It’s Tempting …

Luke 4:1-12; Ruth; Mark 1:12-13

February 24, 2013

It’s tempting to follow up that typically brief Markan reading with a long exposition on the differences between that version of the temptation of Jesus and the much longer, fuller version from Luke that served as our call to worship this morning.

It’s tempting, but I’ll simply say, to begin, let the remarkable difference between the two serve first as a reminder that gospel is not biography, and second as an invitation for your deeper reflection.

It’s tempting to stand up here on the second Sunday of Lent and pretend that just because I’ve spent enough time in the scholarly pursuit of analyzing the gospels to raise some good questions about the text that I also have the answers. It’s tempting, but I think I’ll stick with the questions.

It’s tempting to suggest that we’ve just ordained leaders – deacons and an elder – who bring with them all the answers to all the questions we face as a congregation. It’s tempting, but I’m not about to lay that burden on Toni, Ron and George … unless they want me to!

It’s tempting to pretend that we have all the answers. It’s tempting, but I find more comfort – more genuine, authentic, life-giving comfort in merely trying to do what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke suggested: learn to love the questions themselves.

Still, it’s tempting, especially on a Sunday morning when our young people are providing so much leadership, to imagine that we have answers to all of their questions today, and the ones that are sure to come tomorrow. It’s tempting, but I’ve been a parent long enough to know that I can’t even imagine just what the next question will be much less that I’ll have the answer.

It’s tempting to imagine having that much control over the future that one could anticipate what’s coming next all of the time.

It’s tempting to think that we might have such control because we have enough smarts in school or influence at work or achievement in rank or money in our bank or power from our weapons or beauty in our bodies, but it’s a false hope nonetheless. No amount of achievement, affluence, or appearance no smarts, influence, or power can bring any of us control over that most basic assertion of the season of Lent: we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

It’s tempting to think that we might somehow live outside of that circle, but if the circumstances of your own life haven’t already proved that basic truth – that we all live within the circle of our own mortality – then they will in time no matter how tempting it is to believe otherwise.

Heck, it’s tempting to think that we actually even understand the nature of the things that tempt us. The gospel writers put it in terms of demons and the devil, and we still use such figures to explain the demons that haunt us: drink, drugs, sex, power, money, images, control, busyness – the list just goes on and on.

It’s tempting to think that we can get to the end of that list … and triumph over it through the sheer act of our own will. That is the greatest temptation of them all, and the one about which Jesus has the most to teach us. For when he was tempted he did not respond out of the resources of his own considerable personality and individual giftedness. Instead, he turned to the resources of his faith: the word of God in the sacred scriptures of the people of God, his own steadfast trust in the One who created him and claimed him in the waters of baptism, and the community to which he turns immediately upon leaving the wilderness.

It’s tempting. So much that we encounter along the way is tempting. Jesus clearly understood this because he experienced it. It’s tempting, and when it gets that way Jesus invites us to follow a way of deep wisdom and faithfulness. That way, trod by many before us and filled even now with a great cloud of witnesses, points toward God: toward the heart that beats for love of us all from the center of all that is. For though the journey is fraught with temptation, the way is paved with love. Follow it, in the company of the children of God learning to dwell together faithfully in the questions of our time. Amen.

Journey of Remembrance

Luke 3:1-21

February 17, 2013

We speak often about journeys of faith, and it’s natural that we should do so. Our holy book is far from unique in its many journey stories. From Homer’s Odyssey to the Bhagavad-Gita, from the gospels to the Qur’an, the world’s great wisdom is shared in stories of leave-taking, truth-seeking and home-coming.

The Bible, itself, is filled with journey stories beginning with Abraham taking his family and leaving their home to become a people whose descendants would outnumbers the stars in the heavens, continuing with Moses exodus wanderings toward a land of promise, on through the Babylonian exile and straight through the gospel accounts of the travels of Jesus and the disciples. The only constant is change, and change is experienced in and as movement, journey, pilgrimage.

Faith, it seems, is an active verb – if not grammatically, then certainly as experienced by the faithful who are rarely in one place for long.

What moves them in the first place? What keeps them going? What do they discover along the way?

These are the questions not just of reading sacred scripture. More to the point, they are the questions of our lives. What moves us? What keeps us going? What do we discover along the way?

