Romans 6:12-23
June 26, 2011
It doesn’t happen every day, but pretty regularly I am asked, by non-Christians, “Why are you Christian?” Maybe that has happened to you, or maybe you have simply asked yourself that question. When I’m asked this question, I generally feel a little anxiety because I’m not sure I have a good answer, or more precisely, I’m not sure I articulate it well. But I do have fairly good reasons, I think, and so I have at least attempted to give answers. I am Christian because of community, because I believe the way of Jesus is worthy of following, I trust there are things about the bible I can apply to my own life, being Christian can give me strength to endure things and give me comfort when I am hurting. So, while I feel a little anxiety, I can usually give an okay answer.
It’s the other question that I really worry about. Not why are you Christian, but what is it that Christians do?” When this is asked – or when I ask it myself – I feel anxiety, but I feel much more than that. I often feel the sting of guilt and shame that comes with knowing I live drenched in hypocrisy. As soon as I start to articulate how I believe a Christian should live, what I, as a Christian, should do, I begin to think about how my life differs from this picture.
Being Christian means loving my enemy, I might say to someone. Then, immediately inside I think of all the people I have difficultly loving. Being Christian means caring for creation, I would suggest. But inside I know the truth: I make choices all the time that hurt the environment, like driving when I don’t need to. Being Christian means, I think, seeking and working for peace. But I can’t think of anything I have done recently that is actively working toward peace. Being Christian means caring for the poor. But I just bought an expensive backpack while knowing that money could have been given to someone in need.
In short, when I think about – or am asked about – what a Christian should do in this world, I think about all the ways I wish I could change my behaviors so they better matched what I think I should do. But I know, from lots of frustrating experiences, how hard it can be to change my behaviors. There are many forces, fears, and doubts that work against me. Drive less – yes, but…it can be so inconvenient. Give more – yes, but can’t I have some of the things I want? Love more – yes, but I just can’t make myself feel it, no matter how hard I try.
Faith is about – at least in part – trying to make our lives, our behaviors, conform more and more to what we believe. And let’s face it…this is no easy trick…change is hard.
There is no shortage of people and professions that have, and continue, to seek answers to this fundamental human question: Why is it so hard to change? If we know we want to do something, if we know something is good for us and the world – eat right, exercise more, have more patience – why don’t we just do it? Social scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, theologians, biologists work to answer this question – and try to offer ways we might be able to change more easily.
We are, in fact, learning a lot from these professions about our brains, our consciousness, our behaviors, and more. More and more they can look at studies, experiments, brain images to help us understand how and why we change – or don’t. In many cases they are, I think, on to something. Their findings and insights have advanced our understanding of human nature and behavior significantly. Which kind of begs the question: Does it make any sense at all to look back to Paul –a quirky, slightly neurotic Christian who lived 2000 years ago, for help in answering this question?
I admit I have a love/hate relationship with Paul. Sin, wickedness, obey, righteousness, slaves, sanctification. These words he uses generally aren’t compelling to me. I think his language and metaphors can be so alienating at times that it seems like the only responsible course of action is to leave him firmly planted in the first century. But, then I read his letters again and I do feel a connection, a kinship, a sense that he is touching on things deep inside of me, and maybe he addressing things the experts today are not.
Paul deals with this same issue of change. He talks often about the task of conforming our behaviors to our values. And, without the benefit of MRIs or modern scientific experiments, he is well aware of the human limitations when it comes to change. He knows, first hand, that deciding you want to do something and actually doing it can be worlds apart. And so when he writes to these churches – to these people he cares so much about – he knows they struggle with these very questions. He knows they want help being faithful, just as we often do. And not just help knowing the right things to do, but what to do when we don’t feel able to choose the right no matter how hard we try.
For the early churches, Paul is therapist, behaviorist, and social scientist all rolled into one. But, unlike many who seek to address this issue today, Paul is asking these questions as a follower of Jesus, as someone who tries to connect with the divine One. And this is how I want to ask these questions. I have no interest in throwing out modern science or ignoring all the valuable information we have gained from decades of study and experiments. I read a lot of books by these modern experts because they have a lot to offer. But Paul, I have come to believe, has a perspective I don’t want to lose. He was a man of great faith, and I can learn from him.
I know Paul is using language that is archaic, and even off-putting to us. But I think behind his language and metaphors, he’s speaking about something we know deep in our souls. For example, when Paul talks about “sin”, it isn’t about a moral list of dos and don’ts – as we sometimes think; he is talking about all those things that contribute to the brokenness of the world. All of those things we humans do that hurt ourselves and others. And we do know what those things are. We might not want to call it sin, but we know there are things in our lives and world that are not divine.
And when Paul says we are slaves to sin, while we might not like the image it conjures, it captures a feeling so many of us have: We can’t help ourselves…literally. There are things – culture, systems, power, insecurity, fear - that work their wily ways on us, and we can’t, no matter how hard we try, get out from under them. Paul’s saying we are doing the same hurtful things over and over again and at some level we can’t just change that by ourselves and our own efforts.
When Paul says sanctification – a word we don’t exactly bandy about these days – he is talking about the process of faith whereby we conform our lives more and more to fit our values and beliefs. But this word has an added meaning, which is that the process is not primarily driven by us. Sanctification is the process of God molding us more and more into the people we wish we could be.
Paul, using language we don’t always love, is describing the human condition we all know well, and then talking about how to be a Christian in light of that reality. Curiously though, Paul’s begins not with how to change or what to do, but with grace. Paul says that it’s because of God’s grace that you are no longer under the law, which basically means, there is something that can break through the cycle of destruction and brokenness – and it’s not just that we need to try harder…it’s grace: God’s gift of grace to us and in us. This isn’t usually the starting point of most of the experts today.
