Galatians Sermon Series - “Live By Faith” 5-7-17

Galatians Sermon Series -  “Live By Faith”  5-7-17

   The Apostle Paul is second only to Jesus as the most important person in the origins of Christianity. Yet after two thousand years he remains one of the most controversial figures in the faith’s history. Some find him appealing, others find him appalling; some aren’t sure what to think of him, others know little about him. So as we begin this exploration of one Paul’s letters we’ll consider his importance, his mixed reputation, and how to approach the collection of writings  attributed to Paul.

   Paul’s importance is made clear simply by looking at the New Testament itself. Of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament, thirteen are letters attributed to Paul. Not all were actually written by Paul - and we’ll get to that in a moment - but they bear his name. In addition to these letters we also have the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, written by the Gospel writer Luke, in which Paul is the main character in over half of this volume. So half of the New Testament is by or about Paul. 

   In their book, “The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon,” theologians and bible scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan argue that Paul’s importance “extends beyond the New Testament and into the history of Christianity.” Not only was Paul primarily responsible for the spread of the early Jesus movement to include Gentiles (non-Jews) as well as Jews, but also for it’s spread across much of the Roman Empire at that time. And while Paul, like Jesus, never intended to start a new religion but rather was working within the structure of Judaism, he was primarily responsible for the emergence of Christianity as a new religion that, though it included Jews, became increasingly separate from Judaism.

   Paul’s influence is felt throughout the history of Christianity. Many of its most important, most influential theologians were influenced by Paul’s writings, beginning with St. Augustine. In what is considered the world’s first spiritual autobiography, Augustine wrote in his Confessions, that after reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, “Instantly…there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all of the gloom of doubt vanished away.” After this experience mediated by the writings of Paul, Augustine became the most influential theologian of the first thousand years of Christianity.

   In the more than a thousand years between Augustine and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, Paul gained even more importance, especially for Protestants during the Reformation. 

Martin Luther, the great Reformer, had his transforming experience of radical grace while preparing lectures on Paul, and Paul became the foundation of his theology, especially in how he contrasted grace and law, faith and works, language that shaped Luther as well as how we look at Luther. 

   John Calvin, the other most important Protestant Reformer, also made Paul central to his theology. Calvin’s theological descendants include millions of Protestants: Puritans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, and other Reformed denominations. And two centuries later, Paul played a central role in the birth of the Methodist church. Our founder, John Wesley, was converted to his mission to reform the Church of England while listening to a reading of Luther’s commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, when 

Wesley said he “felt his heart strangely warmed.” Wesley’s life work eventually led to a new denomination that we now know as the United Methodist Church. 

Thus, hundreds of millions of Protestants around the world have Paul as their primary theological ancestor. Needless to say, Paul matters; how, and how much, varies greatly among Christians.

   For some, Paul has been a mediator of radical, unconditional grace. That’s how Luther viewed him. Paul’s message of justification or salvation by grace through faith was joyously liberating for Luther, who in the Catholic church of the time had believed that to be right with God required meeting what were thought to be God’s requirements, a daunting task that tormented him and led to conflict and his protests (thus the name Protestant) against Catholic teachings. Borg and Crossan write, “Radical grace meant for Luther that God accepts us just as we are, and the Christian life is about living more and more fully into this realization, not about measuring up to requirements. 

For Luther, Paul’s message was about the end of requirements, or the Law, as the basis of our relationship with God.

   For other Protestants though, including many descendants of Luther, Paul’s theology has been understood, not as the abolition of requirements, 

but as a new requirement - namely, that believing his theology is required in order to be saved. Despite the emphasis upon God’s grace, “justification by grace through faith” was heard as “justification by faith,” where faith was understood not at trust, but as believing, creating a new form of works righteousness: the “work” being “to believe.” Faith then meant believing in a correct set of doctrines (which, coincidentally, happened to be their’s), and this was the only way to salvation. So what Luther originally experienced as a joyful liberation from a works-based anxiety morphed into the source of deep anxiety for many.

   This notion - that we are saved by something we do, that is believing a particular set of teachings about Jesus, God, and the Bible - continues among many Protestants in our time. It’s especially prevalent among those who emphasize [what’s called “orthodoxy,” or] “believing the right things” as foundational to being Christian and thus as a requirement for salvation.” (Borg, Crossan, pg 8) And, of course, there are thousands of different denominations and sets of beliefs, all of which, in one way or another, assume their belief is the best, the truest, the most biblical, the most Christian.

   Besides these very divergent interpretations of Paul and the writings attributed to him, his letters are not always easy to understand - they don’t always make sense to us. They’re not like the gospels, full of stories about Jesus and his teachings. In fact, Paul rarely mentions the stories of Jesus or the familiar teachings that we find so compelling in the gospels. Paul’s letters are just that, letters. When we read Paul, we’re reading somebody else’s mail. And these letters are written to faith communities that Paul established, places he had already visited to introduce Jesus Christ to them, and now he writes responding to very specific issues or problems that had arisen in those communities. And because these issues are local they don’t always make much sense to us if we don’t know the details of what’s gone on before and what precipitated the current conflict. 

   And if all of that isn’t enough to make some people avoid Paul, there’s the fact that many of the letters attributed to him endorse slavery, the subordination of women, and condemn homosexual behavior. They’ve been used for much of Christian history to justify systems of oppression including slavery.

   The subordination of women within the church and society has lasted even longer that slavery. Only in the last few decades did most mainline Protestant denominations begin to ordain women as clergy. The Catholic church still does not, most conservative Protestant churches do not, and many of these teach the subordination of wives to husbands. And it’s passages from Paul’s letters that are used to justify these positions. Paul has been used to support systems or cultural conventions that are or have been oppressive to more than half the human race. What a guy, right?

   And as if that’s not enough, one passage from his letter to the church at Rome, taken out of context, has been used to justify support of government oppression. 

Romans 13:1-7 says,

   Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is not authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and whose who resist will incur judgment.

