Lost and Found

Roman 12:1-18

Oct. 26, 2014

Every once and a while I’ll wander through the church to do a small bit of picking up. I’m always curious about what’s left behind … which makes me think that perhaps we should have read something from the Book of Revelations this morning. You know, the trumpets sound, the end of times, and we look around to see who’s left behind.

Be that as it may, on this Sunday when we celebrate our Reformation heritage, this text from Romans struck me as particularly appropriate. For me, it captures better than almost anything else in all of scripture what it means – or what it could mean – to be the church.

It also provides an interesting lens through which to look at what we bring to church, and what gets left behind; what we lose, and what we find.

For example, I found this ruler someplace that it didn’t belong, and it got me to wondering how we measure our lives. Lord knows the culture offers us some quick measurements starting with “what’s in your wallet,” but Paul suggests a different set of measurements. To begin with, he says “don’t be conformed to this world” that values affluence and appearance, power and prestige. Instead, “love one another with mutual affection and outdo one another in showing honor.”

That’s no way to win the rat race, but, perhaps, it’s a less rat-like way to measure our lives.

We are not, of course, rats. We’re human beings, created in the image of the divine. Scripture employs various metaphors for the human creature, and this little lamb reminds me that people are often referred to as sheep in scripture. Sheep are stupid animals, so I’ve never been fond of that comparison. There’s a song that the kids sing at camp – I just wanna be a sheep, bah, bah, bah, bah – that I truly loathe, because, on top of being just a horrible piece of “music,” I really don’t want to be a sheep. I think we should strive for more. We have, as Paul indicates, these great gifts: teaching, ministering, leading, and so on.

On the other hand, the humble, stupid sheep does remind me that I cannot make it on my own. I need care from others. I need guidance from others. I need the grace of the good shepherd in my life.

Then there are these gloves … which clearly don’t fit … so you must acquit? Well, never mind that. I got nothing on these – but, if they’re yours, please claim them, otherwise we’ll donate them away.

I’m not sure how long they’ve been sitting out there on a shelf. These items, however, are dated, so it’s easy to guess how long they’ve been around. This newsletter from More Light Presbyterians dated February 2013. In terms of the concerns of MLP, that seems like ages ago. There’s a note in here from the Rev. Debra Peevey, who directed MLP’s campaign on amendment 10-A, which removed restrictions on ordination just a few years ago. She wrote, “Our faith calls us to alleviate suffering. MLP helped make it possible for same-gender partners to take their rightful place among the wider community. That’s exactly what Paul said the Body of Christ was for … the uplifting of the community. Marriage equality is a faith-based proposition.”

It seems like forever ago and just yesterday that we were fighting for ordination equality; marriage equality seemed a still distant goal. When this newsletter was published, same-sex marriage was legal in 9 states. As of last Wednesday, when I signed a Virginia marriage license for Tom and Jerome, same-sex marriage is legal in 32 states holding almost two-thirds of the nation’s population. We rejoice with those who rejoice!

The other publication I found last week is older still – a copy of the Presbyterian journal Church & Society from 2002. It’s a collection of essays reflecting on the then upcoming 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The Presbyterian Church has a long-standing commitment to a woman’s right to choose, and this edition of Church & Society reminds us, on this Reformation Sunday, of Calvin’s emphasis on individual conscience that comes down to us in our Book of Order reminder that “God alone is lord of the conscience.” Moreover, as one essay in this collection insists, God speaks to us and through us often by way of the gifts we have been given as well as ones we may not have, and that the work of individual lives – lived out in a community of faith – is, indeed, the work of discerning what is the will of God, even, and especially in incredibly difficult situations.

In addition to the old journal, I found this blank notebook – an empty journal, if you will. It reminds me that we have the opportunity, as one of my favorite philosophers, Kermit the Frog, put it a long time ago, to write our own endings, to fill our own blank pages with rich and faithful lives, to, as Paul put it,

Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 

Which leads me to the last item I ran across: this “2-ton clear weld epoxy.” It’s like superglue on steroids. It will hold fast to just about anything, and, if you’ve ever accidentally got some on your fingers, you know that it will also hold fast to just about anyone.

There are a lot of images and metaphors for the grace and love of God, and when I picked up this glue last week it struck me as one more pretty good one. For it is the grace and love of God that bind us together in this place. We are one body, with many members. We’ve been given an incredible abundance of gifts. We use them in gracious response to the love and the grace we’ve been given, and, as we use these gifts – prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

Letting love be genuine; hating what is evil, holding fast to what is good; loving one another with mutual affection; outdoing one another in showing honor. Not lagging in zeal, being ardent in spirit, serving the Lord. Rejoicing in hope, being patient in suffering, persevering in prayer. Contributing to the needs of the saints; extending hospitality to strangers – as we use these gifts, what once was lost now is found. Amazing grace, indeed. Amen.

