(Scriptures: Genesis 32:22-31
Romans 9:1-5 Matthew 14:13-21)
Our Old Testament reading this morning is about Jacob, the flawed, complicated, infuriating man, son of Isaac, twin brother of Esau, who nonetheless was shown great favor by God. As we meet in Scripture the various characters who have been part of the great drama of faith, we may identify emotionally or spiritually with some characters more than others, may respond to some characters with awe, to others with pity. But we may not know what to do with Jacob. He’s just not a nice guy. We may have family members or coworkers who rub us the wrong way, who step on our toes, who God apparently put in our lives in order to teach us patience. And Jacob is like that. But we may find reassurance that, if someone as difficult, as ornery as Jacob can find favor with God, there’s hope for us as well.
Literally from the moment of his birth, Jacob did not play well with others – from the moment of his birth, from the moment he drew his first breath, he was grabbing the heel of his brother Esau, and his name is a play on the Hebrew word for “heel”, and is interpreted to mean “one who supplants”. Today we’d call that person “grabby”. This birth narrative set the tone for the relationship between the two brothers – Jacob does indeed turn out to be a heel - as Jacob first bought Esau’s birthright in exchange for a bowl of stew, and then tricked his aged father Isaac into giving Jacob the blessing intended for Esau. Not surprisingly, Esau was murderously angry at Jacob. Rebekah, Jacob’s mother, arranged for Jacob to stay with her brother Laban, and then told Jacob to get out of Dodge City.
At key points in his life, Jacob experienced visionary encounters with the divine. As he fled Esau to go to his uncle Laban, Esau had the vision in which he saw a ladder ascending to heaven, with angels ascending and descending. At this time of crisis, where he was literally fleeing for his life, God reassured him with the promise that had earlier been given to Abraham, of land and of a great family of descendents.
Having arrived at his destination, Jacob finds Laban to be every bit as tricky as Jacob is. Jacob and Laban turn out to be well-matched – not so much like peas in a pod, but more like a pair of scorpions in a bottle. Laban tricks Jacob into serving him for a total of fourteen years and marrying off both Rachel, whom Jacob loved, and the older sister Leah. But Jacob ends up prevailing over Laban in the end. After a total of 20 years with Laban, with Jacob and Laban for 20 years trying to get over on each other, Jacob left Laban, takes with him not only both Laban’s daughters, but vast flocks of sheep and herds of cattle.
At this point, Jacob learned that Esau was coming to meet him, with 400 men, and Jacob was terrified. Jacob had spent his whole life taking advantage of others, tricking his father, getting over on his brother, matching wits with Laban. He’d spent his whole life grabbing – grabbing his brother’s birthright and blessing, grabbing Laban’s daughters and flocks. Now Esau was coming for him, and he wasn’t alone. Had Esau been stewing, nursing a grudge for those 20 years? Was Esau coming for revenge? Was Jacob’s lifetime of grabbing what belonged to others, his lifetime of being a heel, going to come crashing down on his head?
And at this crisis point, Jacob has another vision, in which he spends the night wrestling with an unknown stranger. As he had all his life, Jacob seems to prevailing over the stranger – until the stranger fights dirty, putting out Jacob’s hip. Disabled, Jacob still hangs on for dear life, refusing to let go. He tells the stranger, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” The stranger gives Jacob a new name – Israel – meaning “God strives” or “one who strives with God.” And Jacob gives the place a new name, Peniel, meaning “face of God.” – because, Jacob said, “I have seen God face to face and lived to tell the tale.” Jacob walks off from that place, limping because of his hip, to meet his brother Esau for the first time in 20 years – it’s a tentative meeting, polite on the surface, but cautious – and Jacob tells Esau – “to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” As the stranger at the river had proved to be gracious to Jacob, so Esau likewise proved gracious. And, for once, instead of grabbing what belonged to someone else, Jacob presented Esau with gifts of cattle. Jacob, who had been blessed by God, was able for once to be a blessing to Esau.
This story of Jacob wrestling with God and the renaming of Jacob with the ambiguous name Israel – God strives, or one who strives with God – sets the tone for God’s relationship, not only with Jacob, but with Jacob’s descendents, the whole nation of Israel. Israel is blessed by God, but Israel grapples with God and God struggles to control and tame Israel. It’s a difficult, stormy, contentious relationship, but our gracious God refuses to walk away from Israel….as God refuses to walk away from us.
For Jacob’s story, Israel’s story, may be our story as well. Twice in the midst of crisis – when Jacob had to flee from his brother’s fury and when Jacob 20 years later finally had to face his brother – twice when Jacob feared for his life, Jacob experienced God’s presence in the midst of fear. What looked like a threat turned out to be a blessing. In his wrestling with God, Jacob was both changed and blessed. He came away from that experience with a blessing, with a new name – a new identity - but also with a limp that would always remind him of his face-to-face encounter with the divine.
We all encounter crisis points in our lives. A natural disaster or an accident or illness threatens our health, perhaps our life. Loss of employment leaves us in fear for our future. Anger and betrayal threatens to divide our family, or threatens a lifelong friendship. The sins of our past catch up with us, threatening the future. We’re upset, off-balance. We’re in crisis mode, with adrenalin pumping. “Why did this have to happen?” we ask. “Where do I go from here? Where is God in all this? Has God abandoned me?”
We may also struggle with our own sense of sinfulness. We may have things in our past that make us feel cut off from God’s love. Maybe we’ve had bad experiences with church in our past. We may wonder if God can love us.
It may be that, far from being abandoned, this place of crisis is exactly the place in which God seeks to meet us in a life-changing way. Rather than running, perhaps it’s time to face our fear, to grapple with fears in light of our faith, to grab onto God for dear life and hold on tight. We may be in for the ride of our lives. Like Jacob, out of crisis we may be both changed and blessed. We may come out of our crisis carrying the scars of our struggle, but with a changed life and with blessings from God that follow us from that time forward. Looking back on our struggle, we, like Jacob, may say, “Surely the Lord was in that place, and I didn’t even know it.” May we, like Jacob, keep on keeping on through times of crisis, and seek the God’s presence in the struggle. Amen.
*************
Need a place to ride out a time of crisis? Come to Emanuel United Church of Christ on Sundays at 10 a.m., and grab onto the joy and love of Christ. We're on Fillmore St (off Thompson). www.emanuelphila.org
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
A Turning Point (August 2011 Newsletter)
Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ –
“[Jesus] said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Matthew 16:15
Jesus’ question to Peter marks a turning point in Matthew’s Gospel. Until this point, most of Matthew’s Gospel has told of Jesus teaching the crowds, healing the sick, feeding the multitudes, calming the wind and waves. Asked by John’s disciples if he was the one for whom they had waited, Jesus’ response seems ambiguous. Jesus reminded John’s disciples of his miracles and allowed them to draw their own conclusions. He spoke as if, for John, Jesus’ deeds should speak for themselves. And then Jesus sent the disciples out on their first mission. Up to this point, they had experienced Jesus as teacher, healer, worker of miracles. Accordingly, when Jesus asked who the crowds thought he was, the disciples said that he was seen by the crowds as a prophet.
But then Jesus asked, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter, always eager to run off at the mouth, blurted out, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus was well-pleased with Peter’s answer. But then Jesus began to speak of the suffering he would undergo, and Peter was thrown off balance, to the extent that Jesus rebuked Peter’s lack of understanding. Jesus went on to tell the disciples that, just as Jesus would suffer, his disciples would have to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him.
Jesus’ question to Peter is also Jesus’ question to us. So how do we answer Jesus’ question? Who is Jesus for us? Do we see Jesus primarily as one who will meet our needs, answer our prayers, give us emotional “warm fuzzies”? Not that any of these responses are necessarily wrong - Jesus does all these things - but is this all Jesus is? Like the crowds who followed Jesus, is our faith primarily about getting our own needs met? Do we have a quality of faith that will go the distance when Jesus bids us take up our cross and follow him? Where Jesus leads, are we prepared to follow?
Jesus challenged his disciples to go beyond the easy, noncommittal, partial understanding of the crowd, to go deeper, to reach a place in our faith where we are ready to embrace, not only the joys, but the costs of discipleship. Difficult times, times of tragedy, times of distress, challenge our faith. Like Job, we ask, “where is God in all of this?” But if we are willing to hang on tight to our faith, to wrestle with life’s challenges and questions in light of our faith, we may find a blessing. What we find may not exactly be answers to our questions, but an experience of God’s presence. We may be able to look back on our time of struggle and challenge, and say, “Surely the Lord was with us in that place!”
See you in church!
Pastor Dave
“[Jesus] said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Matthew 16:15
Jesus’ question to Peter marks a turning point in Matthew’s Gospel. Until this point, most of Matthew’s Gospel has told of Jesus teaching the crowds, healing the sick, feeding the multitudes, calming the wind and waves. Asked by John’s disciples if he was the one for whom they had waited, Jesus’ response seems ambiguous. Jesus reminded John’s disciples of his miracles and allowed them to draw their own conclusions. He spoke as if, for John, Jesus’ deeds should speak for themselves. And then Jesus sent the disciples out on their first mission. Up to this point, they had experienced Jesus as teacher, healer, worker of miracles. Accordingly, when Jesus asked who the crowds thought he was, the disciples said that he was seen by the crowds as a prophet.
But then Jesus asked, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter, always eager to run off at the mouth, blurted out, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus was well-pleased with Peter’s answer. But then Jesus began to speak of the suffering he would undergo, and Peter was thrown off balance, to the extent that Jesus rebuked Peter’s lack of understanding. Jesus went on to tell the disciples that, just as Jesus would suffer, his disciples would have to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him.
Jesus’ question to Peter is also Jesus’ question to us. So how do we answer Jesus’ question? Who is Jesus for us? Do we see Jesus primarily as one who will meet our needs, answer our prayers, give us emotional “warm fuzzies”? Not that any of these responses are necessarily wrong - Jesus does all these things - but is this all Jesus is? Like the crowds who followed Jesus, is our faith primarily about getting our own needs met? Do we have a quality of faith that will go the distance when Jesus bids us take up our cross and follow him? Where Jesus leads, are we prepared to follow?