   So while in our own society this passage is often quoted by conservative and evangelical Christians to support Presidents that they like (even as it’s conveniently forgotten when a moderate or liberal President is elected). More infamously, this passage was used by many German Christians to justify support of Hitler’s Third Reich during World War II. Closer to our own time and place, it’s been used by many Christians in this country to oppose civil disobedience during the civil rights movement and to legitimate supporting the American government’s decision to invade Iraq - 

stating that Christians are to support their government whatever they do; an argument that is increasingly unpersuasive to many Christians and that Jesus himself never made.

   So you get a sense of how tricky preaching Paul can be, if for no other reason than I’m 10 minutes into this first sermon on Paul’s letter to the Galatians and I have yet to talk about Paul’s letter to the Galatians. 

Paul, appealing or appalling, comes with baggage that has to be unpacked in order to be understood. 

We won’t unpack all of it today, but there is one last things that we need to get on the table before we get into this particular letter. 

And for that I turn to the great philosopher, Yogi Berra. 

   Yogi Berra, besides being a Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees in the 1950s and 60s, was known for many of the things he is quoted as having said, such as:

• “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” 
• “It’s like deja vu all over again.”  
• “You can observe a lot just by watching.” 
• “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.” 
• “The future ain’t what it used to be.” 
• And most famously perhaps, “It ain’t over til it’s over.” 

Years after his retirement, Berra wrote a memoir, famously titled, “I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said,” in which he corrects the record about which of the sayings attributed to him were actually his, and which he never said or that were reported incorrectly. 

   Paul never got a chance to correct the record, but it’s important to understand this: Paul didn’t really say everything he said. The overwhelming majority of mainstream bible scholars, have concluded that the thirteen letters attributed to Paul fall into three categories: 

• letters definitely written by Paul, 
• letter definitely not written by Paul, 
• and ones about which there is great uncertainty. 

• Again, Borg and Crossan write, “According to massive scholarly consensus, at least seven letters are “genuine” - that is, written by Paul himself. These seven include three longer ones (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians) and four shorter ones (1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon). 

Written in the 50s of the first century, give or take a 

year or two, they’re the earliest documents in the New Testament, earlier even than the gospels, the first of which, Mark, was written about 70. Thus, the genuine letters of Paul are the oldest witness we have to what was to become Christianity.”

   “According to an almost equally strong consensus, three letters were not written by Paul: 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, commonly known as the “pastoral letters” or simply the “pastorals.” Scholars estimate they were written around the year 100, possibly even a decade or two later. These are seen as not genuine, or “non-Pauline,” because they have what looks like a later historical setting and a style of writing quite unlike Paul’s in the genuine seven letters. Thus the letters to Timothy and Titus were written in the name of Paul several decades after his death. 

Now, we may think that writing in somebody else’s name was dishonest or fraudulent, but it was a common literary practice or convention in the ancient world, even in Judaism.”

   “The third group of letters about which there’s no scholarly consensus, are, however, seen by a majority 

of scholars as not coming from Paul. 

Often called the “disputed” letters, they include Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians.” 

Most scholars, including Borg and Crossan, “see these letters as ‘post-Paul,’ written a generation or so after his death, midway between the genuine letters and the later pastoral letters.”

   “Thus,” Borg and Crossan offer, “there are three “Pauls” within the letters attributed to him.” 

They call the Paul of the seven genuine letters the radical Paul - most closely reflecting the radical Jesus. 

They call the Paul of the three pastoral letters the reactionary Paul, because the author of these letters is not simply developing Paul’s message, but countering it or reacting to it at important points. 

In the third group there’s a strong attempt to accommodate Paul’s thoughts to the conventional mores of his time, especially to the Roman Empire, so in comparison to the radical Paul, they name the Paul of the disputed letters the conservative Paul - as in trying to conserve existing thinking, existing power structures.

   And the writers’ purpose, they say, is not to raise a debate about the use of terms like “radical,” reactionary,” and conservative,” but rather to insist that the post-Pauline, pseudo-Pauline letters are actually anti-Pauline with regard to major aspects of his theology. 

They represent a taming of Paul, a domestication of Paul’s passion to the normalcy of the Roman imperial world in which he and his followers lived.” (15) 

That is, they attempt to counter or dial back some of the more radical ideas found in Paul’s genuine letters in order to conserve or maintain existing power structures or influence bases within the Roman Empire and Roman imperial theology that Paul threatens. 

   So, as we begin to study Paul’s letters in general, and Galatians in particular, it helps to look at them within their context by imagining a set of concentric circles. 

The innermost circle would be the community to which he wrote. What specific issues or questions have arisen in that particular community that Paul seeks to address. The second circle that encompasses the first is what’s going on at this time within the early Jesus movement. Remember, it’s not Christianity yet, it’s a movement with Judaism that is spreading slowly in two different directions, among Jews and among Gentiles. 

The third circle is within the context of Judaism itself and how do Paul’s teachings reflect or reject common thinking within Judaism. And then the last or outermost, all-encompassing circle is the Roman Empire, because everything they do, everything that not only Paul but Jesus said and taught were done so in the context of, and often either in response to or rejection of, the Roman Empire and Roman imperial theology. So in order to understand Paul’s letters we must consider the context. 

   Paul's letter to the Galatians has had an immense impact on the Christian understanding of the role of faith in our being made right before God. In it he responds to a severe challenge to his gospel and his apostleship defending “the truth of the gospel:”  A person is made right before God on the basis of what God has done in Jesus Christ, not on the basis of Moses’ Law or any other kinds of works-based righteousness. 

The letter’s thesis is found in Galatians 2:16: “We know that a person isn’t made righteous by the works of the Law but rather through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.” Salvation is God’s gift; in cannot be earned by anything we do. 

   This letter was written in response to the appearance of Jewish-Christian missionaries who came to Galatia questioning Paul’s authority as an apostle and the gospel he preached. Paul’s gospel didn’t require the Galatians, who were Gentiles, to be circumcised or to adopt Moses’ Law. These missionaries, however, insisted that if the Galatians were to enjoy the benefits of the Jewish Messiah, they must be circumcised and do what the Law required. Paul maintained that the Galatians were already in right relationship with God because of their faith or trust in what God had done in Christ, but these missionaries were adamant that the Galatians must be circumcised and follow Jewish law as well. 