The season of Lent offers a time for reflecting on the way, a time for both considering the questions and experiencing them as lived realities.

The journey of Lent is one of remembrance, but it is not a journey back. That is to say, we’re not putting on sackcloth and ashes to turn back the clock. We’re picking up practices of the faith for the living of these days and the days to come.

But we pick them up guided by sacred memory. This morning, as we hear again the story of the baptism of Jesus, we remember our own baptisms. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “when Jesus calls, he bids us ‘come and die.’” In the waters of baptism we do just that: we die to old ways and rise back up to new life.

That new life is centered on another sacred memory that we celebrate at table: that Jesus gave up his own life when the world said “no” to the vision he offered, and that God insisted on “yes” and raised him up to affirm that the light of dawn has the final word over the darkness of the tomb, that life has the final word over death, that love triumphs over hate.

Both of these sites of sacred memory are points along the way not final destinations, and each of them lift up the essential importance of the community. In baptism we are welcomed to the community of the church, saying “welcome the newest member of the household of God.” In these waters we are claimed as God’s own for the world. At table we gather with our sisters and brothers welcoming all without exception, and we are sent out into the world – the people of God to feed the children of God.

So this morning, on this first Sunday of Lent, remember your baptism and be claimed again by its promises. Journey to the table of our Lord to be richly fed that you might continue to sojourn in faith.

Let us pray:

Unveiled

Exodus 34:29-35; Luke 9:28-36

February 10, 2013

Last Sunday, about an hour or so after worship, I was walking through the downstairs hallway checking to see that things were put away, lights turned off and doors locked before heading home. I was singing to myself, “and God will delight when we are creators of justice,” and I heard someone around the corner humming to herself: “la, la, la, lalala, la, la, la, la la.”

I smiled as two thoughts ran through my mind:

First, that is a ridiculously infectious tune that I’ll be singing all afternoon.

Second, there is something more infectious than that song going on in this place these days.

If you’re not careful, you might just catch it!

It is undeniable that there is something powerful and wonderful going on here these days. The question is – or, better, the questions are: what is it? And how shall we respond?

This story from Exodus provides an interesting lens for looking at our present moment. This reading comes rather abruptly in the lectionary. We haven’t been reading the Exodus story, so let me remind you of the context. This is the second time Moses has gone up Sinai to get some tablets. If you recall, when he came back after the first trip his brother, Aaron, had made a golden calf. Moses pitched a small fit, and pitched the first tablets, too.

So he’s had to make a second trip, not only to receive the commandments again, but, more importantly, to bargain with God because the divine Yahweh is really ticked off at the stiff-necked people of Israel.

In the negotiations, we learn a great deal about the God of Israel.

In verses 6-7 of the same chapter as our text for today we find these words, spoken by God about God:

‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,  keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents
upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’ 

In this seminal litany, we discover the profound tension that lies at the heart of Israel’s understanding of Yahweh, if not, indeed, at the heart of God’s self: God’s faithfulness and grace reside in tension with God’s response to the people’s lack of faithfulness.

God will keep God’s promises for a thousand generations, the text suggests, and stay peevish for three or four.

It’s almost like that parental gesture of counting down when you want a child to do what you want and you want it to happen now: “three, … two, ….”

Cheryl’s mom once asked, “what happens when you get down to zero?” The answer: it’s never happened.

But, of course, it has happened, in our lives and in everyone else’s, too. There are times when you anger and disappoint the ones you love most. Sometimes, with human beings, that anger and hurt is enough to rupture a relationship beyond any reparation, and then relationships die.

God, according to the Exodus story, is not like that. We may rupture the relationship, but God will remain faithful forever even if disappointed for a little while. God says, in the verses I just read, that God’s anger will be visited upon several generations, but, of course, in the story of what God actually does, the anger dissipates in the blink of an eye and pretty soon God is patting Moses on the head and sending him back down to the same stiff-necked people with another nice, new set of commandments.

Of course, when we are faithless – out of fear, out of anger, out of hurt – we miss out. I think that’s what the three and four generations is all about. We miss out on seasons of love and justice because we choose not to respond to God’s steadfast love and faithfulness.

But when we open our lives to the presence of God – to the love of the Divine alive in the world – then, to borrow from Isaiah, even our darkness shines like the noonday sun.

The spark of the Divine shines through. The Spirit, alive and working as the power of love in the world, will put a shine on your face.