Right before our passage for this morning Paul has been addressing the major issue about what liberates people from slavery to sin – from our treadmill of behaviors we can’t seem to change. He believes it is the love shown to us in Christ; in other words: God’s goodness and generosity. He has just been arguing that when we accept God’s grace, we enter a new way of life. By this he does not mean we turn over a new leaf and try harder from now on. Rather he means we enter a new system, we become part of a new dynamic; we experience a new set of possibilities. By opening ourselves to God’s goodness we not only experience forgiveness and hope but also begin a journey where that love produces love in and through us.
We have to start by trusting God’s grace – by being released from our guilt and shame. We need to know that where we are is good enough. Perfection is both not attainable and not expected. But notice: at the heart of this notion of Paul’s is a great paradox: we can’t change, we can’t become a better Christian, or more faithful, until we stop thinking we have to change in order to be a better Christian.
We can only be free if we become slaves again, he says. We don’t like the word slave – we don’t think we should be a slave to anything. But the only way Paul can help the people in Rome understand the fundamental shift that is needed to change their lives, is to show them that they have to completely change what drives them, what influences them, what they expose themselves to day in and day out. If it’s not Grace, you might as well pick up your ball and go home. We can only live rightly if we stop trying to live perfectly.
Grace is required if we are to be faithful – if we are to do what Christians are “supposed” to do. If you haven’t yet been freed from your guilt and shame, back up. Accept God’s grace. By doing this, we are opened to this other reality that can influence our lives, our behaviors, our hopes and dreams. Now, I’m not naïve. I don’t assume what I’m saying is simplistic. One big hurdle for many of us, for example, is that we have to first believe and trust God’s grace is real and available to us. And for that to happen, we have to actually experience that grace at some point. And that’s not a given for everyone.
It’s not simple, but according to Paul, it’s required.
Paul leaves us hanging a bit at the end of chapter 6. We don’t know yet how we might accept or feel God’s grace, We don’t know yet how he sees change coming about. So, come back next week. Amen.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Thank You!!
Acts 2:1-21
June 12, 2011: Pentecost Sunday
The Pentecost story marks the beginning of a long season in the church calendar; it lasts from today until Advent begins in November. This season is sometimes called the season of Pentecost, sometimes called ordinary time. The Presbyterians choose to call it ordinary time. But, truth be told, I prefer calling it the season of Pentecost, and it’s not just because I think the red paraments are beautiful. I fear that people think there is nothing extraordinary about ordinary time. There is – and it is tied to the extraordinary story we celebrate this morning.
When the book of Acts begins, the disciples are discouraged. I imagine them very much at loose ends. “What now?” they surely must have been asking. They lost their leader, they felt like the powers that be, the ones they meant to replace, had won. Their only hope was that the empty tomb meant Jesus was going to show up soon and finish what he started – but that obviously hadn’t happened yet, and they were beginning to wonder if it ever would.
I have no doubt the early church Luke wrote to decades later was feeling similarly. Discouraged, at loose ends. They didn’t get to be with Jesus while he was alive, and now Jesus still had not come back as they had expected. They had been in a holding pattern while they waited, but the more time ticked on with no return of Jesus, the more they must have felt like “What now?”.
In response, Luke tells the story of Pentecost and the birth of the church movement. It’s both inspiring and gives, I think, a way forward for a less-than-spirited, directionless church. God is not gone! That’s the message. God is here in the Spirit, and what that means is that everyone is ordained to ministry in the world. Everyone! When we read the rest of Acts, we see that the disciples got to work after Pentecost. They were, pun intended, on fire. The church was born, powered by nothing less than the Holy Spirit…which had come to rest on each and every person. And it came dramatically! This was no gentle breeze. Tongues of fire on each head! Even if the disciples thought Jesus was coming back in their lifetime, Luke had an idea of what to do in the meantime – and it was definitely not ordinary.
In the same way, churches today can, from time to time, grow discouraged. They feel like they are stuck in a holding pattern, or even like they are losing steam and purpose. But often, when you look at the ministries of churches – no matter how large or small their membership is – you will see that there is still life there, energy, flames flickering, dancing, moving out into the world. This season, Pentecost through Advent is about us – we, the Church – and our extraordinary call into ministry – about what we already do and the many ways we can find to live out what God intends. How do we respond to the Holy Spirit’s guidance?
We need to start by reminding ourselves regularly of how much life we already have here, and how much life we offer the world. We are alive, aflame, active in so many ways. Each of us has received the Holy Spirit and are ordained to ministry, and there are many, many ministries in this church through which we live out our call. We each have our part in the body of Christ, as the apostle Paul tells us so many times. When we give of ourselves to the ministries of the church, we do our unique, vital part of the larger picture. We’re not alone. We join our one flame with others to set the world on fire with God’s spirit.
This morning, I am going to remind us of what these ministries are. I’m going to remind you of some of the ways you live out your call. And we are all going to give great thanks – not just for one another, but thanks for the God that is still active in the world through us, through the spirit, placing the flames in our hearts that compel us to give of our time, talents, and resources.
Here’s how we’re going to do this – I’m going to name the ministries of the church. If you currently or have in the past given of your time, talents, or resources to support the ministry, wave your flame above your head. We will see how this congregation is alive (not to mention willing to try any questionable idea the pastor might have).
Education:
In order to grow in faith, in order to continue to listen for, discern, God’s call for us, in order to better asses the needs of our community and world, we need to constantly be educating ourselves, studying, practicing disciplines that give us the space to sense where the Spirit is moving in our lives. This is what we promise to do every time we baptize someone. And not only education for kids – we promise to continue helping people grow in their faith throughout their whole lives. There are people in our midst who make sure these opportunities exist and who give much time to educating this community.
