Sunday Sermon Scripture Discussion

Must we talk about exorcism?

2012-01-26T11:25:00.003-05:00

Our texts for this Sunday are Deuteronomy 18:15-20, Psalm 111, and Mark 1:21-28, which can be read here.

I've been dreading this week for a while--for it brings me to face a topic I would prefer to avoid, a component of Jesus' ministry that I would find it far easier to gloss over or write off as belonging to a past era rather than working to figure out how to apply to our life as modern-day disciples.

Yet this week, we cannot avoid it: it's time to talk about exorcism.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus does many "works of power"--healing the sick and injured, raising the dead, calming the storm. Yet one of the most frequent ways Jesus displays his power as one filled with the Spirit of God is through casting spirits out of tortured, afflicted people. In addition to today's story of Jesus casting an unclean spirit out of a man in the synagogue, Jesus casts a whole legion of spirits out of a man and into a herd of pigs in Mark 5:1-20, relieves a little girl of a demon in Mark 7:24-30, in Mark 9:14-29 casts a demon out of a boy whom the disciples had failed in their efforts to exorcise (you can read these three very interesting stories here).

Perhaps even scarier than the fact that this is something Jesus did repeatedly--at least scarier to someone like me who admittedly doesn't quite know what to make of exorcism stories--is that the power to exorcise is something Jesus said those who followed him would possess. In Mark 6.7, Jesus "called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits."

What on earth does that mean for we who are sent by Christ today? What is this power Jesus has--this power Jesus has now entrusted to us?

Is this a power that's even valid anymore? In our rational, modern day scientific society, many people write off the "demons" of the New Testament as things like seizures and neurologically explainable mental illness--things better treated with medicine than any sort of holy authority. Unfortunately, this has placed a terrible stigma on those who suffer these things over the centuries--a stigma that I hope, at last, is being removed. It has also led to a restriction of exorcism to faith healers who can lay a hand on a tormented person and leave them writhing on the floor--acts that are often all spectacle and no substance.

The question is: is there something else Jesus is talking about here? Are there other spirits lurking among us today that we are called to play a part in casting out as followers of Jesus--voices that compete with and oppose the Spirit of God within us, hidden tormentors of our souls? What *could* it look like for us to claim this power to exorcise these things that destroy us in the way Jesus intended--and to let Jesus have this sort of power over us?

Response Time

2012-01-19T13:30:00.005-05:00

Our texts for this week as we continue our Epiphany journey through "Jesus' First Days" are Jonah 3:1-10, Psalm 62:5-12, and Mark 1:14-20. You may read them here.

This week, our church council has been preparing to go on a retreat together. As part of our preparation, we have all been instructed to take the Myers-Brigg Temperament Indicator to help us learn more about how we're wired, how we react, process and respond. As I took the inventory this week, I was asked to respond "Yes or No" to things like the following: "You are usually the first to react to a sudden event: the telephone ringing or unexpected question"; "You prefer to act immediately rather than speculate about various options"; "Your decisions are based more on the feelings of a moment than on the careful planning." My answer to each of these questions was a definitive NO. Though I have learned to adapt to abrupt shifts or the unexpected, at heart I am about as far from a reactive, spur-of-the-moment, sudden change person as you can get. My reactions are slow; it takes me a while to process; if you ask me to do something suddenly, it's usually not going to go well.

And so it is as I look at today's two stories of people responding to God's call,I find myself much more "in the boat" (to use a bad pun) with Jonah in response to God's call than with the Ninevites or the disciples we meet in Mark. Earlier in Jonah's story, God had instructed him to go to Ninevah--the hometown of his enemies--and proclaim God's word to them. Jonah has spent his whole life trending away from those gross people in Ninevah; turn around now and go preach to them? Not a chance. And so Jonah puts himself on a boat headed in the opposite direction, then ends up in the belly of a great fish at the bottom of the sea. There he has time to reflect on his decisions and finally, begrudgingly, say, "OK--I will go."

Go Jonah does--yet still begrudgingly. He goes halfway into the city and proclaims a half-hearted message to the people. The people, however, are immediately ready to respond--suddenly, abruptly, unexpectedly. They clean up their lives and change their hearts to trust in God so quickly that those of us who like deliberate decisions may look at them and say, "Is this for real? This can't be real. No one just changes like that."

I feel the same way in hearing about Peter, Andrew, James, and John. Jesus utters simple words--"Follow me"--and immediately they drop everything--their livelihood, families, stability. They just take off after this guy that, as far as we know, they've never laid eyes on before. Is this for real? Are they insane? You can't just drop everything and follow!

These stories, then, hit upon the question of our response time. All the people in these stories, eventually, responded to God's call; for Jonah, it involved a trip to the depths of the sea. For Ninevah, it was good they reacted quickly because it was just in the nick of time. For the disciples, they heard the urgency in Jesus' voice and something there was enough to make them respond--to compel them to drop those nets and follow.

It makes me wonder: how do we react when God suddenly breaks into our lives--by hiding in fear, or following with abandon (and, likely, a little fear as well)? How do we recognize God as the thing to which we are called to respond immediately amidst all the world's options? How do we know when God is calling us to leave our careful plans aside and follow the rush of a Spirit we cannot explain? And is it okay, sometimes, if our response time lags a bit?

But perhaps the question underneath all our responses is this: do we believe God has the power to change us quickly, suddenly, forever?

Meet Mark, This Year's Gospel

2012-01-12T12:45:00.005-05:00

Our texts for this Sunday, January 15, are 1 Samuel 3:1-20, Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18, and Mark 1:9-13. The Old Testament readings can be found here; to read the verses from Mark, go here.

NOTE: During these 5 weeks of Epiphany when we are moving verse by verse through Mark's first chapter, I would encourage you to read the entire first chapter of Mark every week (linked above) sometime before coming to worship--straight through, just 45 short verses from start to finish. What sense of who Jesus is do they give you?

This blog (and our next few weeks in worship) will act as your very own introduction to Mark, the Gospel we will be reading for most of the coming year (that's right, friends--with the exception of a few weeks after Easter, we will be reading Mark more or less from now til Thanksgiving!).

What does this mean for you? Well, you will like Mark if...

1) You have a touch of ADD and/or like people who get to the point: Because Mark does, too. He often begins a story, then gets distracted and tells another story, then comes back to the original story. Mark is the shortest of the four gospels by far. He does not waste words, but tells many of the well-known stories of Jesus life with incredible succinctness. He only tells the stories that he wants us to know, and tells them in an almost Twitter-esque brevity.

2) You love action movies: Because Mark moves FAST. His favorite word is the word "immediately", which appears about 43 times in the Gospel--11 times in the first chapter alone. Especially in his first 10 chapters, Mark is booking it at a pretty fast tempo through the ministry of Jesus, and he doesn't like to waste time. This story is urgent.

3) You have a thing for mystery and/or think actions speak louder than words: In Mark's Gospel, the reader and Jesus know who Jesus is almost from the outset, but most of the characters in the story remain rather clueless. This is largely because of what has been called Mark's secrecy motif--Jesus is constantly telling people not to tell who he is. He wants to show this for himself with the life he lives.

4) You want to get a sense of who this Jesus guy is and what he's about: Mark wanted to paint a picture with quick, clear strokes of who Jesus is--Son of God, Messiah, one with great strength and authority yet who would suffer and die. This is the earliest written account (we believe) we have of Jesus' life, and as a result brings us close to the core of this figure who has changed the course of history. If you want to get a quick introduction to Jesus' ways, Mark is an excellent place to start.

As we start with Mark, we'll be spending the next month or so on the beginning of Jesus' ministry, moving almost verse by verse through chapter 1. In this chapter, Jesus appears, is baptized, is tempted, begins to teach, calls disciples, performs his first miracle, heals, prays, travels, and breaks all sorts of rules and conventions--all in the span of about 36 verses. This first chapter is a good place for us to dwell, for in the beginning of Jesus' ministry we learn a LOT about what his life is going to be about. There is no better place for us to start.

We begin this week with the first appearance of Jesus in this gospel: not in a manger, but in a river, where he suddenly appears to be baptized by John. Why do you think this is the first visual of Jesus that Mark gives us? What does it mean that this is how the story of Jesus in this Gospel begins--with Jesus joining the pilgrims at the Jordan, seeing the heavens turn open, and hearing a voice that had to both comfort and confuse?

Join us on Sunday as we begin our Markan journey by asking these questions together!

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas...

2012-01-05T21:16:00.003-05:00

Our texts for this Sunday--on which we will celebrate Epiphany--are Isaiah 60:1-6, Psalm 72, and Matthew 2:1-12. Give these very interconnected texts a read here.

"The Twelve Days of Christmas" used to be my least favorite Christmas song. Every time it came on the radio (unless it was this totally amazing version recorded by The Muppets) I would change the station. What do twelve days have to do with anything? And who would really want their true love to give them such completely ridiculous gifts?

And then in seminary I learned what the 12 days of Christmas actually are: the days that unfold between Christmas Day and January 6, which is designated as "Epiphany"--the day on which we celebrate the visit of the magi and the revelation of Christ's light to all the nations of the world. Epiphany is actually a more ancient Christian festival than the celebration of Christmas, but today--at least in American culture where we prefer to celebrate the "50 Days Before Christmas" rather than "The Twelve Days of Christmas" with decorations up by November 15 and down by December 26--the day of Epiphany, as well as the 10 days of Christmas falling before it, and the seven-week season of Epiphany that follows it, often get lost in the shuffle.

What do we lose in losing such a season? This week I read a reflection by Linda J. Vogel and Dwight W. Vogel on how daily life intersects and needs the seasons of the Christian worship year, and was reminded anew how much Epiphany--a day and season of revelation and worship, of illumination and worldwide impact--is needed. Consider their wise words:

When we long for things to be different, when we watch and
wait,
we are an Advent people.

When we recognize the presence of the holy in the
ordinary,
we celebrate Christmas.

When a sense of the sacramental is broken open to us, and we
respond by offering our material wealth, our worship, our
lives and our deaths,
we live an Epiphany life.

The magi, or wise men, of the Gospel reading that falls on Epiphany every year shows us what it looks like to live such "an Epiphany life": Here we find people who studied the world around them and the promises of God, and who made the connections between the two. Here we find people willing to take a journey that was costly in more ways than one--that could have even cost them their lives when it brought them in contact with a violent ruler who felt threatened. Here we find wealthy, educated people not afraid to humble themselves before a peasant toddler, to offer worship that--on the surface--would make them look...well...kind of silly.

The wise men who sought Jesus by the light of the star seem a good place to start the Epiphany journey that will occur not just on this Twelfth Day of Christmas, but stretching weeks into the future as we begin to walk with a growing Jesus as he begins his own revelation of who he is and the Epiphany life to which he is, even now, calling us. Be with us on Sunday as we move from the season of waiting and the season of recognizing into coming days accompanied by the magi's wisdom as we seek to follow the star together.

Simeon's Song

2011-12-29T12:30:00.003-05:00

Our texts for this New Year's Day/First Sunday in Christmas are Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 148, and Luke 2:22-40. You may read them here.

However, the key text for this week--Luke 2:22-40--is best not read, but heard, for it is a song! So, rather than writing about Simeon's song, sung in the Temple in response to meeting the Baby Jesus, I want to encourage you this week to listen to it. The text, from scripture, is sung in many liturgical traditions after communion, at funerals, or as part of Evening Prayers before bedtime. It is a song that has remained fresh in Christian imagination and worship for 2000 years. What makes Simeon's words so potent?

I encourage you to read Simeon's song lyrics below, then click the "play" button on the two links below to listen to two very different musical interpretations of them: One, by the ecumenical community in Taize, France, which offers Simeon's words repetitively in Latin; the other, by a contemporary songwriter who imagines the scene and the song that unfolded in the Temple and weaves them together with the words of "O Come O Come Emmanuel" that we have been singing expectantly throughout this season.

"Lord, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel."

&amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://matthewsmith.bandcamp.com/track/your-king-has-come-matthew-smith"&amp;amp;amp;gt;Your King Has Come [Matthew Smith] by Various Artists&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;

Listen and reflect: what do you hear in Simeon's song?

Two Sides of the Story

2011-12-22T22:00:00.005-05:00

Our texts for this Christmas Eve are Isaiah 9:2-7 and Luke 2:1-16, while our texts for Christmas Day are Isaiah 52:7-10 and John 1:1-5, 10-18.

It only happens once every 6 years or so: Christmas Eve falls on a Saturday. On these rare years, those of us in traditions that do not typically worship on Christmas morning (such as we Baptists!) get to pull a double-header, gathering to hear the story, sing the carols, and worship together not just on the candlelit eve of Jesus' birth, but also in the beautiful light of Christmas day.

"Why do we need church on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day?" I heard someone ask this week. "Wouldn't once cover it?" Well...one shot at the story of Jesus coming to earth, one means of celebrating this event and this work of God is definitely not enough if our Gospel texts for these two holy days are any indication. Luke and John cast two very different lights upon the story of Jesus coming to earth. Honestly, if you read them totally out of context, never having heard them before, would you even know they were accounts of the same tale?

Luke speaks of an event bound to history, taking place in a specific time and moment. It tells of the journey of an ordinary couple through the Judean countryside, birthing a son about whom we are told only three things: he was his mother's firstborn, he was wrapped in rags, and his cradle was a feeding trough. Very earthy stuff. Then, remarkably, angels do announce this child's birth--but still it's just to shepherds, a few guys lurking in nearby fields--more ordinary, lowly people. Interestingly, never is the child given a name in this passage--he is given titles, but never a name.

John's account, on the other hand, hearkens back not to a moment of local history, but to the beginning of all history--his opening words of "In the beginning" exactly mirror the words that began Genesis 1's creation account. Here we learn not about the origins and journey of any ordinary person, but of the Word--the logos--the very wisdom of God, which is now taking on flesh and dwelling among God's people. This Word-made-flesh is not just any human; this Word-made-flesh is showing us the fullness of God, and inviting all who encounter him into fullness of life as God's children. This One who created all is breaking into creation is creating the world--and us--all over again. It's as cosmic as a vision can get, one of a scope beyond our imagination--yet John does take a moment to get direct. This one about whom we are speaking, this Word made flesh? His name is Jesus.

Luke tells the story in prose, in a story that can be acted out by children in costumes; John offers us poetry, words that create space for imagination but paint few concrete pictures. Both inspire awe, imagination, and wonder at a God who seems to do everything except the predictable--yet from totally different sides of the story. So come join us this Christmas Eve (worship at 5 PM!) AND Christmas Day (worship at 10 AM!) as we get the gift of viewing Jesus from both of these perspectives--above us and beside us, among us and all around us, through stories and songs of grace that we can never tell and sing enough. We need both sides of the Jesus story, and this year we actually get to spend time sitting amongst the beauty of both!

Getting the Good News Through

2011-12-15T23:56:00.005-05:00

Our scriptures for this fourth Sunday of Advent are 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 and Luke 1:26-38. But I want to begin our reflection for this Sunday when we consider, in our season of waiting, how we are waiting for love by looking back at what we talked about this past Sunday: how we are waiting for the joy of good news. There was an incredibly powerful quote I meant to include in our conversation around this in the sermon this past Sunday, so since I neglected to do that I will post it here:

"We all long to hear a good word: a word that brings good news, a word that can sustain us, a word that can give us the vision and courage to make it through another day, a word that tells us God is with us. Precisely what that 'good word' is, what it says, will vary from context to context. A person who is drowning doesn't want to hear about food any more than a person who is starving wants to be thrown a life preserver. We each long to hear a word that speaks to where we are, in our own particular place and time." (Professor Holly Hearon, workingpreacher.org)

I think it's true--we are each waiting for good news--but good news is not uniform for everyone. It will not be received in the same way by everyone. We hear every piece of news colored by our histories, our needs, the ways we have been burned or blessed in the past, the way we imagine the future is "supposed" to be.

Think about the good news that unfolded in Luke 1. When Mary's cousin Elizabeth got word she was pregnant--a miracle in her old age after years of barrenness!--this was good news indeed--almost too good to be true for one who had been waiting for this news for decades. But for Mary? At the age of maybe 13 or 14, this was the last news Mary was looking for--it was, in many ways, like being thrown a life preserver when water was nowhere in sight. No wonder, at the angel's appearance and words to her, she found herself not immediately filled with joy deeply troubled, disturbed, confused, rattled. Why would God seek to bring good news to the world in this way--a way that, it seemed, would almost certainly mean bad news for young, unwed Mary? Why would God choose this route to reach us?

I've been captured this Christmas season by a beautiful song co-written and recorded by one of my favorite singer/songwriters, Andy Gullahorn. "I Will Find a Way" dares to imagine God trying to figure out how to bring God's love to a world that God was not sure would be able to receive God's love. What creative ways would God have to find to get this good news, this good Word that is Jesus, across in the context of our broken, suspicious world? The song speaks of a broken, abused young woman—a woman maybe Mary’s age—and speaks from God’s perspective in considering how to get the good news of love across to her. I strongly encourage you to listen to the song here and consider how God had to be creative--unconventional--unexpected--if good news that would completely blow anything else we have ever experienced out of the water was to be received by a world that, in Gullahorn's words, "gave up on love waiting for a change."