So, the larger question Paul addresses is this: 

Is trust in what God has done in Christ sufficient for salvation, or is more required?

   Paul responds in three ways: 

• First, he reviews the events of his past to show the Galatians that he received his gospel and apostleship directly from God and Jesus Christ rather than from humans, therefore, they can trust the gospel he preached to them. 
• Second, which is what we’ll touch on next week, he explains that the Galatians receive salvation because they’ve been baptized into Christ and received the gift of the Holy Spirit, therefore, they don’t need to be circumcised. 
• Finally, Paul argues that even though the Galatians are not under the Laws’ authority, they fulfill [Christ’s] Law by practicing the love commandments through the power of the Spirit, the focus of our later messages in this series.

   So, in that context, Paul begins this letter, as he does in all of the genuine letters, with this form of greeting:

From Paul, an apostle who is not sent from human authority or commissioned through human agency, but sent through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead; and from all the brothers and sisters with me.

To the churches in Galatia.

Grace and peace to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. He gave himself for our sins, so he could deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father. To God be the glory forever and always! Amen.

  

   This leads to our first passage today. Paul recounts what they already know about him from his prior visit: 

he was a Pharisee’s Pharisee - he worked harder than anyone, was stricter than anyone, in enforcing the very Law of Moses that he now says no longer applies in Christ. God called him, he said, and revealed to him through his encounter with Jesus on the Damascus Road, this new gospel of grace alone. He didn’t receive this gospel from any other human beings, including and especially the apostles in Jerusalem, it came to him directly from Jesus Christ - straight from the horse’s mouth we might say - so he accepts no human challenges to the nature of his message or the validity of his apostleship to the Gentiles.

   Paul’s conversion speaks to the priority of grace -  the fact that he didn’t “find” Jesus, it was through God’s initiative of grace that Jesus “found” him. 

The divine initiative, the prevenient grace of God, initiates the contact with Paul, and, he says, with us. 

   Paul reminds us that Christ’s revelation and Christ’s love continually break through the bounds that religion sets on them. For Paul, limiting grace in and to a particular community or in relation to particular religious practices will always violate the gospel. And the church cannot be reminded of this often enough.

   Paul claims that the leaders of the church in Jerusalem were changing their tune about salvation by grace through faith by requiring circumcision of Gentile converts, calling them hypocrites. For Paul, this practice threatened a total corruption of salvation by grace, meaning that radical trust in Jesus alone was not enough. To reinstate the law as a means of salvation, was a betrayal of the agreement between he and Peter that allowed Jews and non-Jews to be equal partners in the early Christian community. If we think of a traditional practice as essential for faith, we exclude from our community lovers of Christ who practice differently than we do. Think, for example, Catholics who deny communion to non-Catholics or other Protestants who 

re-baptize people who weren’t baptized “their way,” or within the United Methodist Church and the debate of LGBTQ rights. This would have been catastrophic for Paul - and for all non-Jewish Christians. Paul and Peter, like Christians through the centuries, are struggling to live into the reality of divine grace that is no longer tied to compliance with Mose’ Law.

   And one of the reasons this is difficult for some is that in the face of God’s unbounded and freely given love and grace, those institutions and people who would try to somehow mediate or control access to God’s grace through socially created divisions or religiously oriented requirements or commitments, lose their standing - their authority - their control.

   Communities of faith don’t need to be identical 

because the gospel doesn’t depend on uniformity. 

Their agreement was threatened when Peter waffled between his allegiance to Jewish tradition and allegiance to a new community devoted to Christ. 

For Paul, the gospel could survive plurality, but it could not survive the displacement of divine grace by binding customs, laws, and moral codes. Religious traditions give structure and meaning to our lives, but they also produce divisions in the human community among Catholics, Methodists, Greek, Orthodox, evangelicals, progressives, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims. Like Peter in his moment of indecision, we often feel more allegiance to our religious party than to the teachings of Jesus. 

But Paul’s letter to Galatia is a reminder that being a Christian is not about allegiance to religious parties. 

God plays no  favorites.

   For Paul, through death and resurrection Christ comes to dwell in the human heart and to produce a community based not on social distinctions, rules of law, or even uniformity of belief, but on love. 

We become “In Christ,” as Paul puts it. 

And being “In Christ” reveals the essential intimacy that exists between humanity and its creator, an intimacy that we can neither neutralize nor police, because it doesn’t depend on us but on the graciousness of God. 

Free from the logic of a social world built on the oppression of others, we’re able to recognize others as bearers of the Divine as well.

   God so urgently desires to display love for all humanity that God takes human form, walks among us, and shows us - in word and deed, in birth and death, and in victory over death - the intimacy and power of God’s love. Though Christians know this indwelling through the revelation of Christ, it can coexist with any religion, which is why Jews and Gentiles alike could enter into Christian community. “Christ in us” requires nothing but faith that rests in the confidence, the trust, that God is God and God is Good. This was the stumbling block for the missionaries to Paul’s gospel in Galatia, and it remains a stumbling block for many Christians today. 

For Paul, if Christ’s gracious presence and God’s overflowing grace is reduced to a mere by product of compliance to some new religious law, then the gospel itself is lost.

   Paul, in his time, speaks to the difficulty of sorting out what Christianity will be as it moves from its base among Jesus’ Jewish followers out into the wider world. Notwithstanding his views on faith, Christianity did become a new religion and, for many, unfortunately, a new set of laws. Many Christians feel attached to their familiar beliefs, moral positions, worship practices, and songs of their community. In a pluralistic and changing world, it feels important to cling to these as if they were the gospel itself, because they seem stable, reliable. 

They reflect our ordinary understandings of what allegiance to God should look like. Changing a hymnbook or rethinking an ethical position can make us feel as if “Christ died to no purpose.” But Paul reminds us that faith involves the ongoing anguish of fidelity to a God who remains mysterious, even in God’s most intimate revelations. He writes of the difficulty, even fragility of trust in unconditional love. He invites us to confidence in a cross that never ceases to disorient our minds. 

   Paul’s depiction of the priority of faith as simply trust provides neither crystal clear answers nor comforting practices. Instead, we’re offered Christ himself. 