Jesus challenged his disciples to go beyond the easy, noncommittal, partial understanding of the crowd, to go deeper, to reach a place in our faith where we are ready to embrace, not only the joys, but the costs of discipleship. Difficult times, times of tragedy, times of distress, challenge our faith. Like Job, we ask, “where is God in all of this?” But if we are willing to hang on tight to our faith, to wrestle with life’s challenges and questions in light of our faith, we may find a blessing. What we find may not exactly be answers to our questions, but an experience of God’s presence. We may be able to look back on our time of struggle and challenge, and say, “Surely the Lord was with us in that place!”
See you in church!
Pastor Dave
Seed, Yeast, Pearl, & Fish
(Scriptures: Genesis 29:15-28
Romans 8:26-39 Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52)
I’ll open today’s sermon with what is perhaps a familiar story: the story of the ten blind men describing an elephant. Since they were blind, they could experience the elephant primarily through their sense of touch. The ten touched and handled different parts of the elephant. Asked to describe the elephant, the one who touched the trunk said, “The elephant is like a snake, slithering back and forth”. One who touched the leg said, “The elephant is like a tree trunk, very thick and sturdy.” One who touched a tusk said, “The elephant is curved and very hard and pointy on one end.” One who touched an ear said, “The elephant is like a leaf, flapping in the wind.” And so on. All were right – about the part of the elephant each touched – and all were wrong in assuming that what they experienced is all there was. The elephant was, in part, like all of these things, but in its entirety was like none of these things.
Today’s sermon title may look like the name of a law firm – “if you’ve been injured in an accident, call the law offices of Seed, Yeast, Pearl & Fish….” – but in reality it’s a combination of the various metaphors Jesus uses in today’s Gospel to give his listeners a glimpse of the Reign of God. I think the wide range of images tells us that the Reign of God Jesus describes is something that’s nearly impossible to sum up in just a few words, something that is not just one thing, but many things. It’s sort of as if, in order to explain what this Reign of God is, Jesus is having a sort of “show and tell” time with his listeners, pulling different images out of his mind and sharing them with his hearers, and explaining how each of these images tells something about God’s reign.
The first two images describe the Reign of God as something that grows, that starts out very small and has power far beyond the size of its origins. In the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus is playing with images that would have been familiar to his Jewish audience. The Ezekiel, 17th chapter, verse 22, provides a classic Old Testament image of the coming of the Messiah: “God will a twig from the top of a cedar and plants it on a high mountain, so it will produce branches and bear fruit and becomes a mighty, noble cedar, and in its shade, every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest birds of every kind.” In this parable, the birds represent the Gentile nations; it’s the image repeated elsewhere in the Old Testament of a time in which Israel will be a blessing to the Gentiles, to the nations, and people would come from the north and south and east and west to be blessed by Israel. In his mustard seed parable, Jesus plays with this image – he may have had his tongue in his cheek as he was speaking - and brings it down to earth: instead of the noble cedar tree, the common mustard bush. While mustard could be grown as a spice, there were also wild mustard bushes that you might not necessarily want in your garden, that could grow like a weed and take over any ground in which it landed. So Jesus’ image of God’s reign is equal parts ‘mighty oaks from little acorns grow’ and “you give it an inch, it’ll take a mile.” But it also includes the image of shelter; the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. All sorts of people – Jew and Gentile – will find shelter, will make their home in the expansive reign of God. The parable of the yeast parallels the mustard seed image; a tiny bit of yeast in three measures of flour – which in our measuring would have been about a bushel of flour - can make loaf rise into a huge amount of bread, to provide nourishment for many. Like the image of the mustard bush, there’s some ambiguity in this image as well: remember that while under the kosher guidelines leavened bread could be eaten most of the time, in preparation for Passover, observant Jews were to purge their homes of any leavened bread. So these images of the reign of God are very down to earth, not speaking of something far away on a mountain top and or set apart for high holy days, but something that’s common, something that ordinary people could experience every day, but something that has enormous power of growth and transformation. Sort of like the old camp song you may remember: “it only takes a spark to get a fire going, and soon all those around can warm up to its glowing/ that’s how it is with God’s love, once you’ve experienced it, you spread His love to everyone, you want to pass it on.”
The next two snapshots of the kingdom – treasure hidden in a field, a pearl of great price – to show that responding to God’s reign isn’t just a priority, one of many, but rather the priority. The response of the person who wasn’t even looking, but stumbled onto a treasure – and the response of the merchant who was looking for something, but found a treasure far beyond expectations – is not moderate. Apparently they never heard the saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Their reaction isn’t like that of a stockbroker who prudently wants to keep a balanced portfolio of investments – some stocks, some bonds, some money markets, a little of this sector, a little of that. No, in both cases they sell everything else in order to acquire the treasure. And Jesus is saying that that’s the response he seeks from us – our commitment to God’s kingdom isn’t to be one commitment among many, one of the many balls we juggle and try to keep in the air – but rather the commitment, our foremost commitment, the commitment that makes us get up in the morning and put our shoes on and face the day.
And finally, the parable of the fish caught in a net. This parable is sort of like last week’s parable of the wheat and the weeds – all sorts of folk will respond to the invitation of the kingdom. When we evangelize, we’re to cast a wide net, inviting in as many as possible. It’s not our job to sort people out, but rather to invite them in - “Love them all, and let God sort them out.”
Whew! What a strange collection of images! How do you bring all this together?
I guess one way to look at it is to consider what these images are not. These images are not about tidiness, not about moderation, not about straight lines and neat boxes. They’re also not about heavy-handed power from above. Rather, they’re about growth that runs wild, about a kingdom that draws everyone in and provokes extravagant responses. It’s also a kingdom that doesn’t look like much at first glance, and involves all kinds of people. Just as God chose an aged, childless couple named Abram and Sarai as father and mother of a nation, just as God uses the trickery of characters like Jacob and Laban to produce the 12 tribes of Israel - God’s realm is the same way – all kinds of folks are to be found there, and all sorts of folks have a part in God’s plan. We expect something that resembles a mighty oak tree or cedar, but we end up with a mustard bush growing out of control, or yeast bubbling up inside a lump of dough. There’s immense – even supreme - value there, but it’s hidden, hard to find, like the pearl of great price.
So today’s message seems to be – wake up! Keep your eyes open. Be aware of your surroundings. And expect the unexpected. God reigns, but likely in the last place we’d care to look, or among the last people we’d expect to find it. And when we find it, we are to respond with everything we have, joyfully being willing to put everything else on the shelf in order to respond to God’s call.
I was at the morning funeral for our former pastor, the Rev. Dr. Gene Grau. Gene Grau was one who followed the Lord wherever the Lord called – to Ghana, to an interim pastorate in England, to numerous pastorates in southeastern Pennsylvania, including of course here at Emanuel. At the funeral, in addition to folks from Brownback’s United Church of Christ and numerous other UCC congregations, there were two rows of people from Ghana, some in African dress – and who but Gene Grau could have drawn such a wildly diverse collection of people into the same room. Truly, like yeast, God’s love got into the life of Gene Grau, and his life story is the account of his extravagant response to God’s call. Like a mustard seed, God’s love was planted in Gene Grau, and as God’s love grew in Gene, people from around the globe found shelter through Gene’s many ministries over his lifetime of service.
And what happens when we make this extravagant response, when we give ourselves to God’s work? God doesn’t promise us a rose garden. There are risks. We can think of the early disciples, faced with hostility both from the Jewish religious establishment and the mighty Roman empire. They were few, they were weak, they were persecuted, and some were martyred….and yet they turned the world upside down, sort of a mustard seed producing a huge bush in which birds could find shelter, or yeast making a lump of dough rise. Even facing all that hostility, they had assurance of God’s care, similar to what we find in our reading of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome:
"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose….If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
'For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.'
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
God worked through that small group of early disciples, as God worked through Gene Grau, and I’m convinced that God is working through our small gathering here at Emanuel, just as God worked mightily through the small group that founded Emanuel congregation back in 1861. At first glance, we may not look like much, but neither does a mustard seed, or yeast….and yet when we put ourselves in God’s hands, God will use us far beyond what our numbers and resources suggest. When we put ourselves in God’s hands, we are more than conquerors, and nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God. So let us allow ourselves to be surprised by joy at what God is doing and what God will do through Emanuel Church, here in Bridesburg, and in places we’ll never know about until that great day when we see God, not dimly as in a mirror, but face to face. Amen.
****************
Please join us on Sunday mornings at 10 am at Emanuel United Church of Christ. We're on Fillmore Street, just off Thompson. www.emanuelphila.org
Romans 8:26-39 Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52)
I’ll open today’s sermon with what is perhaps a familiar story: the story of the ten blind men describing an elephant. Since they were blind, they could experience the elephant primarily through their sense of touch. The ten touched and handled different parts of the elephant. Asked to describe the elephant, the one who touched the trunk said, “The elephant is like a snake, slithering back and forth”. One who touched the leg said, “The elephant is like a tree trunk, very thick and sturdy.” One who touched a tusk said, “The elephant is curved and very hard and pointy on one end.” One who touched an ear said, “The elephant is like a leaf, flapping in the wind.” And so on. All were right – about the part of the elephant each touched – and all were wrong in assuming that what they experienced is all there was. The elephant was, in part, like all of these things, but in its entirety was like none of these things.
Today’s sermon title may look like the name of a law firm – “if you’ve been injured in an accident, call the law offices of Seed, Yeast, Pearl & Fish….” – but in reality it’s a combination of the various metaphors Jesus uses in today’s Gospel to give his listeners a glimpse of the Reign of God. I think the wide range of images tells us that the Reign of God Jesus describes is something that’s nearly impossible to sum up in just a few words, something that is not just one thing, but many things. It’s sort of as if, in order to explain what this Reign of God is, Jesus is having a sort of “show and tell” time with his listeners, pulling different images out of his mind and sharing them with his hearers, and explaining how each of these images tells something about God’s reign.