We wait…but how ready are we actually to receive such overwhelmingly good news? Are our hearts ready to make room for Christ’s presence? If not, what is keeping that love out? What must God break through to come to us once again?

And once we receive God’s love…to what lengths are we willing to go to see that love carried into the world, to ensure God’s good word can be heard by those who long for it most desperately? What can we learn from God’s choice to become incarnate in us about how we, then, can make Christ’s love intimately present to the world?

When Everyone Does Their Part

2011-12-09T16:18:00.009-05:00

Our scripture texts this week are Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Luke 1:46-55; and John 1:6-8, 19-28. Give them a read through here.

Maybe I'm just on a strange grammar kick right now, or in a stretch of being particularly attentive to words, but reading through our passages for this week--particularly Isaiah and Luke--made me think, again, about the power of verbs and how they are used in different ways. This time, it was not verb tenses that struck me so much as they did last week, but rather who is called upon to carry out the various actions named by these prophetic songs.

Consider the verbs invoked by Isaiah. In this vision, actions are attributed to three different subjects. If we were to sort them out, we would find that this passage tells us that

The servant(s) of God will...

bring good news
bind up (or heal/mend)
proclaim
comfort
provide
give
greatly rejoice!

God will...

love justice
hate thievery and crime
faithfully give
make a covenant
bless
cause righteousness and praise to spring up

And all the people (in response to these actions of the servant(s) and God) will...

be called
build up
raise up
repair
acknowledge God's blessing

Usually, you need nouns and pronouns and participial phrases and crazy things like that to make a picture complete...but this picture of verbs is a pretty remarkable one in and of itself, a picture of sheer activity. Just sit with these verbs for a moment...read down the three lists, slowly, consecutively. Imagine...if each of us did what God had called us to--the servants of God in community, the world around them witnessing the work of these communities, and God faithfully carrying out God's promises...what vision of a new heaven and earth might we receive? Would it be one very much like the song of a world turned upside-down that Mary sang--a world turned upside down in all the right ways?

How might the wholeness God desires for creation come to pass if we all, as faithfully as we knew how, chose to do our part--to bring vision of a world embraced by joy to life? To what action are you being called in this season of waiting, preparation, and transformation--and what action do you most long for from our God, and from our world?

Waiting for Resolution

2011-12-02T12:17:00.004-05:00

Our scripture texts for this second Sunday of Advent are Isaiah 40:1-11, Psalm 85:8-13, and Mark 1:1-8. Read them in advance of Sunday here.

As a writer, one of my weaknesses is picking a verb tense to use throughout a piece. My editors are always telling me, "Abby, just pick one and stick with it!"--but still I find myself shifting back and forth, not quite sure whether the story I am telling is one past, one present, or one future.

In our Lectionary Bible Study this month, we noticed that the writer of Isaiah seems to struggle similarly to resolve his verb tenses--in the same passage, an event can be spoken of as past, present, and future; an action can be now and not yet; a reality can be complete and yet unseen. Such tension is typical of prophetic literature which connects God's past actions to what God is doing in the present and what God has promised yet to do.

Take, for example, our passage this week from Isaiah 40--a passage which helps this book make the turn from the impending threat of exile to living in exile and looking beyond it. Listen to the things that are said to be past, present, and future actions of God or God's people in this text:

In the past: Jerusalem "has served" and "has received"; the Lord "has spoken"

In the present: God's comfort, tender speech; we are to cry, prepare, make straight; we wither, fade; we must get up, lift up, not fear, say, see; God comes, rules.

In the future: The landscape shall be lifted up, shall be made low, shall become level; God shall be revealed, the people shall see and shall cry; God will stand forever, will feed, will gather, will carry and gently lead.

This week's Advent theme is that of peace, and peace--past, present, future--is an idea that this passage invites us to consider in all of its manifestations. How are we waiting for the resolution of tenses and tension in our own world--for peace to prevail? What has our experience of peace--or lack there of--been in the past? What is our present experience of peace? What is the future peace we envision and move towards? What is our role in all of this, and God's role, and the role of all the earth?

Big questions not easily resolved--but may we resolve to wait and wrestle with them in this season where we draw near to both what is now and what is not yet, even as we feel the continued impact of all that has been.

Our Advent Question

2011-11-23T21:22:00.009-05:00

Our texts for this first Sunday in Advent are Isaiah 64:1-9 and Mark 13:24-37. You may read them here.

This Advent, I invite you to consider an important question:

What are you waiting for?

We live in a culture where we try to eliminate waiting as much as possible, but somehow waiting remains one of those things we cannot avoid.

We wait in line for those things we desperately need.

We wait for rides to show up that never come...

...and for flights endlessly delayed by forces beyond our control.

Around here, we wait in a LOT of traffic.
We wait for the phone to ring, bringing good news or bad, a voice we long for or a voice we dread.
We have waited--and continue to wait--for justice long overdue to be done.

We wait on tiptoe for the one we love to show up.

As Christmas approaches again, we continue the difficult work of waiting--for justice, for relationship, for the news we are craving, for dreams that it seems will never be realized. Advent is our season not to avoid this waiting, but to live into it--to take time to dig and assess what it is, really, that we are waiting for--yearning for--pleading for, sometimes with patience, sometimes with desperation.

What are you waiting for?

How are you waiting for it?

And why are we waiting in the first place?

Join us this Advent season as we wonder about and wrestle with these things, seeking among the questions the hope, peace, joy, and love for which we so deeply and desperately long.

Time to Start Over, Yet Again

2011-11-17T15:56:00.003-05:00

Our texts for this Christ the King/Reign of Christ Sunday are Joshua 24:1, 14-25; Psalm 24; and Matthew 25:31-46. You may read them here.

It's amazing to me how many different calendars we live by. There's the annual calendar that begins on January 1 and runs to December 31; there's the school year calendar, which begins (more or less) around Labor Day and ends sometime after Memorial Day; Birthdays mark the beginning of a new year in our individual lives; most organization have a Fiscal Year calendar, which sometimes starts in July and runs to June; in our congregation, we install new leadership beginning October 1, with terms ending September 30. That's a lot of beginnings, a lot of endings, a lot of starting over.

But that's not all: we come this week to the end and beginning of another calendar by which we are invited to shape our lives: the Liturgical Calendar, the cycle of seasons by which we order our worship. This Sunday, called Christ the King or Reign of Christ Sunday (to learn more about this lesser known day in our liturgical year, check out this site), marks the final Sunday of our Worship Year. Next Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, is the true first Sunday of our new worship year, no matter what our wall and Google calendars say! On this day, we look forward to the day when Christ will be recognized and reign as king over all the nations; next week, even as we continue looking forward, we start to turn our gaze back, back to the days of waiting for Christ to come among us the first time, to be born in the flesh. Next week, we get to start the story of Jesus all over again, hear it all again as if for the first time.

I appreciate the cycle of the church year, the chance to start over and retrace our steps every November/December by going back to the beginning, and even this plethora of new-beginning options in the various calendars we live by because I need each and every one of them--how we need these start-overs! I mean, just look at our text from Joshua--how many times have the Israelites already affirmed God as Lord, affirmed the covenant since they left Egypt? They praised God at the Red Sea, agreed to what God would say from Sinai before God even spoke the first commandment, covenanted with God once the commandments had been given, covenanted with God AGAIN once the Golden Calf worship had torn the covenant apart...the list goes on and on. Yet here we find yet another ending--the end of Joshua's life as leader of Israel--and another time to start over, to begin anew with a serious community promise to serve the Lord and no other God.

The people sound earnest; yet in spite of the pomp and circumstance, more start overs will be needed in the future....many, many more. They will forget...fall short...get confused...get lazy...be dulled into sleep. They will have to decide again, over and over, who they are going to serve.

And so our texts for this week are good ones for this point in our year. The Covenant making ceremony in Joshua 24 sounds like an ending, but really it's just a beginning--and this is the life we live as well. In the coming days of starting over, may we remember the grace God gives us, over and over and over...may we find the courage and space to begin yet again.

New Book, Same Scene?

2011-11-10T11:02:00.005-05:00

Our Old Testament text for this week moves us into the book of Joshua--Joshua 3:3b-17--while our Gospel text brings us closer to the conclusion of our year-long commitment to hearing stories from the Gospel of Matthew--Matthew 25:14-30. The Psalm from which our Call to Worship will be drawn is also worth reading--Psalm 107.

After two months journeying with Moses through Exodus and Deuteronomy, a new day has dawned in the life of Israel. For the first time since leaving Egypt, they have a new leader, Joshua. They are about to enter a new land, the land God had promised them as part of God's covenant with them. "New" seems to be the key word here.

Yet...the scene before them doesn't look all that new. To get out of the wilderness, they must cross a body of water--just as they crossed one to enter it. This passage is rife with echoes of the crossing of the Red Sea that we spent time with in Exodus 14, and though this is a different generation than those who made that crossing, they have heard the story so many times that they feel like they were there in flesh. The Jordan River--even in flood stage--will be nothing compared to that crossing, with a whole sea in front of them and an army at their back! They can handle this, hands tied behind their backs.

Joshua can see this confidence among the people. They've lived in this region for a while now--they know the way across this river that has been their lifesource. Heck, some of them actually HAD crossed this river before, at some designated fords that made getting across less than intimidating (see Josh 2:7). They were ready for this; it was nothing they hadn't seen before--they could find their way.

Except...it was different, and the way was not as obvious as it initially seemed. Thus this crossing begins with these instructions in Joshua 3:3-4: "When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God being carried by the levitical priests, then you shall set out from your place. Follow it, so that you may know the way you should go, for you have not passed this way before."

The Israelites are ready to be independent--to spread their wings and fly, to show all that they've learned. They are ready to not just be wandering, clueless slaves but people connected to a land, charged with decision making and responsibility. And, in some senses, God is ready for them to grow up and be this, too.

But this does not mean that Israel knows where it's going and can leave God's leadership, God's miraculous provision, behind. What lies in front of them may look familiar, but it's a whole new chapter in their story--they are going to need God's presence to guide them each step of the way. Get ahead of that guidance, and the flood waters could very well swallow them up, no matter how prepared and smart and worldly they feel.

New book, apparently new scene, same story. As Adam and Eve tried to ingest God's knowledge, as the citizens of Babel sought to build their own skyscraper to heaven, as the Israelites tried to store up manna for the day God didn't come through, we don't want to admit how dependent we are. But since the scene before us is always new, how can we hope to move forward unless our ever-providing, leading, and knowing God goes first before us?

In the Meantime: Those other 13 chapters

2011-10-28T14:50:00.003-04:00

Our texts this week go off lectionary for the Old Testament and back in the lectionary for the Gospel: Exodus 35:4-29, 36:1-3 (yes, I am not joking) and Matthew 21:33-46.

Here's something interesting about Exodus, as we come to the end of our lectionary journey through this book: The lectionary (suggested readings for the church year) is full of stories from Exodus' first half. We get tales from Exodus 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 20 this year alone. Exodus, however, does not end with chapter 20; it goes on another 20 chapters, out of which only two chapters are suggested to read: a snippet from Exodus 32 and another snippet from Exodus 33.

What happens in the rest of those chapters?

Little known fact: 13 of Exodus' 40 chapters (25-31 and 35-40) are devoted to the construction of the Tabernacle-- a Dwelling place for the presence of God, that may honor and host God's presence. Unlike the later Temple the Israelites would construct, this Tabernacle would be portable--mobile--able to accompany them in their travels and in their movement into the Promised Land. It would hold symbols of ways God had spoken to and provided for them and be constructed and adorned with meticulous and holy precision. It would be the place where God's glory could dwell...and God took tons of time, both before and after the Golden Calf debacle, to outline for the Israelites how they are to assemble such a place.

I am thinking, if 13 chapters are devoted to the blueprints of and process of setting up the Tabernacle, we probably should not ignore the role the Tabernacle played in early Israel's formation. When you read Exodus 35, it likely will overwhelm you (as it does me) with unfamiliar terms--ephods and mercy seats, lampstands and curtains for screens and tanned rams skins. We don't have much framework for these ideas and can quickly get lost in them...BUT, I think we do need to think about the meaning behind them. What does it look like for us to create holy space? How do the things we bring and build reflect what we believe about God? What does it look like for us to provide a welcome for God's presence, in whatever form God's presence may take? How do we create space for God to travel with us, to abide and dwell among us?

I hope that, even amidst the somewhat confusing language of these tabernacle chapters, this central story of Exodus can help us ask these central questions of ourselves this Sunday. Looking forward to being back together!

In the Meantime: Can't We Stop Here?

2011-10-12T17:16:00.004-04:00

Our scripture texts this week are Exodus 32:1-20 and Matthew 22:1-15--click on the passages to read! (And I promise, one day, things will be simpler and we'll rejoin our regularly scheduled lectionary programming...Advent is not far away, my friends!)

Sometimes I wonder if the writer of Exodus has ever heard of that mantra, "Quit while you're ahead." If the biblical author had, they might have wrapped up the book of Exodus just before this week's reading--that would make a more "happily ever after" place for the story of the liberation and reclamation of God's people from slavery into freedom to conclude. After God gives the Ten Commandments as the foundation of the covenant relationship, God spends the next three chapters (Exodus 21-23) elaborating on the ideas laid out to introduce the covenant. At the end of this elaboration, Exodus 24 announces that "the people answered with one voice, and said, ‘All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.'" The covenant is sealed, and confirmed with an amazingly intimate celebration of holy encounter: "Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire, like the very heaven for clearness...Also they beheld God, and they ate and drank."

Seriously? Talk about a happy ending! These leaders of Israel got to attend a banquet where they SAW GOD and feasted together in (we can deduce) God's presence. The epilogue is even better: they return down the mountain, and God sets out giving Moses directions on how to build a tabernacle that can be a symbol of God's clear presence among them at all times, that can travel with them wherever they may go--a place they may worship intentionally in the presence of God, and know God's mercy and provision continue to journey with them. At the end, God gives Moses the "tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God" (Exodus 31:18)--God's words to hold on to forever. God has done it! God has laid out a way for Israel to be God's covenant people! As our Manna and Mercy Book so often put it, "God's dream is coming true!"

But this isn't the end of the Exodus story. Rather, we abruptly get this week's reading shattering all this hope and celebration. Why interrupt such a fairy tale ending to Israel's ordeal with a story that paints them (and, in some senses, their God) in such a volatile light? Why can't the covenant people just live blissfully, peacefully, and wisely after ever?

Well...because life with God is not a magical mystical fairy tale. It is messy. And though we might like to stop before this week's less beautiful story, we cannot--for we need to know what it looks like to live with God even in the midst of the messes we make, in the midst of relationships broken and patience worn thin and trust misplaced and self-indulgence run amok--because this is where we usually have to figure out how to live with God, and where God has to figure out how on earth to live with us, and where we struggle to live with one another amidst our frustrations.

So we need the part of the story that comes on Sunday--it may not be pretty, but it sure is true.

In the Meantime: Faith Before Sight

2011-10-06T10:43:00.005-04:00

Our scriptures this week are a bit scrambled from the ordinary lectionary because, really, there are moments when the Gospel and Old Testament pairings would just make a lot more sense if they were in a different order! (Look at me trying to rearrange the wisdom of many...forgive me, but really, I feel like we need to be reading these passages together today--shouldn't we read the commandments together with what Jesus had to say about them, even if what Jesus had to say doesn't technically show up in our Gospel readings for three more weeks?). SO, that said, our readings are Exodus 20:1-21, with Philippians 3:7-14 and Matthew 22:34-40 (click on each passage to read it).

We all know Exodus 20--the Ten Commandments. Well, at least we think we all know this ubiquitous passage that has sparked great public debate and great hair-raising appearances by Charlton Heston...though we may want to rethink how well we know them, being as a recent survey said more Americans could name the 7 ingredients of a Big Mac than the 10 Commandments (I added the link so you would know I was not making this up).

But even fewer of us, I think, know the scene that unfolds in Exodus 19, the chapter just before God opens God's mouth to give these "ten words" to the people to guide their life together. In Exodus 19, all the Israelites are gathered in a crowd at the base of this mountain towards which God has been aiming them for the last three months through the wilderness. There, God gives Moses a message to share with the people:

‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy [people].’ (Exodus 19:4-6)

God calls them to obedience, to live in covenant with God; and upon hearing these words, we are told in Exodus 19:8, "The people all responded together, 'We will do everything the LORD has said.'”

OK, so here is how I read this, though I may be wrong: the people are agreeing to God's covenant before they have even heard what it will be. The covenant words are not given until Exodus 20; here in Exodus 19, they know a covenant is coming, but do not yet know what it will contain. But these people--so often filled with doubt, grumbling, and still new in their knowledge of this God--agree to live by this covenant about to be given before they know what will be included.

Are they insane? I basically never agree to anything before I hear the details. I mean, if you say, "Can you do me a favor?" even if you are one of my dearest and most trusted friends, I'll usually wait to hear what the favor is before replying "Yes"...just because you never know. How much would you have to love and trust someone to agree with what they are going to say and to promise to live by their words before you even know what words they are going to speak?

But I think that is what makes this one of Israel's shining moments in its history: this crazy God has delivered them from Egypt, brought them through the Red Sea, given them water from a rock and bread and meat like rain from heaven. Everything God has promised so far has, miraculously, happened. So now...whatever God asks of them...they agree, sight unseen. They agree simply because of what they have come to know of this Yahweh character thus far, trusting that God's name is true: God will be who God will be into the future, forever, no matter what God may ask of them.