• We have Sunday School and bible teachers for all our children, past teachers, youth group leaders – wave
• We have people who teach bible study to adults
• We have people who have led short courses on things they feel passionate about: book groups. Small group leaders. Environment class. Just to name some recent ones.
• We have a group of people – an education committee that oversees it all.
All of those folks wave your flames together. Thanks be to God!
Buildings and Grounds
I was reminded recently by someone in our church how integral the our buildings and grounds are to doing the work and ministry of this church. Just to have a place to come and worship alone is essential – a place set apart from the world, sacred, special. But it doesn’t stop there. We need space to do education, we need places for people to gather to share about their lives and faith. We also need a place – a buildings and grounds – that reflects who we are so that people can tell just by looking. A place that is inviting, warm, open. A place that is environmentally conscious – that shows our concern for our impact on creation. A place that radiates God’s love. People give a great deal of time and muscle to this ministry.
• People who work on the landscaping.
• People who tidy up the building both inside and out – moving tables, picking weeks, shoveling on Sunday morning.
• People who build things, from hangers for our paraments to fences next to the building or shelves in the office.
• People who oversee huge projects; anyone who has ever been on the buildings and grounds committee…new windows, new bathrooms, roof maintenance, greening the church. For that matter, anyone who was a part of the massive effort to build this very building – I know some of you are still around!
• People who have overhauled complete rooms to make them more inviting and usable.
• Anyone who has ever participated in a clean up day.
• Anyone who has ever set up for an event or cleaned up after.
EVERYONE WAVE TOGETHER: THANKS BE TO GOD!
Congregational life
The church exists for the sake of the world. This means for the sake of all who walk through our doors. The ministries of congregational life make people feel welcome, included; they draw us all closer together in fellowship; theses ministries help us care for each other at our most vulnerable; times like when we lose someone or go through a crisis. To put it simply, congregational life ministries are the church being the church.
• Who has organized or volunteered to help with funeral lunches
• Who is on the Prayer chain
• Who has ever baked Bread to give to visitors
• Who has ever helped with a Lenten lunch
• Who has organized things like retreats and family fun nights, epiphany parties, any fellowship event, small groups
• Who has helped with 3rd Sunday potlucks
• Who has ever talked to someone who is a first time visitor at the church
• Who has headed up one of the volunteer call lists
• Who has ever helped with the newsletter
ALL WAVE – THANKS BE TO GOD!
Mission
The church exists for the sake of the world. That means we also exist for the sake of people who will never enter our sanctuary but are in need of our care and compassion. This church is so good at reaching out to the community and world. Our youngest folks in this church are no exception – we see the same spirit of mission alive in them. There will be lots of times under this category for you to wave your flame high in the air! And these are only things going on right now – if we listed past things, we would need weeks.
• Kids against hunger
• Environment committee
• Sang in nursing homes,
• College group minitry
• Driving Grinnell community members to medical appointments out of town
• Deacons – care for those in the church, but also charged to care for the least among us – those on the margins – those in desperate need of compassion who don’t ever come to church.
• Heifer (anyone who has ever given a quarter, collected a quarter, helped with rummage sale, etc.)
• CROP Walk
• Trick-or-treated for Unicef,
• Community meals,
• Collected money, or given money, for One Great Hour of Sharing
• Given food to mica
• Anyone who has ever made an offering to the church no matter how big or small – helping local poor through mica gma our own local needs fund. – helping around the world PDA, peacemaking
WAVE TOGETHER: THANKS BE TO GOD!
Worship
Worship is at the heart of what we do. And it is not something we come to. Worship is the act of a community. You create worship every week by participating in whatever way you do. Worship is giving thanks to the one God – it is confessing – proclaiming – sharing – changing - motivating. Believe me, this is not the pastor’s job alone. And thank God. If I were, we’d all be in big trouble. Worship is what we do together, and how we do it depends on all of you.
• Liturgists
• Ushers
• Greeters
• Van drivers
• Choir / provided any music
• Communion servers
• Acolytes
• Nursery attendants
• Flowers, banners, decorated the communion table
• Served on the worship committee
*** All of you who come to worship – now listen carefully, this is not a “catch all” group. The church would be dead. The church would not live without the people coming together to give thanks, hear the word of God, encounter God’s transforming spirit. And these things would not happen without all of you. Think of the prayers of the people alone: Think of what you give to this community when you listen deeply to the prayers people bring each week and hold them up to God. Worship is an act of all the people. THANKS BE TO GOD!!!
We have so much life here. So much spirit working through us. But like the disciples the Spirit is still blowing – maybe it’s blowing you to something new. This will look very different for different people. It will look very different at different times in our lives. Sometimes our ministry is active, physical, verbal. Sometimes it’s quiet witness – being a witness to God’s transforming spirit in one life and letting that witness inspire those who come after us. Our abilities and limitations change over the course of our life, but the presence of the Holy Spirit is constant, and there is always a way God has for us to be a part of the church. I think of all of those in this congregation I have watched as they faced death – just one moment in their life, a time when they can’t lift a finger, yet minister powerfully to all of us about faith, meaning, life and God’s sustaining presence.
I hope you have been surprised to see how many things there are! I also hope you feel inspired to get involved, to listen for where the spirit is calling you today. We keep the church alive, as it has lived ever since that 1st Pentecost.
[TALK ABOUT AFTER WORSHIP]
We are a church of ordained people who show up and say, “Here I Am, God, what do you want me to do?” As we move into our ordinary time, think of the extraordinary things we do because of the movement of the Holy Spirit. Let’s keep the spirit alive! Amen.