The first two images describe the Reign of God as something that grows, that starts out very small and has power far beyond the size of its origins. In the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus is playing with images that would have been familiar to his Jewish audience. The Ezekiel, 17th chapter, verse 22, provides a classic Old Testament image of the coming of the Messiah: “God will a twig from the top of a cedar and plants it on a high mountain, so it will produce branches and bear fruit and becomes a mighty, noble cedar, and in its shade, every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest birds of every kind.” In this parable, the birds represent the Gentile nations; it’s the image repeated elsewhere in the Old Testament of a time in which Israel will be a blessing to the Gentiles, to the nations, and people would come from the north and south and east and west to be blessed by Israel. In his mustard seed parable, Jesus plays with this image – he may have had his tongue in his cheek as he was speaking - and brings it down to earth: instead of the noble cedar tree, the common mustard bush. While mustard could be grown as a spice, there were also wild mustard bushes that you might not necessarily want in your garden, that could grow like a weed and take over any ground in which it landed. So Jesus’ image of God’s reign is equal parts ‘mighty oaks from little acorns grow’ and “you give it an inch, it’ll take a mile.” But it also includes the image of shelter; the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. All sorts of people – Jew and Gentile – will find shelter, will make their home in the expansive reign of God. The parable of the yeast parallels the mustard seed image; a tiny bit of yeast in three measures of flour – which in our measuring would have been about a bushel of flour - can make loaf rise into a huge amount of bread, to provide nourishment for many. Like the image of the mustard bush, there’s some ambiguity in this image as well: remember that while under the kosher guidelines leavened bread could be eaten most of the time, in preparation for Passover, observant Jews were to purge their homes of any leavened bread. So these images of the reign of God are very down to earth, not speaking of something far away on a mountain top and or set apart for high holy days, but something that’s common, something that ordinary people could experience every day, but something that has enormous power of growth and transformation. Sort of like the old camp song you may remember: “it only takes a spark to get a fire going, and soon all those around can warm up to its glowing/ that’s how it is with God’s love, once you’ve experienced it, you spread His love to everyone, you want to pass it on.”
The next two snapshots of the kingdom – treasure hidden in a field, a pearl of great price – to show that responding to God’s reign isn’t just a priority, one of many, but rather the priority. The response of the person who wasn’t even looking, but stumbled onto a treasure – and the response of the merchant who was looking for something, but found a treasure far beyond expectations – is not moderate. Apparently they never heard the saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Their reaction isn’t like that of a stockbroker who prudently wants to keep a balanced portfolio of investments – some stocks, some bonds, some money markets, a little of this sector, a little of that. No, in both cases they sell everything else in order to acquire the treasure. And Jesus is saying that that’s the response he seeks from us – our commitment to God’s kingdom isn’t to be one commitment among many, one of the many balls we juggle and try to keep in the air – but rather the commitment, our foremost commitment, the commitment that makes us get up in the morning and put our shoes on and face the day.
And finally, the parable of the fish caught in a net. This parable is sort of like last week’s parable of the wheat and the weeds – all sorts of folk will respond to the invitation of the kingdom. When we evangelize, we’re to cast a wide net, inviting in as many as possible. It’s not our job to sort people out, but rather to invite them in - “Love them all, and let God sort them out.”
Whew! What a strange collection of images! How do you bring all this together?
I guess one way to look at it is to consider what these images are not. These images are not about tidiness, not about moderation, not about straight lines and neat boxes. They’re also not about heavy-handed power from above. Rather, they’re about growth that runs wild, about a kingdom that draws everyone in and provokes extravagant responses. It’s also a kingdom that doesn’t look like much at first glance, and involves all kinds of people. Just as God chose an aged, childless couple named Abram and Sarai as father and mother of a nation, just as God uses the trickery of characters like Jacob and Laban to produce the 12 tribes of Israel - God’s realm is the same way – all kinds of folks are to be found there, and all sorts of folks have a part in God’s plan. We expect something that resembles a mighty oak tree or cedar, but we end up with a mustard bush growing out of control, or yeast bubbling up inside a lump of dough. There’s immense – even supreme - value there, but it’s hidden, hard to find, like the pearl of great price.
So today’s message seems to be – wake up! Keep your eyes open. Be aware of your surroundings. And expect the unexpected. God reigns, but likely in the last place we’d care to look, or among the last people we’d expect to find it. And when we find it, we are to respond with everything we have, joyfully being willing to put everything else on the shelf in order to respond to God’s call.
I was at the morning funeral for our former pastor, the Rev. Dr. Gene Grau. Gene Grau was one who followed the Lord wherever the Lord called – to Ghana, to an interim pastorate in England, to numerous pastorates in southeastern Pennsylvania, including of course here at Emanuel. At the funeral, in addition to folks from Brownback’s United Church of Christ and numerous other UCC congregations, there were two rows of people from Ghana, some in African dress – and who but Gene Grau could have drawn such a wildly diverse collection of people into the same room. Truly, like yeast, God’s love got into the life of Gene Grau, and his life story is the account of his extravagant response to God’s call. Like a mustard seed, God’s love was planted in Gene Grau, and as God’s love grew in Gene, people from around the globe found shelter through Gene’s many ministries over his lifetime of service.
And what happens when we make this extravagant response, when we give ourselves to God’s work? God doesn’t promise us a rose garden. There are risks. We can think of the early disciples, faced with hostility both from the Jewish religious establishment and the mighty Roman empire. They were few, they were weak, they were persecuted, and some were martyred….and yet they turned the world upside down, sort of a mustard seed producing a huge bush in which birds could find shelter, or yeast making a lump of dough rise. Even facing all that hostility, they had assurance of God’s care, similar to what we find in our reading of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome:
"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose….If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
'For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.'
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
God worked through that small group of early disciples, as God worked through Gene Grau, and I’m convinced that God is working through our small gathering here at Emanuel, just as God worked mightily through the small group that founded Emanuel congregation back in 1861. At first glance, we may not look like much, but neither does a mustard seed, or yeast….and yet when we put ourselves in God’s hands, God will use us far beyond what our numbers and resources suggest. When we put ourselves in God’s hands, we are more than conquerors, and nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God. So let us allow ourselves to be surprised by joy at what God is doing and what God will do through Emanuel Church, here in Bridesburg, and in places we’ll never know about until that great day when we see God, not dimly as in a mirror, but face to face. Amen.
****************
Please join us on Sunday mornings at 10 am at Emanuel United Church of Christ. We're on Fillmore Street, just off Thompson. www.emanuelphila.org
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Sower, Seed, Soil
Scriptures: Genesis 25:19-34,
Romans 8:1-11 Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
(Note: This sermon includes a brief tribute to Emanuel UCC's former pastor, the Rev. Dr. Eugene Grau, who went home to be with the Lord on July 8.)
Today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel gives us one of the more familiar of Jesus’ parables. The parable and its interpretation seem fairly straightforward – a sower tosses seed onto varying kinds of soil, some favorable to the growth of the seed and some unfavorable. The seed falling on the varying kinds of bad soil – stony, shallow, weedy – either doesn’t sprout at all, dies early, or is choked and fails to produce fruit. The seed falling on the good soil, by contrast, produces a bumper crop. In Matthew’s interpretation, the seed is the gospel, and the varying kinds of soil parallel varying responses to the Gospel. The parable is so straightforward that it seems difficult to say anything new about it – it says what it says, and that’s that. But it sometimes happens that when we are confident we know what a Scripture says, we may later find that what appeared to be a straightforward Scripture has layers of meaning we’d never considered. If we are too quick to turn off our hearing aids in response to familiar Scriptures, we may miss a message God has waiting in the text for us.
For example, the sower’s methods may seem, to us, a bit odd. If we’re planting tomatoes in our garden or rows of corn on some patch of land we own, we would likely first take time to prepare the soil by plowing it to break up the hard surface and by pulling weeds. And we might be careful in spacing out the seeds, roughly estimating some number of inches between each seed, lest we plant them too close together and in competing for nutrients, they crowd each other out. That’s what we would do, but the sower in our story behaves very differently. The sower tosses handfuls of seed here, and there, and everywhere, so that some seeds land on the hard path, others amid the rocks, others under a thorn bush – and yes, the sower does manage to get some of them inside the garden, onto the soil that’s known to be good. If you’re trying to conserve a limited number of seeds and wants the greatest return on that limited investment, you won’t do what the sower in Jesus’ parable did. But in the framework of the parable, the seed is the Gospel – God’s good news – which is unlimited, boundless. There’s no threat of running short or running out of Gospel – with God, there’s always good news in abundance. So, if the sower has an unlimited, self-replenishing supply of seed – well, then the sower can afford to take a more expansive view of sowing, tossing seed onto the soil that’s known to be prepared and fertile, as well as giving the less desirable ground a chance to nourish the seed. And that’s what God does with us, offering the Gospel to those prepared for it, but also to those whose hearts truly aren’t prepared to act on it – or at least not prepared to act on it at that moment. God gives everyone a chance to respond.
Why did the early church record this parable of Jesus? Perhaps they were perplexed that despite their best efforts, so many seemed unresponsive to the Gospel. Various teams of disciples would enter a town, find their way to the town square, and proclaim the message of Jesus. While some would respond, often with extravagant joy, others would be indifferent and some would be openly hostile. How could so many turn away from Good News? For those early disciples, hostile reactions to the gospel must have seemed as baffling as hostile reactions to ice cream would seem to us. And then the early church remembered this parable and reflected that Jesus never expected everyone to respond – or at least not to respond immediately.
Which brings me to another point about this parable that caught my interest. In the framework of the parable, the sowing of the seed, or the sowing of the Gospel, is something that happens once. Either the seed sprouts, or it doesn’t. You snooze, you lose. But one parable can’t say everything there is to say about God’s saving acts in the world, and in our experience, the seed is sown not once, but many times, over and over. The seed is sown every Sunday here at Emanuel and other churches, is sown in words of hope and deeds of kindness throughout the week. And our lives may contain all sorts of soil, some areas receptive to the Gospel and other parts, not so much. As Alexander Solzhynistan wrote, the line between good and evil runs, not between countries or between political parties, but through every human heart, through each of our lives. I can think of any number of times when I heard some word of godly exhortation, that at the time I heard it, either didn’t make sense or seemed downright offensive. But while nothing much may have happened at the time, that seed, that word, exactly because it annoyed or bothered me, got tucked away in the back of my mind until some later point in my life when, with more life experience – that is to say, more experience of God’s grace - under my belt, I was ready to respond. In this way, I’ve changed my mind on lots of topics over the course of my life. I suspect each of you have too. I believe God is constantly tilling the soil, constantly preparing our hearts for the gospel. Those parts of our lives that are hard like trampled-over ground or crowded with the weeds of conflicting priorities - God will eventually get around to plowing and weeding even this unpromising soil. Those parts of our lives that in the past may have seemed untouched by Good News – jobs that drain us, difficult relations with family members, our use of our time and money – will finally be prepared to respond to God’s word of grace.