What Belongs to God?

Isaiah 45:1-7; Matthew 22:15-22

October 19, 2014

So, one day last week I went down to the Arlington County Courthouse, raised my right hand, and solemnly swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Never mind that, with respect to the one “authority” vested in me by the commonwealth, the two documents appear to be in subtle disagreement if not downright sharp conflict, I am now an agent of the state, part and parcel of the reign of Caesar.

“Render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar; render unto God that which belongs to God.”

So much of life gets lived out in the tension captured in that deceptively simple-sounding phrase.

For example – a timely one, to be sure – take the whole question of marriage. As the late Will Campbell put it,

What is a marriage license but a legal contract? And what does any legal contract promise and offer except the right to sue one another at another time and place before another of Caesar’s agents? Perhaps such contracts are socially necessary but what does that have to do with us?[1]

What does that have to do with the church, with the community of faith, Campbell wants to know.

Now, if you don’t know Will Campbell, well you should – especially if you’re a Southerner, or white, or a Protestant who grew up in the 20^th century. His writing, more than anything else I’ve ever encountered, has challenged me regularly to meditate over this fundamental distinction, this line through the middle of our lives that separates what belongs to God from what belongs to Caesar. This line, as Campbell’s note on weddings suggests, runs through our love lives, our relationships. It also runs through our economic lives, our political lives, and, certainly through our faith lives.

Moreover, if Walter Brueggemann is correct in his assertion that, in the Bible, justice amounts to sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it, then this simple-sounding instruction from Jesus runs right through the middle of our ethical lives, and is crucial to more than we can imagine.

All of which is to say, there’s a whole lot going on in this little back-and-forth between Jesus and the Pharisees. It helps in the unpacking if we understand a few cultural and religious touchstones that frame the encounter.

To begin with, this story is a fine example of politics making strange bedfellows. The Pharisees and the Herodians generally could not stand one another and held nothing in common. Well, OK. One thing: neither could stand Jesus. So, united in their hatred of the upstart prophet they conspire to trap him.

The Pharisees know that if Jesus endorses paying taxes to Caesar then most of the crowd will turn against him. It’s not that the people hated taxes – at least not more than anybody else. But they especially hated paying tribute to Caesar for that tax essentially funded the occupying power that dominated their lives.

On the other hand, the Herodians were basically supporters of the occupation, and knew that public opposition to this particular tax would be considered sedition.

Both sides figured to put Jesus in a rhetorical vice.

But his response turns the tables completely – and not just on his tormentors. The tables have been turned on the bystanders, as well.

For one thing, those in the crowd, most of them faithful Jews, would have heard several things in Jesus’ rejoinder – “show me a coin, whose image and likeness does it bear?” First, they would have understood that Jesus himself did not have any money. He did not carry the coin of the realm. But his inquisitors were complicit in the system they pretended to critique, while Jesus was clearly not a part of it or party to it.

Second, the crowd would likely have heard, in Jesus’ words, an echo of the creation story from Genesis in which God says, “let us create humankind in our own image and likeness.”

In the early days of the church, these distinctions between God and Caesar were sharp and sharply felt. Then, in the early 300s, the emperor – Caesar, himself, as it were (although, actually, Constantine) – converted to Christianity.

Although, as Brian McLaren put it in a talk last week, “what we call Constantine’s conversion to Christianity is more accurately understood to be Christianity’s conversion to the mindset of Caesar.”

McLaren went on to say that if we don’t come to terms with our violent past – that is to say, with the history of Constantinian Christianity, imperial Christianity, Caesar’s Christianity, Christendom itself – if we don’t come to terms with that past we don’t deserve any future.

So, you see, the tables have been turned on all of us, in Jesus simple turn of a phrase.

For now we must ask ourselves some key and troubling questions, including

·      What belongs to Caesar?

·      What belongs to God?

·      And, in whose image and likeness am I created?

We could, perhaps productively and faithfully even, follow Dorothy Day on this. She said, “after you render unto God what is God’s, there’s nothing left for Caesar.” There is certainly a great deal of truth to that assertion, and it rests on firm Biblical footing. After all, as the psalmist says, “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein.” Or, similarly: “the earth belongs to God; the earth and all its people.”