If we begin with trust, we can live into our traditions more lightly. We can enjoy the practice our particular community provides without insisting that it is the only way. 

Our trust in God’s grace can allow us to be nourished by our tradition without assuming that those who practice differently have no knowledge, relationship, or salvation from God. Faith as an act of trust rather than a requirement tied to belief, gives us the confidence to honor our heritage, while recognizing the new things God is doing in other people’s lives. The radical Paul of the seven genuine letters insists that our trust in God’s radical, unconditional love is always justified, and never regretted, and is the only thing needed for salvation, in this life or the next. Amen. 

"Roll Down Justice - Welcome: A New Jerusalem" 4/16/17 (Easter Sunday)

4-16-17 Sermon “Welcome: A New Jerusalem”

   Have you ever been just flat out rejected? 

Maybe for a loan, or maybe a job for which you applied? Perhaps you were rejected when you tried to join the military, or a club of some kind. Maybe you were trying to buy a house and the seller rejected your offer. Or, hopefully not, but maybe you were proposing marriage and he or she said, “no.”

   Probably none of us have faced this kind of rejection though:

>SHOWED “TOP 5 NBA ALL-STAR REJECTIONS” VIDEO

   Those are some powerful rejections, and with the NBA playoffs about to consume the next 3 months of our lives I thought I’d get you primed for it. 

   But seriously, as many times, or as many ways, as any of us have faced rejection in our lives, none of us have faced the kind or level of rejection that God has experienced. This happened over and over again between God and the people of Israel. The Hebrew Bible is full of stories of God’s unrequited love. At Sinai in the wilderness, while God is trying to define their developing relationship the people are busy forming a golden calf. Later, as God sends the people into the promised land, they refuse, saying they couldn’t take the land from the people there. It happened again at Ramah, when God sought covenant to be their only God - God would be their God and they would be God’s people - but instead they demanded Samuel give them a king. It happened when Solomon chose many wives over devotion to God, which led to the division of the kingdom. It then happened in both the divided kingdoms, Israel and Judah, when the people failed to keep God’s commandments and worshiped Baal instead of God. Over and over again, God extended God’s love, and Israel slapped it away like Charles Barkley in the paint. 

   And we do it too. God calls us into a life of love, fellowship, and relationship and we initially say yes; but then we wander off, seeking our own desires, our own ambitions, our own fulfillment. We may return for a while, but the lure of our desires is too strong to resist, and we reject God again. Our rejection is rarely intentional and is often filled with sorrow and regret; yet like Peter denying Christ after saying he would never do that, we profess our love for God, then turn away and act as though we’ve never met. 

   You see, we don’t know what to do with God’s love, it’s like nothing we’ve ever experienced. 

The third verse of the Jeremiah passage for today talks of God’s everlasting love, a love that exists before our existence and beyond our existence; a love that is not dependent upon us, on who we are, or what we do - 

it’s a love that defines the very nature of the God who is love. This love both causes and sustains our very existence. God’s everlasting love is the foundation of all that exists. And that kind of love can be a bit frightening.

   God’s love, everlasting and foundational, is often not shared, or not returned when poured out on humanity. God’s love is unconditional, but human love is certainly conditional. As much as we try to profess unconditional love for our spouse, our children, we cannot begin to love on par with God. God’s love is spontaneous and unmotivated; human love seeks to gain something, it covets something, even if it’s just affection. Because God’s love is so unlike human love, we’re incapable of responding adequately to God’s love, if at all. God created us in love, and continually seeks us, calling to us, inviting us into relationship - but often we reject it nonetheless.

   Sometimes, though, rather than rejection, it may be that we’re  unable to recognize true love like this. Human love almost always comes with strings attached. Rarely does someone love us for being ourselves and ourselves alone; more often they love us for things we can do or that we bring into a mutual relationship. When we finally experience a love that seeks nothing in return, it may frighten us, so we may reject it rather than risk being hurt. Rejection is a painful thing; to be rejected over and over again would be unbearable. 

   But that’s exactly what we put God through. 

It’s no wonder we can’t fathom the love of God, because as humans, we wouldn’t keep trying. God continually extends God’s self in love, and we repeatedly reject God. We may not betray that love with our words, but we often do it with our actions. Often, this form of rejection carries with it the natural consequences that disobedience brings. Disobedience results in punishment for sin. Some perceive that punishment as coming from God. Others, though, recognize it as being the natural consequences of the act of disobedience itself. 

Regardless, the result may cause us to wander in a wilderness of our own making for a time. 

But even then, God tries to woo us back into a loving relationship that, if we would just accept it, we’d never want to reject again. In the midst of our self-made wilderness, God seeks us, finds us, calls us, and extends the offer of love and relationship again, and again, and again. The tension is never resolved, but love always wins. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing.

   Our feature song today, “Welcome,” sings that invitation, that desire for relationship. 

Now, there are different ways we can hear this song. The easiest is for us to hear it as an invitation from the church to those who are not part of the church. At Crossroads we certainly extend that open and inclusive invitation to all! But what if we imagine these words of welcome, of invitation, coming to us from God, how would that sound to us?

“Let’s walk together for a while and ask where we begin

to build a world where love can grow and hope can enter in.

To be the hands of healing and to plant the seeds of peace,”

   I hear that as an invitation from God to be in relationship, the desire to walk together reminiscent of the line from the beloved hymn…“And he walks with me and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own…”

   And it continues, “and ask where we begin to build a world…”

   That’s partnership, God and us working together, building a world where, the song say, “love can grow and hope can enter in.”

   That’s God’s vision for earth, for humanity, for all of creation. And we get there, the songs says, “by being the hands of healing, and by planting the seeds of peace…”

   I love this song as it is, but thinking of this song in this way adds more depth of meaning, as it weaves together with our scripture readings today. Jeremiah 31 says,

At that time, declares the Lord,

    I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they will be my people.

   God’s vision is to be in relationship with ALL people, even as they’ve rejected God again, and again. 

And then Jeremiah says,

the Lord appeared to them from a distance:

I have loved you with a love that lasts forever.

    And so with unfailing love,

        I have drawn you to myself.

Again, I will build you up,

    and you will be rebuilt, virgin Israel.