And what a response! Jesus said that when the seed of the word falls into fertile ground, it will bring forth fruit in abundance, 30 times as much, or 60 times, or 100 times as much. No matter how beaten-down we may feel, we may find ourselves amazed by the fruit of God’s work in our lives. In this connection, I think of my predecessor, Emanuel's former pastor, the Rev. Dr. Eugene Grau, who went to be with his Lord late last week. His was an amazing life, including missionary service in Ghana, leadership positions in the Philadelphia Association and the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference, and faithful pastoral service for more than six decades, including more than a decade here at Emanuel. We at Emanuel knew Rev. Grau when he was in his 80’s and 90’s – but I’d ask us to remember that once upon a time, long years ago, Rev. Grau had been a baby, had been a young child, had been a little boy named Eugene Grau. I would love to know – who planted the seed of the Gospel in Eugene Grau’s life? His parents? His home church? Whoever planted that seed, there’s no way they could have known how fruitful for the Lord Gene’s life would become. Truly in Rev. Grau’s life, the seed of the Gospel brought forth fruit a hundred fold, a thousand fold even. Who can know how many lives were touched by the seeds of the Gospel planted by Rev. Grau over the course of more than nine decades on this earth.
Rev. Grau was an outstanding example of a life well lived for the Lord, and not all of us can point to accomplishments like his. But all of us can respond to the Gospel in our own way, with words of kindness and deeds of love, taking the fruit of the Gospel in our lives and planting them as seeds in the life of others. Those who respond to the Gospel can affirm, with Paul, “There is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus our Lord.” With Paul, we can cry to God, “Abba! Father!” even calling God “Daddy” – that’s what “Abba” means in this context, knowing that it is the Spirit of God bearing witness with our Spirit that we are children of God. With Paul, we can affirm that in Christ, God is able to do in our lives what we are unable to do for ourselves. May this good news of the Gospel bear abundant fruit in our lives, and may that fruit of the Gospel be life-giving to all with whom we come in contact. Amen.
Romans 8:1-11 Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
(Note: This sermon includes a brief tribute to Emanuel UCC's former pastor, the Rev. Dr. Eugene Grau, who went home to be with the Lord on July 8.)
Today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel gives us one of the more familiar of Jesus’ parables. The parable and its interpretation seem fairly straightforward – a sower tosses seed onto varying kinds of soil, some favorable to the growth of the seed and some unfavorable. The seed falling on the varying kinds of bad soil – stony, shallow, weedy – either doesn’t sprout at all, dies early, or is choked and fails to produce fruit. The seed falling on the good soil, by contrast, produces a bumper crop. In Matthew’s interpretation, the seed is the gospel, and the varying kinds of soil parallel varying responses to the Gospel. The parable is so straightforward that it seems difficult to say anything new about it – it says what it says, and that’s that. But it sometimes happens that when we are confident we know what a Scripture says, we may later find that what appeared to be a straightforward Scripture has layers of meaning we’d never considered. If we are too quick to turn off our hearing aids in response to familiar Scriptures, we may miss a message God has waiting in the text for us.
For example, the sower’s methods may seem, to us, a bit odd. If we’re planting tomatoes in our garden or rows of corn on some patch of land we own, we would likely first take time to prepare the soil by plowing it to break up the hard surface and by pulling weeds. And we might be careful in spacing out the seeds, roughly estimating some number of inches between each seed, lest we plant them too close together and in competing for nutrients, they crowd each other out. That’s what we would do, but the sower in our story behaves very differently. The sower tosses handfuls of seed here, and there, and everywhere, so that some seeds land on the hard path, others amid the rocks, others under a thorn bush – and yes, the sower does manage to get some of them inside the garden, onto the soil that’s known to be good. If you’re trying to conserve a limited number of seeds and wants the greatest return on that limited investment, you won’t do what the sower in Jesus’ parable did. But in the framework of the parable, the seed is the Gospel – God’s good news – which is unlimited, boundless. There’s no threat of running short or running out of Gospel – with God, there’s always good news in abundance. So, if the sower has an unlimited, self-replenishing supply of seed – well, then the sower can afford to take a more expansive view of sowing, tossing seed onto the soil that’s known to be prepared and fertile, as well as giving the less desirable ground a chance to nourish the seed. And that’s what God does with us, offering the Gospel to those prepared for it, but also to those whose hearts truly aren’t prepared to act on it – or at least not prepared to act on it at that moment. God gives everyone a chance to respond.
Why did the early church record this parable of Jesus? Perhaps they were perplexed that despite their best efforts, so many seemed unresponsive to the Gospel. Various teams of disciples would enter a town, find their way to the town square, and proclaim the message of Jesus. While some would respond, often with extravagant joy, others would be indifferent and some would be openly hostile. How could so many turn away from Good News? For those early disciples, hostile reactions to the gospel must have seemed as baffling as hostile reactions to ice cream would seem to us. And then the early church remembered this parable and reflected that Jesus never expected everyone to respond – or at least not to respond immediately.
Which brings me to another point about this parable that caught my interest. In the framework of the parable, the sowing of the seed, or the sowing of the Gospel, is something that happens once. Either the seed sprouts, or it doesn’t. You snooze, you lose. But one parable can’t say everything there is to say about God’s saving acts in the world, and in our experience, the seed is sown not once, but many times, over and over. The seed is sown every Sunday here at Emanuel and other churches, is sown in words of hope and deeds of kindness throughout the week. And our lives may contain all sorts of soil, some areas receptive to the Gospel and other parts, not so much. As Alexander Solzhynistan wrote, the line between good and evil runs, not between countries or between political parties, but through every human heart, through each of our lives. I can think of any number of times when I heard some word of godly exhortation, that at the time I heard it, either didn’t make sense or seemed downright offensive. But while nothing much may have happened at the time, that seed, that word, exactly because it annoyed or bothered me, got tucked away in the back of my mind until some later point in my life when, with more life experience – that is to say, more experience of God’s grace - under my belt, I was ready to respond. In this way, I’ve changed my mind on lots of topics over the course of my life. I suspect each of you have too. I believe God is constantly tilling the soil, constantly preparing our hearts for the gospel. Those parts of our lives that are hard like trampled-over ground or crowded with the weeds of conflicting priorities - God will eventually get around to plowing and weeding even this unpromising soil. Those parts of our lives that in the past may have seemed untouched by Good News – jobs that drain us, difficult relations with family members, our use of our time and money – will finally be prepared to respond to God’s word of grace.
And what a response! Jesus said that when the seed of the word falls into fertile ground, it will bring forth fruit in abundance, 30 times as much, or 60 times, or 100 times as much. No matter how beaten-down we may feel, we may find ourselves amazed by the fruit of God’s work in our lives. In this connection, I think of my predecessor, Emanuel's former pastor, the Rev. Dr. Eugene Grau, who went to be with his Lord late last week. His was an amazing life, including missionary service in Ghana, leadership positions in the Philadelphia Association and the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference, and faithful pastoral service for more than six decades, including more than a decade here at Emanuel. We at Emanuel knew Rev. Grau when he was in his 80’s and 90’s – but I’d ask us to remember that once upon a time, long years ago, Rev. Grau had been a baby, had been a young child, had been a little boy named Eugene Grau. I would love to know – who planted the seed of the Gospel in Eugene Grau’s life? His parents? His home church? Whoever planted that seed, there’s no way they could have known how fruitful for the Lord Gene’s life would become. Truly in Rev. Grau’s life, the seed of the Gospel brought forth fruit a hundred fold, a thousand fold even. Who can know how many lives were touched by the seeds of the Gospel planted by Rev. Grau over the course of more than nine decades on this earth.
Rev. Grau was an outstanding example of a life well lived for the Lord, and not all of us can point to accomplishments like his. But all of us can respond to the Gospel in our own way, with words of kindness and deeds of love, taking the fruit of the Gospel in our lives and planting them as seeds in the life of others. Those who respond to the Gospel can affirm, with Paul, “There is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus our Lord.” With Paul, we can cry to God, “Abba! Father!” even calling God “Daddy” – that’s what “Abba” means in this context, knowing that it is the Spirit of God bearing witness with our Spirit that we are children of God. With Paul, we can affirm that in Christ, God is able to do in our lives what we are unable to do for ourselves. May this good news of the Gospel bear abundant fruit in our lives, and may that fruit of the Gospel be life-giving to all with whom we come in contact. Amen.
Lighten Up!!
(Scriptures:
Genesis 24:34-67 Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Romans 7:15-25a Matthew 11:16-19,25-30)
Jesus’ words near the end of our Gospel reading are among the most comforting in Scripture. Jesus invites all who labor and are heavy laden, all those weighed down by the cares of life, to come to him. Jesus promises that his yoke is easy, and his burden lighter than the burdens we impose on ourselves.
This message of Jesus runs counter to the message of our society, and counter to our own attempts to manage our heavy loads. In our culture, we draw much of our identity from our work. If I meet someone for the first time, I may ask them, “well, where do you work?” or just “what do you do?” Since the Industrial Revolution, our society has used machinery to reduce the need for brute force, and more recently computer technology has reduced the need for mundane, repetitive mental labor. The hope has always been that this technology would introduce an age of leisure, with machines and robots tending to our every need. The outcome, however, has not been a reduction of work, but rather a change in the nature of work. While there is indeed less need for physical strength or certain forms of mental drudgery in the work place – it’s been a long time since I’ve had to add up long columns of numbers by hand - the work force seems divided between those who have difficulty finding work, because of limited demand for their skills, and those who are employed and are working longer and longer hours to keep up with the demands of management, or working two and three low-pay, no-benefits part-time jobs – want fries with that? - to keep up with the bills. We have not, thank goodness, yet reached the point of Japan, where the cultural expectation to work weekends and overtime has led to the Japanese national phenomenon of karoshi, death by overwork. But our culture’s overemphasis on work leads to strain on families, lack of sleep, and, for many, an ongoing sense of feeling drained, spent, used up.