I am terrified by this kind of faith. But isn't this what all faith is--trusting the character of God enough to trust that, whatever is to come, God will make for a us a way of life, a way to walk? It boggles my mind that Israelites who have lost faith in moments of just a little thirst or a rumble in their stomachs can make such a big promise in this moment...but still, in spite of their stumbling, they want to be a people who put faith before sight--because of who they believe this God to be. The Israelites were even more clueless about what was about to come than we who more quickly name Big Mac components than commandments...yet they felt they had enough of a clue, based on who God is, that they could promise to seek to live in these ways.

Now that's faith. Scary faith. Real faith. Risky faith. Faith that makes me stand with them at the foot of the mountain and ask, "Can I really commit myself to God's hopes for me and the ways God wants me to live before I even know fully what they are? Can we do that today as a faith community--be those who commit to God by faith even before we have sight?"

In the Meantime: The Mountain's Getting Closer...

2011-09-29T12:04:00.003-04:00

This week we are going slightly off lectionary in our Exodus journey to include a passage that is not part of the lectionary readings: Exodus 18:13-27, which you can read here. Our epistle and gospel readings will be from the lectionary--Philippians 2:1-13 (a passage, in my opinion, that you can never read enough!) and Matthew 21:23-32, which can be found here.

When God commissioned Moses from the burning bush, God made Moses a promise: "This shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you," God said to Moses: "When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain" (Exodus 3:12). God made it clear even before Moses' mission to be God's agent of liberation began that their voyage out of Egypt and towards the land of promise would include a return to this place where Moses first met God, where God made God's self known as the hearer of the oppressed and the great I AM. It has been a long road back to the mountain, but by Exodus 17 and 18, Sinai--the mountain of God's presence, of God's promise--is just beginning to take shape in front of them. Something big is on the horizon, literally and metaphorically.

Like any long trip, however, the last few minutes can seem neverending, making you feel like that destination cannot come quickly enough and, in fact, may not get here at all. At the beginning of Exodus 17, there is another water shortage, and quarreling breaks out among the people yet again and leads Moses to cry out in exasperation--if Moses were an overwrought mother, it is at this point that I could hear him yell something like, "Don't you MAKE me pull this car over and separate you all!"

The water need is addressed yet again by a God who apparently handles roadtrips with exceptional patience and grace. As soon as they've all been refreshed, though, comes a bigger problem: the Israelites face their first attack, by the Amalekites. Here we get a glimpse of the future as Joshua--who will take over leadership of the people when Moses no longer can lead--steps into his first starring role. Yet Moses remains integral to the battle--amazingly, it is only as long as he holds up his staff--the staff that parted the waters and brought water from the rock--that the Israelites find themselves ahead in the battle. When his arms grow tired and begin to sag, others hold up his arms for him, keeping his arms "steady until the sun set" (I love this image from Exodus 17:12).

And so, many challenges must be overcome before the people can set up camp at the base of the mountain and come to that much anticipated place of worshipful encounter with God. Yet, in the beginning of Exodus 18 we find that before they can climb the mountain the Israelites have one more thing to accomplish: reunion and reconciliation with some of their estranged family, the Midianites. Moses now sees his father-in-law Jethro, wife, and two children for the first time since he returned to Egypt, and these branches of the family tree of God's people are reunited in worship and fellowship and peace. God's family, at least symbolically, is coming to the foot of Mt. Sinai more whole than they have been since Cain turned on Abel, Ishmael was cast out, and Jacob deceived Esau. In this reunion, the way is opened for Jethro to be an unlikely but important voice in shaping Israel's future (which we will talk about in our text this Sunday).

Fighting and reconciliation--these are the movements through which God's people move as the mountain grows closer in their sight. Will these experiences of anger, violence, and then restoration make the children of Israel ready to hear God's words from that hill and learn what it is they truly left Egypt for?

In the Meantime: Songs and Springs

2011-09-21T17:33:00.004-04:00

Our lectionary readings for this week are Exodus 16:1-15, Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45, and Matthew 20:1-16. You can read them here. Our blog discussion this week, however, will focus on what happened "in the meantime" between last week's passage of the parting of the Red Sea and this week's passage of the gift of manna to the hungry people.

It never occurred to me, before just now, that Exodus 15:1 should be one of my favorite Bible verses. Why, you ask? Because it bears this good news: "Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord." Here, my fellow lovers of rock and jazz, of piano and guitar, of choir anthems and songs of praise, is the first appearance in the Bible of that glorious form of human expression called music. It is here, after God has made God's self known to them in a crazy display of power, after they have made it to the far side of the sea by impossible faith, that we get our first recording of people bursting into song.

Can you imagine the moment? Stuttering Moses, often not able to get a solid sentence out, discovers the richer sounds his voice box can project. A sense of shared community exists for the first time among the Israelites as their voices join together in unison and harmony. The song of praise, which expresses what they'd learned about their God in more depth and layers than any simple words they could have spoken, goes on and on and on; and then, just when it seems to be over, even the women are given a voice: Moses' sister Miriam--the one who once watched her brother floating near his death in the waters and who had now seen the waters close over those who had oppressed and imprisoned them for so long--takes up tambourines and leads her fellow women in an encore of song and dance: "Sing!" she cries. "Sing!" On this day, song became part of the worship of the people of God--a component of worship that I now find it hard to imagine approaching God without.

Once the singing fades out, however, the people have to continue to follow God's command to journey. They leave the shores of the sea and travel for three long days--days which take them far from water. Finally, they come upon a spring--woohoo, let's praise God again!!--only, wait--don't praise God. This water has a taste so bitter it could be more deadly to them than dehydration. And so, their songs of praise are quickly supplanted by murmurs and grumbles, their rejoicing canceled out by the fears induced by their harsh new reality. Again, though--surprisingly quickly, actually--God acts on their behalf. God shows Moses how to turn the water sweet, and they drink deeply, soothing their parched throats before venturing on. When they reach their next stop, they discover their momentary panic had been premature: the next stop beyond Marah, Elim, had "twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water." They have returned, again, to the water brings life, to springs that well up songs of praise within them.

I think this first chapter of Israel's life post-Red Sea is an important one for entering into the next chapter. Take time to read this one, then read on into Exodus 16. Where do you see parallels? Where do you see conflicts? Why, just one chapter later, do these suddenly liberated slaves now cease to sing?

In the Meantime: "Let My People Go!"

2011-09-15T11:55:00.003-04:00

Our lectionary passages this week are Exodus 14:10-29 (I altered the lectionary inclusions a little bit), Romans 14:7-12, and Matthew 18:21-35--check them out here.

A LOT happens between the call of Moses (last week's story) and the passage of the children of Israel through the watery walls of the Sea (this week's story). Living into his call from God was no easy task for Moses--I think Moses knew this, explaining why he went to such great lengths to argue with God about God's choice of a leader. Yet once Moses turned aside to look at the bush, he was in for the long haul; and a long haul indeed it would be.

Moses leaves the glow of the bush and enters the throes of despair. His worst fears come true: no one is listening to him. He goes to Pharaoh to ask Pharaoh to let the Israelites go for three days--just three days!--to the wilderness to worship this God who has appeared to them. Pharaoh's reply is constant: “Who is the LORD, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD and I will not let Israel go.”

Then, Moses goes to tell the people what God has promised--liberty from their hard labor that is becoming increasingly harsh, life as God's protected people in a new land that can be theirs. But even Moses' own people "did not listen to him because of their discouragement and harsh labor" (Exodus 6:9). Pharaoh's grip of power is so tight that it seems no one and no thing can loose it--the Israelites are as confident of this as Pharaoh himself appears to be, scoffing in the face of this God.

At this point, however, God becomes determined that all of these doubters--Egyptians and Hebrews alike--have an opportunity to see a different power at work; and so a story unfolds that could cue music for Irving Berlin's great song "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" from the musical Annie Get Your Gun-- a spirited duet in which two singers attempt to outdo each other in increasingly complex tasks. This is perhaps an inappropriately light way to look at the very intense drama that unfolds in Exodus 7-12. The plagues have always troubled me--I mean, who would not be troubled by the suffering and death that unfolds in this struggle? But it seems that, in the context of this narrative, their point is clear: to make obvious that God's power is greater than any human power, even the seemingly unshakable power of Pharaoh, the only power the people have ever known. Anything Pharaoh can do, God can overrule--God can do all things better, not just in theory but in visible action. I love how Walter Brueggeman describes the purpose of the plagues narrative:

"The plague cycle makes the point that the processes of human power are not as cut, dried, and foreclosed as the powerful imagine. Another power is loose in the world that finally precludes any system of power that overrides the fragility of human persons and human community. This inscrutable power will not finally tolerate such abuse. At the center of public history is “wonder,” which no ruthless pharaoh can resist or squelch. It is that wonder wrought by God that in the end creates human possibilities for freedom and justice, for well-being and covenant." (The New Interpreters Bible)

This background, I think, is needed to put the crossing of the Red Sea in perspective--another horrible narrative that ends in life for some and death for others. Why carry out the Exodus in this way? Is God just showing off? This story is central to Israelite history...why are we called to wrestle with it again and again? I confess that my moral self still doesn't know what to do with the violence, and I may still not know at the end of Sunday--in fact, I probably won't. It grates on what I feel is right, on the love of God that I believe extends to all people. But maybe, from time to time, we need to be reminded that the great power of God extends to all people as well. Sometimes, if we are going to walk through the sea, we need more than the embrace of love--we need to know a power bigger than we can comprehend is backing us up. Sometimes we need to know God not just intimately, but powerfully; sometimes we need to be reminded how different from us God truly is.

But I am definitely still working on this. What do you think?

In the Meantime: Hints of Vocation

2011-09-08T11:14:00.004-04:00

Our lectionary texts this week (as we continue to run a couple of Sundays behind everyone else--but that's okay!) are Exodus 3:1-15, Romans 12:9-21, and Matthew 16:21-28. You may read them here.

In the Meantime: Throughout our Exodus series in worship, I plan to use the blog space to fill in the gaps in the Exodus story, highlighting the texts we will not be covering in worship that fall in between the ones we will be spending focused time with. So, today we will cover the ground between Moses' birth and his encounter with a burning bush: the growing-up years found in Exodus 2:10-25.

The Burning Bush encounter of Moses with God is one of the most well-known accounts in scripture (thank you, Charlton Heston); what is lesser known, however, is what led Moses to be out in the far corner of the wilderness in the first place.

Moses, you see, was a pretty mixed-up guy: born a lowly Hebrew, rescued by a princess, initially raised by his own people but then sent to live in an Egyptian palace. As a young adult, Moses has feet in a couple of worlds but a true home nowhere...a fact that is confounded his worlds collide in a violent way. Seeing an Egyptian mistreating a Hebrew, he is filled with rage at the injustice and secretly kills the Egyptian when he believes no one is looking. Yet when he tries to interact with the Hebrews after this, they call him out on his crime rather than embracing him--what he had done was not as hidden as he had believed. His adopted grandfather, Pharaoh, remembered Moses was really a Hebrew and not an Egyptian and prepared to kill Moses for his crime; so Moses fled, as fast as he could, to the desert land of Midian. There he marries and has a child, settling down for a life in oblivion as a stranger in a foreign land, hoping no one finds out he's there.

While Moses is trying to hide, however, God is seeking to reveal. The end of Exodus 2 brings out God as a major player in the story of Exodus for the first time: God hears the cries of the Israelites just as Moses had, and God determines that it's time to act. God takes notice of the people God had promised to love and preserve--their suffering will be hidden no more.

In the intersection of the story of Moses' violent retribution and God's hearing of the people's cries, what we get a full-blown picture of in Exodus 3 begins to take shape in fits and starts: Moses' vocation. In his book Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC, Frederich Buechner beautifully defined this idea of a vocation, or one's particular calling from God:

“The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done. If you find your work rewarding, you have presumably met requirement (a), but if your work does not benefit others, the chances are you have missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work does benefit others, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you are unhappy with it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your customers much either… The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

I don't know that fighting the oppression of the Hebrews by the Egyptians was Moses' "deep gladness", but in these intervening verses it is shown to be a deep passion that bubbles up over his Egyptian upbringing to remind him of who he deeply is. God's hearing of the Israelites' cries reveals a deep hunger: for liberation from bondage, for freedom from oppression. As God calls to Moses from the bush, God will call Moses to the intersection of these things: his burning desire for justice, and his people's loud cries for help. Here, in his young adult years of growing up, Moses is beginning to discover his calling; and though he tries to flee from it, to live a life unnoticed, it pursues him even to the far reaches of the desert, and he finds he cannot evade its pursuit but, rather, must turn aside to look.

That turning is what we will spend time with on Sunday...I look forward to the encounter we will share together, and the ways it may call us to consider our own deep passions and the world's deep hunger, and the ways these things intersect.

A Journey Not to be Missed

2011-09-02T17:48:00.013-04:00

Thanks to Hurricane Irene, our lectionary texts this week are the same as last week--we are still waiting to get started on our Exodus journey! Take a look back at last week's post for some introductory reflections on Exodus and to find the link to these great texts.

So this week, I want to use the blog space to tell you all about a way of reading the biblical story through the lens of Exodus that has changed how I approach the Bible--a way that you will be invited to walk along this fall as well. When in seminary, a professor introduced me to a book written and illustrated by Lutheran pastor Dan Erlander: Manna and Mercy: A Brief History of God's Unfolding Plan to Mend the Entire Universe. In 100 beautiful pages, Erlander moves us through the course of the entire biblical narrative, from the beginning of creation in Genesis to the new creation in Revelation, and traces the course of the human relationship with God as set in the gift of Manna to the Israelites in the desert (a story we'll encounter in worship this September) and continued in the birth, life, and death of Jesus and the living church Christ established (that would be us!).

Here's what I love about Erlander's account: it is simple enough that if you feel "biblically illiterate" and want a non-threatening way to get a feel for the course of this whole great story we live our lives by, Manna and Mercy is for you. It is deep enough that if you have read the Bible cover to cover hundreds of times and studied it in school and still want to read old stories with fresh eyes, Manna and Mercy is for you. And if you are anywhere in between these ends, swimming around wishing you had a way to encounter scripture that could help you figure out how what God has been doing through history weaves together and redirects our paths as God's people, then guess what...Manna and Mercy is for you.

SO, I hope you'll join us on Sunday nights at 6:30 starting next Sunday, September 11, when we'll look at the first biblical stories of God constituting a particular people to reflect God's character here on earth:

Then, on September 18, we will sweep through the story of the rest of the Old Testament: the story of how God's people fell out of covenant with God, and God's great plan to restore them:

On September 25, Jesus comes into the picture, and we see how he fits in with God's redemptive vision that God has been working towards all along:

Finally, on October 2 we will look at the ministry of the church--God's people on earth today--and God's vision for a heaven and earth made new, with all things brought together in Christ.

Come join us these four Sunday nights at 6:30 as we move through history together and let it shape our future as the people of God!

Confessions of a Pastoral Nerd

2011-08-25T11:27:00.004-04:00

Our lectionary readings this week (which technically were last week's readings) are Exodus 1:8-2:10, Romans 12:1-8, and Matthew 16:13-20, which can be found here.

Remember Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a Redneck if..." jokes that were so popular a few years ago? Well...I have a variation on the theme:

"You might be a Pastoral nerd if you have spent the last year being excited about the arrival of September 2011, when you will get to preach for two or three months on the book of Exodus."

Seriously. When I realized the Fall 2011 Year A Lectionary takes us on a lengthy journey through Exodus, I could not have been more excited. Why, you ask? Well, many reasons, and I will give you just a few below:

1. Exodus brings us face to face with the great questions. You all have known me long enough now to know that I love asking questions, and Exodus' narrative takes many of the major questions of our faith head-on. Genesis may be the first book of the Bible and allow us to dip our toes into some of these issues, but Exodus is where the story really begins and the questions begin to flow...questions such as, "Who is this God?" "What does this God care about?" "What is the human relationship with this God, and the human role in this God's world?" "How does this God want us to live with one another?" "What does this God think of our suffering?" "How can we begin to honor and worship this God?" "Where is God?" And seriously...this is just the tip of the Exodus iceburg. Now til November won't be nearly long enough to get to all of these, but Exodus can prompt us to wrestle together with the questions that matter most.

2. Exodus shows us what salvation looks like. Centuries before Jesus, God set about saving God's people from themselves, from the snares of sin, and from each other in a daring act of liberation that unfolds across Exodus' pages. Long before Jesus, here we learn that salvation often involves suffering; that it involves a relationship of incredible trust between God and God's people; and that God will go to any length to see God's people restored to the freedom for which they were intended. Our relentless, passionate God emerges full force here as one who will not let us go, challenging us to consider again the ways we need God's salvation and the ways we can participate in God's redemptive work in this world.

3. Exodus is a story of community. Here, for the first time, God works not just in the life of one individual or family, but an entire people, knitting them together to be a sign of God's presence in this world. It lays out life together not just as one of morality and being "good people", but of being utterly concerned for the common good and the welfare of both one's neighbors and one's enemies. It shows the life of God's people as a life lived collectively, and navigated in covenantal relationship with one another. This means it is a story with tremendous power to shape and define our life together with one another in community at Broadneck.