June 12, 2011: Pentecost Sunday
The Pentecost story marks the beginning of a long season in the church calendar; it lasts from today until Advent begins in November. This season is sometimes called the season of Pentecost, sometimes called ordinary time. The Presbyterians choose to call it ordinary time. But, truth be told, I prefer calling it the season of Pentecost, and it’s not just because I think the red paraments are beautiful. I fear that people think there is nothing extraordinary about ordinary time. There is – and it is tied to the extraordinary story we celebrate this morning.
When the book of Acts begins, the disciples are discouraged. I imagine them very much at loose ends. “What now?” they surely must have been asking. They lost their leader, they felt like the powers that be, the ones they meant to replace, had won. Their only hope was that the empty tomb meant Jesus was going to show up soon and finish what he started – but that obviously hadn’t happened yet, and they were beginning to wonder if it ever would.
I have no doubt the early church Luke wrote to decades later was feeling similarly. Discouraged, at loose ends. They didn’t get to be with Jesus while he was alive, and now Jesus still had not come back as they had expected. They had been in a holding pattern while they waited, but the more time ticked on with no return of Jesus, the more they must have felt like “What now?”.
In response, Luke tells the story of Pentecost and the birth of the church movement. It’s both inspiring and gives, I think, a way forward for a less-than-spirited, directionless church. God is not gone! That’s the message. God is here in the Spirit, and what that means is that everyone is ordained to ministry in the world. Everyone! When we read the rest of Acts, we see that the disciples got to work after Pentecost. They were, pun intended, on fire. The church was born, powered by nothing less than the Holy Spirit…which had come to rest on each and every person. And it came dramatically! This was no gentle breeze. Tongues of fire on each head! Even if the disciples thought Jesus was coming back in their lifetime, Luke had an idea of what to do in the meantime – and it was definitely not ordinary.
In the same way, churches today can, from time to time, grow discouraged. They feel like they are stuck in a holding pattern, or even like they are losing steam and purpose. But often, when you look at the ministries of churches – no matter how large or small their membership is – you will see that there is still life there, energy, flames flickering, dancing, moving out into the world. This season, Pentecost through Advent is about us – we, the Church – and our extraordinary call into ministry – about what we already do and the many ways we can find to live out what God intends. How do we respond to the Holy Spirit’s guidance?
We need to start by reminding ourselves regularly of how much life we already have here, and how much life we offer the world. We are alive, aflame, active in so many ways. Each of us has received the Holy Spirit and are ordained to ministry, and there are many, many ministries in this church through which we live out our call. We each have our part in the body of Christ, as the apostle Paul tells us so many times. When we give of ourselves to the ministries of the church, we do our unique, vital part of the larger picture. We’re not alone. We join our one flame with others to set the world on fire with God’s spirit.
This morning, I am going to remind us of what these ministries are. I’m going to remind you of some of the ways you live out your call. And we are all going to give great thanks – not just for one another, but thanks for the God that is still active in the world through us, through the spirit, placing the flames in our hearts that compel us to give of our time, talents, and resources.
Here’s how we’re going to do this – I’m going to name the ministries of the church. If you currently or have in the past given of your time, talents, or resources to support the ministry, wave your flame above your head. We will see how this congregation is alive (not to mention willing to try any questionable idea the pastor might have).
Education:
In order to grow in faith, in order to continue to listen for, discern, God’s call for us, in order to better asses the needs of our community and world, we need to constantly be educating ourselves, studying, practicing disciplines that give us the space to sense where the Spirit is moving in our lives. This is what we promise to do every time we baptize someone. And not only education for kids – we promise to continue helping people grow in their faith throughout their whole lives. There are people in our midst who make sure these opportunities exist and who give much time to educating this community.
• We have Sunday School and bible teachers for all our children, past teachers, youth group leaders – wave
• We have people who teach bible study to adults
• We have people who have led short courses on things they feel passionate about: book groups. Small group leaders. Environment class. Just to name some recent ones.
• We have a group of people – an education committee that oversees it all.
All of those folks wave your flames together. Thanks be to God!
Buildings and Grounds
I was reminded recently by someone in our church how integral the our buildings and grounds are to doing the work and ministry of this church. Just to have a place to come and worship alone is essential – a place set apart from the world, sacred, special. But it doesn’t stop there. We need space to do education, we need places for people to gather to share about their lives and faith. We also need a place – a buildings and grounds – that reflects who we are so that people can tell just by looking. A place that is inviting, warm, open. A place that is environmentally conscious – that shows our concern for our impact on creation. A place that radiates God’s love. People give a great deal of time and muscle to this ministry.
• People who work on the landscaping.
• People who tidy up the building both inside and out – moving tables, picking weeks, shoveling on Sunday morning.
• People who build things, from hangers for our paraments to fences next to the building or shelves in the office.
• People who oversee huge projects; anyone who has ever been on the buildings and grounds committee…new windows, new bathrooms, roof maintenance, greening the church. For that matter, anyone who was a part of the massive effort to build this very building – I know some of you are still around!
• People who have overhauled complete rooms to make them more inviting and usable.
• Anyone who has ever participated in a clean up day.
• Anyone who has ever set up for an event or cleaned up after.
EVERYONE WAVE TOGETHER: THANKS BE TO GOD!
Congregational life
The church exists for the sake of the world. This means for the sake of all who walk through our doors. The ministries of congregational life make people feel welcome, included; they draw us all closer together in fellowship; theses ministries help us care for each other at our most vulnerable; times like when we lose someone or go through a crisis. To put it simply, congregational life ministries are the church being the church.
• Who has organized or volunteered to help with funeral lunches
• Who is on the Prayer chain
• Who has ever baked Bread to give to visitors
• Who has ever helped with a Lenten lunch
• Who has organized things like retreats and family fun nights, epiphany parties, any fellowship event, small groups
• Who has helped with 3rd Sunday potlucks
• Who has ever talked to someone who is a first time visitor at the church
• Who has headed up one of the volunteer call lists
• Who has ever helped with the newsletter
ALL WAVE – THANKS BE TO GOD!