In the church, we may find expectations that may be different, but just as daunting. A sense of obligation can lead us to take on more and more responsibility at church – as if everything depends on us, and the entire place will fall apart if we don’t show up, if we don’t stand and deliver. Guilt and shame – whether over specific failings or a general sense of failure – may block out the light of God’s love and joy from our lives. Our attempts to deny and hide from our sins and limitations can make it hard to be honest with those around us. If we carry a false image of a God who is angry, endlessly demanding, vengeful, we can tie ourselves up in knots trying to appease the wrath of the great Taskmaster in the sky.
In our reading from Romans, Paul gives us a vivid description of his struggles with sin and his thanksgiving for God’s grace. As Saul, trying to please God apart from the saving work of Jesus, he tied himself up in knots and tore himself to shreds. Remember that when, as Saul, he persecuted the church, he did it precisely because he thought it was what God wanted. After his Damascus road encounter with the Risen Christ, he learned that those he thought were detestable sinners were instead God’s beloved, that his best, most fervent attempts to please God were instead sin, were instead precisely an offense to God. The law declares God’s will, and Paul wants to do God’s will, but because of the power of sin finds himself instead doing what he detests. Like an addict, the compulsion of sin drives Paul to do what makes him sick at heart. For Paul, the law acts as a mirror, and gazing into that mirror, Paul is horrified by what he sees. He feels himself locked away from light of God’s grace, staggering under his burden of guilt. “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Paul asks. And then Paul answers his own anguished question with words of gratitude and praise – “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
We may find ourselves described in Paul’s words. We affirm that, in baptism, our sinful nature has been put to death, and we rise out of the water in the new life of Christ. These are God’s promises – but the fulfillment of these promises comes over the course of our lives. The power of sin, though ultimately broken, still stubbornly hangs on. The new life in Christ, begun in baptism, is only fully realized in the life to come. Our future is with God, but the past, represented by sin working through our flesh, is still very much with us. But thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, for despite our stumbles in this life, by God’s grace, we are assured that the new life begun in baptism will become eternal life with God. For now, Paul says in Colossians 3:3, our lives are hidden in Christ – the true selves that God would have us be, the true selves that in the future we will be, for now are hidden in Christ. When we feel weighed down with guilt, we can have faith that sin and death do not have the last word. Though life in the present may be a very mixed bag, our true selves, the selves we are destined to become, are hidden in Christ. And we can rest in that. Every week we confess our sin, and every week we affirm that, in Christ, our sins are forgiven. This isn’t to say that God is indifferent to sin – indeed, human sin led Jesus Christ, God the Son, to the cross - but rather to affirm that the power of sin in our lives is broken, not by our own efforts, but by the saving work of Jesus Christ. Having been freed by Christ from sin, we are now freed to love and serve God and neighbor. Having broken the heavy yoke of sin under which we staggered, we are fitted with the easy yoke – the Greek calls it a good yoke or a kind yoke - offered by Christ.
What burdens are you carrying? Are these the easy burden of Christ, or the heavy yokes we lay on ourselves and each other. It is not Jesus who bids us to work ourselves to an early grave – remember that God commanded us to observe the Sabbath – that is, to rest – and in the Deuteronomy version of the 10 Commandments, God explicitly links the command of Sabbath rest to God’s liberation of Israel from the heavy servitude of Egyptian bondage, where there was no rest. Characteristically, the religious establishment of Jesus’ day turned the Sabbath itself into yet another burden, but it was Jesus who liberated the Sabbath, saying that the Sabbath was made for us, not us for the Sabbath. It is not Jesus who bids us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. It’s not Jesus who leads us to envy the lives of others. It’s not Jesus who calls us to pretend to be something we’re not, to project a false image of ourselves.
Indeed, the power of sin tries to project a false image of God – tries to depict our gracious God , our God of love, as a vicious, vengeful God, as a puritanical God who wants to stamp out every bit of pleasure in our lives. But in Scripture, God’s love and grace come through. Our Old Testament readings depict this experience of God’s love. After last week’s harrowing reading from Genesis, in which God narrowly averted Abraham from offering Isaac as a sacrifice, we have today’s somewhat long, but utterly lovely story of the coming together of Isaac and his wife, Rebekah. Human love, human caring, human tenderness, are gifts from God, gifts to be embraced, not shunned. This comes through even more strongly in our reading from the Song of Solomon, a collection of ancient love songs, one of the few such readings in the lectionary. If you think of Scripture as dry and didactic, a collection of “thou shalt nots”, if you haven’t read the Song of Solomon for a while, I’d encourage you to give it a look. It’s sensuous, it’s erotic – and it’s in the Bible. Later interpreters saw these songs as an image of God’s love for humankind – and if this is the case, God’s love is passionate, tender, God wooing and God pursuing humankind in love.
And finally, in our reading from Matthew, Jesus responds to criticisms that he hangs out with the wrong kind of people. He’s seen as a party guy, hanging out and even eating with sinners. In Jesus’ time, the banquet table was seen as an image of the kingdom of God – if you invited someone to a banquet, you were in effect also saying that you’d like to sit at table with this person in the kingdom of God – and Jesus kept inviting the wrong people to the banquet. Again, God pursuing sinners, not dragging them off to a public flogging, but inviting them to a banquet.
In a few moments, we will gather to be refreshed at the Lord’s table, to share bread and wine, to remember Christ’s offering of his body and blood, in the assurance that in this act of eating and drinking together, Christ is truly present with us. So come to the table, not because you must, but because you may. Come to the table, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and Christ will give you rest. Amen.
Genesis 24:34-67 Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Romans 7:15-25a Matthew 11:16-19,25-30)
Jesus’ words near the end of our Gospel reading are among the most comforting in Scripture. Jesus invites all who labor and are heavy laden, all those weighed down by the cares of life, to come to him. Jesus promises that his yoke is easy, and his burden lighter than the burdens we impose on ourselves.
This message of Jesus runs counter to the message of our society, and counter to our own attempts to manage our heavy loads. In our culture, we draw much of our identity from our work. If I meet someone for the first time, I may ask them, “well, where do you work?” or just “what do you do?” Since the Industrial Revolution, our society has used machinery to reduce the need for brute force, and more recently computer technology has reduced the need for mundane, repetitive mental labor. The hope has always been that this technology would introduce an age of leisure, with machines and robots tending to our every need. The outcome, however, has not been a reduction of work, but rather a change in the nature of work. While there is indeed less need for physical strength or certain forms of mental drudgery in the work place – it’s been a long time since I’ve had to add up long columns of numbers by hand - the work force seems divided between those who have difficulty finding work, because of limited demand for their skills, and those who are employed and are working longer and longer hours to keep up with the demands of management, or working two and three low-pay, no-benefits part-time jobs – want fries with that? - to keep up with the bills. We have not, thank goodness, yet reached the point of Japan, where the cultural expectation to work weekends and overtime has led to the Japanese national phenomenon of karoshi, death by overwork. But our culture’s overemphasis on work leads to strain on families, lack of sleep, and, for many, an ongoing sense of feeling drained, spent, used up.
In the church, we may find expectations that may be different, but just as daunting. A sense of obligation can lead us to take on more and more responsibility at church – as if everything depends on us, and the entire place will fall apart if we don’t show up, if we don’t stand and deliver. Guilt and shame – whether over specific failings or a general sense of failure – may block out the light of God’s love and joy from our lives. Our attempts to deny and hide from our sins and limitations can make it hard to be honest with those around us. If we carry a false image of a God who is angry, endlessly demanding, vengeful, we can tie ourselves up in knots trying to appease the wrath of the great Taskmaster in the sky.
In our reading from Romans, Paul gives us a vivid description of his struggles with sin and his thanksgiving for God’s grace. As Saul, trying to please God apart from the saving work of Jesus, he tied himself up in knots and tore himself to shreds. Remember that when, as Saul, he persecuted the church, he did it precisely because he thought it was what God wanted. After his Damascus road encounter with the Risen Christ, he learned that those he thought were detestable sinners were instead God’s beloved, that his best, most fervent attempts to please God were instead sin, were instead precisely an offense to God. The law declares God’s will, and Paul wants to do God’s will, but because of the power of sin finds himself instead doing what he detests. Like an addict, the compulsion of sin drives Paul to do what makes him sick at heart. For Paul, the law acts as a mirror, and gazing into that mirror, Paul is horrified by what he sees. He feels himself locked away from light of God’s grace, staggering under his burden of guilt. “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Paul asks. And then Paul answers his own anguished question with words of gratitude and praise – “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
We may find ourselves described in Paul’s words. We affirm that, in baptism, our sinful nature has been put to death, and we rise out of the water in the new life of Christ. These are God’s promises – but the fulfillment of these promises comes over the course of our lives. The power of sin, though ultimately broken, still stubbornly hangs on. The new life in Christ, begun in baptism, is only fully realized in the life to come. Our future is with God, but the past, represented by sin working through our flesh, is still very much with us. But thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, for despite our stumbles in this life, by God’s grace, we are assured that the new life begun in baptism will become eternal life with God. For now, Paul says in Colossians 3:3, our lives are hidden in Christ – the true selves that God would have us be, the true selves that in the future we will be, for now are hidden in Christ. When we feel weighed down with guilt, we can have faith that sin and death do not have the last word. Though life in the present may be a very mixed bag, our true selves, the selves we are destined to become, are hidden in Christ. And we can rest in that. Every week we confess our sin, and every week we affirm that, in Christ, our sins are forgiven. This isn’t to say that God is indifferent to sin – indeed, human sin led Jesus Christ, God the Son, to the cross - but rather to affirm that the power of sin in our lives is broken, not by our own efforts, but by the saving work of Jesus Christ. Having been freed by Christ from sin, we are now freed to love and serve God and neighbor. Having broken the heavy yoke of sin under which we staggered, we are fitted with the easy yoke – the Greek calls it a good yoke or a kind yoke - offered by Christ.
What burdens are you carrying? Are these the easy burden of Christ, or the heavy yokes we lay on ourselves and each other. It is not Jesus who bids us to work ourselves to an early grave – remember that God commanded us to observe the Sabbath – that is, to rest – and in the Deuteronomy version of the 10 Commandments, God explicitly links the command of Sabbath rest to God’s liberation of Israel from the heavy servitude of Egyptian bondage, where there was no rest. Characteristically, the religious establishment of Jesus’ day turned the Sabbath itself into yet another burden, but it was Jesus who liberated the Sabbath, saying that the Sabbath was made for us, not us for the Sabbath. It is not Jesus who bids us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. It’s not Jesus who leads us to envy the lives of others. It’s not Jesus who calls us to pretend to be something we’re not, to project a false image of ourselves.
