministry of this congregation – seems like a really good time to talk about the meaning of membership – about what it means to be, in Paul’s words, a member of the body of Christ.

I want this to be mostly a conversation, but I want to name up front a couple of concerns that I think we must be mindful of as we talk together about what it means to be a member of the church, generally, and what it means to be a member of this congregation, specifically.

So let’s recall briefly our context: being church, as a membership institution, in an era that is increasingly unchurched and, to coin a phrase that aims at the deep suspicion of institutions in general that marks our age, “a post-membership age.” Put those two well-known and widely acknowledged social trends in a local (and national) context that is increasingly diverse culturally and in terms of religious heritage and you have at least a triple-whammy that strikes at the heart of traditional congregational life.

Moreover, all of that is happening as we live into post-modernity, and while there is no consensus on just what that means, at the very least “post-modern” means that the very notion of “certainty” is no longer certain or stable – at least insofar as “certainty” rest on unassailable notions of “truth.”

So, in that volatile social-cultural-political mix, we pose the question: what does it mean to be a member of the church of Jesus Christ?

The Book of Order, which is the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), lists about a dozen “marks of membership,” or areas of involvement that are part of each member’s commitment to the church, to be exercised according to gift and call and context. These are listed on the back of this morning’s bulletin.

Take a moment to look at them.

·         What questions do these raise for you?

·         What resonates with you? Speaks to you?

·         Are there gaps in this list in terms of your understanding of church? Is anything missing?

·         What surprises you about this list?

As I looked back over this list, and especially as I did so with Paul’s words to the church at Corinth ringing in my ears, I was surprised by one thing:

This list says absolutely nothing about what one must “believe” in order to belong to the church. Given what I said to begin with about the cultural context in which we move these days, I find that refreshing and promising.

At the same time, I find in it a challenge to us as we continue to work to build a more vibrant congregation, and, especially, as we try to learn together both what exactly that might mean and, just as importantly, how we might speak of it to others along the way.

That is to say, if the core of your church commitment revolves around the conviction that “believing in Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God assures your eternal salvation,” and that it is, therefore, your moral and Christian responsibility not only to confess that faith publicly but to invite others into a “saving relationship with Jesus,” then you have pretty clear “talking points” about what church means and how to speak of it with others.

But what if church means something different than that? What if the meaning of church is much more deeply bound up in being a community committed to following the way of Jesus than in offering our intellectual consent to a set of propositional statements about Jesus?

In that context, I hear in the Book of Order’s “marks of membership” also a deep challenge and invitation to think again together about how we define membership, how we mark membership, what rites of passage we invent to incorporate individuals into the body.

Let me put that just a little differently. Every time we welcome new members or baptize people into the church we ask a set of questions that come from a completely different era of church life, beginning with the first one: “who is your Lord and Savior?”

That question, by itself, is a huge stumbling block to a whole lot of people who are otherwise very much attracted to the idea of following Jesus, of trying to live out the way of Jesus in the world in the context of the community of the church. So, here’s another set of questions:

·         Using Paul’s metaphor of the church as the body of Christ, are there new ways we might incorporate folks into the body?

·         Are there specific “affirmations of faith” that should be part of that incorporation? Or, are there “affirmations of intention to follow the way of Jesus” that we might imagine, instead?

This is only the beginning of a community conversation that I think we need to have. We’ll touch on a few additional aspects next Sunday, but these two brief conversations in the context of Sunday-morning worship are nothing more than invitations to engage a much deeper, richer and fuller conversation about what church means in our time. I hope you will want to engage that both for your own soul’s satisfaction, but also because, whatever church has meant in the past that meaning is fast fading away. If we do not work out, in fear and trembling, the meaning of church for a new day then there will be no church when that new day dawns.

Whatever else we may be, and whatever we may believe about it along the way, one thing we have long been here is a community that prays together. So let us close our time together this morning with the prayers of the people.

The Politics of Jesus: Incarnate Grace

Luke 4:16-21

October 28, 2012

Today is Reformation Sunday, that Sunday when we remember that we are heirs to the Protestant Reformation and that we follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin. As John Buchanan wrote in his editorial earlier this month in Christian Century, “The Reformation led to a full embrace of the radical political implication of a humanity created in the image of God – each individual with God-given dignity and value. And as a consequence it led to political rights, to a new recognition of justice in the civic and political arena, and to a stress on grace as the fundamental word that God has spoken and on gratitude as the essential response of one who has received grace.”[1]

I’m glad Reformation Sunday comes when it does for it’s always good to remember that legacy in the days just prior to an election. It gives me hope for the days that come after the election – days that cannot arrive too soon in my book!

Anybody else here who will be glad when the ads and calls and canvassers go away for a while? And I don’t just mean Wes and Don because they work at the board of elections!

Personally, I can’t wait for the presidential politics to be past, for a while, because perhaps then we really could turn toward the Reformation-inspiring politics of Jesus. They are surely not the same thing! I read all about the third presidential debate, but I could find no mention in anything that I read about either candidate saying anything about loving enemies and praying for those who spite America.