Mission
The church exists for the sake of the world. That means we also exist for the sake of people who will never enter our sanctuary but are in need of our care and compassion. This church is so good at reaching out to the community and world. Our youngest folks in this church are no exception – we see the same spirit of mission alive in them. There will be lots of times under this category for you to wave your flame high in the air! And these are only things going on right now – if we listed past things, we would need weeks.
• Kids against hunger
• Environment committee
• Sang in nursing homes,
• College group minitry
• Driving Grinnell community members to medical appointments out of town
• Deacons – care for those in the church, but also charged to care for the least among us – those on the margins – those in desperate need of compassion who don’t ever come to church.
• Heifer (anyone who has ever given a quarter, collected a quarter, helped with rummage sale, etc.)
• CROP Walk
• Trick-or-treated for Unicef,
• Community meals,
• Collected money, or given money, for One Great Hour of Sharing
• Given food to mica
• Anyone who has ever made an offering to the church no matter how big or small – helping local poor through mica gma our own local needs fund. – helping around the world PDA, peacemaking
WAVE TOGETHER: THANKS BE TO GOD!
Worship
Worship is at the heart of what we do. And it is not something we come to. Worship is the act of a community. You create worship every week by participating in whatever way you do. Worship is giving thanks to the one God – it is confessing – proclaiming – sharing – changing - motivating. Believe me, this is not the pastor’s job alone. And thank God. If I were, we’d all be in big trouble. Worship is what we do together, and how we do it depends on all of you.
• Liturgists
• Ushers
• Greeters
• Van drivers
• Choir / provided any music
• Communion servers
• Acolytes
• Nursery attendants
• Flowers, banners, decorated the communion table
• Served on the worship committee
*** All of you who come to worship – now listen carefully, this is not a “catch all” group. The church would be dead. The church would not live without the people coming together to give thanks, hear the word of God, encounter God’s transforming spirit. And these things would not happen without all of you. Think of the prayers of the people alone: Think of what you give to this community when you listen deeply to the prayers people bring each week and hold them up to God. Worship is an act of all the people. THANKS BE TO GOD!!!
We have so much life here. So much spirit working through us. But like the disciples the Spirit is still blowing – maybe it’s blowing you to something new. This will look very different for different people. It will look very different at different times in our lives. Sometimes our ministry is active, physical, verbal. Sometimes it’s quiet witness – being a witness to God’s transforming spirit in one life and letting that witness inspire those who come after us. Our abilities and limitations change over the course of our life, but the presence of the Holy Spirit is constant, and there is always a way God has for us to be a part of the church. I think of all of those in this congregation I have watched as they faced death – just one moment in their life, a time when they can’t lift a finger, yet minister powerfully to all of us about faith, meaning, life and God’s sustaining presence.
I hope you have been surprised to see how many things there are! I also hope you feel inspired to get involved, to listen for where the spirit is calling you today. We keep the church alive, as it has lived ever since that 1st Pentecost.
[TALK ABOUT AFTER WORSHIP]
We are a church of ordained people who show up and say, “Here I Am, God, what do you want me to do?” As we move into our ordinary time, think of the extraordinary things we do because of the movement of the Holy Spirit. Let’s keep the spirit alive! Amen.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Easter People: Marcus Borg
Acts 1:6-14
June 5, 2011: 7th Sunday of Easter
There are parts of the bible that when we hear the words, our ears perk up. They ring familiar, sometimes we have an immediate, emotional reaction, and we might even think “that really speaks to what I’m dealing with today.” When a liturgist reads them on a Sunday morning, we are engaged, and we actually hear the words.
• Blessed are the peacemakers.
• I have come to bring good news to the poor.
• Wives submit to your husbands
Other parts of the bible make our eyes glaze over, our minds wander, our heads nod sleepily.
• The sun turning black, the moon turning blood red, stars falling to earth like figs right before the rapture.
• Long, complicated theological treatises by Paul explaining a God that makes no sense to us in the end.
• Discourses about Jesus the high priest seated at the right hand of the Father.
Why the difference? It’s about relevance. If something seems relevant to us today, we are engaged. If something seems like a supernatural hallucination of people who lived 2000 years ago, or made up fairy tales people are trying to pass off as nonfiction, well, why not think about what you’re going to have for lunch today.
The bible isn’t the only thing that suffers a relevance problem. Sometimes our understanding and images of God and Jesus get in the way of us being able to relate to the divine, much less the bible, in any meaningful way. Most of our images and ideas about God come from what we learned as children, or what we hear in pop culture and the media. God is a father up in heaven, looking down, foreseeing and controlling every little thing. God is a judge up there somewhere, throwing lightning bolts at people who are doing the wrong thing. Our understanding of Jesus is of a miracle working superhero, who was literally raised from the dead, defying, of course, any and all science. These are not uncommon ways to think about God and Jesus, they are embedded in most of our psyches whether we are conscious of them or not.
It’s interesting, because those images persist in most of our minds, but then, because we accept the findings of science, and live in modern, post-Enlightenment times, we don’t in our hearts of hearts really “believe” in those things. They may not have been bad starting places when we were children. They might have started us well down the path of faith. But, now, they are more fairy tale than bedrocks of our lives.
The problem is this: Those images persist, and they don’t necessarily help connect us to God, but we, generally, don’t have other images or understandings of God to replace them. God, as father, judge, magician up there in the clouds somewhere, becomes irrelevant to our lives and we’re left with no way back to the divine.