That’s what Moses discovers on the mountaintop.

A similar thing happens to Jesus in the story of the transfiguration. His encounter with the Divine puts a shine on his entire being, and it’s so wondrous that his disciples are dumbfounded.

Or, maybe, they’re just dumb. Peter is so impressed by the experience that he wants to pitch a tent and just stay right there, presumably forever. I can imagine that maybe he was also hearing some ridiculously catchy music that wormed its way into his ears and he’s just humming it over and over, and is feeling so full of the spirit, and he’s seeing Jesus there all aglow, and he can’t imagine anything better ever in the whole, wide world and so he just blurts out: “guys, let’s just stay right here forever!”

At that point, the whole thing shifts. It is always tempting to stay put when you’ve reached the mountaintop but both of these stories insist on moving on. More than that, however, they insist on moving on changed.

That’s the part of the stories that speaks powerfully to our present moment. When I walked through the halls humming, and hearing someone else humming, last week I knew that we had reached a mountaintop moment here. All of the work of dreaming, discerning, and deciding has brought us to a peak that is beautiful and joyous and fun.

I’d like to pitch a tent and stay for a while.

But Moses had to go back down to the people and say, “we’re not supposed to say put, we have a land of promise to keep on marching toward.” Jesus had to go back down and say, “we’re not supposed to stay put, we must turn our shining faces toward Jerusalem.”

So what do we do with this moment at CPC when the Spirit is moving powerfully in our midst? We can’t stay put, we must move on. That much is clear. The question is, how shall we live transformed lives?

If we listen and are guided by the values of our culture, we meet such moments as this one – filled with energy and ready to go – and ask the question, “what can I do?” It’s the classic American question, and it makes of the energy of worship a kind of filling station to check into once a week or so in order to go back out and live in a culture that really doesn’t care a whit about the source of one’s energy as long as it is turned toward the purposes of the world as it is.

But the gospel presses a fundamentally different question. We do not ask “what can I do” but rather “what do I owe to God and to my neighbor?” Moreover, the gospel insists that we ask these questions not merely as individuals but also in community: “what do we owe to God and to our neighbors?”

If we understand what is going on CPC right now in cultural terms or, better, in terms of cultural values – then we’ll interpret this moment as giving each of us individually a song to sing that gets us through the week and helps “me to do what I can do.” This small “s” spirit will wear off in time – a time that may be visited to the 4^th generation.

If, on the other hand, we understand this moment as empowering us to live fully into our debts to God and neighbor, we will find more than Sunday morning transformed for more than a few weeks.

We can come down off of the mountaintop, filled with the spirit of God, faces shining in transfiguration to be those who work for the transformation of the world. That is what Moses came down the mountain to do. That is what Jesus came down the mountain to do. That is what we shall come down the mountain to do. May it be so for the sake of a world desperate for transformation. Amen.

Risk Love

1 Corinthians 13; Luke 4: 21-30

February 3, 2013

When I was a college freshman, in some English class I think, I recall encountering Paul’s words from the letter to the Corinthians, and thinking that they were from some Shakespeare play. True story. In my defense, “love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant” does sound like something that Romeo might have said.

When I became an adult, to borrow from Paul, I put an end to childish readings. Well, at least to some of them, and in doing so I came to understand that, despite the fact that Paul’s words get read at countless weddings, he wasn’t talking about the kind of love that Romeo would have been talking about.

Instead, Paul was talking about a kind of love that finds its sole source not in the vagaries of the human heart, but rather in the heart of God. This is risky love, and it is the heart of what I mean when – borrowing from Martin Luther King – I speak of the commonwealth of the beloved or, in King’s words, “the Beloved Community.”

As my friend, Tom Driver, wrote last week for the Huffington Post, “King was no sentimentalist. For him, love was not just a feeling. It was decision and action.” Love is action – nonviolent action – that leads toward the Beloved Community.[i]

That kind of love-in-action knows no bounds, and it is the most powerful force in the universe.

It’s also what nearly got Jesus tossed off a cliff.

This passage from Luke is one of the quirkiest little stories in the gospels. How can it be that the crowd goes from all speaking well of Jesus to filled with rage and ready to throw him off a cliff in the literary blink of an eye? Surely it can’t be his reading of Isaiah, even with its call to jubilee forgiveness of debts. That might get you tossed off the Rush Limbaugh show, but folks in the synagogue would have been familiar with and accepting of the prophetic vision of justice even if they didn’t actually practice it.