I’m certainly not going to argue otherwise. Instead, I’ll push in a slightly different direction, not because I think there is some realm that does not belong to God. No, that line of argument, which some take from reading Jesus’ words in our text today, leads to the tradition of withdrawing from the world to live at pious distance from the godless realm filled, one supposes, with godless sinners.

Here, again, I rely on Brother Will Campbell. Campbell writes of being pushed by his friend P.D. East to define the Christian faith.

“Okay. If you would tell me what the hell the Christian Faith is all about maybe I wouldn’t make an ass of myself when I’m talking about it. Keep it simple. In ten words or less, what’s the Christian message?” We were going someplace, or coming back from someplace when he said, “Let me have it. Ten words.” I said, “We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.” [2]

Which means that none of us gets to claim any special piety or privilege, we’re all part of the same muck and mass of humanity. None of us gets to withdraw to some place apart, holy and wholly unblemished. We’re all messed up; but that’s not the end of the story, because God loves us anyway. We all belong to God.

Nevertheless, we live in a world that looks for Caesar, and looks to honor him, to bow before him, and to conform to his expectations and his orders.

Perhaps, to run with Campbell’s metaphor, we spend our lives looking for a Caesar because we are all bastards, or, perhaps more gently and more generally, all orphans, and thus spend our lives trying to find a parent who will claim us, guide us, shape us.

The pressing question, for me, thus becomes: who is Caesar? Who is the false god to whom I give my allegiances in life? Who are the Caesars of our lives?

*****

It’s easy, perhaps too easy, to say in this place that we belong to God. Heck, we might even actually believe it while we’re sitting here, and we might say we’re going to live as if it’s true. But then we go out into a broken world, full of, well, lots of other bastards, and lots of Caesars clamoring for our allegiance. Out in the marketplace we often forget who we are and to whom we belong.

One American ethicist famously said, “show me your check book and I will show you your values.” Jesus put it like this: where your treasure is there will be your heart. In still other words, the path to Caesar is paved with our gold.

So I invite you to an exercise in remembering:

You got a pen when you came in this morning. I invite you take out a credit card and use the pen to draw a little symbol on the card – a fish, perhaps, as the early church used for its symbol, or a cross. Either way, but a mark, a sign to remind you to whom you belong. (The sticky note is in case you can’t write on the card itself – write on the note and fold it around the card.) For the next week – or longer – I invite you to ponder these question every time you use this credit card: does what I am spending my treasure on right now reflect how I belong to God? If all that I am and all that I have truly does belong to God, does this purchase reflect that fundamental and God-given identity?

In our brokenness we turn, too often, to false gods, and, what is worse we miss the Mother and Father of us all, who will, above all else, love us, even though we are all bastards.

In those moments, all too rare for most of us, when we remember who we are and to whom we belong we begin to render unto God what belongs to God. We can, as Paul put it, give thanks to God and recall faith, love, and hope in the One who challenges, even now, to know the difference between God and Caesar, and to trust that we do, after all, belong in life and in death, to God. Amen.

---

[1] Will D. Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly (New York: Continuum, 1986) 213.

[2] Campbell, 220.

A Hunger for Peace

Isaiah 5:1-7
October 6, 2014
We share a hunger for shalom. That hunger, as innate and universal as the hunger for food, gnaws at us all, for we all know too well its absence. We cry “peace, peace” but there is no peace.
Whether we speak of global and international situations or domestic and familial ones, we know all too well the absence of peace in our lives. Open the laptop, flip on the television, glance at a headline, or listen to the neighborhood chat, and you know this.It is tempting, often, to throw up one’s hands in despair at this and give up all hope of it ever being any other way. It is tempting, often, to retreat and tend to one’s own garden, to turn inward in discouragement, to seek solace in solitude or escape in mindless entertainments, to find numbness in one or another narcotic.

I suspect that we have all been down one of those roads, and perhaps we’ve been down more than one. That’s not surprising. After all, we live in a culture that seems, all too often, to celebrate violence and one that is certainly awash in it. We are shaped by the myth of redemptive violence and are enthralled by its spell socially, economically, politically and spiritually.

If this were a book instead of a sermon, I’d trace down each of those broad categories and flesh out fully how, for example, hierarchical structures in schools, churches and business are shaped by and perpetuate the myth of redemptive violence socially. It would be sadly simple to do so. It would be even simpler to show how vast sectors of our economy – from the entertainment industry to the weapons manufacturers – are broadly dependent upon the myth, and thus willingly perpetuate it. Our politicians, and thus our politics, pay homage to the myth at every opportunity, and all of that shapes, reshapes, and, ultimately, deforms our spiritual lives. None of this is difficult to demonstrate.