4. Finally, Exodus is a story for a time of change. We see that in the first startling line of our reading for this week: after rehashing Israel's history, and its favored status in Egypt because of Joseph's work, we get this disruptive news: "Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph." The Hebrew people had to navigate a rapidly changing world, one that tried to strip them of their core identity as people of the promise, one that required innovative new leadership and great discernment of God's movement. As we seek what it means to be God's people in our rapidly changing times--times this week rattled by earthquake and threatened by hurricane, among so many other things--how can the Exodus journey provide us with wisdom for our own?

I could go on forever about this, but will stop here and just encourage you to join us for Bible study on Saturday morning as we enter into Exodus, to check in with the blog each week for reflections on parts of Exodus we may not have time to cover in worship, to spend some time with this great book yourself, and to take advantage of other opportunities that may emerge this fall that allow you to immerse yourself in this great story. It may make me a pastoral nerd, but I think the possibilities for this book to reshape our congregational imagination are rich beyond description, and I cannot WAIT to get started.

Challenge of openness to "the other"

2011-08-15T12:40:00.003-04:00

Abby’s are jottings perhaps mine are scribblings. Pray that Abby has a refreshing week full of fun and joy as she spends time at the beach with her family. njpl

This week we will work with four scriptures that challenge us to see a faith that is wide open and inclusive. We will see a God who wants to be part of the life of each person on earth and who longs to be part of what happens in each life. Now can you read that sentence and put your own name in the two places which say ‘each person on earth’ ‘each life’?

Like this- God wants to be part of Miranda’s life. God longs to be part of what happens in Miranda’s life.

Then read it again and think of the person or group of people you are least likely to love and appreciate and put that person or group of people in the spot where your name was before.

That is the crazy, wacky God we worship each Sunday. Not only does God love and care for you and the rest of us who try to be a part of God’s mission on earth but God loves and cares for those who are far from being a part of the plans God has for all of creation.

Before you come to worship this Sunday, think back over this past year from last August until now. Jot down for yourself things that have happened to you that you could never have anticipated last August. If you are like me when you make this list, you will be stunned to recall much of what occurred. I won’t give you any suggestions for how you deal with what you find as you look back. Let your own heart and mind ponder the events of the past twelve months.

Then think of the events others have lived through on our planet both people you know and those unknown and perhaps far away. What did they face? What did they live though?

Read Psalm 67 – a nice short passage on which to meditate.

In keeping with our theme this Sunday of the Inclusive love of God, please take a few minutes and view one or all three of these music videos to hear one hymn illustrated with pictures that will at once open, challenge and touch your heart. This is the God we worship. Do we dare to live out the challenge of this amazing openness to ‘the other’?

http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=_alyyRqh61M

http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=7YiBrGocHhI&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULvldtss4hg

See you on Sunday

Nancy

(posted by Jeremy on Nancy's behalf)

Location, location, location...

2011-08-11T13:07:00.003-04:00

As we are still scooting along a week behind the Lectionary Calendar,our texts for this week are Genesis 37:2-28 (you'll notice I expanded this from what is in the lectionary--what's the point about talking about Joseph the dreamer if we never mention his dreams?), Romans 10:9-15, and Matthew 14:22-33, available to read here.

Sometimes, when I talk about how we can approach our texts for the week, I feel kind of redundant in the things I encourage you to do. This isn't for lack of originality, I promise; it is more of the fact that there are perspectives it would behoove us to bring to scripture that we have often been trained to neglect. Our worship practices, ironically, are what often keep us from hearing the scripture as we need to. What I mean is this: the lectionary does have us reading scripture *somewhat* in order. Thanks to the fact that we've spent the last few weeks with Jacob, this story of his family is not totally out of the blue; and we have been traveling the road of Matthew's gospel, with just a few detours into John, since December.

Yet...as we read the stories of scripture each week in relative isolation from one another as individual events rather than as part of a bigger story (which, due to our inability to read an entire book of the Bible in worship every week, is--I suppose--a necessary shortcoming), we often miss so much of the richer meaning that can be found from putting stories in context. This is why it is so crucial that we constantly ask ourselves when reading scripture, "What is the bigger context here? What has taken place before this? What is going to take place next? How does this connect to where we've been and where we're going?"

I think Matthew 14 has a particularly significant context, the more I think about it. We spent a lot of time in July with the parables of Matthew 13, covering that chapter almost in its entirety; last week we read the story that immediately precedes this one, Matthew 14:13-21, the story of Jesus feeding 5,000 people. But what we skipped is the critical tale that occupies the first 12 verses of Matthew 14, and I cannot get away from the possibility that that gory account of the beheading of Jesus' cousin, forerunner, baptizer, and friend John the Baptist is the story that is the undercurrent of this whole chapter. The one preparing the way for Jesus has just been killed in a horrifying manner; and throughout the rest of the chapter, one can almost see Jesus reeling from this news, trying to figure out his next move, trying to process his grief. He begins by withdrawing to an isolated place, perhaps to hide out from Herod for a bit since it seems inevitable that he will be next, perhaps simply to pray and lay out his sorrow and--dare I say it--fear before God. But the crowds follow him there, finding him even in this remote place, and Jesus is filled with compassion to put his own grief aside long enough to teach, to heal, to feed.

In this week's story, however, Jesus gets a chance to get the quiet he needs again--he makes the disciples get in a boat and leave him so he can sit and pray. Maybe he is sending the disciples away from him so they won't be caught up in the fate he is now realizing will likely be his--maybe he pushes them out to sea on a raft for their own safety, who knows? But soon the sea is not safe, and again Jesus abandons his solitude to come to them where they are, to meet their needs. It is as he does this that, for the first time, Jesus is identified as the Son of God--one not just human but divine, with power to save. And it won't be long after this before Jesus begins telling the disciples of his now inevitable fate: that John the Baptist is not going to be the only one to lose his life in this divine mission.

I just wonder how we read these miraculous acts of Jesus--feeding the masses, going to the disciples--differently in their critical location amidst Jesus' grief and Jesus' apparent recognition of how this mission is likely going to end. How can we see Jesus' compassion and presence and provision and salvation more fully as we locate it within the turmoil within him, turmoil he seemed to find strength to repeatedly put aside for the sake of caring for those around him--an act miraculous enough to leave his friends in worship, recognizing for the first time that this one among them was more than they'd ever dreamed? Location, location, location...what difference does it make?

How Do We Find the Pearl?

2011-07-28T17:14:00.005-04:00

Our texts this week are actually the texts from last week, which we missed due to our fantastic Music and Arts Presentation. So, we'll be looking at Genesis 29:15-28, Romans 8:26-39, and most particularly Matthew 13:31-33 and 44-53. They can be read here.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
-Matthew 13:45-46

And now I had discovered the good pearl. To buy it I had to sell all that I had; and I hesitated. -Augustine, Confessions (8.1.2)

The parable of the pearl has long fascinated me, which is part of the reason I could not let this week of lectionary scriptures pass me by. When I have faced brutal decisions in life, times that you know you have to make difficult choices, this parable has more than once come to my mind: what is my pearl of great price? And what am I willing to give up in order to pursue it?

These are scary questions--and difficult ones to answer. Let's just be literal about the parable for a minute, shall we? I just checked my bank account, and in the month of July I have made 38 different purchases using my checking account. This doesn't count cash, which is harder to keep track of--a few dollars here, a few there. I looked at where the money had gone, and maybe there were a few frivolous purchases, but most were needful (well, fairly needful) things--rent, gas, insurance, food, phone, car repair, charitable giving, gifts for people with birthdays or birthing children, medicine--things it would be awfully hard not to be able to pay for.

So I wonder what the merchant did once he had his pearl. A pearl won't feed you, or house you, or get you from place to place...it may be amazing and awesome and the coolest thing you've ever seen, but really, now that you have it...now what? Was it all he'd hoped it would be or did he find, as that great progressive Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney once pointed out, that there is "no agony in life more acute than those moments when you realize you've paid too much" (which, though a bit of an exaggeration--I can think of many things more agonizing--does touch on the depths of regret such a choice can trigger)?

I realize that this is a parable, and hence not meant to be taken literally. But it troubles and challenges me: what is worth giving everything for--what is so great that we can give even the good up? What is so important that all other things of importance fall away? There are a lot of pearls in our lives that are incredibly valuable...how can we choose one, and how can something so great ask so much of us?

What is our pearl of great price, and what will we give up to hold it--and it alone--in the palm of our hand?

Kids Can!

2011-07-21T17:05:00.007-04:00

This week, as a group of our kids from our Music and Arts Camp (see the pictures throughout this post!) will be presenting music and drama as the core of our worship time, we will not be following the lectionary. Instead, some of the 55 amazing kids who have been with us the last five days will be telling us the stories of great kids from the Bible--kids who help us learn that they can do amazing things when they realize that they are not just children, but the children of GOD! I would encourage you to read the amazing stories we read this week in advance of Sunday--the story of Samuel learning to listen to God's voice; the story of David being chosen to be king; the story of a little girl whose willingness to forgive brought healing; the story of friends who were willing to stand up for what was right even at great cost; and the story of one little boy whose willingness to give his tiny lunch to Jesus let 5,000 people be fed. They are all stories WELL worth our time (and, since it is approximately 10,000 degrees outside, the fiery furnace story may be particularly apt to read right about now!).

As we began to plan for Music and Arts Camp, I was amazed by the number of stories there were to choose from in the Bible featuring kids! Honestly, it was a hard list to narrow down; besides the five stories we chose, there were dozens of other amazing tales that I so wanted our kids to hear. There was Miriam, protecting her brother Moses as he floated in the bushes so that he could live to lead God's people. There was Gideon, being chosen by God as an unimportant child to lead his people out of oppression. There was Esther, probably not far into her teen years when she realized God had made her queen "for such a time as this" to save the Jewish people from extinction. There was Jeremiah, chosen by God before he was born to be a prophet to the nations. And let us not forget dear Mary, probably not much more than 13 or 14 when she was asked to bring God's son into the world. It seems like we could have EASILY done two weeks focusing on biblical kids who can!

I think what this slew of biblical kids called by God can teach us--among other things--is how low we often set the bar for what we can do, at all stages of life. "I can't do it!" is one of the most frequent and frustrated cries we hear from any child attempting a new task who wants to get it right immediately--to be able to do it just like grownups. As adults, we think we're too old to be called to something new, to do something important, to change--we don't want to risk the failure, the discomfort, making fools of ourselves or being hurt. God's continued invitation to the Samuels and Slave Girls among us reminds us that if we can manage to do things like listening, forgiving, giving what little we have--that God can do some remarkable things with whatever we offer freely. It sounds cliched, but it is really beyond true--God believes that we can, with God's unconditional love and help supporting us.

I wonder, if we started kids off earlier (and us grownups, too!) learning about people in the Bible who, though as ordinary as they are--forgotten youngest brothers, people whose names did not even get recorded, boys and girls from all countries and classes--were called by God to do extraordinary things...I wonder if then we could see the Bible not just as a book of crazy things that happened long ago and could never happen today, but as our story, the great adventure into which God invites all of us who have been called children of God (and that is what we are!) to live.

May we be challenged by our children and these kids from long ago on Sunday morning to believe that when God calls us God's children and invites us into God's ongoing story in this world....we, too, can do anything!

What...or, rather, Who...is this all about?

2011-07-06T11:44:00.004-04:00

Our lectionary texts this week are Genesis 25:19-34, Romans 8:1-11, and Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, which can be read as always here.

As I will be traveling to a writing conference in Minnesota on Sunday, our good friend Stephen Price will be sharing with us in worship at Broadneck this week, and he has a very interesting batch of scriptures to work with! It's a week I'm sad to be gone, both because I am eager to hear Stephen's insights into these passages and because the Parable of the Sower has long been one of the teachings of Jesus that fascinates me most.

Here's what fascinates me about it: so often in this parable, we focus on the different types of soil--rocky, thorny, shallow, dry, gravel. I have no idea how many times in my life I have heard the question posed, "Which kind of soil are you?" with the central point of the parable being to find ourselves in it. I've also spent a great deal of time thinking about and listening to sermons that focus on the seeds in this parable and their harvest--"Are you bearing fruit? Is the word of God growing in you?"

These are all valid questions--and the seed and the soil are crucial to the parable. But I have become convicted that the most important verse in the parable (if we can call one verse more important--maybe, I should say rather, the key to the parable?) might be one of its shortest, and one that mentions neither seed nor soil: perhaps it is verse 18, where Jesus says, "Hear then the parable of the sower" (emphasis added). Though Jesus nowhere here goes into great detail about the sower in the way he did with the soil and the seeds, it is the sower he wants his hearers to pay attention to, to focus in on in this story.

So this is the question that confronts me every time I sit with this parable: what kind of Sower is this? What kind of crazy farmer throws seeds on rocks, weeds, thorns, and paths, wasting time planting in regions that are obviously not ripe for growth? This is obviously not the brightest Sower on the farm...why be so wasteful? Why so nondiscriminatory in sowing in places seeds have little chance to grow? Is what we're reading here a parable of immense grace--is this a picture of God along the line of the parable of the Prodigal Son, another example of the extravagance and almost recklessness of God's love?

What kind of Sower is this? What--or rather, who--is this parable really talking about?

"Things Your Pastor Would Totally Avoid Preaching About Were It Not For The Lectionary," Part III: The Letters of Paul

2011-06-30T10:10:00.004-04:00

Our Lectionary Readings this week are Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67, Romans 7:13-25a, and Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30. The readings as always are found here, but it would really be helpful with these somewhat complex passages to read the entirety of each chapter (Genesis 24, Romans 7, and Matthew 11) rather than just the brief segments chosen by the lectionary.

In case you have not picked up on this pattern by now, each week the Revised Common Lectionary of suggested scripture readings that we follow lists four texts for the church's consideration: an Old Testament text, a Psalm, an Epistle reading (i.e. a New Testament reading other than from Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John), and a Gospel reading. In my year at Broadneck, I have preached on a good number of Old Testament texts and a large number of suggested Gospel readings; I have even preached the Psalms a few times; and I have occasionally brought in Epistles. I have not, however, preached a sermon solely focused on one of the books that makes up a third of the New Testament canon: the letters attributed to the apostle Paul. In spite of Paul's frequent appearance in the lectionary, I tend to avoid him whenever possible.

Why, you ask?

I ask myself this question, too. There are a few reasons I can think of: an obvious excuse would be that it is some texts attributed to Paul that have been used to argue things that have been damaging to so many people--including passages that have been used to justify the exclusion of women from ordained ministry. Yet heaven knows that there are offensive things in the Old Testament, too, and occasionally in the Gospels...so this isn't enough.

I guess another reason is that I love stories--I love the rich characters and encounters that emerge in Gospel and Old Testament texts, and the dense theological statements of Paul are sometimes harder to convey. But...Paul's letters were also written to specific communities, each with their own stories to be told...so this isn't enough either.

I suppose, if I am honest, Paul is just hard. He seems to contradict himself at points, and so much of his complex language could be construed in so many different ways. When I was in college, the girls' small group I was part of my first year decided to spend a semester reading the book of Romans, and we only made it to chapter 2 before we had gotten into so many arguments over Paul that we had to call it quits. Theologians and biblical scholars have exhausted bottle upon bottle of ink, roll after roll of parchment and paper, and countless Microsoft Word files over the past two millenium going at it about what Paul means not just overall, but in a single word here and there---for instance, today's text has raised exponential scholarly debate over the identity of the "I" (is it Paul? is it a rhetorical device representing all humanity? Is it Jews who have not believed the message of Christ? Is it pagans? Is it Christians continuing to struggle?), and each of these interpretations would cause you to preach the passage in a different way. With so many opinions, how can you ever know that your interpretation of Paul is "right," that you are not becoming another in a long line of preachers and Bible readers who have misconstrued his letters?

Still, in spite of all these misgivings, we cannot ignore Paul-- such a large portion of our canon is attributed to him, and he has perhaps done more than any other theologian to shape the theology of the Church--some have argued his teachings had more of an impact on the direction of the church than those of Jesus himself! So this week, if I don't wimp out, Paul will be present with us in worship...how will we read his words in Romans 7 together? Hopefully with a lot of openness and grace, wrestling with Paul as so many have before us in hopes that the wisdom of God's Spirit will prevail even amidst the confusion.

"Things Your Pastor Would Totally Avoid Preaching About Were It Not For The Lectionary," Part II: The Binding of Isaac

2011-06-23T12:35:00.005-04:00

"Abraham and Isaac", by John August Swanson

Our lectionary texts this week are Genesis 22:1-14 (though the whole chapter is worth reading) and Matthew 10:40-42 (though it is better put in context if you start a few verses earlier--at least at verse 37). I would also recommend Psalm 13, though I am not sure if we will deal with it directly on Sunday--it is one of the absolute most powerful prayers out there, in my humble opinion. You can read all of these texts here.

Okay.