Indeed, the power of sin tries to project a false image of God – tries to depict our gracious God , our God of love, as a vicious, vengeful God, as a puritanical God who wants to stamp out every bit of pleasure in our lives. But in Scripture, God’s love and grace come through. Our Old Testament readings depict this experience of God’s love. After last week’s harrowing reading from Genesis, in which God narrowly averted Abraham from offering Isaac as a sacrifice, we have today’s somewhat long, but utterly lovely story of the coming together of Isaac and his wife, Rebekah. Human love, human caring, human tenderness, are gifts from God, gifts to be embraced, not shunned. This comes through even more strongly in our reading from the Song of Solomon, a collection of ancient love songs, one of the few such readings in the lectionary. If you think of Scripture as dry and didactic, a collection of “thou shalt nots”, if you haven’t read the Song of Solomon for a while, I’d encourage you to give it a look. It’s sensuous, it’s erotic – and it’s in the Bible. Later interpreters saw these songs as an image of God’s love for humankind – and if this is the case, God’s love is passionate, tender, God wooing and God pursuing humankind in love.
And finally, in our reading from Matthew, Jesus responds to criticisms that he hangs out with the wrong kind of people. He’s seen as a party guy, hanging out and even eating with sinners. In Jesus’ time, the banquet table was seen as an image of the kingdom of God – if you invited someone to a banquet, you were in effect also saying that you’d like to sit at table with this person in the kingdom of God – and Jesus kept inviting the wrong people to the banquet. Again, God pursuing sinners, not dragging them off to a public flogging, but inviting them to a banquet.
In a few moments, we will gather to be refreshed at the Lord’s table, to share bread and wine, to remember Christ’s offering of his body and blood, in the assurance that in this act of eating and drinking together, Christ is truly present with us. So come to the table, not because you must, but because you may. Come to the table, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and Christ will give you rest. Amen.
A Prophet's Reward
(Scriptures: Genesis 22:1-14 Jeremiah 28:5-9
Romans 6:12-23 Matthew 10:32-42)
Today the lectionary gives us an odd, and challenging, assortment of Scripture readings. We have the very difficult story of Abraham’s willingness to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice before God stops him. We have Jeremiah’s response to a false prophet who promised a speedy end to Babylonian captivity. We have Paul’s ruminations about the power of sin and grace in our lives. And we have the tail end of a section of Jesus’ instructions to his disciples in preparation of sending them out on their first mission. He is very up front about how divisive his message will be – households will be set to disagreement about him, because Jesus makes an absolute claim for the primary loyalty of his disciples. Jesus said that those who would put even their own families above their commitment to Jesus are not worthy of Jesus.
We get a picture of what loyalty to God will mean in our very difficult reading from the Old Testament. We’re told that God tests Abraham by demanding that he offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. In hearing this, we should remember that Isaac was Abraham’s only son by his wife Sarah, the son that God had promised Abraham and Sarah, the son for whom, in their old age, Abraham and Sarah had waited for so long. And now God was telling Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. And as we read, we wonder – how could God ask such a thing. It’s a barbaric request. It didn’t make sense. And the text heightens the unease within us when, in addressing Abraham, God explicitly refers to Isaac as “your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love.” Talk about twisting the knife!
Oddly, we’re not given any sense that Abraham hesitated. He makes the necessary preparations and calls Isaac to go on a walk with him. We’re not given access to Abraham’s thoughts during the long walk to the top of Mt. Moriah. We do learn that Isaac seemed to be getting some hint of what was to come, or at least was feeling increasingly uneasy about where this walk with his father might be leading, when Isaac observed that Abraham had brought everything but the sacrificial animal, to which Abraham said that the Lord would provide the sacrifice. And, of course, that’s just what happened: After Abraham had bound Isaac for sacrifice and raised his knife, the Lord stopped him just in time, Abraham saw a ram stuck in the bushes, and offered the ram as the sacrifice. God commended Abraham for proving that he would not withhold his own son from God. As awful as this story reads to us, it’s considered a holy moment in Jewish history; the mountain was called Yahweh-yireh or Jehovah-Jireh – the Lord provides. Through the years, as people would ask “how did this mountain get the name “The Lord Provides”, the community elders would recount this story. Many centuries later, King David offered a sacrifice on this same site to ward off a plague on his people, and it is thought that this is the same mountain where Solomon’s Temple was built. Also, this incident established once and for all that, unlike some of the false gods of the peoples surrounding Israel, Israel’s God did not demand human sacrifice as payment for the peoples sins.
It would be hard to imagine what the walk down the mountain was like for Abraham and Isaac. On one hand, both were alive to walk down the mountain, and that’s good. But what would the conversation have been like? Perhaps Isaac asked his father “what on earth were you thinking?” Isaac must have wondered if he could ever fully trust his father again. Both lived to tell of their encounter with the divine, and both were blessed for their faithfulness, but both were forever changed by the experience – it was a most costly blessing.
Now, in our Gospel reading, as Jesus is preparing his disciples for their first mission trip, Jesus is not asking his disciples to offer their families on altars as human sacrifice. But Jesus is asking his disciples potentially to sacrifice their relationships with their families, to put their loyalty to Jesus ahead of their loyalties to their families. Especially with the more conservative expressions of Christianity having become so identified with what they call “family values”, Jesus’ words here seem almost – dare I say it – unchristian. And so we may hasten to try to explain away Jesus’ words….surely he didn’t mean to say that! But if we read the Gospels with an open mind, without preconceived notions, with the blinders off, we will likely find that Jesus’ sense of family values was and is very different from the family values we hear about from the TV and radio preachers. On one hand, Jesus saw marital vows as binding, and left only narrow grounds for divorce. Jesus also condemned the tradition of his day by which one could avoid supporting their parents by designating portions of their possessions as items designated to donated in the future to the synagogue, and the writer of I Timothy says that one who fails to provide for their family is worse than an unbeliever. Divorced women and widows without support were very vulnerable in Jesus’ day, and Jesus didn’t want the Christian community to leave these vulnerable ones out in the cold, so to speak. On the other hand, Jesus was calling his followers into a family of faith whose ties were to be even stronger than those of our natural family. This is how Paul, in one of our readings from Romans that we’ll encounter in a couple weeks, could call Jesus the firstborn of a large family. This is how Jesus could say that his disciples who had left behind their families would receive a family a hundredfold. Indeed, once when Jesus was teaching and someone said his mother and brothers were outside the house, Jesus called his followers his true family, and left mom and the brothers standing outside. So it is in this sense that Jesus said he had come to bring a sword; the kind of Christian community he sought to build would inevitably intrude on families of birth or families of marriage, would leave non-Christian family members feeling like they, too, were shut out of some part of the lives of their Christian family members.
Jesus ends this difficult, difficult section of teaching by saying that those who find their lives will lose them, while those who lose their lives for his sake would find them. At this point, Jesus’ demands likely were giving his disciples second thoughts…do we really want to hang around with this guy? Maybe when he sends us out, we should just keep walking. But then Jesus ends with a few verses about rewards – that those who provide hospitality for his disciples, it is as though they provided hospitality for Christ himself. Anyone who welcomes a prophet as a prophet receives a prophet’s reward, and one who welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person receives the reward of the righteous, and one who does as little as offer a cup of cold water to a new believer – whom Jesus called “one of these little ones” – would not lose their reward.
That phrase, “a prophet’s reward” struck me as having multiple layers of meaning. What is a prophet’s reward? On one hand, we know that prophets generally met with opposition – remember that Jesus called Jerusalem the city that stoned the prophets. Our brief reading from Jeremiah reminds us that false prophets like Hananiah, who told people what they wanted to hear, were welcomed, while true prophets such as Jeremiah, who told them difficult things that they needed to hear, were persecuted. And certainly those who openly welcomed and provided hospitality to a prophet, might risk bringing down on their own heads the persecution encountered by the prophet – a sort of guilt by association. On the other hand, by casting their lot with the prophet, and by extension, casting their lot with God, God would set their hospitality on the same level as the prophet’s faithfulness, and reward them accordingly. So prophets received contrasting rewards, if you will – persecution from the world; eternal life from God.
It would seem that, in these passages, God is making a whole lot of extreme demands. God asks much. Perhaps it seems that God asks too much. How can God possibly expect us to be willing to leave everything else behind to be disciples of Christ? When we start to think along these lines, we should remember that God is not asking anything of us that God did not do himself. Abraham was, finally, not asked to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, but God did offer his son Jesus as a sacrifice. As costly as Christian discipleship may be for us, it’s nothing compared to what God’s passionate, committed love affair with humankind has cost God. As today’s reading from Romans says, “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord is the gift of God, free to us – but purchased by God at great price, the death of his Son Jesus. Similarly, while we cannot work our way into heaven or do anything to earn eternal life – truly responding to the message of Jesus will, over time, change our lives in radical ways. As Paul said in our reading from Romans, because of the saving work of Christ, we are freed from sin to be radically obedient to God, called from self-absorbed, self-centered isolation into the new community of faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of this in his book “The Cost of Discipleship” when he contrasted what he called “cheap grace” – the false view that because of the saving work of Christ, we can continue to do whatever we want and Christ will somehow clean it up in the end – with what Bonhoeffer called “costly grace” – grace that makes a radical change in our lives. And Bonhoeffer practiced what he preached: Bonhoeffer’s radical obedience to God at a time when the German church of his day was corrupted by obedience to Hitler, led him to his execution by the Nazis.
From Romans 11:22 – “Note then the kindness and the severity of God.” God’s great kindness led Jesus to the cross. God’s severity demands a response from those who would follow. In today’s readings, God’s severity may demand that we leave behind all that is familiar for the sake of the Gospel. By contrast, in God’s kindness, God will reward even those who offer a cup of cold water in the name of Jesus to the least of Christ’s disciples. May God’s radical kindness toward us lead us toward radical kindness toward our neighbors. May we at Emanuel always be ready to welcome those whom God sends us. Amen.