Marcus Borg is a scholar and theologian who is passionate about making God, Jesus, and the Bible relevant to people – especially mainline, progressive, science-embracing, people that live in this in between space of doubting what they know about God from Sunday school, but not having a more mature, sophisticated image of God to replace the old ones. He wrote books like, “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time,” “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time,” and “Meeting God Again for the First Time” (okay, maybe he’s not the most original book title giver ). But he is a skilled, accessible writer that tries to help people reconnect with God.
In describing what he sees as the problem for Christians in the modern world he writes about three different responses to the disconnect between our modern worldview and the worldview of the bible:
“Some of us resist the impact of the modern worldview by becoming fundamentalists, by insisting on the truthfulness of premodern Christian ways of seeing things in spite of their conflicts with modern knowledge. Others of us seek to add the notion of God to the modern worldview. We view the universe as a gigantic machine, made up of tiny bits and pieces of “stuff” all operating in accord with natural laws, then we add a notion of God as a supernatural being who created the whole but who is essentially outside the process. This makes God distant. Still others give up the notion of God altogether…and not always consciously. This makes God irrelevant.”
I have chosen Borg as our Easter person today because he has, for many people, resurrected God and Jesus, and even people’s faith by offering a fourth response; new, better images of God, something other than our insufficient childhood understandings. He has given people permission to expand their understanding of God, which has made God relevant to their lives again.
One reason he can do this for others is because of his own experiences. Borg grew up in the church learning from the adults in his life about Jesus and God and the bible. He learned it well. God the distant mastermind, Jesus the supernatural sacrifice and way to heaven. But, by the time he got to college, he realized those ideas were not sustainable in the face of the real world. They could not be reconciled with what he knew of science and the world around him. Because for him those images were so strong, and because he had been told how sacred they were, he couldn’t see God any other way, but he could no longer believe in this God. And so, he drifted from faith, from Church and from God.
As an adult, he reconnected to Christianity through the scholarly study of the New Testament. He found in his studies of history, and of the context in which the authors of the bible lived that the images we learn as children are gross oversimplifications of what is in the bible itself. The understandings and images of God in the bible are so varied, so rich and multi-layered, so nuanced and complex. Such a God can be relevant in a varied, multi-layered, nuanced and complex world. He realized that when we never grow beyond what we learned as children we are ignoring the God described by these incredible people of faith who wrote our scriptures. Most of the time our images of God are far more simplistic, facile, and child-like than theirs ever were.
One of Borg’s contributions to rethinking theology that moved people beyond simplistic ideas was by distinguishing between two different Jesus’ we find in the new testament: the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus. The pre-Easter Jesus is the historical Jesus. The post-Easter Jesus is what Jesus became after his death to those who sought to follow him. Specifically, the post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience, not the Jesus of history.
The gospels contain two kinds of materials: some goes back to Jesus as a figure in history, and some is the product of the communities themselves decades after Easter, laying what they now believe about the post-Easter Jesus back over the historical Jesus. And often these two Jesus’, post and pre Easter, are present in the same biblical passage, the same story. The Jesus of the bible is a combination – something can be based in history but then a layer is added that is myth and story born of the experiences of people who didn’t know the pre-Easter Jesus. This is why we get different accounts of his birth, life, death and resurrection in all of the gospels. They are not history – they are a mix.
This doesn’t make the bible any less true. People were experiencing God through this post-Easter Jesus. They themselves didn’t think they were writing history. They were writing religious truth and experience to lead others to understand God and follow Jesus. The problem is when we collapse the pre and post Easter Jesus into an historical figure, and then demand we believe in that Jesus. Borg says we are far more likely to connect with God when we tease out the two Jesus’ and try to learn what the biblical writers were trying to say through myth and story to the Christians of their day.
This reimagining of Jesus coupled with the personal story of Borg opened many, many people up to reconnecting with their faith, with God, with the bible and with Jesus. It gave them new ways to look at these things that incorporated a modern worldview, rather than ignore it.
When we are freed from stale, insufficient notions of God, Jesus and the bible, we can return to the bible with a different lens – and maybe we might even find some of those eye-glazing passages have actual relevance to our lives today. Take, for example, our passage today: the ascension of Jesus. I’m going to guess this is in the eye-glaze-over category for most of us. Probably about the time Jesus is whooshed up into heaven in a Hollywood rapture-type scene, you’ve stopped thinking about its relevance to your life and visions of eggs and bacon creep into your mind.
But, by not insisting on a literal interpretation that has no chance of being relevant, we are free to relook at a story that might have something to say that really would apply to our lives. No longer calling things like the ascension historical events that really happened, we can ask ourselves why the author used this myth. We can see new meanings in texts that used to seem distant. We aren’t imposing old, useless images back onto this wonderful text, we are allowing new ones to emerge.
The story of the ascension is obviously about the post-Easter Jesus. It is not history – it is myth, meant to illuminate something about Luke’s experience of God and his hopes for the early Christians of his community. Luke talks about the Spirit, and in this story, we see that Spirit is a new image of God for these disciples. What they had before is no longer helping them connect with God and move forward in faith. Jesus, who was to be the new king of the world had died, left them when he was killed on the cross. God as the one who would overthrow the oppressors seemed a joke given nothing in their lives had changed since Jesus came as God-in-flesh. They had to let go of what they knew and allow a new understanding in, so God could once again be relevant in their lives.
Their reality had changed since Jesus died…significantly. Now their understanding of God had to change as well. Admitting that Jesus was really gone, and that they really didn’t know if and when he was coming back, Luke still feels God’s presence through this powerful Spirit he writes about. Luke says to his community, “Jesus left, but his Spirit remains,” and for Luke, when they connected to the Spirit, they would be compelled to now be God-in-flesh in the world.” Luke was offering his readers a new way of seeing and connecting to God.