So, most preachers have commentators they lean on to help them navigate the muddy and difficult waters of scripture interpretation on a weekly basis--"experts" who bring a fabulous combination of thoughtfulness, scholarship, and pastoral sensitivity to the biblical text. This week, however, there was a problem: as I began my study work, I found that many commentators whose insight I appreciate did not write about the first suggested lectionary reading from Genesis 22. Most commentators turned to the alternate suggested reading from Jeremiah (one of the RARE occasions that Jeremiah could be seen as the "soft" text), or else stayed close to the Gospel text on hospitality.

Why, you ask?

Because this Genesis text is scary.

Ter-ri-fying.

We like stories and texts that give us answers. This one, however, seems to call everything into question and raise more emotional and ethical and spiritual questions than we can possibly answer...perhaps even more than we can ask. The starkness of the story both makes it almost painful to read and invites us into that dangerous place of trying to fill in an infinite number of gaps in the story.

Why did God ask for this?

Why didn't Abraham fight back and argue with God?

What if Abraham had said no?

Did Isaac realize what was going on?

What was Abraham thinking, feeling?

What kind of God asks you to sacrifice your child?

Was God just toying with Abraham?

This isn't the God we know in Jesus, is it?

This was just a one time thing--God would never ask something like this of us, right?

Like I said, scary. Every time I've read this text this week, the tightness in my chest has grown exponentially...to read of this sort of encounter between God and someone God has chosen and (we presume) loves and cares for...it's like looking a nightmare in the face. And even if it has a "happy" ending, there's nothing feel-good about it whatsoever as far as I can see.

So why not go for Jeremiah, or the Matthew text? Something easier...which would be, essentially, any other text?

Well...because this story is here for a reason. No matter how much we've tried to explain it away, to dismiss it as child abuse, to relegate it to the land of the crazy...it's a core narrative of Judeo-Christian faith and therefore must tell us something crucial about this "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" that we still claim to worship. History has not swept this ugly incident under the rug, and neither can we. There's something key we need to encounter here about the character of our God...and about ourselves as made in that God's image. I don't know what it is yet--and come Sunday, may honestly still not know. It may be many things. But this isn't a story we can shove away, but must wrestle with continually...sit with in the darkness...let speak, even if it speaks words we don't want to hear.

So have courage, as on Sunday we go where few dare to go. I have no idea what we'll find, but I am glad that as the children of God at Broadneck, we'll be making the journey together.

"Things Your Pastor Would Totally Avoid Preaching About Were It Not For The Lectionary," Part I: The Trinity

2011-06-16T14:30:00.004-04:00

Our scripture readings for this first Sunday in the season of Pentecost (also called Ordinary Time) are Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Psalm 8, and Matthew 28:16-20. The very brief epistle reading from 2 Corinthians is also worth your time. You may read them all here.

For some reason, the liturgical calendar which we follow in our year together as a church and which shapes the lectionary of scripture readings we follow designates the Sunday after Pentecost each year as "Trinity Sunday." It's the one and only day that celebrates not a particular person or scriptural event, but a doctrine of the church--for, though the three-fold phrase of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" does show up occasionally in scripture (our New Testament readings for today being the case in point), the actual word "Trinity" never does--it's a term that did not come into mainstream Christian use until late in the 4th century. It emerged from a series of arguments among early theologians as to how we can understand God the Father/Creator/Almighty, Jesus, and now the Holy Spirit given to the church at Pentecost as all being the same God. The answer, which was given to me in seminary in the form of this nifty diagram, is this:

Well...that clears is all up, now doesn't it?

Any time I try to explain or, in this case, diagram the Trinity, my head wants to explode. My greatest fear, when I met with my ordination council that was going to examine me to see if I was ready to be an ordained minister, was that they would ask me something like, "How would you explain the Trinity to children?" I spent the whole day before my ordination council pouring over my notes from my Church History and Theology classes in case this question came up, trying to come up with a simple answer, with some insight into this mystifying diagram which somehow left me cold, and came to only one conclusion: I can't explain the Trinity to myself, let alone to others.

And maybe that's the point. Maybe this Trinity Sunday is here not to take us back to fourth century controversies, but to help us encounter the present-day God as expansive, multifaceted, and utterly unexplainable. To encounter God as One (or Three-in-One) who is always shifting, always moving, yet always present.

A diagram--well, depiction--of the Trinity that I've come to like a lot more than the one I was given in seminary is this one, painted by Jan Richardson, which will also grace our bulletin cover on Sunday:

I love this image--one of touching, of movement, of wholeness, of invitation, of equality yet distinctiveness. It's an image of the Trinity that comes from the Celtic tradition, and Richardson speaks of it this way: "In the Celtic triple spiral, there is a space where the three spirals connect. It is both a place of meeting and of sheer mystery. Its vast, vibrant emptiness reminds me that, in this life, we will never know all the names of God. Even as the Trinity evokes, it conceals. We will never exhaust the images we use to describe the One who holds us and sends us, who enfolds us and impels us in our eternal turning."

The Trinity may be something I don't particularly want to attempt preaching on; and who knows, the word Trinity may not actually show up a lot in my sermon on Sunday. But I hope that, not just on this Sunday but on every Sunday, this sort of Trinitarian God will, indeed, be present to us: a God of evoking, concealing, inexhaustible mystery, a God who "holds us and sends us, who enfolds us and impels us." Join me as we place ourselves amidst this spiraling sweep of our God this Sunday.

Fill in the Blank

2011-06-09T09:25:00.005-04:00

On this Pentecost Sunday--the day when we welcome the gift of the Holy Spirit to all people as Christ's enduring presence in this world--our scripture lessons are Numbers 11:24-30, 1 Corinthians 12:3-13, and Acts 2:1-21. An alternate story of the gift of the Spirit can be found in John 20:19-23. You may read all these passages here.

I am not usually a fill-in-the-blank sort of theologian; this may be part of the reason why I never made it through the Experiencing God study back when it was so popular a year ago, nor have I ever made it through a Beth Moore workbook. Today, however, I am going beyond my usual tendencies and offering a fill-in-the-blank question as food for thought. Ready? Complete the following sentence:

The Holy Spirit is _____________________.

Here's my theory about this blank: If we had begun the sentence "God is" or "Jesus is", though we would have gotten a diversity of answers, there would have been some standards that popped up consistently: "Good", "Our Creator", "Our Father", "Our Savior", "Lord," "The Son of God," "Love." An answer of some sort would likely have come to mind pretty quickly. It is my prediction, though, that it's entirely possible that each of us completed the sentence above differently, and that an answer was probably not immediate. This is because, for some reason, our knowledge of and ability to describe the Holy Spirit seems chronically more ambiguous; this was true even for the writers of the early church creeds that many traditions still recite as their confession of faith each week. The Apostles Creed has several clear things to say about God: "The Father, Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth." It has even more to say about Jesus: he is/was God's Son, our Lord, born to Mary, suffered, crucified, died, was buried, rose, and ascended, just to name a few. But all it says about the Holy Spirit (other than it was how Jesus was conceived) is this: "I believe in the Holy Spirit." Boom. That's it. No elaboration...no explanation...no fleshing out, no filling in the blanks.

I think it's okay that we continue to be a bit confounded by the Holy Spirit, because it was confounding on the first day it made its full appearance as well. The crowds listening to the disciples could understand the different languages the Holy Spirit was leading the disciples to speak; they could not, however, reach a consensus on what was happening. "What does this mean?" is the poignant question many asked. "They are drunk" was the somewhat comical explanation others offered. Others scoffed. Others were amazed. Only one thing was for sure: according to The Message's wonderful translation of this text, "They couldn't for the life of them figure out what was going on."

"What does this mean?" This is Pentecost's enduring question to us. It's part of the reason why, though the day of Pentecost is one single Sunday, the Season of Pentecost in our worship lasts a full five to six months every year--we need that much time to even begin to approach that blank, to even begin to find a way to articulate this new and powerful presence of God among us and within us.

Be with us on Sunday as we welcome this Spirit again in all of its mysterious fullness, and be sure to wear red for the occasion (I have so much respect for whoever created that video).

Happy Ascension Day!

2011-06-02T10:31:00.004-04:00

The readings for this Sunday are the end of Luke's first volume--Luke 24:44-52--and the beginning of Luke's second volume--Acts 1:1-11--with a little Ephesians (1:15-23) thrown in for good measure. You can read them here.

Happy Ascension Day!

Yep...that's right, if you didn't know it, today is a major day in the life of the post-Easter church! 40 days after Easter Sunday, and 10 days before Pentecost Sunday, comes Ascension Day. This day is ripe with theological and missional significance--it is the day Jesus ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father, taking his place of rightful authority over all creation (see Philippians 2:6-11 for a wonderful theological interpretation of this!). It is also the day Jesus commissioned and blessed his followers for the work they would carry on in his bodily absence. It was a day of looking back at what God had done, and of looking forward at what God was yet to do; a day of looking up to heaven and out to the ends of the earth. Falling where it does in the church calendar, however, often means that it falls right off of our radars, being as it always lands on a Thursday. Hold these realities together and, as Sean White put it in Feasting on the Word, we might find that "no other festival in the Christian year is more important and less emphasized than the ascension of the Lord."

So the question I pose today is, what meaning does the ascension hold for modern Christians? Is it a day worth emphasizing more than we do? What does it teach us about our God, our Christ, the Spirit we wait for, ourselves? How do we need to be reminded of Jesus' lordship and our callings on this holy day? What does ascension teach us not just about the world beyond this world--whatever world that was that Jesus' body ascended into--but, I think much more significantly, about this world we are in and its connection to something so much bigger than ourselves?

As you reflect on these texts and these questions and the many others that your celebration and contemplation of this day will undoubtedly bring about, I leave you with a prayer that our Wednesday night meditation group spent some time with last night which opened up my thinking about the ascension in some new ways. We talked about whether this is actually a prayer (written by Walter Brueggeman in his book Prayers for a Privileged People) or more of a theological reflection, but I would encourage you to take its words and try praying them as a prayer of confession. Even though we, as Baptists, do not offer the creed each week, we are familiar with this language of ascension, most likely, but only vaguely so--not personally. I think this has the power to be a prayer that might open us up to the power of this holy day we have long neglected as we gather around these texts on Sunday. Blessings upon us as we do so.

"Candidates for Newness"
by Walter Brueggeman

We live in the long stretch between
Easter and Pentecost, scarcely noticing.
We hear mention of the odd claim of ascension.
We easily recite the creed
"He ascended into heaven."
We bow before such quaint language and move on,
immune to ascent,
indifferent to enthronement,
unresponsive to new governance.

It is reported that behind the ascending son was
the majestic Father riding the clouds;
But we do not look up much;
we stay close to the ground, to business and
to busyness,
to management and control.

Our world of well-being has a very low
ceiling, but we do not mind the closeness
or notice the restrictiveness.
It will take at least a Pentecost wind to
break open our vision enough to imagine a new governance...

Until then, we stay jaded,
but for all that,
no less candidates for newness.

One Small Step for Jesus' Disciples, One Giant Leap for the Early Church...

2011-05-26T16:30:00.005-04:00

Our readings for this sixth Sunday in Eastertide come from Acts 17:22-31 (though I would recommend expanding this to include verses 16-21 and 32--we will do this on Sunday!), 1 Peter 3:13-22, and John 14:15-21. They can be read here.

It doesn't take much for us to jump from last week's Gospel reading in John 14:1-14 to this week's in John 14:15-21; in fact, in our last Bible study at church I heard one person express frustration that these passages were divided at all--like much of John's Gospel, they flow into one another and need one another to be fully heard! John 14:15-21 continues Jesus' farewell discourse to his disciples, giving them another reason to trust him--that another Advocate will be sent to them so they will not have to journey alone even after his imminent bodily departure from them. It's a nice appendix to Jesus' words of reassurance from last week.

The Acts reading, however, requires a giant leap of time, imagination, and context for us to enter into. Last week, a man named Saul approved of the death of Stephen, outside of the gates of Jerusalem; this week he stands in Athens, Greece, with a new name and a new mission--to take up the work of proclamation for which Stephen had been killed. While all of our other readings from Acts this lectionary year come from chapters 1-7 this one randomly propels us all the way to chapter 17. While all our other stories from Acts the past few weeks (and in the next two) took/will take place in Jerusalem, this one puts us nearly a thousand miles northwest of there. Previously the Gospel has been proclaimed to Jews or, at least, people who knew Jewish ways; now we find the Gospel being proclaimed to Stoics and Epicureans, to people who fill their marketplace with idols to every imaginable God, for whom Socrates was more familiar than Moses. We have leaped forward with the Gospel into a whole new world, one that's far from the home base out of which we've been operating.

Since we'll be operating in a new cultural landscape with this portion of Acts this week, I thought we could have a quick lesson on some of the strange terms in this passage which help us understand where Paul wasas he carried the news of Jesus somewhere it had likely never been before. So, here's a quick vocab lesson (I am indebted to the New Interpreter's Bible for much of this info):

Among those Paul meets in Athens are “Epicurean and Stoic philosophers." Who were these guys? Here are a couple of incredibly oversimplified intros:

Epicureans believed that the avoidance of pain and suffering is the true aim of this life. They felt that a personal, provident god–a god who could make a practical difference in the outcome of a happy life–simply does not exist, so religious devotion does not matter as much as living a life of simple pleasures. Epicureans would not have thought much of all the idols in Athens, most likely, since they didn't expect any of these gods was expected to intervene and make a difference.

Stoics, meanwhile, were guided by their analytical observations and careful reasoning. They sought to live in harmony with the cosmos because they believed the deity was in all things--the "live and move and have our being" reference that Paul drops would have made them cheer and nod in agreement, it probably came from one of their writers! Yet the idea that God could be personalized in someone like Jesus would have been deeply troubling to them and, like the Epicureans, the idea of any life beyond this one seemed a ludicrous concept.

Paul's encounter with these groups led him to the Aeropagus--an elevated, open-air site just to the west of the acropolis in Athens (see picture at right--anyone want to join me on a field trip?). The Areopagus was the equivalent of a city assembly or council that would hear public debates and give verdicts. Paul may well have been taken there to determine whether he has the credentials to bring his “strange teaching” into a place as sophisticated and learned as Athens, where he wanders as a strange curiosity but not necessarily one with any credibility.

Paul's trip to Athens is a bit overwhelming, especially when it takes us so far out of the context we've been in before, into a world of strange new terms and unfamiliar settings. It makes me wonder how Paul's engagement of this whole new context might challenge us as Christ's church to not just move in logical, linear ways, but be willing to immerse ourselves in places totally foreign to us--to deeply encounter and hear what our neighbors think, to open ourselves up to their judgment rather than passing judgment on them, to speak with conviction what we believe even if people look at us like we've grown approximately seventeen heads. To continue our "Growing up" theme from last week, where might this text challenge us to move from tentative baby steps to giant leaps for the sake of living out Jesus' commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves?

The Way

2011-05-19T18:36:00.012-04:00

For this fifth Sunday of Eastertide, as we continue to consider the implications of a risen Christ for our life together as God's people on this earth, the passages that will guide our reflection come from Acts 7:55-60 (though this is among the lectionary's more absurd choices; you really need to read the whole of chapters 6 and 7 to have any sense of what these 6 verses are about!); 1 Peter 2:2-10; and John 14:1-14, which can be read here.

There are about 1,000 things I either want to say or feel need to be said (or, at least, discussed) about this Sunday's Gospel reading--parts of which are among the most familiar things Jesus ever said, parts of which sound like they are still in the original Greek and lacking a clear translation for all the sense they make. After spending some time last Sunday dwelling in Jesus' beautiful image provided in his statement, "I am the gate," however...I wondered if it would be more fruitful this week to continue a visual approach to the Gospel and to consider what we picture when Jesus offers another of his "I am" declarations here: "I am the way."

I did a Google Images search for pictures that come up when you type in "I am the way, the truth, and the life", and the myriad pictures of different ways that came up were fascinating to me. You got a lot of pictures that are similar to this in genre and content:

A lot of words are added to Jesus' declaration in this picture...loaded words, interpretive words....words which may not have been Jesus' intention in offering us this image. Yet other accounts offer a similar theological interpretation without words. I found this one particularly interesting...and disturbing, the more I look at it:

Bridges seem a common motif to depict "the way," whether starkly photographed or whimsically imagined:

Artists have been captured by this description of Jesus, finding a wide variety of ways to sketch and paint representations of the way:

Then there's this, a way that looks like there is within it, ironically, no way through at all:
There are some images of the way that look common enough that they could be found in our neighborhood, even in our own backyard:

And then there are some ways that take a different shape than any road or path we've ever thought about before:

As I scrolled through all of these and many more images, looking for a concept of what it might mean to think of Jesus as "way," (which can also be translated "road" or "path", in case you wondered!), I found some interesting, but none that were like, "Yes! That's it!" So my question to you is...based upon what YOU know of Jesus...if you were to photograph, draw, or depict what sort of way you think Jesus is...what might you contribute to this series of images? Which images draw you in, if any? Which appall you, if any? Is there only one way to picture this way, or many?

A picture does indeed paint a thousand words...or, in this case, at least, those ten vivid words shared by Jesus: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." May we all enter into the mysterious imagination of the fullness of what those rich words might convey and invite us into.

Does Jesus Really Know Us?

2011-05-12T11:43:00.000-04:00

Our scripture texts this week are Acts 2:42-47, 1 Peter 2:19-25, and John 10:1-10, which you can read in full here.