Again, you will play your tambourines

    and dance with joy.

   “I have drawn you to myself” is sort of like the line from the refrain of the song, “welcome to this place, you’re invited to come and know God’s grace.”

   The refrain in a song is that part which is repeated after each verse, that carries and reinforces the main message of the song. The refrain of our “Welcome” song goes:

welcome, welcome to this place,

you’re invited to come and know God’s grace.

All are welcome, the love of God to share

‘cause all of us are welcome here,

all are welcome in this place.

    “This place,” if heard as an invitation from the church, would mean this church, this congregation, this group of people, who are extending the invitation to come and share the love of God with us, here. When heard as coming directly from God, though, “this place” is the place of everlasting, foundational, unconditional, eternal love of God that welcomes us into God’s grace regardless of where we’ve been, regardless of what we’ve done. 

It extends a welcome exponentially greater than our rejection of God. 

   The next verse, rather than relating to the words of the prophet Jeremiah, though, more closely recalls the Gospel story from Holy Thursday. 

“Let’s talk together of a time when we will share a feast,

where pride and power kneel to serve the lonely and the least,

and joy will set a table as we join our hands to pray,”

   When I hear this in our Easter context I picture Jesus and his disciples gathered around the table to share in the Last Supper. And it calls to mind the events of that evening, as John’s gospel records them, as Jesus wrapped a towel around himself and began the humble act of washing his disciples’ feet. “Pride and power kneel,” the lyric says, “to serve the lonely and the least.”

  In Advent, leading to Christmas, a familiar hymn implores, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here…” That song is a prayer, a plea, for God to free captive Israel from their exile in Babylon. The first Sunday of Advent begins a new year in the life of the church. Easter Sunday, then, is the day on which the year turns to celebrate the ultimate release of our captivity to the exile of sin and death, in the resurrection of the One sent by God to free the captives, give sight to the blind, make the deaf hear, and to reveal God’s everlasting, eternal, unconditional love for all of God’s beloved children. The passage from Jeremiah, written while Israel is still mired in the deep, dark depression of their exile, lays out God’s promise to do just that.

   But you’re probably wondering, why focus on this seventh century BCE curmudgeonly old prophet Jeremiah on this most holy day of the Christian year? I’m guessing you didn’t come expecting to hear about a 2700 year old prophecy, you came expecting to hear about a stone rolled away from a tomb, angels, earthquakes, and a risen Jesus Christ. That’s where this journey leads, I promise.

   This prophet, who was called by God as a very young man and was reluctant to take up the call, spent nearly his whole life attempting to relay the challenging and hopeful words of God to a people who were undergoing the greatest crisis of their nation’s history: the decline, destruction, and exile of Israel. Jeremiah witnessed all of this in his forty years of active ministry, watching the temple collapse under the merciless onslaughts of the Babylonians, witnessing the murder of King Zedekiah’s sons and the blinding of their grieving father. How could one live through those events and retain the hope of a future with God? 

   Likewise, how can we live in a time of terror and greed, filled with deep uncertainties, shot through with economic, social, and political upheavals, images of wars and rumors of wars, famine, pestilence, starvation, and violence flooding the nightly news, and still come to celebrate and find hope in the risen Christ? 

Well, perhaps the prophet Jeremiah has something to teach us after all. Because while the people of Israel were eventually freed from their captivity in Babylon and were “rebuilt,” as the prophet said, in the Promised Land, God had a bigger vision. God’s love knows no boundaries of time or place. 

And it is God’s vision and everlasting love that are revealed most fully in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

   The gospel writer Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth and Matthew’s account of Jesus’ resurrection provide identical words of reassurance, which, when read together, seem to wrap the entire gospel narrative in those words: “Do not be afraid.” According to Luke those are among the first words the angel Gabriel utters when he tells Mary that she has found favor with God and will bear a son named Jesus. Later, at Jesus’ birth, they’re the first words offered to the shepherds in the field: “Do not be afraid.” 

  And in our passage today from Matthew, when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary find the tomb of Jesus empty and the earth shakes, an angel reassures them: “Do not be afraid.”

  And when the women leave the tomb to tell the disciples what had happened, Jesus meets them on the way and after greeting them, says “Do not be afraid.” 

In fact, EVERY time a person in the bible encounters an angel, those words are spoken.

  When was the last time someone said that to you, and did so with authority? When was the last time someone said that to you and you believed it?

   As children, when a thunderstorm or nightmare woke us up crying, the words of comfort from our parents, “there’s nothing to be afraid of,” came as great comfort to us. But that seems like a long time ago.

   As adults, our fears are more complex than the easily provable absence of a monster under the bed, and reassurance more difficult as well. As adults, we live with an increasing sense that there is much to fear: loss of health, loss of income, even fear of death itself. 

And younger adults are not exempt: fear of crushing student loan debt, fear of job loss or of not finding a job, fear of starting a family in difficult economic times. 

When grown-up fears are stirred by such enormous realities, it can seem as if words of reassurance are nowhere to be found.

   In fact, as adults, we know enough about how the world works that when someone tells us not to be afraid, we can become suspicious. On a recent airline flight we were experiencing a slightly bumpy ride, when the flight attendance came over the intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen, you may have noticed that we’re experiencing an unusual amount of turbulence today, but let us assure you that there is no reason for concern.” Well honestly, I wasn’t concerned until she made that announcement. What made her feel the need to tell us that?

   As a pastor I spend a portion of my time in close proximity to illness, even death. Many of you are, or were, in the healthcare field, and you did the same thing. Others of you are, or were, teachers, so you spent much time with children who are easily frightened by many things unknown or uncertain. And when we’re confronted by fear, loss, and uncertainty, we want to offer words of assurance, but sometimes they aren’t there for us. Our words are unsatisfactory. Ultimately, even doctors don’t have the authority to say “Do not be afraid.” Doctors don’t know the future. They don’t have the antidote to uncertainty. They cannot accompany a patient down every road. None of us can.

   Nevertheless, that’s what the angels come to say - in scripture and, occasionally, in our lives - “Do not be afraid.” It’s how you know you’re being visited by an angel. Who else can say “Do not be afraid,” and do so with authority, but angels and Jesus? Jesus can - and does. Several times in the Gospels Jesus says, “Fear not.”