Such a message can speak to me today. Sometimes the old ideas about Jesus and God don’t work for me. They don’t inspire me, motivate me, or make me feel at all connected to something divine. But, Luke, as well as Borg, suggest I need to stop looking back to old understandings and instead connect with the divine in new ways that fit my experiences and worldview so that I might be compelled forward in my faith and life.
The ascension, even though it is not an historical event, or maybe because it is not an historical event, does raise questions we can struggle with: What is our experience of God? Do we need to let go of some ideas that have just become barriers to our faith? What replaces those ideas? How do you experience the divine? What difference does God make in your life?
Your ultimate ideas about God obviously do not have to match Borg’s. Although Borg has offered a helpful alterative that makes sense to many people, it is only one person’s way of talking about a God that is relevant and fits his experience. Borg is an Easter person not because he found the answer once and for all. He is an Easter person because he shows us how to continue a journey with God. He gives us permission to let go of images that no longer help us. He encourages us to develop understandings and images of God that fit our experience and make God, Jesus, and the bible relevant.
Something I take from Borg’s work is that those of us who are progressive Christians, who don’t insist on literal readings and understandings of God, who have let go of simplistic images of God that most people don’t find relevant to their lives today, can help resurrect God and Jesus for others. We can share our experiences, give permission to embrace both science and faith, articulate an intelligible, relevant God that speaks as much to us today as to those who wrote our scriptures. We can talk about how passages in the bible that would be irrelevant if read literally can be meaningful when seen as myth and metaphor.
Often when people reject faith and religion, they are rejecting a very particular idea of God or reading of the bible. We might have something to offer folks who still yearn for connection to the divine, but don’t have anything to grab onto other than old, stale, useless images that come up short. Like Borg, we can bring God back to life for people, we can help them feel the Spirit of God, and connect them with meaning and purpose. Amen.
June 5, 2011: 7th Sunday of Easter
There are parts of the bible that when we hear the words, our ears perk up. They ring familiar, sometimes we have an immediate, emotional reaction, and we might even think “that really speaks to what I’m dealing with today.” When a liturgist reads them on a Sunday morning, we are engaged, and we actually hear the words.
• Blessed are the peacemakers.
• I have come to bring good news to the poor.
• Wives submit to your husbands
Other parts of the bible make our eyes glaze over, our minds wander, our heads nod sleepily.
• The sun turning black, the moon turning blood red, stars falling to earth like figs right before the rapture.
• Long, complicated theological treatises by Paul explaining a God that makes no sense to us in the end.
• Discourses about Jesus the high priest seated at the right hand of the Father.
Why the difference? It’s about relevance. If something seems relevant to us today, we are engaged. If something seems like a supernatural hallucination of people who lived 2000 years ago, or made up fairy tales people are trying to pass off as nonfiction, well, why not think about what you’re going to have for lunch today.
The bible isn’t the only thing that suffers a relevance problem. Sometimes our understanding and images of God and Jesus get in the way of us being able to relate to the divine, much less the bible, in any meaningful way. Most of our images and ideas about God come from what we learned as children, or what we hear in pop culture and the media. God is a father up in heaven, looking down, foreseeing and controlling every little thing. God is a judge up there somewhere, throwing lightning bolts at people who are doing the wrong thing. Our understanding of Jesus is of a miracle working superhero, who was literally raised from the dead, defying, of course, any and all science. These are not uncommon ways to think about God and Jesus, they are embedded in most of our psyches whether we are conscious of them or not.
It’s interesting, because those images persist in most of our minds, but then, because we accept the findings of science, and live in modern, post-Enlightenment times, we don’t in our hearts of hearts really “believe” in those things. They may not have been bad starting places when we were children. They might have started us well down the path of faith. But, now, they are more fairy tale than bedrocks of our lives.
The problem is this: Those images persist, and they don’t necessarily help connect us to God, but we, generally, don’t have other images or understandings of God to replace them. God, as father, judge, magician up there in the clouds somewhere, becomes irrelevant to our lives and we’re left with no way back to the divine.
Marcus Borg is a scholar and theologian who is passionate about making God, Jesus, and the Bible relevant to people – especially mainline, progressive, science-embracing, people that live in this in between space of doubting what they know about God from Sunday school, but not having a more mature, sophisticated image of God to replace the old ones. He wrote books like, “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time,” “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time,” and “Meeting God Again for the First Time” (okay, maybe he’s not the most original book title giver ). But he is a skilled, accessible writer that tries to help people reconnect with God.
In describing what he sees as the problem for Christians in the modern world he writes about three different responses to the disconnect between our modern worldview and the worldview of the bible:
“Some of us resist the impact of the modern worldview by becoming fundamentalists, by insisting on the truthfulness of premodern Christian ways of seeing things in spite of their conflicts with modern knowledge. Others of us seek to add the notion of God to the modern worldview. We view the universe as a gigantic machine, made up of tiny bits and pieces of “stuff” all operating in accord with natural laws, then we add a notion of God as a supernatural being who created the whole but who is essentially outside the process. This makes God distant. Still others give up the notion of God altogether…and not always consciously. This makes God irrelevant.”
I have chosen Borg as our Easter person today because he has, for many people, resurrected God and Jesus, and even people’s faith by offering a fourth response; new, better images of God, something other than our insufficient childhood understandings. He has given people permission to expand their understanding of God, which has made God relevant to their lives again.
One reason he can do this for others is because of his own experiences. Borg grew up in the church learning from the adults in his life about Jesus and God and the bible. He learned it well. God the distant mastermind, Jesus the supernatural sacrifice and way to heaven. But, by the time he got to college, he realized those ideas were not sustainable in the face of the real world. They could not be reconciled with what he knew of science and the world around him. Because for him those images were so strong, and because he had been told how sacred they were, he couldn’t see God any other way, but he could no longer believe in this God. And so, he drifted from faith, from Church and from God.