Romans 6:12-23 Matthew 10:32-42)
Today the lectionary gives us an odd, and challenging, assortment of Scripture readings. We have the very difficult story of Abraham’s willingness to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice before God stops him. We have Jeremiah’s response to a false prophet who promised a speedy end to Babylonian captivity. We have Paul’s ruminations about the power of sin and grace in our lives. And we have the tail end of a section of Jesus’ instructions to his disciples in preparation of sending them out on their first mission. He is very up front about how divisive his message will be – households will be set to disagreement about him, because Jesus makes an absolute claim for the primary loyalty of his disciples. Jesus said that those who would put even their own families above their commitment to Jesus are not worthy of Jesus.
We get a picture of what loyalty to God will mean in our very difficult reading from the Old Testament. We’re told that God tests Abraham by demanding that he offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. In hearing this, we should remember that Isaac was Abraham’s only son by his wife Sarah, the son that God had promised Abraham and Sarah, the son for whom, in their old age, Abraham and Sarah had waited for so long. And now God was telling Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. And as we read, we wonder – how could God ask such a thing. It’s a barbaric request. It didn’t make sense. And the text heightens the unease within us when, in addressing Abraham, God explicitly refers to Isaac as “your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love.” Talk about twisting the knife!
Oddly, we’re not given any sense that Abraham hesitated. He makes the necessary preparations and calls Isaac to go on a walk with him. We’re not given access to Abraham’s thoughts during the long walk to the top of Mt. Moriah. We do learn that Isaac seemed to be getting some hint of what was to come, or at least was feeling increasingly uneasy about where this walk with his father might be leading, when Isaac observed that Abraham had brought everything but the sacrificial animal, to which Abraham said that the Lord would provide the sacrifice. And, of course, that’s just what happened: After Abraham had bound Isaac for sacrifice and raised his knife, the Lord stopped him just in time, Abraham saw a ram stuck in the bushes, and offered the ram as the sacrifice. God commended Abraham for proving that he would not withhold his own son from God. As awful as this story reads to us, it’s considered a holy moment in Jewish history; the mountain was called Yahweh-yireh or Jehovah-Jireh – the Lord provides. Through the years, as people would ask “how did this mountain get the name “The Lord Provides”, the community elders would recount this story. Many centuries later, King David offered a sacrifice on this same site to ward off a plague on his people, and it is thought that this is the same mountain where Solomon’s Temple was built. Also, this incident established once and for all that, unlike some of the false gods of the peoples surrounding Israel, Israel’s God did not demand human sacrifice as payment for the peoples sins.
It would be hard to imagine what the walk down the mountain was like for Abraham and Isaac. On one hand, both were alive to walk down the mountain, and that’s good. But what would the conversation have been like? Perhaps Isaac asked his father “what on earth were you thinking?” Isaac must have wondered if he could ever fully trust his father again. Both lived to tell of their encounter with the divine, and both were blessed for their faithfulness, but both were forever changed by the experience – it was a most costly blessing.
Now, in our Gospel reading, as Jesus is preparing his disciples for their first mission trip, Jesus is not asking his disciples to offer their families on altars as human sacrifice. But Jesus is asking his disciples potentially to sacrifice their relationships with their families, to put their loyalty to Jesus ahead of their loyalties to their families. Especially with the more conservative expressions of Christianity having become so identified with what they call “family values”, Jesus’ words here seem almost – dare I say it – unchristian. And so we may hasten to try to explain away Jesus’ words….surely he didn’t mean to say that! But if we read the Gospels with an open mind, without preconceived notions, with the blinders off, we will likely find that Jesus’ sense of family values was and is very different from the family values we hear about from the TV and radio preachers. On one hand, Jesus saw marital vows as binding, and left only narrow grounds for divorce. Jesus also condemned the tradition of his day by which one could avoid supporting their parents by designating portions of their possessions as items designated to donated in the future to the synagogue, and the writer of I Timothy says that one who fails to provide for their family is worse than an unbeliever. Divorced women and widows without support were very vulnerable in Jesus’ day, and Jesus didn’t want the Christian community to leave these vulnerable ones out in the cold, so to speak. On the other hand, Jesus was calling his followers into a family of faith whose ties were to be even stronger than those of our natural family. This is how Paul, in one of our readings from Romans that we’ll encounter in a couple weeks, could call Jesus the firstborn of a large family. This is how Jesus could say that his disciples who had left behind their families would receive a family a hundredfold. Indeed, once when Jesus was teaching and someone said his mother and brothers were outside the house, Jesus called his followers his true family, and left mom and the brothers standing outside. So it is in this sense that Jesus said he had come to bring a sword; the kind of Christian community he sought to build would inevitably intrude on families of birth or families of marriage, would leave non-Christian family members feeling like they, too, were shut out of some part of the lives of their Christian family members.
Jesus ends this difficult, difficult section of teaching by saying that those who find their lives will lose them, while those who lose their lives for his sake would find them. At this point, Jesus’ demands likely were giving his disciples second thoughts…do we really want to hang around with this guy? Maybe when he sends us out, we should just keep walking. But then Jesus ends with a few verses about rewards – that those who provide hospitality for his disciples, it is as though they provided hospitality for Christ himself. Anyone who welcomes a prophet as a prophet receives a prophet’s reward, and one who welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person receives the reward of the righteous, and one who does as little as offer a cup of cold water to a new believer – whom Jesus called “one of these little ones” – would not lose their reward.
That phrase, “a prophet’s reward” struck me as having multiple layers of meaning. What is a prophet’s reward? On one hand, we know that prophets generally met with opposition – remember that Jesus called Jerusalem the city that stoned the prophets. Our brief reading from Jeremiah reminds us that false prophets like Hananiah, who told people what they wanted to hear, were welcomed, while true prophets such as Jeremiah, who told them difficult things that they needed to hear, were persecuted. And certainly those who openly welcomed and provided hospitality to a prophet, might risk bringing down on their own heads the persecution encountered by the prophet – a sort of guilt by association. On the other hand, by casting their lot with the prophet, and by extension, casting their lot with God, God would set their hospitality on the same level as the prophet’s faithfulness, and reward them accordingly. So prophets received contrasting rewards, if you will – persecution from the world; eternal life from God.
It would seem that, in these passages, God is making a whole lot of extreme demands. God asks much. Perhaps it seems that God asks too much. How can God possibly expect us to be willing to leave everything else behind to be disciples of Christ? When we start to think along these lines, we should remember that God is not asking anything of us that God did not do himself. Abraham was, finally, not asked to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, but God did offer his son Jesus as a sacrifice. As costly as Christian discipleship may be for us, it’s nothing compared to what God’s passionate, committed love affair with humankind has cost God. As today’s reading from Romans says, “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord is the gift of God, free to us – but purchased by God at great price, the death of his Son Jesus. Similarly, while we cannot work our way into heaven or do anything to earn eternal life – truly responding to the message of Jesus will, over time, change our lives in radical ways. As Paul said in our reading from Romans, because of the saving work of Christ, we are freed from sin to be radically obedient to God, called from self-absorbed, self-centered isolation into the new community of faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of this in his book “The Cost of Discipleship” when he contrasted what he called “cheap grace” – the false view that because of the saving work of Christ, we can continue to do whatever we want and Christ will somehow clean it up in the end – with what Bonhoeffer called “costly grace” – grace that makes a radical change in our lives. And Bonhoeffer practiced what he preached: Bonhoeffer’s radical obedience to God at a time when the German church of his day was corrupted by obedience to Hitler, led him to his execution by the Nazis.
From Romans 11:22 – “Note then the kindness and the severity of God.” God’s great kindness led Jesus to the cross. God’s severity demands a response from those who would follow. In today’s readings, God’s severity may demand that we leave behind all that is familiar for the sake of the Gospel. By contrast, in God’s kindness, God will reward even those who offer a cup of cold water in the name of Jesus to the least of Christ’s disciples. May God’s radical kindness toward us lead us toward radical kindness toward our neighbors. May we at Emanuel always be ready to welcome those whom God sends us. Amen.
One in Three
(Scriptures: Genesis 1:1 – Genesis 2:3 Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13 Matthew 28:16-20)
Today is Trinity Sunday, in which the church lifts up the doctrine of the Trinity, one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or in other language, God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Trinity Sunday is always the Sunday following Pentecost, when we celebrate the coming of that third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.
Given the amount of thought the church has given to this doctrine and the amount of conflict the doctrine has produced – there have been numerous controversies, and even the split in around the year 1054 between the Eastern and Western church was related to the way in which the Holy Spirit relates to the other two persons of the Trinity – not to mention the much more recent and much more localized split in New England and elsewhere between the Trinitarian Congregationalists, who went on to become part of the UCC, and the Unitarians, who did not - it is striking that the word Trinity is nowhere found in Scripture. While readings such as today’s mention the persons of the trinity and there are other hints of the Trinity elsewhere in Scripture, the full-blown doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly stated in Scripture. I say this to remind us that the doctrine of the Trinity is a human creation, a human attempt to understand that One God who is presented in three persons in Scripture. Inevitably it a human attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible, to define the undefinable – for any God within our ability to define is inevitably a God that we have shrunken and made over in our own image. And whenever we discuss human doctrine, no matter how venerable, we need to maintain some measure of humility, recognizing that while doctrine is – one hopes - derived from Scripture, it does not carry the weight of authority that Scripture does. Nonetheless, the doctrine of the Trinity is among the most venerable the church has to offer.
One way in which the Trinity is understood is in terms of function: God the Father as creator, who created the world, and not just our world, but the cosmos, all that is, God the Son as the redeemer, who proclaimed the reign of God and by his death and resurrection liberated us from sin, and God the Holy Spirit as sustainer, God within us, God among us, giving us strength for each new day, praying in groans to deep for words when our human thoughts and words fail us. Yet all acts of creating, redeeming, and sustaining are done, not by three separate gods, but by our one gracious God.