So what’s going on? Understanding God’s love in action in the world helps draw us into the same deeper truth that Paul’s letter points toward.

The love of God, that power that beats from the heart of all that is, is not jealous, it does not insist on its own way, it rejoices in truth, and it does not end. It does not, that is to say, stay inside the lines that we draw around it. It does not pay heed to the limits we erect to it. It risks trespassing every boundary that human beings seek to impose upon it.

Jesus understood this. His entire life and ministry can best be understood as experiments with such risks, such risky love.

In this inaugural sermon in Nazareth Jesus points to the lines and then crosses them. Jesus upset his listeners precisely because he challenged their own self-understanding as the sole recipients of God’s love. As Jim Rice, editor of Sojourners,[ii] puts it, “he challenged their self-identification as the sole participants in God’s covenant.”

Jesus reminded his listeners that “there were widows in Israel in the time of Elijah – in a time of drought and famine – yet God did not send Elijah to them but, instead, to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also plenty of lepers in Israel back in Elisha’s day, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian."

In other words, Jesus is saying, God’s promise, God’s love is not the sole possession of the people of Israel. In fact, as our own scriptures tell us, sometimes God’s grace and love fall on completely other people.

In reflecting with his friends later, I imagine Jesus might have admitted that these were not the most popular “sermon illustrations” to use when speaking to the people of Israel. It was as if in, say 1956, a preacher in a white church in Alabama or Mississippi or, oh, I don’t know, maybe Virginia, lifted up Rosa Parks as an illustration of God’s powerful activity in the world. Or, perhaps, someone in 1980 preaching on love and justice and lifting up Harvey Milk as an illustration. Or even today, in many Presbyterian churches, using Michael Adee as an example of God’s love in action.

As Rice concludes: “While Jesus is redefining who is the elect [… he is] proclaiming that God's love has no boundaries. That's not a very popular message among those—found in every time and place—with a clear sense of who are the insiders and who are the outsiders.”

God’s boundary-breaking love works its gentle subversions in all kinds of places in every age and culture. Often in the most unexpected, least “religious” venues.

Bob Costas was on the Daily Show one night last week, and he told a simple story about the great Stan Musial, who died last month. Musial was one Costas’ St. Louis childhood heroes, a Hall of Fame baseball player known simply as Stan the Man.

At an All-Star Game in the mid 1950s – less than a decade after Jackie Robinson had broken the color line in Major League Baseball – four great All Stars, each African-American, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron, were playing cards by themselves in the National League clubhouse before the All-Star Game. All of the white players were across the room, nowhere near the four black stars. Then Stan Musial, whose major league career began before Robinson’s, Musial –“the longest tenured and most respected of those National League stars” – walked across the room, sat down and said, “deal me in.”

Costas said that Aaron had recalled that story to him just last week at the memorial service for Musial. It had stuck with Aaron for more than 50 years. Aaron told Costas, “I didn’t just like Stan Musial, I wanted to be like him.” In the middle of the era of Jim Crow, Costas said, what did it say when the most respected player among them all did that simple, decent thing?[iii]

Not a “religious” example, to be sure. But, then again, neither is feeding a widow or healing a leper. For that matter, neither is desegregating city busses or public schools, neither is standing for peace in a time of war, neither is witnessing for marriage equality at the county courthouse.

Risky? Perhaps. So risk love. For, you see, the love of God – expressed in and through the simplest of human gestures at baseball games, hospital rooms, around tables – knows no boundaries. When we put God’s love in action in simple, decent, human gestures, it breaks down every barrier.

So I’m wondering, as we prepare to come to a table around which there are no barriers, where in your lives – especially in unexpected moments –have you seen boundaries broken by simple gestures of love?

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[i] Thomas F. Driver, “The Culture of Violence and the Beloved Community,” Huffington Post, January 31, 2013.

[ii] Jim Rice, “The Unlimitable Gift,” Sojourners. From Preaching the Word, (http://archive.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=resources.sermon_prep&item=LTW_980149_CEpiphany4&week=C_Epiphany_4)

[iii] Bob Costas interview from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, January 28, 2013