The fourth Sunday in Eastertide is traditionally "Good Shepherd Sunday," a time for us to contemplate the idea of the risen Christ as "the shepherd and guardian of our souls," as Peter's epistle describes him, or as the One who calls the sheep by name and leads them out that they may find pasture, as John's Gospel describes him.

Our Wednesday night prayer and meditation group spent some time with the Gospel text last night, and though this is a text I have read innumerable times (because I find John 10:10 one of the most significant and mystifying verses in all of scripture), I was struck by something I had never been struck by before. I'm still turning it over in my head this morning, so as I shared it with the group last night I will share it now with you:

In verse 8, Jesus says, "All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them." This is in a similar vein to the claim Jesus made back in verse 5 about his sheep: "They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers." I read this last night, and alarms began to go off in my head for what now seems a ridiculously obvious reason: Um, Jesus...I don't know if you've noticed or not, but we listen to thieves and bandits constantly. We run after strangers like it's our job, if it seems like they'll lead us somewhere that will satisfy our needs. So how can you say we have not done this in the past and will not do it in the future? You claim to know us...but these two verses make me wonder if you really do.

So what is Jesus doing here? Is this the power of positive thinking? Does Jesus think that if he plants seeds of a different way in our minds, we'll begin to realize there is another way and live into his words? This makes sense for the passage about our future...but what about what he said about our past? Is this a statement of forgiveness--that Jesus is just not even going to remember that we listened to the thieves in the past, is giving us a fresh start, clean slate, new way to live?

What do you think? I really am intrigued by this. I'd encourage you to read another blog post I ran across last night that asks some of these questions at The Hardest Question, a lectionary site whose honesty I really appreciate. Then join us on Sunday as we seek to know better this Shepherd who claims to know us intimately, to figure out how to shape our futures together in a way that reflects His character in our community...no matter how wayward and misled we may have been in the past.

Wondering Again

2011-05-05T12:38:00.003-04:00

On this third Sunday in Eastertide--the season we have been given in which to continue to celebrate the resurrection and to enter into its mystery, trying to figure out what a risen Christ means for the life we live NOW--our texts are Acts 2:36-41 (though I will be including 32 and 33, just for context), 1 Peter 1:17-23, and Luke 24:13-35. You can read them here.

A couple of months back, I wrote in a blog about the power of "wondering" questions--questions that do not have clear-cut answers but that invite us deeper into the mystery of the story. I find this week's stories full of mystery--a mysterious companion on a journey, a mysterious disappearance, mysterious languages spoken that draw a crowd that by some great mystery hears truth and joins the fellowship of Jesus' followers. So it seemed like this might be a good time to offer some more "wondering" questions about our passages.

Though I will be focusing more on the Acts readings than the Gospel readings in this Eastertide season (though, as Jeremy pointed out last week, this will be with the intention of seeing how the early church was shaped by these resurrection Gospel stories--so really we'll be reading the stories in conversation with one another!), it is Jesus' mysterious appearance in Luke that makes me wonder most this week:

I wonder why the two travelers were headed to Emmaus. It seems like the messages from Jesus on that Easter morning were either to head to Galilee or to remain in Jerusalem...what are these folks doing heading to this random village that we know little about besides the fact that it was seven miles from Jerusalem?
I wonder why we only learn the name of one of the disciples on the road to Emmaus...and why this is a disciple we have never heard from before, nor hear from after.
I wonder why, even though they can tell the story of Jesus' death and resurrection with accuracy and clarity, the two on the road remain sad even as they speak what is good news.
I wonder what Jesus said to interpret the scriptures from Moses to the prophets to the recent events in Jerusalem...wow, don't you wish we'd gotten than conversation recorded??
I wonder why Jesus walked ahead as if he was going on...did he really intend to continue, and if so, to where? If not, I wonder why he made it look as if he was going on?
I wonder why the two disciples were so intent on forcing him to stay...the verb used here means literally "to twist one's arm."
I wonder why Jesus vanished as soon as they recognized him...and where he went!

A couple of wondering questions from Acts as well:

I wonder what the "many other arguments" were that Peter used that brought about such an incredible change in that crowd gathered in Jerusalem, that turned them from mocking the disciples to joining their ranks?
I wonder why it was Peter--the one who denied Jesus!--who gave this first sermon of the church, who could speak with such conviction and certainty.

As we wonder, may we find our hearts burning within us in the days to come as we consider the wonder-fullness of the resurrection story and the ways it reshapes the story we live this day.

The Rebellious Child and the New Church

2011-04-27T08:34:00.004-04:00

Note: While Abby is away this week, you get me (Jeremy). Don't worry - it's only temporary and I'll keep it brief! http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

A Bible study brunch at Broadneck is a lively thing. Lots of good questions, thoughtful folks sharing ideas, and (of course) plenty of tasty food to help fuel all of this. Maybe it is these things which made me think of Passover and the Seder - a time of re-living faith stories and questions around a shared meal. As we looked at this week's passages (John 20:19-31 and Acts 2:14-32), Abby invited us to think about how these visits from the resurrected Jesus and Peter's speech to a mocking crowd might have influenced the development of the early church. Paraphrasing the rebellious child (one of the four children used as symbolic questioners during the Seder), I wondered, "What's this mean to all of you?" Or, as Jolly put it last week, "What's it to ya, bub?"

I think this is a great question that Abby raises, and it's one that Stephen (our former interim and member) raised, and I think it should be in our thoughts anytime we try to think about our life together as community. By looking at the diversity and challenges within early faith communities and churches (!) and how they were addressed, there is a lot we can/should learn and ideas that we should continue to reflect on if we are to embody Jesus in the world.

So, what do I sense in these passages about the disciples, community, and following Jesus? Quite a few things, actually, some of which might be interesting to you, some of which probably aren't, and some that might be useful in a broader context. Briefly:

1. Just as we see his humanity throughout Jesus' life, we see honesty in emotional reactions in both the Easter scriptures and in this passage in John. Joy, fear, apprehension, awe, guilt, anger, relief, and a dozen other feelings are expressed here. Everyone involved - even the initially mocking crowds - illustrates how diverse reactions were to this new angle of relationship with God. In the passage from John (and in the resurrection texts), Jesus spends quite a bit of time just trying to calm folks down and get them to really see a new reality. Peter seems to attempt to do something similiar, illustrating that Jesus is trying to free us from fear of death. Just as God didn't abandon Jesus to the Pit/Sheol/Hades, neither will God abandon you. For all our supposed enlightenment and rationality and logic, seems to me that we are just as driven by our emotions and still in need of peace in order to begin to understand the reality of life around us.

2. Connected with these emotions, we see a spectrum of faith. In my reading and experience, there's a tension between faith and a "need" for proof that, it would appear, has been pretty consistent through quite a bit of human history. Jesus appears (at least twice) in a locked room next to some already freaked out disciples and has to show them his wounds. Hearing about this from people he trusted with other vital things wasn't enough for Thomas - he has to touch to believe. Where are you on this spectrum? How and why does it change from time to time? Why are some things so easy to take "on faith," but others require tangible evidence? I don't think this tension is a bad thing, entirely - just a part of being human. But how to live with it? Last point on this issue: Not one disciple called Thomas a jerk/heathen/unbeliever for expressing his honest doubts, or kicked him out of the group. Interesting, no?

3. Peter's speech wasn't just for the culturally recognized leaders (elder men). He addressed slaves, women, men of Judea and all the various peoples of Jerusalem. This supports Jesus' message and actions of equality and of changing how we perceive and interact with and value others.

4. When Jesus' empowers the disciples here in John to forgive, is this really a new thing, or just drawing attention to the power we all hold? I invite you to read the different translations side by side of John 20:23 here. The question isn't what is retained or held, but who does the holding. The Greek tenses and words used seem to indicate a duality between continual retention and instant release (as well as who does the retaining) that isn't exactly clear in most translations. In any case, it doesn't seem to say that God cedes power of ultimate forgiveness to the disciples, and instead points out that it's up to them if they want to carry around another person's sins. Obvious a statement it may be, but I think it shows a struggle that we experience daily in how we approach forgiveness. How much do we hold onto the wrongs of others, and why? Are we going to approach forgiveness as a transaction, a "gift" that must be reciprocated, and which isn't truly a gift? (see Miroslav Volf and his book "Free of Charge" on this one, if you like, or some Marcel Mauss on "The Gift")

What's all this to you, oh rebellious child? What's this to you, oh church?

Peace to you all from a rebellious child,

Jeremy

Some Reflections on Good Friday

2011-04-22T09:30:00.000-04:00

I have decided to use the blog a little differently this week. There are a couple of reasons for this: first, it seems a little strange to me to blog on Resurrection texts in the days that mark Jesus' death, days when an outcome of resurrection was far from certain. Second, since we are not "officially" gathering as a faith community on Good Friday (though I hope those of you who are able will join us for the Community Crosswalk beginning at Noon at Broadneck, rain or shine), I thought that it could be useful to reflect on the story and meaning of this day instead of moving to our Sunday Sermon Scriptures (which I hope you will still read ahead of time here--we'll be using the Matthew Gospel text, the Jeremiah reading and the Acts reading). So here are some reflections for your Good Friday:

Last year, I spent Good Friday in France, believe it or not. While visiting family in Germany, I took the train across the border to spend the day in the picturesque village of Strasbourg. After visiting a Catholic cathedral with powerful depictions of the crucifixion and a Lutheran church that dated back to the days of...well...Luther, I sort of accidentally stumbled into a Good Friday service taking place in a Protestant church not far from the center of town. I crept into the back and took my place in a pew, hoping I could be a worshipper and not a tourist. One of the congregants handed me a bulletin, and I graciously accepted it as I settled in to listen.

Now, I took French in high school, but that was a loooong time ago. Hence, most of the words of songs and prayers in this service were lost on me. But as various people got up to read the words of the Passion story from Matthew's gospel...I found that I recognized every word. Even when I didn't know the exact meaning of the language, I understood the exact meaning of their message--the agony, abandonment, hopelessness, and derision portrayed in every syllable. It was one of the most powerful experiences of hearing the Good Friday narrative I've ever had, and rather than continuing my village wanderings I sat in that chapel for a long time afterwards reflecting on it.

Hearing the story in a language foreign to me and yet recognizing every word of it made me wonder--is such deep comprehension part of what makes this story of Jesus' death so powerful? A demonstration of love unto death is something that can be understood across time, across cultures. Suffering is something with which anyone who has lived more than a few years, no matter their background, is well acquainted. Is this why we keep crosses in our sanctuaries and hang them around our necks even though they are gruesome instruments of death--because somehow, in that sharing in Jesus' suffering and reminder of it, we are brought closer to Jesus than at any other time? That this is God's love made visible in a way that we cannot understand, yet at the same time understand deeply as people who, too, have suffered?

I also have often wondered, if Easter is the central event of the Christian faith, why we don't put empty tombs in our churches or on our jewelry. I wonder if this is because death is something far more tangible for us, more comprehensible, than the tremendous mystery that is resurrection. We've all known suffering; but we have not all known resurrection. Most of us, in spite of the fact that we now live in what Walter Brueggeman called an "Eastered World", live in places that look more like Friday or Saturday than Sunday: places marked with disappointment, with brokenness, with suffering. I think this was true even for the early church: after all, the Gospel writers devoted dozens of verses to Jesus' death but struggled to come up with more than a few words to describe the resurrection. How can such a mystery that none of use have yet experienced be named? There were many witnesses to the crucifixion...but no one, as best as we can tell, saw Jesus rising with their own eyes. A select few saw him post-resurrection, but the rest of us were left to depend on the fearful and joyful witness of those few to this unknown.

I am not sure where all these somewhat rambling wonderings lead...but perhaps this is what Easter faith is, at its heart: living into the mystery of God with the full spectrum of our wonder. In this day, however, I continue to ask: what does it mean to have as the core, universal symbol of our faith a story of intense suffering? As we gaze upon a day of pain that cuts to our souls, how might we begin to imagine an Easter morning that points beyond any adequate description? How might we learn to see and receive the sudden, surprising and never-before-seen gift of incomprehensible life beyond our visible and all-too-real knowledge of death?

Overwhelming Shifts

2011-04-14T12:03:00.007-04:00

The lectionary texts for this Palm/Passion Sunday are myriad--it is the only day of the church year that recommends two totally different sets of readings in the same time of worship. This week, we will be focusing on the Gospel readings--Matthew 21:1-11 and Matthew 27:11-54--with an assist from the Epistle reading, Philippians 2:5-11. They are full, full, full, so spend some time with the first set of readings as well as the second set before we gather around them and delve into them on Sunday.

Palm/Passion Sunday, the final Sunday of the Lenten season, is full of shifts, shifts that can quickly overwhelm even those of us familiar with the stories and events that mark this day. I think the shift is supposed to feel abrupt--because what will happen in this Holy Week is harsh and abrupt, no matter how much Jesus' entire life and ministry seems to have been tending towards this showdown in Jerusalem. But I thought I would help us lean into Palm Sunday by highlighting just a few of the shifts that happen here:

1) In terms of our lectionary-guided journey, we move from John's account of the Gospel story which we have been immersed in for the past four weeks back to Matthew's account. Though both writers tell the same story, their accounts sound radically different in our ears. John's language of seeing and hearing and belief is replaced by Matthew's language of kingdoms and Old Testament fulfillment and Messiahs, linking the Jesus story more strongly back to its Jewish roots and the way Jesus came into radical conflict with the secular and religious powers of his day. If John is the lofty gospel that helps us make divine connections, Matthew brings us strongly back to earth, showing Jesus in his very particular social and political context and making some statements with his words and life that end up getting him killed.

2) We've spent the past four weeks with Jesus in very intimate settings, looking at individuals working out their understanding of Jesus in one-on-one dialogue and interaction. Jesus has had some of the longest conversations we see from him in scripture with folks ranging from an old Pharisee to an isolated woman to a formerly blind man cast out of the synagogue to a grieving sister. This week, such intimate conversations are a thing of the past; we are thrust into the crowds, shoulder to shoulder with other palm-waving pilgrims, moved along by the tide of the crowd like revelers in Times Square on New Year's Eve, a tide that carries us through Pilate's courts and ultimately up a hill from which we will all scatter. How does the way we interact with Jesus and view him change as the formerly chatty Jesus falls eerily silent and the voices that fill our ears are those of the crowd around us?

3) The readings for this day take us from shouts of praise to shouts of death...how does this happen so quickly? How can people so sure of Jesus' identity one day want to crucify him for it barely a few hours later? What happens in that gap between palms and passion to provoke such a turn?

I'd encourage you, if you have time this week, to read not just the two Matthew bookends appointed for this day, but the entire narrative that unfolds from Matthew 21 to Matthew 27. This is the overwhelming narrative that shifts Christ's future from acclaimed Messiah to crucified criminal...and as we let it wash over us, it just may shift our futures as well.

Something Worth Dying For

2011-04-07T15:04:00.003-04:00

Our Lectionary texts for this fifth Sunday in Lent are Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, and John 11:1-8, 14-48, and 53. This selection from John differs slightly from the listed Lectionary, so you may want to go here and read it as we will be reading it. The rest of the passages, as usual, are here.

What is worth dying for?

This is among the many questions this week's Gospel passage raises for me. You see, in the other Gospel stories, it is Jesus' cleansing of the Temple that is the straw that breaks the Pharisees' backs, so to speak. In Mark and Luke, it is stated explicitly that this is the act of Jesus (usually seen as happening the day after Palm Sunday) that makes the Pharisees determined to kill him by the end of the week (see Mark 11:15-18, Luke 19:45-48), and in Matthew it is certainly implied by the mounting anger of the religious leaders as Jesus invades their space and turns over the tables of their work and their beliefs that it is his Temple presence that gets him killed.

John, however, sees things incredibly differently. John has Jesus cleansing the Temple earlier in his ministry; and though Jesus has some serious brushes with death after that time (see especially John 10:31, 39), the Pharisees are not yet set in their plan to kill him. In John's Gospel, the act that ultimately gets Jesus killed is his decision to raise Lazarus. This is part of why we have adjusted the scope of the lectionary reading, for it is in verse 53 that we find the fear the disciples had of Jesus being killed if he returned to Judea and raised Lazarus early in the chapter confirmed at its end: "So from that day on they determined to put him to death." How could a joyful, colorful scene of resurrection like the one above merit death?

It's a question worth pondering on a couple of levels. First, why did Jesus choose this to be the thing worth dying for--or, at least, worth setting his death in motion? After all, though Lazarus got a few more years on earth, perhaps, he would die again--he was not resurrected to eternal life, as best as we can tell, but simply raised to continue life on this earth for a while. And this is heightened by the fact that the authorites not only want to kill Jesus for raising Lazarus, but Lazarus himself so evidence can be erased (John 12:9-11). What if Jesus getting killed for raising Lazarus only results in Lazarus getting killed as well--perhaps by a much more torturous, painful death than he'd suffered in the first place? What sort of statement was Jesus trying to make here--I mean, if he was really trying to save the sisters from the pain of losing their brother whom they all loved, wouldn't he have not allowed the death to happen in the first place? What is Jesus' motivation here?