The myth of redemptive violence, as the late Walter Wink put it, “enshrines the belief that violence saves, that war brings peace, that might makes right. It is one of the oldest continuously repeated stories in the world.”[1]

Wink traces it back to the oldest known creation myths, including the Babylonian Enuma Elish, according to which creation is an act of violence by violent gods who establish order from chaos by means of disorderly violence. The Enuma Elish dates back to at least 1,200 years before the time of Jesus, and predates the Babylonian exile of the people of Israel by some 600 years.

During that exile, the words that now open our Bible were written, and Jewish priests inscribed a direct counterpoint to the Babylonian creation myth. Thus, according to the Genesis story, a gracious God creates a good creation. “Chaos does not resist order. Good is prior to evil”[2] and violence and evil enter creation as a result of the brokenness of the human creature.

In other words, it’s a lot more complicated and nuanced than the simple, Manichean division into good and evil, into good guys and bad guys, us and them, friends and enemies.

Certainly the entire ministry of Jesus calls into question such simplistic divisions. The call to love enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, to break bread with the marginalized and the outcast demands of us some fundamental rethinking of the black and white divisions that we too often use to judge the world around us.

Isaiah also challenges such simplistic divisions, and the text this morning reminds us of the call to act with justice for all people. As Amy Steele, who teaches at the Vanderbilt Divinity School, puts it, this text “also cautions us against assuming postures of privilege, as if our way of life or worship will somehow guarantee our … well-being.”[3]

Well-being is one of the various meanings captured in the single Hebrew word shalom, which also suggests right relationship with community and with God as well as peace.

For many years the first Sunday of October has offered up the lovely liturgical confluence of World Communion Sunday and Peacemaking Sunday. There’s something quite compelling about pairing a small “c” catholic – as in “universal” – gathering at table with a recommitment to the equally universal call to the followers of the Prince of Peace to the work of peacemaking.

The thing about communion – the key aspect of it, I believe – is that no one is compelled to come to this table. The church – that is to say, you and I – do not demand it. Rather, we offer it to all who gather responding the invitation of the One who said, “come, and I will give you peace.”

As Martin Niemoller said, “You must not say that you want or demand peace from everybody, for the way of Christ is not to demand but to offer peace. I think that is also the way of his church – it has to be the way of his church – to offer peace. [… God] offered […] peace in Christ Jesus, and the way to put into action the love of Christ is to love our enemies. That is not just a sentimental matter,” wrote the pastor who spent almost a decade of his life in a Nazi concentration camp, “that is the way God brings about good things in [the] world and development for the better among the human beings on this globe.”[4]

None of this is easy, and all of it is incredibly complex, as well. It plays out in deeply personal and broadly political ways. None of us lives it perfectly.

I was reminded of that in a powerful essay published last week concerning opposition to the Islamophobic vitriol of Pamela Geller, who is known for the hateful bus and subway ads she’s placed on Metro and other major metropolitan transit systems around the U.S. Geller last week put on hold a campaign that was to have featured images of slain journalist James Foley, when Foley’s family, rising above their own deep wounds and grief, asked her not to use pictures of him in her latest ads.

As Jay Michaelson, writing in The Jewish Daily Forward, put it

“Geller is a fundamentalist like the [terrorists of ISIS] are fundamentalists; she is irrational like they are irrational.

“And another irony: So are we, if we simply assume that Geller is over there, and I’m over here. Moderate/Extremist is just another Us/Them dichotomy — one that gives me a pass just as Geller’s Us/Them dichotomy gives her.

“Actually, we are all Pamela Geller to some extent: She is simply the manifestation of the fearful, irrational, and hateful parts of each of us. There’s a Geller inside me and a Geller inside you. I can listen to that part of myself and “know she’s right.” Or I can listen to it, reflect on it, and explore whether that’s the voice I want to obey.”[5]

For followers of Jesus, there is another voice speaking – one that says, “be not afraid,” one that says, “love one another as I have loved you,” one that says, “love your enemies,” one that says, “follow me,” one that says, “this is my body, broken for you.”

Peacemaking begins at table as we respond to that invitation, break bread together, and discover a common hunger for shalom. Amen.

[1] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (New York: Doubleday, 1988) 42.

[2] Ibid. 46.

[3] In Preaching God’s Transforming Justice, Year A, Ottoni-Wilhelm, Allen, and Andrews, eds. (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2013) 419-20.

[4] Martin Niemoller, in The Way of Peace, ed. Walter Wink (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2000) 63.

[5] http://forward.com/articles/206504/we-are-all-pamela-geller/#ixzz3F10Kusjh