As an adult, he reconnected to Christianity through the scholarly study of the New Testament. He found in his studies of history, and of the context in which the authors of the bible lived that the images we learn as children are gross oversimplifications of what is in the bible itself. The understandings and images of God in the bible are so varied, so rich and multi-layered, so nuanced and complex. Such a God can be relevant in a varied, multi-layered, nuanced and complex world. He realized that when we never grow beyond what we learned as children we are ignoring the God described by these incredible people of faith who wrote our scriptures. Most of the time our images of God are far more simplistic, facile, and child-like than theirs ever were.
One of Borg’s contributions to rethinking theology that moved people beyond simplistic ideas was by distinguishing between two different Jesus’ we find in the new testament: the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus. The pre-Easter Jesus is the historical Jesus. The post-Easter Jesus is what Jesus became after his death to those who sought to follow him. Specifically, the post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience, not the Jesus of history.
The gospels contain two kinds of materials: some goes back to Jesus as a figure in history, and some is the product of the communities themselves decades after Easter, laying what they now believe about the post-Easter Jesus back over the historical Jesus. And often these two Jesus’, post and pre Easter, are present in the same biblical passage, the same story. The Jesus of the bible is a combination – something can be based in history but then a layer is added that is myth and story born of the experiences of people who didn’t know the pre-Easter Jesus. This is why we get different accounts of his birth, life, death and resurrection in all of the gospels. They are not history – they are a mix.
This doesn’t make the bible any less true. People were experiencing God through this post-Easter Jesus. They themselves didn’t think they were writing history. They were writing religious truth and experience to lead others to understand God and follow Jesus. The problem is when we collapse the pre and post Easter Jesus into an historical figure, and then demand we believe in that Jesus. Borg says we are far more likely to connect with God when we tease out the two Jesus’ and try to learn what the biblical writers were trying to say through myth and story to the Christians of their day.
This reimagining of Jesus coupled with the personal story of Borg opened many, many people up to reconnecting with their faith, with God, with the bible and with Jesus. It gave them new ways to look at these things that incorporated a modern worldview, rather than ignore it.
When we are freed from stale, insufficient notions of God, Jesus and the bible, we can return to the bible with a different lens – and maybe we might even find some of those eye-glazing passages have actual relevance to our lives today. Take, for example, our passage today: the ascension of Jesus. I’m going to guess this is in the eye-glaze-over category for most of us. Probably about the time Jesus is whooshed up into heaven in a Hollywood rapture-type scene, you’ve stopped thinking about its relevance to your life and visions of eggs and bacon creep into your mind.
But, by not insisting on a literal interpretation that has no chance of being relevant, we are free to relook at a story that might have something to say that really would apply to our lives. No longer calling things like the ascension historical events that really happened, we can ask ourselves why the author used this myth. We can see new meanings in texts that used to seem distant. We aren’t imposing old, useless images back onto this wonderful text, we are allowing new ones to emerge.
The story of the ascension is obviously about the post-Easter Jesus. It is not history – it is myth, meant to illuminate something about Luke’s experience of God and his hopes for the early Christians of his community. Luke talks about the Spirit, and in this story, we see that Spirit is a new image of God for these disciples. What they had before is no longer helping them connect with God and move forward in faith. Jesus, who was to be the new king of the world had died, left them when he was killed on the cross. God as the one who would overthrow the oppressors seemed a joke given nothing in their lives had changed since Jesus came as God-in-flesh. They had to let go of what they knew and allow a new understanding in, so God could once again be relevant in their lives.
Their reality had changed since Jesus died…significantly. Now their understanding of God had to change as well. Admitting that Jesus was really gone, and that they really didn’t know if and when he was coming back, Luke still feels God’s presence through this powerful Spirit he writes about. Luke says to his community, “Jesus left, but his Spirit remains,” and for Luke, when they connected to the Spirit, they would be compelled to now be God-in-flesh in the world.” Luke was offering his readers a new way of seeing and connecting to God.
Such a message can speak to me today. Sometimes the old ideas about Jesus and God don’t work for me. They don’t inspire me, motivate me, or make me feel at all connected to something divine. But, Luke, as well as Borg, suggest I need to stop looking back to old understandings and instead connect with the divine in new ways that fit my experiences and worldview so that I might be compelled forward in my faith and life.
The ascension, even though it is not an historical event, or maybe because it is not an historical event, does raise questions we can struggle with: What is our experience of God? Do we need to let go of some ideas that have just become barriers to our faith? What replaces those ideas? How do you experience the divine? What difference does God make in your life?
Your ultimate ideas about God obviously do not have to match Borg’s. Although Borg has offered a helpful alterative that makes sense to many people, it is only one person’s way of talking about a God that is relevant and fits his experience. Borg is an Easter person not because he found the answer once and for all. He is an Easter person because he shows us how to continue a journey with God. He gives us permission to let go of images that no longer help us. He encourages us to develop understandings and images of God that fit our experience and make God, Jesus, and the bible relevant.
Something I take from Borg’s work is that those of us who are progressive Christians, who don’t insist on literal readings and understandings of God, who have let go of simplistic images of God that most people don’t find relevant to their lives today, can help resurrect God and Jesus for others. We can share our experiences, give permission to embrace both science and faith, articulate an intelligible, relevant God that speaks as much to us today as to those who wrote our scriptures. We can talk about how passages in the bible that would be irrelevant if read literally can be meaningful when seen as myth and metaphor.
Often when people reject faith and religion, they are rejecting a very particular idea of God or reading of the bible. We might have something to offer folks who still yearn for connection to the divine, but don’t have anything to grab onto other than old, stale, useless images that come up short. Like Borg, we can bring God back to life for people, we can help them feel the Spirit of God, and connect them with meaning and purpose. Amen.
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