Then there's this layer of the question: why would the Pharisees choose to kill someone for bringing life? Wouldn't this be a person it would be amazing to have around--one who could undo even physical death? Wouldn't you want them on your side rather than snuffing them out? What of this act motivated the Pharisees to see it as the final nail in Jesus' coffin? I think there are probably layered answers to this one. One possible key emerges in Eugene Peterson's translation of verse 48:"If we let him go on, pretty soon everyone will be believing in him and the Romans will come and remove what little power and privilege we still have." Ouch...do our needs for power and control really run that deep...that they could compel us to take a life, and to reject life springing forth right before our eyes?

In John's telling of the story, Jesus chose to perform this miracle with full knowledge that it would probably lead to his death. Why was this act of raising Lazarus worth dying for in Jesus' eyes? And in the Pharisees' eyes, why did bringing about life make Jesus worthy of death? Questions worthy of our wrestling as we continue this Lenten journey of coming clean with hard questions and even harder realities.

Appreciating John

2011-03-31T11:53:00.004-04:00

Our lectionary texts for this fourth Sunday of Lent are 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, and John 9:1-38, which can be found here.

In the spirit of our Lenten theme of "Coming Clean," I have a confession to make: The Gospel of John has long been a serious thorn in my flesh, to borrow Paul's metaphor. In the past, when I have had to preach on passages from the Fourth Gospel, it usually ends with me lying facedown on the carpet sometime around 11:30 pm on Friday night screaming, "I don't know what this man is talking about!" John's language is beautiful, but often convoluted--packed with imagery and so many layers of meaning that it can be hard to discover the meaning behind it all (which I guess, at least, was part of John's point in how he wrote).

Preaching John several weeks in a row, however, has helped me understand and appreciate John in a way I never have before. In taking on three of the stories unique to John--Jesus' encounters with Nicodemus, the Woman at the Well, and the Man Born Blind--in consecutive weeks, we can see things in our continued immersion in John's writing that we cannot see if we take each story on its own. To understand John, we need to read everything he writes in the context of his broader narrative--you can't take stories as isolated incidents.

There is so much we can see when we hold these stories side by side that we cannot see if we take them on individually. We can learn that for John, understanding is always gradually revealed--each of these characters took some time to get who Jesus was and what he was about; it was always a process, and this is what discipleship is for John! We can also see that encounters with Jesus take all sorts of different forms--we may slink off to him by night, or run into him in the heat of the day, or be approached by him out of nowhere on the street--discipleship not only unfolds in different times and ways, it begins in different times and ways. We can see that certain ideas were key to John--water, Spirit, light, seeing, hearing--all of these things show up in all of these stories in some way, and the meaning of these terms in each story sheds light on their meanings in the others.

Realizing that John's stories can be better understood in their broader context made me want to look at this story of the Blind Man in its wider context. Due to the way our Bible is laid out, we tend to take John 9 as an isolated unit, with a neat beginning in verse 1 and a conclusion in verse 41; in reality, however, Jesus keeps speaking into chapter 10. We rarely read Chapter 10 with Chapter 9; in fact, I don't think I have EVER seen Chapter 10 read with Chapter 9. Chapter 10, where Jesus talks about his identity as the Good Shepherd, is the appointed reading for the fourth Sunday post-Easter, not the fourth Sunday of Lent. But, if we remove our verse and chapter markings, it seems this discourse belongs with the story of the Blind Man's healing--it may even be Jesus' commentary on and explanation of this sign that he performed in chapter 9 since, in chapter 9 itself, Jesus' voice is heard very little at all.

So here's my "Appreciating John" exercise of the week for you: Read John 9:1 all the way through to John 10:20. I am going to post it below without verse markings. How does reading this in context as a single unit change the way you understand Jesus' decision to heal the blind man and how that scene unfolded, if at all?

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam’ (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. The neighbours and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’ Some were saying, ‘It is he.’ Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’ He kept saying, ‘I am the man.’ But they kept asking him, ‘Then how were your eyes opened?’ He answered, ‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, “Go to Siloam and wash.” Then I went and washed and received my sight.’ They said to him, ‘Where is he?’ He said, ‘I do not know.’

They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, ‘He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.’ Some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath.’ But others said, ‘How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?’ And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, ‘What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.’ He said, ‘He is a prophet.’

The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, ‘Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?’ His parents answered, ‘We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.’ His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, ‘He is of age; ask him.’

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, ‘Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.’ He answered, ‘I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.’ They said to him, ‘What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?’ He answered them, ‘I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?’ Then they reviled him, saying, ‘You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.’ The man answered, ‘Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.’ They answered him, ‘You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?’ And they drove him out.

Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’He answered, ‘And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshipped him. Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains.

‘Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.’ Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

So again Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.’

Again the Jews were divided because of these words. Many of them were saying, ‘He has a demon and is out of his mind. Why listen to him?’ Others were saying, ‘These are not the words of one who has a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?’

Detail Oriented

2011-03-24T14:00:00.003-04:00

Our Lectionary Readings this week are Exodus 17:1-7, Psalm 95 (which is included because of its reference to the Exodus reading, in case you were wondering what it's doing here--and I know you were!), and John 4:5-29 (the appointed reading is the whole chapter but, face it, that's a lot to chew...especially when we'll have full chapters of John the next two Sundays! But more of that below).

Following that exceptionally long preface, you can read the passages in full here.

Each week of Lent, the size of the reading we are invited to enter into in our Gospel readings gets progressively larger. We move from 17 verses of John 3 last week to 25 (or, in the Lectionary's suggestion, 37!) verses of John 4 this week, to 41 verses of John 9 next week and 45 verses of John 11 the week after. This is not to mention the suggestion of the entire Passion reading from Matthew 26-27 on Palm Sunday!

So how do we process texts that are so long and have so much context--especially when they contain sometimes hard to follow dialogues full of rich imagery as these from John do? At the point when this story from John 4 was about to make me hyperventilate in its complexity this week, I was reminded of a great way to study scripture: look at a passage's gaps and details. Often it is the things that are left out or (seemingly) randomly included that can clue us into the author's meaning and intention in the way he tells the story.

So, as you read our Gospel text before Sunday, I would invite you to reflect (as I am doing) on some of the fascinating details of this encounter between Jesus and a nameless Samaritan woman:

1) Lots of geographic detail is given in the first two verses. Why is it significant that this is Jacob's Well (pictured at right)? What has happened there in the past that hearers of this story would be clued into? (for an interesting symbolic use of wells in the Old Testament days of Jacob, just for fun, check out Genesis 24, Genesis 29, and Exodus 2...hmmm...)

2) I love that the text takes time to say Jesus was tired (v.6) and, presumably, thirsty. We rarely get human moments Jesus in John's account... why include this detail here?

3) Remember that this story follows the story of Nicodemus. As we did with Nicodemus, we get a time of day for this woman's encounter with Jesus: it's not night, but high noon. Why mention the time?

4) Look at the detail of the number of different names Jesus is called by the woman: a Jew, Sir, a prophet, the Messiah, and (finally at the end of the chapter by the townspeople) the Savior (the only time the human Jesus is called this in ANY of the Gospels). What's up with this progression?

5) In verse 28, the woman runs off leaving her water jar at the well. Why include this? And why did she leave behind the jug, do you think?

Some of these may be chasing rabbits, but I think it is these details that lead us into the deeper meaning of the story. What other details do you notice as you read this story? What might the details, when incorporated into the whole, tell us? Join us Sunday as we plumb the depths of this remarkably profound conversation together, and prepare yourself to be surprised by what may emerge as we let ourselves get detail-oriented about a familiar story.

Seeing Double

2011-03-17T23:14:00.005-04:00

Our scripture readings this week are Genesis 12:1-4, Psalm 121, and John 3:1-17 (though I think reading all the way through verse 21 is worthwhile). You may read them here.

An ironic fact to begin this beautiful spring day: a passage that contains what many call the most simple core of Christian faith--John 3:16, one of the first verese we learn as children and one displayed on countless posters and player eye black at football games as a basic four-syllable evangelism tool--is actually full of incredible complexity.

The complexity of our Gospel reading may, to a large extent, be lost on we who read and consider the passage in English (though, if any of us take time to carefully read the entire passage and not just skip to what we see as the punchline in its sixteenth verse, its maze of images and ideas would be complex to anyone!). But if we look back to its original written language of Greek and, in some cases, back to Jesus' spoken language of Hebrew/Aramaic, there are some interesting double (and triple!) word plays happening here that I think John wanted us to pay attention to. Several sets of words throughout this passage give the text its nuance and remind us that it cannot be distilled quickly to one thing, no matter how well known part of it is to us:

Verse 3: You must be born anothen. The confusion that takes place in the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus can, at least in part, be traced to the confusing meanings of this Greek word that is translated "from above" by the NRSV, "again" by the NIV, and "anew" by other accounts. All of these translations are equally valid because this squirrely Greek adverb means all of these things: it could be taken to be a chronological reference (again) or a spatial one (from above); it could represent being born a second time, being remade completely, or deriving one's identity and origins from a new place entirely. The language here seems intentionally mysterious, invoking the possibility that this birth of which Jesus speaks of is not always that straightforward, to say the least.

Verse 8: "The wind (pnuema/ruach) blows whereever it pleases...so it is with the Spirit (pneuma/ruach)." This word play doesn't show up in English but works in Greek or Hebrew: the term used to express "wind", "breath", and "spirit" is the same word. So you could just as easily say "The Spirit blows whereever it pleases", or "the breath (of God) blows wherever it pleases"...and this is exactly Jesus' (and John's) point. God's Spirit is just as unruly as that wind...making the birth that this wind effects, once again, complex and mysterious.

Finally, here's a crazy one: Verse 16: Placement of "in"--Some people who study Greek intensively have argued that the placement of the phrase "in him" in John 3:16 is up for debate--according to sentence structure, the sentence could not only read "whoever believes in him...shall have eternal life" but as legitimately could read "whoever believes...shall have eternal life in him." Whoa...have we been memorizing this verse one way all these years when it could have equally been memorized another way? My Greek is nowhere near strong enough to make such interpretive decisions...but I'm going to sit with this nuance and think about how it could change the meaning to think about the difference between "believe in him" and "eternal life in him"...how would such a shift change the meaning of this verse for you, if at all?

After all these complex questions, if we can say one thing about this passage that is simultaneously so well known and unknown, it's this: this is a complicated birth Jesus is describing, one that has a great deal of ambiguity and mystery to it. Join us Sunday as we wade into these issues and questions together.

I Wonder...

2011-03-11T11:16:00.005-05:00

Our scripture texts for this first Sunday in the season of Lent are Genesis 2:15-17 and 3:1-7, Psalm 32, and Matthew 4:1-11. They can be found (along with the epistle text, which we will not be using throughout this season but which is always worth reading, especially in connection with the other texts) here.

I've spent this past week at a curriculum writing conference that stoked the fires of my love for the mystery and possibility that lies within the pages of scripture. One of the main ways we were encouraged to read and write about scripture is through the use of "I wonder" questions--questions that can help us reflect on and probe the many unanswerable questions of the biblical story, that can draw our attention both to a passage's beautiful details and to the ways it fits into the arc of a must bigger story.

So, today, instead of offering any sort of concrete insight into these most well-known passages of the temptations of Adam and Eve and of Christ, I simply offer you four "I wonder" questions in anticipation of Sunday for our two primary passages...for there is much to wonder about here.

As you read the Old Testament text...

I wonder... why Eve expanded the prohibition against eating of the fruit of the tree to a prohibition against even touching the tree? No words are wasted in this passage...so why are these extra words spoken, and I wonder what they reveal?

I wonder... why, after the serpent addresses her response, neither Eve nor Adam (who, note, was with her!) speak back to the serpent, nor to each other--they seem to just silently consider and eat. What's up with the silence?

Fig leaves are apparently itchy and scratchy...a bit like sandpaper. So I wonder why this, of all the darn leaves in the garden, is what the man and woman used to fashion their clothes?

I wonder... what it feels like to have one's eyes suddenly opened...

And from the New:

I wonder what it means that in addition to speaking of Jesus fasting 40 days and nights, the writer felt the need to mention that Jesus was hungry? Doesn't that seem like a huge "duh"...

I wonder how it would change the way we hear the Tempter's first challenge if we translate his first question not "If you are the Son of God" (as most translations do), but "Since you are the son of God" (as the Greek may actually better lend itself to)?

I wonder why every temptation seems to move Jesus higher--from the stones on the ground, to the pinnacle of the Temple, to a high mountain...I also (this is question 3 and a half) wonder why these things that show up so frequently in Matthew--stones, Temple, mountains--are also the key locations in this key story?

I wonder why, in all of Jesus' responses, he only uses two words of his own that are not drawn from scripture: "Away, Satan!"...and I wonder (OK, four and a half) what the connection is between Jesus saying this here and saying it to Peter later in Matthew when Peter tries to insist that Jesus not face death?

So there you go, friends...wonder away. It's a pretty remarkable way to read scripture, with an eye to wonder. Join us tomorrow morning at Bible Study for more wondering, and on Sunday as we all enter into the deep wondering of this season of Lent together.

From One Mountain to Another

2011-02-28T17:33:00.005-05:00

This Sunday's lectionary texts are from Exodus 24:12-18, 2 Peter 1:16-21, and Matthew 17:1-9, found as always here.

We've spent the past 5 weeks sitting on a mountainside with Jesus, listening to him deliver a sermon mindboggling in its depth and complexity and simplicity and power. That Jesus was a few mere months into his public ministry; his disciples had left everything behind to follow him, but still didn't totally know who "him" was.

It's harsh to jump so abruptly to another mountain. We miss so much in the valley inbetween--years, likely, at least a couple of years worth of teaching, travelling, and amazing miracles. We've missed countless brilliant parables, multiple run-ins with the powers that be, and infinite ridiculous questions from the still-clueless disciples as they try to put the pieces together about their most unusual rabbi.

Finally, just before this little mountain climbing adventure commences, one of the disciples, at least, has put things together: when Jesus finally decides to ask the fateful question, "Who do you say that I am?", Peter is able to reply: "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Jesus' strange reaction to this moment of illumination is to start talking about his death which is, apparently, right around the corner.

And so we climb this new mountain. This time, there are no crowds; it's simply Jesus, Peter, James, and John, looking down across the valleys where they've shared so much time together, when suddenly the whole scene changes. Jesus...doesn't look like Jesus anymore, at least not the Jesus they have known for almost three years now: he's glowing...his clothes look all different...and who's that with him? No one they've seen before...but it sure looks like...Moses? Elijah? And they're talking.

THIS is what they'd been waiting for--what Peter had been looking for in that moment he'd told Jesus who he thought Jesus was--something spectacular, something that would confirm his identity without a doubt: that heavenly voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him" that they hadn't been around yet to hear at Jesus' baptism.

Why here? Why now? Why would the disciples get this vision of Jesus' full glory at this point in their journey together? Why would we get this vision at this point in ours?

Well, I guess because even if we have missed all the narrative between the mountains, we are headed to the same place in our journey that Peter, James, and John were in theirs--things are about to get painful. Things are about to change. And before everything changes on that cross, everything is going to change, for a moment, on this mountain: a preview of coming attractions, a preview of what is true about Jesus before the cross and will be true afterwards--that this is God's own chosen, the one to whom we must listen even when the road leads up another mountain, to Calvary's hill.

Mountains, in ancient tradition, were believed to be a place where you can touch the holiness of God. That holiness was seen in one way on the mount of that Sermon, where Jesus laid out a new way of life; it is seen in another here, a God shining in glory who was God in the days of Moses and Elijah and will be for all days to come; and holiness that will be seen in another way on a cross atop another mountain, where God's love lays its life down.

This mountain may seem like an abrupt shift...but it's all part of what God has been showing us all along: just as this God is different, so is his Son different. Thanks be to a God for that!

Putting on our Reading Glasses

2011-02-24T15:29:00.003-05:00

Our Lectionary texts for this week, the last Sunday in Epiphany and the last Sunday in our Sermon on the Mount series, are Isaiah 49:8-16, 1 Corinthians 4:1-5, and Matthew 6:24-34. Read them here.

Just before we began this series on the Sermon on the Mount five weeks ago with the Beatitudes with which Jesus began His sermon, I had a great post-worship conversation with a member of our congregation who posed a compelling question. His question was something like this: what if Jesus intended the Beatitudes not just as a stand-alone piece, but as the lens through which we can then read and understand the rest of the Sermon on the Mount?

This question has stayed with me as I have studied and preached on and dialogued with you about these texts over this past month. The more I think about it, the more I think Jesus was brilliant (insert the requisite "duh" here if you'd like), because I think that's exactly what Jesus did by beginning with the Beatitudes: he wanted these phrases rolling in our heads through the rest of his sermon. He wanted these to be the phrases through which we could encounter his more detailed teachings, and his more detailed teachings to be further understood as they are held together with Jesus' statements of blessing.

(As an aside, I've also become convicted that the Lord's Prayer is a lens through which we can read the whole Sermon--making Jesus even more brilliant--but that's another blog for another time...or perhaps another sermon series for another season).

Think about putting on the Beatitudes as your reading glasses as you consider these teachings we've studied the past few weeks:

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."

"But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile."

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."

"For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy."

"But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift." (I think this could go with "poor in spirit" too...there's lots of overlap here)

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven."