   When the angel says, “Do not be afraid,” or when Jesus says, “Fear not,” it’s not assurance that nothing can go wrong, because in life often things DO go wrong. It’s not assurance that everything turns out for the best, because, if we’re honest about it, it doesn’t. Rather, it’s the assurance that, whatever may happen to us, whatever the day may hold, God has the power to strengthen and uphold us; that whatever we must face, we don’t face it alone; that nothing we encounter is stronger than God’s love; that ultimately God gets the last word; that in the end - and sometimes even before the end - God’s love is triumphant. Love wins. 

Only God can offer such assurance, and that’s why, in the end, only God, or one of God’s messengers, can say, “Do not be afraid,” and say it with authority.

   It’s not the words that are said that matters. 

Rather, what matters is the source. Soren Kierkegaard illustrated the difference by observing that when a theology student says, “There is eternal life,” and God’s own Son says, “There is eternal life,” the words may be the same and equally true, but there is a critical difference: only one assurance is said with authority.”

   The words, “Do not be afraid,” take strong root in the hearts of the characters of this Gospel story, because they accept that these words come from the only one with the authority to give such assurance. There’s only one who can offer such words in the face of life’s uncertainties and before the certainty of death, and do so with authority: the one who showed that death has lost its hold. 

And so the final verse of our song says,

“Let’s dream together of the day when earth and heaven are one,

a city built of love and light, the new Jerusalem,

where our mourning turns to dancing, every creature lifts its voice…
 

   “Let’s dream together of a day,” hearkens back to Jeremiah’s vision of the people returned from exile, dancing and singing, or of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem only a week ago, the people dancing and singing. 

The image of a New Jerusalem is not imagining some future life after death, it’s talking about this life, about God rebuilding that which is broken in this life, in our world, in us. In the midst of the despair that this world can bring, this is God’s ongoing invitation to come back into relationship, to come back into the everlasting, eternal, unconditional love of God, in which all of this can happen here and now.

   The same invitation God extends through the prophet is given to us as well. “Let’s dream together of a day when earth and heaven are one.” 

The prayer Jesus taught his disciples, says of God’s vision, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” 

It’s not about waiting, it’s about bringing to reality here, what is already done in heaven. Come back - forgiveness, relationship, new life, a city built of love and light - new Jerusalem is available to us, NOW! 

That is the invitation God extends over and over. 

That is the work God calls the church to do, the kind of people God calls us to be. That is the message the church is called to spread, the invitation we are to extend on God’s behalf. Any other message, is not of God. 

Any other message is not Gospel.

   So what are we afraid of? Why do we reject such total and absolute love being offered to us? And why are so many so hesitant to share God’s message of love with others? Is it because we don’t understand it? 

Is it because we think we can keep it to ourselves? 

Is it because a God who IS love just seems too good to be true? Well, it IS too good to be true by human standards, but it’s true of God nonetheless!

   Fear not! God, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, turns our mourning into dancing. This is the invitation God extends to all of us. This is the invitation that the church is compelled to make to those who haven’t known this amazing unconditional kind of love in this life, in this world. That is our job - that is the mission of those who claim to follow Jesus Christ.

   When we hear this song as an invitation from the church, it’s a powerful message of openness, inclusion, and love because the church is the body of Christ in the world today. But when we also hear it as coming from God, it’s all that and more, because it comes with the authority of the God of all time and all places, the God whose love is so expansive, everlasting, foundational, and eternal, as to be beyond what we can even perceive. Yet there it is. For God so loved the world, that God gave God’s Son, that whoever trusts in him would have eternal life. For Jesus came not to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

  So, who needs to hear this message of welcome?

Who needs to know that they’re welcome as a Child of God, as part of the Beloved Community, as part of the answer to fear, death, destruction, prejudice, violence and oppression? 

As followers of Jesus Christ we are Easter People! 

We are God’s Messengers of Hope!

So let’s sing together for all those who need to hear us singing…

(invite all to sing)

singing welcome, welcome to this place,

you’re invited to come and know God’s grace.

All are welcome, the love of God to share

‘cause all of us are welcome here,

all are welcome in this place.

Amen.

Roll Down Justice - The Day Is Coming: We Are One 4/9/17

4-9-17 Sermon “The Day is Coming: We Are One” by Rev. Jay Anderson

(Cheering) We’re #1! We’re #1!

   When you’re on top of the world, especially in the sports world, that’s what you get to cheer, right? The University of North Carolina men’s basketball team and the University of South Carolina women’s team can both legitimately declare, “We’re #1!” And at every level of sport, from Little League to the the professional leagues, all around the world, teams vie for the right to claim, “We’re #1!” or, as Frank Sinatra liked to croon, we’re “king of the hill, top of the heap.” Queen’s classic hit song, “We Are the Champions” will ring out, over and over again, in each sport’s championship events, ad nauseam. 

   Being #1 means being set apart from the competition, set above, better than - at least on a given day - any of your competitors. Saying, “we are one,” as our message title suggests today in light of our scripture readings, seems less like “We Are the Champions,” and more like “Kum Bah Yah” doesn’t it? In our closing hymn today we sing, “we are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord.” That’s a completely different message than the one we so often hear in our society, in marketing, in politics, in sports, anywhere. We proclaim our #1 status on billboards and bumper stickers. We rank everything in life in order to determine not only who is the best, but also who is not; from best place to work, best restaurants, best new cars, best new performer, you name it and we rank it. And even in competitions where teamwork is celebrated, we’re still compelled to single out one member of that team, as the “most valuable player.” We just can’t help ourselves. We like winners, we also like to make sure somebody, anybody but us, is also clearly the loser. Our claims of being #1 always, always, come at the expense of another. Put another way, as it has been famously, or infamously, offered, in our society, finishing #2 just makes you the first loser.

   “We are one,” though, is a message of unity, of togetherness, of cooperation, not of competition. It offers a sense of camaraderie, of teamwork that can perhaps result in becoming #1 at something, but that doesn’t necessarily require vanquishing all comers as the goal or the measure of success. Oneness can be success in and of itself. 