However, the doctrine of the Trinity speaks, not of one God with three functions, but of one God in three persons. So there is an image of intimacy, fellowship, among the three persons of the trinity. This intimacy is defined under the Greek word “perichoresis”, meaning mutual interpenetration and mutual indwelling, beside which the deepest human intimacy appears only as the faintest of shadows. We get some sense of this in John’s Gospel in Jesus’ farewell address to his disciples, when he says such things as “I am in the Father and the Father is in me, and you are in me as I am in the Father. This only mentions two persons of the Trinity, Father and Son, but it’s no great leap to extend the metaphor to include the Holy Spirit in this image. Perichoresis – peri means “around”, and “choresis” comes from the same root as choreography – so we can think of the three persons of the Trinity in a continual, eternal, never-ending choreography or dance of mutual love. All of which is to say that we worship a God who is relational, both within Godself and in always reaching out in love to humankind, with a depth of relationship, of passion and yearning, that human beings can, at best, only barely begin to glimpse.
Our reading from Genesis shows our Triune God at work. As God speaks the universe into being – “let us create” – we remember that John’s Gospel affirms that Son, the Word made flesh, was present from the beginning, and we feel the Spirit moving over the face of the waters.
During the coffee hour last Sunday, we read the creation story, as we read it this morning. We noted that there’s something different in the creation of humankind than from the other parts of creation, that humankind is said to be created in God’s image. It’s the only part of the creation story where we read this affirmation – in God’s image God created them, male and female God created them. Certainly, we share much in common with animals – we have bodies, internal organs, and such. We have much of the same fight or flight instincts they do, what evolutionary biologists call our “lizard brains”. But as we think of the ways in which humans differ from animals – in having consciousness, a soul, the ability to think, to plan, to relate, to love – to name just a few – we can affirm that in these elements, humans resemble God in a way that animals do not. We’ve spoken of the dance of mutual love among the persons of the Trinity, and given that joy, we may well wonder, with the Psalmist, “what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them.” – and yet the Psalmist also affirms that God has created us a little lower than God, and crowned us with glory and honor. The miracle is that, even though God has no particular need of us, yet in his grace he passionately cares for us, whom God created in God’s image. Certainly sin has deeply marred that image of God within each of us, but the resemblance is still there, however faint. This is important to remember when we’re inclined to abuse others, to oppress others, to dismiss others, to use others for our own purposes – and we are all guilty at times of the sin of loving things and using people, instead of the other way around – that those whom we abuse, oppress, dismiss, and use – are, like us, bearers of the divine image, however deeply buried under the wreckage of sin, and passionately beloved by God.
Our Gospel reading today is the last four verses of Matthew’s Gospel, commonly called the Great Commission. It is one of the very few places in which all three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are named together…..appropriate for Matthew’s Gospel, as, among the four Gospels, Matthew’s Gospel includes the most developed language relating to the church. However, we should remember that our reading is not called the Great Theological Summit, but the Great Commission – the focus is not on theological reflection, but on action, on mission. There are two uses of the word “all” that are noteworthy. The Risen Jesus says that “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me” and “go and make disciples of all nations.” – and we are to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything (or “all”) that I have taught.
This is all-encompassing language – Christ has all authority – not just over our Sunday mornings, but over all things; therefore we are to make disciples of all nations – which involves going way, way, way outside our comfort zones - and teach them to obey all that Jesus has commanded. But with this broad claim of authority and the broad mission statement comes an equally broad promise: I will be with you always”. Not just now and then. Not just on Sunday mornings. Always. Always.
Amid all that is mysterious about the Trinity, Jesus is the best revelation we have of the character of God. Remember that, in John’s Gospel, Philip asked Jesus to show the disciples the Father, to which Jesus replied that since they had seen Jesus, they had seen the Father. And so if we want to know what God is like, the best way to do that is to look at Jesus as presented in the New Testament, especially the Gospels. Jesus who came preaching good news to the poor, liberation of the captive, the reign of God, Jesus who ate and drank with those whom society scapegoated as sinners and confronted those who used their positions of power to oppress, Jesus who cast out demons and healed diseases, Jesus who, while we were yet sinners, died for us – this is the best image we have of what God the father is like. And as followers of Jesus, we are to live in the same way, going forth into all the world to make disciples and baptize and teach, so that through our words of caring and deeds of love, our neighbors nearby and our neighbors far away come to know this same Good News. May God use our congregation, Emanuel Church, to bring this good news to our neighbors down the block and our neighbors around the globe. Amen.
2 Corinthians 13:11-13 Matthew 28:16-20)
Today is Trinity Sunday, in which the church lifts up the doctrine of the Trinity, one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or in other language, God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Trinity Sunday is always the Sunday following Pentecost, when we celebrate the coming of that third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.
Given the amount of thought the church has given to this doctrine and the amount of conflict the doctrine has produced – there have been numerous controversies, and even the split in around the year 1054 between the Eastern and Western church was related to the way in which the Holy Spirit relates to the other two persons of the Trinity – not to mention the much more recent and much more localized split in New England and elsewhere between the Trinitarian Congregationalists, who went on to become part of the UCC, and the Unitarians, who did not - it is striking that the word Trinity is nowhere found in Scripture. While readings such as today’s mention the persons of the trinity and there are other hints of the Trinity elsewhere in Scripture, the full-blown doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly stated in Scripture. I say this to remind us that the doctrine of the Trinity is a human creation, a human attempt to understand that One God who is presented in three persons in Scripture. Inevitably it a human attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible, to define the undefinable – for any God within our ability to define is inevitably a God that we have shrunken and made over in our own image. And whenever we discuss human doctrine, no matter how venerable, we need to maintain some measure of humility, recognizing that while doctrine is – one hopes - derived from Scripture, it does not carry the weight of authority that Scripture does. Nonetheless, the doctrine of the Trinity is among the most venerable the church has to offer.
One way in which the Trinity is understood is in terms of function: God the Father as creator, who created the world, and not just our world, but the cosmos, all that is, God the Son as the redeemer, who proclaimed the reign of God and by his death and resurrection liberated us from sin, and God the Holy Spirit as sustainer, God within us, God among us, giving us strength for each new day, praying in groans to deep for words when our human thoughts and words fail us. Yet all acts of creating, redeeming, and sustaining are done, not by three separate gods, but by our one gracious God.
However, the doctrine of the Trinity speaks, not of one God with three functions, but of one God in three persons. So there is an image of intimacy, fellowship, among the three persons of the trinity. This intimacy is defined under the Greek word “perichoresis”, meaning mutual interpenetration and mutual indwelling, beside which the deepest human intimacy appears only as the faintest of shadows. We get some sense of this in John’s Gospel in Jesus’ farewell address to his disciples, when he says such things as “I am in the Father and the Father is in me, and you are in me as I am in the Father. This only mentions two persons of the Trinity, Father and Son, but it’s no great leap to extend the metaphor to include the Holy Spirit in this image. Perichoresis – peri means “around”, and “choresis” comes from the same root as choreography – so we can think of the three persons of the Trinity in a continual, eternal, never-ending choreography or dance of mutual love. All of which is to say that we worship a God who is relational, both within Godself and in always reaching out in love to humankind, with a depth of relationship, of passion and yearning, that human beings can, at best, only barely begin to glimpse.
Our reading from Genesis shows our Triune God at work. As God speaks the universe into being – “let us create” – we remember that John’s Gospel affirms that Son, the Word made flesh, was present from the beginning, and we feel the Spirit moving over the face of the waters.
During the coffee hour last Sunday, we read the creation story, as we read it this morning. We noted that there’s something different in the creation of humankind than from the other parts of creation, that humankind is said to be created in God’s image. It’s the only part of the creation story where we read this affirmation – in God’s image God created them, male and female God created them. Certainly, we share much in common with animals – we have bodies, internal organs, and such. We have much of the same fight or flight instincts they do, what evolutionary biologists call our “lizard brains”. But as we think of the ways in which humans differ from animals – in having consciousness, a soul, the ability to think, to plan, to relate, to love – to name just a few – we can affirm that in these elements, humans resemble God in a way that animals do not. We’ve spoken of the dance of mutual love among the persons of the Trinity, and given that joy, we may well wonder, with the Psalmist, “what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them.” – and yet the Psalmist also affirms that God has created us a little lower than God, and crowned us with glory and honor. The miracle is that, even though God has no particular need of us, yet in his grace he passionately cares for us, whom God created in God’s image. Certainly sin has deeply marred that image of God within each of us, but the resemblance is still there, however faint. This is important to remember when we’re inclined to abuse others, to oppress others, to dismiss others, to use others for our own purposes – and we are all guilty at times of the sin of loving things and using people, instead of the other way around – that those whom we abuse, oppress, dismiss, and use – are, like us, bearers of the divine image, however deeply buried under the wreckage of sin, and passionately beloved by God.
Our Gospel reading today is the last four verses of Matthew’s Gospel, commonly called the Great Commission. It is one of the very few places in which all three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are named together…..appropriate for Matthew’s Gospel, as, among the four Gospels, Matthew’s Gospel includes the most developed language relating to the church. However, we should remember that our reading is not called the Great Theological Summit, but the Great Commission – the focus is not on theological reflection, but on action, on mission. There are two uses of the word “all” that are noteworthy. The Risen Jesus says that “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me” and “go and make disciples of all nations.” – and we are to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything (or “all”) that I have taught.
This is all-encompassing language – Christ has all authority – not just over our Sunday mornings, but over all things; therefore we are to make disciples of all nations – which involves going way, way, way outside our comfort zones - and teach them to obey all that Jesus has commanded. But with this broad claim of authority and the broad mission statement comes an equally broad promise: I will be with you always”. Not just now and then. Not just on Sunday mornings. Always. Always.
Amid all that is mysterious about the Trinity, Jesus is the best revelation we have of the character of God. Remember that, in John’s Gospel, Philip asked Jesus to show the disciples the Father, to which Jesus replied that since they had seen Jesus, they had seen the Father. And so if we want to know what God is like, the best way to do that is to look at Jesus as presented in the New Testament, especially the Gospels. Jesus who came preaching good news to the poor, liberation of the captive, the reign of God, Jesus who ate and drank with those whom society scapegoated as sinners and confronted those who used their positions of power to oppress, Jesus who cast out demons and healed diseases, Jesus who, while we were yet sinners, died for us – this is the best image we have of what God the father is like. And as followers of Jesus, we are to live in the same way, going forth into all the world to make disciples and baptize and teach, so that through our words of caring and deeds of love, our neighbors nearby and our neighbors far away come to know this same Good News. May God use our congregation, Emanuel Church, to bring this good news to our neighbors down the block and our neighbors around the globe. Amen.
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