Each candidate may believe that he has been anointed for this time, but I haven’t heard much from either of them by way of good news for the poor, in spite of the fact that there are millions of Americans living in state-defined poverty and billions of human beings suffering in abject poverty around the globe. I haven’t heard much from either of them about proclaiming release to the captives, despite the fact that the country they want to lead imprisons more of its citizens than any other country on earth. And the only real jubilee that national politicians seem to favor is for financial institutions deemed “too big to fail,” all while so many of our fellow citizens teeter on the brink of financial calamity.

No, the politics of the presidency bears precious little relationship to the politics of Jesus, so let’s just get on with the election and be done with it.

The politics of Jesus is waiting. It is waiting for us. It is waiting for the ones called to follow the one who was anointed to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, liberation to the oppressed and jubilee to all.

The politics of Jesus is waiting for us. It is waiting for us to embody it, moment by moment in every aspect of our lives, because the politics of Jesus is all about grace incarnate in this world.

In a practical manner, this means that each of us, in every aspect of our lives, is called to follow the same calling Jesus proclaimed in that initial public appearance. It means setting aside narrow political concerns for a much broader understanding of politics – politics as the ways and means that power is exercised in the city for the purposes of justice and shalom.

Such a politics compels us to embody grace always, because power gets exercised in the city not just on the first Tuesday in November, but in every single moment of every single day.

Take a deep breath. Breathe in. Without getting into the details of air quality indexes and suspended particulate matter, suffice it to say that the stuff that is in the air you just inhaled is there because of the ways that power gets exercised in the city – for better and for worse.

How many of you ate breakfast this morning? Again without getting into the nitty gritty of food production, processing, and so on, it is enough for now to say that the entire food system and agriculture economy is what it is – for better and for worse – because of the ways that power gets exercised in the city.

How about the clothes you’re wearing this morning. Without looking at all the tags, I’m willing to bet that most of us are wearing at least some item of clothing about whose manufacture we simply do not want to know. It is enough to say that those manufacturing conditions are what they are – for better and for worse – because of the ways that power gets exercised in the city.

The politics of Jesus invites us to live each and every aspect of our lives with eyes wide open to the realities of the exercise of power, and to pay particular attention to those who are powerless or who are the victims of power exercised without regard to justice and shalom.

To do that in every aspect of our lives – in our most intimate relationships, at home, at school, in our neighborhoods, at work, and, perhaps it goes without saying, within this community – means to embody the grace we have been given. The politics of Jesus is the embodiment of grace in the city – and city means where ever human beings live and move and have their being.

The purpose of the church – and on this day of a congregational meeting during which we’ll talk about visions and ministry and mission it’s good to recall the purpose of the church – is to be the provisional embodiment of that grace lived out in community.

We embody grace in response to the grace that has been freely given us. In receiving grace, we are called to respond in gratitude by living lives worthy of the calling we have received with that grace.

What this means, in practical terms, is that there are no relevant distinctions or spheres in our lives such that we might say, “this is the faith part of my life and this is the work part of my life, or this is the church part of my life and this is the political part of my life.”

No. There is just “my life,” given to me as a gift from the Creator of all life, and every aspect of my life is both opportunity and responsibility for embodying grace, for making it real, giving it flesh, incarnating it in the world.

If there is a part of your life where this is not true, then change it. Does the work that you do embody grace into the world? If not, then change it. Does the way that you interact with you most intimate beloved ones embody grace into the world? If not, then change it. Does the way you treat your neighbor embody grace into the world? If not, then change it.

It’s all that simple; and all that hard. But then nobody said that the politics of Jesus would be easy!

Indeed, do any of you recall what happened to Jesus right after he preached that inaugural sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth according to Luke’s gospel?

Yeah. They took him out and tried to throw him off a cliff.

Why would they do that? After all, all he said was, “I’m here to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, liberation to the oppressed.”

Commentators offer all kinds of suggestions about why the people got so angry with Jesus so quickly, which is to say that this, like so much of scripture, is open to various interpretations. I believe that at least part of what is going on is that the people, like most of us, did not want to be reminded of the ugly truth that marred their city and, perhaps, of their own complicity in that truth. They preferred the happy talk of the powers that be over and against the strange and poetic challenges of this marginal prophet who saw the facts on the ground and was willing to name them honestly.

The facts on the ground – the facts of our own lives – when honestly confronted will often disturb and provoke us for they do not always reflect the grace we are called to embody. Sometimes the political is also deeply personal, and the politics of Jesus always makes deeply personal demands on us.

That’s where the grace of God comes in. None of us will live into our several callings well all of the time. We are frail and broken vessels, jars of clay and sometimes more like shards. The best of us is capable of acts of great ugliness and violence, and you need look no further than our presidential politics to know that is true.

Fortunately, we do not rely solely on our own capacity to exhibit grace in the world; we rely upon the grace of God.

Responding to that grace, we can embody it in the world, as a community committed to constant and consistent concern with the ways and means that power is exercised in the city for the purposes of justice and shalom. For though the presidential political season is almost over, the politics of Jesus is for all seasons. We enter each and every season trusting the grace of God – a mighty fortress, a bulwark never failing, whose reign is forever and whose grace is from everlasting to everlasting. Amen.

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[1] “Luther’s Legacy,” John M. Buchanan, in Christian Century, Oct. 17, 2012, 3.