   Let’s consider that through the lens our scripture passages today, starting with Isaiah 35. The passage from last week, Isaiah 58, took place after the people of Jerusalem had returned from exile to their broken and devastated city. Whatever positive things you might say about Jerusalem, “We’re #1!” would not be one of them. But our passage today is located among writings that depict the people of Judah while still in exile, still strangers in a foreign land. They’re on the outside looking in. 

  So, the chapter before today’s reading, Isaiah 34, paints a devastating picture in which the heavens disappear, the land is ruined, streams and soil are poisoned, and only a few animals and fruitless plants abound. Isaiah 34 paints a vivid verbal portrait of despair. And chapter 36, after today’s reading, continues in that same vein, but in between we encounter chapter 35, a vision of hope that seems totally out of place.

   Isaiah 35:1 inaugurates a completely different vision than what comes before and what follows. Here, what was a landscape of despair blossoms as suddenly as spring crocus from newly thawed ground. Divine majesty is glimpsed in the wild places as water springs up in the desert. Courage shows itself in the strengthening of weak hands, knees, and hearts. Restored bodies mirror the healing landscape, as blind eyes open, deaf ears hear, the lame leap up, and the speechless sing. Chapter 35 sounds more like the later chapters of Isaiah, describing Judah’s return from exile to rebuild broken Jerusalem. This story of Judah’s historic resurrection is central to Christian and Jewish faith. Neither Jews nor Christians would exist today had this not occurred.

   But events as deeply woven into our faith history as Jerusalem’s restoration take on for us an air of inevitability. Yet they cannot be taken for granted. Other nations destroyed by great empires -- including Aram, Moab, and the Northern Kingdom of Israel -- were never to reestablish after their crises had passed. We have Judah’s story only because it survived destruction. Every time our scripture reading brings us to Jerusalem’s phoenix-like restoration 2500 years ago is a moment to stop for gratitude and wonder. As Isaiah 34 and 35 vividly show, reversal of fortune isn’t guaranteed. But it is possible. Judah’s success story sets a precedent for hope, showing that happy endings have occurred in the past and can occur again.

   In literature, underdog accounts such as these satisfy our thirst for poetic justice. We love the underdog tale, in literature, in sports, in film,  in life. What would be the point of a story in which conditions for the lowly went from bad to worse without a dramatic “happily ever after”? Why read detective or adventure novels in which the mystery is never solved, larger perspectives never appear, and the honorable are never vindicated? We read literature not so much for whether poetic justice will prevail, but how it will do so, which twist or turn will come in the nick of time to bring the satisfaction we’ve waited for. 

   We read the Bible in much the same way. 

Think about it: stories beginning with barrenness end in fruitfulness. Childless couples are suddenly “with child.” A nation suffering oppression under a powerful and brutal empire is led to freedom on a “highway” through the sea.  Heroes descend before they ascend: sold into Egypt, threatened with famine, subjected to evil edicts, surrounded by Assyrian forces. They are pursued by rulers, abandoned by supporters, thrown into cisterns, shipwrecked, beaten, and even crucified, dead and buried. But the Bible rarely leaves innocents in such straits. Like other literature, Scripture employs reversals to encourage hope.

   Yet we know that real life doesn’t always offer us such carefully constructed happy endings. Happily ever after isn’t inevitable. Reversals cannot necessarily be counted on. When it is our lives in the balance - here and now - and not those of others that we simply read about, then the stories are much more complex.

   On television, we know with some degree of certainty that MacGyger, Agent Gibbs, Magnum, P.I., Wonder Woman, Nurse Jackie, or whoever our title character hero or heroine is will reliably survive whatever predicament they find themselves in, regardless of how dire their situation may appear. Good will triumph. 

If we could reliably expect poetic justice in life, of course, all suffering would be as harmless for us as well. 

But the real life possibility of our own failure and the inevitability of our own death demand much from us, forcing us to grow in endurance as we hope against hope, as we strengthen spiritual muscles of generosity, patience, and virtue. Some people’s stories end well. 

But sometimes, through no fault of their own, others may lose, or even yield to despair. 

Because real life differs from literature in this way, readers may be tempted to dismiss passages like Isaiah 35 as unrealistic, the miraculous relegated to a fantasy world.

   It’s this kind of understanding that makes some believe that Isaiah 35 is just fantasy, hallucination, mere mirage in the midst of desolation. Readers of Isaiah don’t expect this passage to be where it is. Some scholars believe it’s location here is due to an editorial miscue, that because it reflects the prophets view of events that take place in the historical record found in 2 Kings, that this passage should have been placed somewhere after chapter 40, when Isaiah turns to that post-exilic period.

   But what if that’s not the case? What if maybe, just maybe, the Holy Spirit who inspired Scripture and who inspired those who put the canon of Scripture together, inspired this placement as well? Maybe this oasis of new life and new hope is located here in order to provide a mustard seed of hope to those who are most desperately seeking something, anything, in these darkest and direst of times. Because if it’s true that hope that is seen is not really hope, it’s also true that hope that is left unseen, that is not dared, is not hope either. It’s true that presuming every blind eye will open - whether literally or metaphorically - is a presumptuous mistake. But so is expecting no blind eyes to open. There’s a middle way: In faith, we can approach scripture not out of presumption, whether positive or negative, but out of openness to the future, out of expectancy for the nearly unimaginable good that God can indeed accomplish at any moment.

   We can understand, though, why the people of Isaiah’s time might balk at this idea. The exile was a horrific period in the life of first Israel and then Judah. The country we know as Israel divides in two after King Solomon dies, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. In 722 BCE Israel is conquered and exiled by the Assyrian empire. In 587 BCE Assyria is then conquered by Babylon, along with all of its empire that includes the former Israel, as well as the southern kingdom of Judah. Most of the people are shipped off to Babylon where they remain for 50 years before they’re allowed to return after the Persian Empire defeats Babylon. This passage is placed during the exile, not after it. At this point there is no sign of hope, there is no present hope of return. Life for the exiled Jewish people is as dire, dreary, and dystopian as the wilderness described in the previous chapter. 

   But then we’re told that there would be a highway - a Holy Way, Isaiah calls it.  The Lord’s ransomed ones, he says, the exiles of Judah will return and enter Jerusalem with singing, with everlasting joy upon their heads. Happiness and joy will overwhelm them; grief and groaning will flee away. Their vision, their understanding of this passage, is that God will return with them, and that even nature, all of creation, will rejoice in the presence of God. All will be restored, creation will be restored, the deserts will become fertile ground, the grasslands will become filled with life as wetlands, just as the physically disabled will be restored so will all of creation in the midst of God’s restorative justice. 

All will be one with God and with creation.

   And this vision of light in the midst of darkness, healing in the midst of illness and disease, water flowing and flowers blooming in the lifelessness of the desert, and a high way, a Holy Way through the desolation that will lead to restoration with and in God, is placed this week alongside the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.

   The desolation of Jesus’ day is as plain as the desolation of Isaiah’s, the only difference being the people are in the reconstituted, post-exilic Israel. They’re still a captive nation, the empire of record being Roman instead of Assyrian, Babylonian, or Persian. They are oppressed under Caesar and his minions, Pilate and Herod. That is the situation Jesus has encountered and challenged in his short ministry.

   After nibbling around the edges, going from small town to small town, in the wilderness areas of Judea, Jesus now turns toward the center of power, Jerusalem. And he rides into the city in a parade intended to mock the parade of the Roman governor. The people throw their cloaks on the ground to make a way, a highway if you will, for this prophet, Jesus. They wave palm branches the way the emperor’s entry would be accompanied by the waving of flags. 

   The people rejoice together - they recognize the satire in the mimicry that’s going on, but they are also filled with hope; hope for so much more. This must be the one, they believe, the Messiah who will finally free them from oppression and empire, once and for all. So they’re celebrating, they’re raucous, they’re laughing and shouting and singing. A people can dream, can’t they? We can almost hear the cries of “We’re #1!” beneath the shouts of “Hosanna!” 

   But the Pharisees, afraid that this demonstration will stir Rome’s anger and bring even more force to bear on the people of Israel, tell Jesus to quiet his disciples. It’s already bad enough here, they believe. Pilate is in town with all of these soldiers. If the peace is disturbed then Rome will just quell the disturbance with even more violence. 

“Stop your people, Jesus,” they demand, “stop them!”

   But like crocus blooming, or water suddenly streaming in Isaiah’s desert, the people see the hope of God’s glory in this prophet on a donkey in their midst. They’ve seen in this man the blind made to see, the deaf made to hear, the lame made to leap. They’ve seen miracles, healings, even the dead raised to life. How can they be quiet? 

And Jesus concurs. “If they were silent,” Jesus tells the Pharisees, “even the stones would cry out!”

   Even the stones would cry out!

   All of creation is one with God when restoration is at hand. All of creation, living and breathing, blooming and flowing, unite when God is in their midst. In Luke it is the stones who threaten to cry out, in Isaiah it is the wilderness itself that cries out in celebration. A Way, a highway, a Holy Way is laid out.

 In Isaiah, the stream of God’s righteousness and justice flows through the darkest, driest places and resurrects an exiled people, just as centuries later that same stream of righteousness and justice flows into Jerusalem.

   The Day is coming, we are compelled to understand. The day is coming when the sheep will lie down with the lamb. The day is coming when the swords will be beaten into plowshares. The day is coming when the healing waters of God’s restorative justice will roll down, when peace will flow like an overflowing stream. And the waters of God’s justice will flow over all of creation, not in a flood of destruction as described in Genesis, but in gentle waters, as in baptism. Water, in and of itself, is the key to life as we know it. Without water, there is no life. In the waters of baptism, we are offered new life. We’re reminded that we are one with God, one with Christ, and one with each, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

   There are so many in our world who don’t feel as one, though, who suffer under exile of one kind or another. 

In Syria, Sudan, the Congo and other countries innocents are being killed by ruthless governments that apparently will do anything, anything to stay in power. 

Meanwhile so-called “Christian nations” around the world, including the U.S., tolerate a genocide of brown skinned people that they would never have allowed to go this far if the victims were white. In South Sudan, people are fleeing by the hundreds of thousands to escape ethnic violence and hunger. In South America hundreds have died and thousands are impacted by flooding, the result of a changing climate that is nearly universally acknowledged, except by those who stand to lose money or power by accepting the obvious. Creation cries out again, not in rejoicing, but in anguish and pain over events that choke the life out of all but the strongest, most affluent, and most privileged in the world.   

   On this Sunday, we remember and celebrate the physical coming of the Son of God into the City of God on another Sunday some 2000 years ago. We remember and celebrate the hope he brought then and now. And just as a way, a highway, was made for Jesus as people lay down their cloaks and palm branches on that day, a way for Jesus to bring hope into our lives and our world is made as we wave palm branches and lay down our lives before Jesus this day. 

The unity, the one-ness of all of creation, the fusion of the material and Spirit is made manifest in the incarnated Christ. We are one with God and all of creation through Jesus Christ; We share in his baptism as he shares in ours. We are created in the divine image of the Triune God revealed to us in Jesus who becomes the eternal Christ. As his self-professing followers, we are called to do the same unifying work of Jesus, as the church, the body of Christ in the world today. 

   All of creation cries out for the body of Christ to do the work of justice that Jesus did and calls us to do in his place and his name. The world and all of creation needs the church, and specifically the people of the church, to be the hope, to be the life, to be resurrection in the world today. Because when the world sees in the church, not a reflection of itself, but the image and spirit of Jesus Christ, then it too will recognize the presence of God and rejoice. 

The day is coming, Isaiah says, when all will be one. The day is coming, Jesus tells us, when death in all its forms will give way to resurrection. 

The day is coming, when a stone placed on a tomb of perceived defeat will be rolled away - the stone crying out to reveal victory - God’s might YES to the work Jesus did and that he hands on to us. That unifying call makes us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world. 

   It is when we strive to be one with Christ and with God’s creation that, as Isaiah suggested:

 Waters will spring up in the desert, 

and streams in the wilderness.

The burning sand will become a pool,

    and the thirsty ground, fountains of water.

The day is coming when maybe, just maybe, even more stones will cry out! Amen.