I've been using the Beatitudes as my reading glasses as I've read this week's passage from Matthew 6:24-34...particularly verses 24 and 33. This is because I feel one of the Beatitudes we studied last night in our meditation group, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" connects intimately with what is at the heart of this teaching. Jesus begins by speaking about the disciple's need to be undivided, reminding those who follow him that they cannot serve two masters--it is just impossible, you will end up loving one and hating the other, having to choose one over the other. Then Jesus tells them on the one, singular choice they are to make: to seek first the kingdom of God and God's righteousness, making this their absolute focus and priority. I believe that at least one way we can think about "pure in heart" is in terms of a clearness and singleness of focus...having a heart that seeks after and focuses on one thing above all else, not getting distracted by many peripheral worries and desires...and that such singleness of focus is what can truly enable one to see God. What happens if we read these words of Jesus about anxiety, fruitless striving, and worry in light of Jesus' promise that those who are pure in heart--undivided and undistracted in their pursuits--will see God?

This could all be out there...but I think it's worth thinking about. What do you think?

A Smorgasbord of Scriptural Fun

2011-02-17T16:42:00.003-05:00

Our lectionary passages this week are Leviticus 19:1-2, 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23, and Matthew 5:38-48. You can read them, as always, here.

Gosh...okay, there's too much fun in the lectionary this week to stick with one idea for this blog. So this week will be a buffet of biblical reflection...a veritable smorgasbord of subjects to think about. Take your pick:

Dish #1: Leviticus? Really? Yes, friends, you are seeing correctly. This is Leviticus' one shining moment in the sun, the one time in all three years of the Lectionary cycle that we read from this third book of the Hebrew Torah (or five books of the law--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy...just in case you were wondering). Given much of Leviticus' nature, it's not surprising that only once in 150+ Sundays does this book show up: after all, it includes such lovely topics as why it's bad to eat shellfish (see chapter 11), how to properly sacrifice a goat (see chapter 16) and the grossly defiling effects of mold (chapters 13 and 14...real page turners). Yet...it is also in the heart of Leviticus, here in chapter 19, that we find what Jesus named as one of the two greatest commandments: the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. I keep reading this passage for today and wonder if we've lost something in throwing Leviticus out with its strange litany of laws...yes, this is the book in the Bible where most of our New Year's Resolutions to read the Bible through hit a terrible wall. But what clues about the nature of God and God's desires from us might we have been missing in our omission? (And, just for the record, I don't think what we'll learn if we draw near to Leviticus is that God hates shrimp...)

Dish #2: Resisting Evil In our Saturday morning Bible Study, a serious question was raised: when Jesus says in Matthew 5, "Do not resist an evildoer," what is Jesus saying? What is meant by "resistance" here? I've done a lot of reading around this this week...and most commentators seem to agree that "resist" is an incredibly weak and probably not fully accurate translation of this statement by the NRSV (the translation we use most in worship). The word used here for "resist" is actually a term, in most of its other usages, that references warfare--it literally means "to stand against," naming that moment in battle when two armies have marched towards each other until they are literally face to face, standing against each other, and bloodshed is commencing. So what Jesus is saying here, it seems, is "do not go to violent battle against an evildoer"--do not take the same tactics that they take. What Jesus offers here are alternate forms of "standing against" evil that do not involve violence, it would seem. (Theologian Walter Wink has a lot to say about this, and is a great person to read if you are interested in learning more).

Dish #3: What Jesus REALLY Meant, Redux: In response to last week's blog post about ways to interpret the Sermon on the Mount, Nancy Lively (a member of our congregation currently teaching at a seminary in Prague) sent along some great words about the ways the student community at International Baptist Theological Seminary is seeking to base their life together upon the tenants of the Sermon on the Mount, and the stories they are uncovering of people who have chosen to live and act according to Jesus' words. Many of her students come from nations across Eastern and Central Europe that have seen great conflict throughout their lives; yet here, in community with one another, they are learning to live in peaceable ways, and to speak with great conviction that these teachings of Jesus are not just livable--they are vital if we are going to know the life that is truly life. I'm encouraged to know that a new generation of Christians and Christian leaders coming along are wrestling seriously with these questions along with us...any of you who are interested should get Nancy to share with you some of the things she has been learning from her students. Remarkable.

So there you go...enjoy, and see you Sunday as we dig into this scriptural feast, seeing how it might nourish our life together...

What does Jesus REALLY mean?

2011-02-10T12:32:00.003-05:00

Our sermon texts this week are Deuteronomy 30:15-20, 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, and Matthew 5:21-37, found here.

Last week we talked about the interpretive challenge of the many apparent contradictions found in Jesus' core teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. This week, it seems that the broader question of how we interpret the Sermon on the Mount might be a good one for us to consider based on the comments I've been hearing around the church as we've dug into these texts. Things like, "If we took this literally, I'd be walking around without a right eye...or a hand...or legs..." and questions like, "Does Jesus mean we all have to do all of these things? How is this possible? It looks impossible."

The Sermon on the Mount as a whole can inspire these reactions in us. But perhaps no section more than this week's, where the things that plague us most--earthy things like anger, lust, making promises we can't keep, broken relationships--are confronted by Jesus head-on. We all get angry...so are we all subject to hell? Is calling someone an idiot really as bad as murder? If Jesus really wants us to gouge our eyes out when we look at someone lustfully, why are we not all walking around like pirates in eyepatches?

As you read these texts and wrestle with questions like these, I thought it might be useful to introduce some different ways people have looked at these texts over the years in their interpretations of them for practical living, as they've tried to answer that most annoying of questions: "What does Jesus REALLY mean?" I leave them up to your meditation, but do include my snapshot reflections on each view at the end.

Option 1: The Sermon Applies to Everyone, or to All Christians, and to All Times.

Early Christianity took this sermon quite literally, and problems quickly emerged (as expected) when Jesus' high ethic ran into a world that tends to run by the lowest common denominator.
So, interpreters have worked to figure out realistic ways the Sermon could still apply to everyone. Some say it is best to think of Jesus' teachings as standards of idealistic goals that, even if we cannot literally reach them, can at least provide us with direction for our ethical striving. The sermon, in the way, is seen as principles and attitudes that should influence our practice. Others (Martin Luther was a big proponent of this angle) said the sermon applies to us all at all times, but that its function is to help us all realize how much we are in need of grace as we cannot possibly live by this law. I don't love either of those spins; I don't believe Jesus was about scaring us into grace with visions of severed arms, but nor do I believe Jesus would speak this seriously if Jesus didn't really mean it and just wanted us to get the gist of what he was saying and do the best we can with it...this doesn't feel like Jesus to me.

Option 2: The Sermon Applies Only to Certain People.
During the Middle Ages some theologicans began to argue that the precepts of the Christian faith apply to all Christians, but that these loftier teachings are only for a select few--say, priests, monks, and nuns. This view says that as a few people embody this way of life, they help the Church as a whole be a witness to what life in the kingdom of God looks like. This feels like a cop-out to me, but maybe that's because I, as a minister, don't want to be the only one who has to live this way...I recognize that this sermon was aimed primarily at Jesus' inner circle of disciples, but he said it in the hearing of everyone...and Jesus never seemed elitist to me in the way that this view implies.

Option 3: The Sermon Applies Only to Certain Times.
Some have said this is the kingdom ethic that will be practiced during the millennial kingdom, after the second coming of Christ; or that Jesus expected the end of the world to come soon, so people would only have to live this way for a very brief period of time. Eh...this makes me nervous, too. Jesus was speaking in present tense. Jesus never mentioned time limits. And Jesus seemed to believe that with the constitution of this new community, the kingdom of God is already among us, not just a way that is to come...it's the way Jesus lived while on earth.

So....that clears it all up, doesn't it?

I read all these angles that try to make sense of what Jesus is saying, and wonder if our problem is just that: trying to make sense of what Jesus says. Because Jesus isn't trying to give us common sense wisdom for living in this world: he's trying to give us an uncommon way to defy the sense of the way this world works with our foolish way of the cross. We look at these standards and say, "There's no way to live this in the real world; we're just human," when maybe what we need to be asking ourselves is, "How do we live the witness of a different sort of world while in the midst of this one? How can we show that, yes, we're human, but we're animated by more than that--the Spirit of God lives within our broken lives and, on occasion, helps us live in a way that is radically different?" It's almost like Jesus is inviting us (as I mentioned in my post last week) to live with imagination that goes beyond lists and things that make sense...that wades us into the messiness that is human relationship that is always in flux, that challenges us to challenge the ways that are accepted and those least common denominators we've been living by and to believe we were called by Christ to something more...and can live into that something more, bit by bit, right now.

I don't know what Jesus really meant...but I don't think he was trying to trick us, maim us, chronically frustrate us with our own inadequacy, or leave us a helpless puddle of guilt. Nor do I think he was trying to let us off the hook in any way...I think he was challenging us to be that salt and light he had called us, to live for the sake of others in a way that transforms and gives life to the world--to choose life that others might live. How can we begin to choose this life in ways that are imaginative yet faithful, possible even as we toe the line of impossibility?

*I am indebted to Eugene Boring's outstanding commentary on the Sermon on the Mount found in the New Interpreter's Bible Commentary for helping me sift through these three options of how to read and apply Jesus' words in Matthew.

How is this possible?

2011-02-02T21:50:00.003-05:00

Our lectionary texts for this week are Isaiah 58:1-12, 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, 16 and Matthew 5:13-20. You can read them in full here.

Have you ever noticed how much Jesus seems to contradict himself? If you were to carefully read all those red-letter (words of Jesus) portions of your Bible in one sitting, it would seem like Jesus often presents contrasting ways of discipleship that don't seem like they can simultaneously be true (see photo at right...it's really not too far off of this).

Nowhere do Jesus' seemingly contradictory tendencies show up more clearly than in some of his core teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. Take, for example, Jesus' famous statement in our Gospel text for the day:

"Let your light shine before all people, that they may see your good works and praise your Father in heaven." Matthew 5:16

How do we mesh this with Jesus' words just a few minutes later, according to Matthew's account:

"Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven." Matthew 6:1 (a theme Jesus continues for many verses after this).

Then look back at the Beatitudes we studied last week. How do we hold "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted" together with Jesus' later question of, "How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them?" (Matthew 9:15). How can "Blessed are the peacemakers" be uttered by the same Teacher who declares, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34)? How does the One who tells us later in this sermon not to worry about tomorrow but focus only on this day (Matthew 6:34) later tell a parable condemning young women who fail to take enough oil with them to last more than one day in their lamps (Matthew 25:1-13)? Jesus, I would really love to live the way you teach me to live...but seriously, how is all of this possible?

We could go the route that some biblical scholars have gone and just write these things off as examples of contradictions in the Bible that should have been caught by good editors, showing us, perhaps, that these words are only human after all. We could (as many preachers have) try our hardest to weave these teachings together or harmonize them, compromising each until neither actually says what it initially said.

But I was completely struck--perhaps even captivated--this afternoon when I read the words of New Testament scholar Eugene Boring about the presence of these contradictions:

"The Gospel is not intended as a rule for life, but to stimulate imagination and personal responsibility. The jagged edges of Jesus' sayings should not be too quickly rounded off to make them consistent with other biblical teachings, or even each other. Talk of the kingdom of God generates a certain wildness that is lost if it is domesticated" (Eugene Boring, "Matthew" in The New Interpreter's Bible).

It makes me wonder if this is what Jesus meant when he said in the later part of our Gospel lesson, "I have not come to abolish [the law] but to fulfill [it]" (Matthew 5:18). Is this what it looks like to live fulfilling the law--not to follow orderly, logical steps but to dance between the contradictions, learning our own place and embracing the wildness of it all if it allows us to imagine and begin to create a whole new world, if it lets us participate in and experience God's kingdom here on earth?

I'm still chewing on it, but wow...I sure like that idea. What do you think?

The Sermon on the Mount

2011-01-27T12:43:00.003-05:00

Our lectionary readings this week are Micah 6:1-8, 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, and Matthew 5:1-12. You can read them here.

Over the next few weeks, our Gospel readings all come from the inaugural sermon of Jesus' ministry according to Matthew's Gospel: The Sermon on the Mount, that rich block of teaching that makes up chapters 5-7. We will be experiencing all of chapter 5 and a chunk of chapter 6 over the next few weeks, giving us a rare opportunity to immerse ourselves in this sermon over a period of time, to hear how Jesus' words are still words that hold power for us.

I have a couple of good clergy friends who are preaching the next few weeks under a sermon series title that's something like "The Greatest Sermon Ever." I can hardly dispute this--the Sermon on the Mount is amazing. But I didn't want to use this title to frame our next few weeks, because I don't think what Jesus was trying to do here was preach a great sermon (though it was) that would be forever immortalized (though it has been) and make him famous and beloved (which it did...though, as is true for most who preach prophetically, that beloved thing didn't really last and didn't fully sink in til after he was long gone from this earth and was no longer ruffling the people's feathers on a weekly basis). I think Jesus' intention here was in shaping a community. He gives this sermon just after calling the disciples and going out among the people healing for the first time; these people are now following him around, and Jesus sees that they are ripe for the harvest (to swipe a metaphor he will use elsewhere). Speaking to them, having their total focus on the mountain as they are isolated away from everyday life, is a prime opportunity for Jesus to begin to reshape their imaginations and worldviews and perspectives and priorities--to begin to paint a picture for them of what their new Life Together in community might look like.

This week, we get only the opening lines of Jesus' sermon--those oft-quoted lines of the Beatitudes (a title that comes from the Latin word for "blessed" which shows up so many times in this passage). Jesus begins not with a clear to-do (or not-to-do) list like the 10 commandments, as God did when God began to shape the Israelites after their exodus from Egypt. Jesus begins with words that read more like a poem, or a riddle--setting an early precendent for the way he will teach mostly not with clear cut mandates, but with parables that invite the people to engage themselves in the interpretation.

What is the significance of Jesus' choice to begin by speaking about blessedness?

What does it mean to be blessed?

How can we use this poetic introduction as a lens through which to encounter and interpret the rest of Jesus' sermon? We often read and study the beatitudes in isolation from the rest of Matthew 5-7...but they are very clearly linked to this larger text. How can making the connection help us live into them?

As we prepare for these weeks of spending time with Jesus' sermon and figuring out what it might mean for our Life Together as the people of God and as Broadneck Baptist Church, this week I would encourage you to take 20 or 30 minutes and read Matthew 5-7 straight through without stopping, to get the feel of the sermon from start to finish. What kind of impact does it make on you? And how would the sermon have felt different if it had begun, say, with verse 13 rather than with this declaration of blessing?

Food for thought, as usual, as we begin this most interesting journey together. May we allow ourselves and our life together to be shaped anew by Jesus' words to us in the coming weeks.

"I'll Take Old Testament Geography for $800, Alex..."

2011-01-19T14:56:00.006-05:00

Our lectionary readings this week are Isaiah 9:1-4, 1 Corinthians 1:10-18, and Matthew 4:12-24--give them a read through here, paying special attention to the Isaiah reading and the first part of the Matthew reading, which will be the focus of our comments below!

Have you ever been in a situation where things are referenced from the past that everybody around you seems to know about, but that don't ring a bell for you? Maybe you were the youngster in a group reminiscing about a sitcom from 30 years ago or a certain 8-track recording that was all the rage...maybe you are from an older generation and have found yourself unable to decipher the text message slang and pop culture references batted about by a group of teens...maybe you have been in a church where past members are referenced as if they are still present, but you have no idea who they are and no frame of reference for what dropping their name might mean.

In reading today's passage from Isaiah, and its subsequent quotation by Matthew, it would be easy for us to glaze over at some of Isaiah's references like someone in a group where everyone else is clued in about something that's foreign to you. "In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he will make glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations...the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian." Naphtali? Zebulun? Midian? Where on earth are these places? What was Isaiah referencing? And what did the beginning of Jesus' ministry have to do with these ancient allusions hundreds of years later? To spend any time on these hard-to-pronounce ancient names may seem like a waste of our time...but if we travel back in Israel's history to look at the meaning of each of these locations, I think we may find some incredible parallels in them to our own time and place.

First, to Naphtali and Zebulun--the names of two of Jacob's lesser known sons, and two of the lesser known regions of ancient Israel. The tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun were given acreage in the northern region of the Promised Land--not prime real estate. They may have had some nice waterfront along the Sea of Galilee, but borders were also in perilously close proximity to basically every superpower that would beat up on Israel. They would become the first part of the land to be overrun by Assyria, plunging its residents into the darkness of exile and force servitude to a foreign king long before residents of Jerusalem and the southern kingdom of Judah. These lands were isolated and vulnerable, and hence most subject to abuse and oppression of any of Israel's peoples.

Isaiah proclaims that it is these run-down regions will be raised up "as on the day of Midian." Anyone out there who can tell me the meaning of Midian? Anyone? Well, in case you have not memorized Judges 6, God once told Gideon to go take on the Midianites, an invading army that was threatening Israel with troops more numerous than locusts and too many camels to be counted. Gideon, reluctantly, raises an army of thousands; but then God makes him cut his numbers, cut cut cut until only three hundred fighters remain, so that all will know that the victory was won by God and not by human force. Not only does Gideon take a tiny army to battle, the only weapons he is allowed to take are trumpets and torches--yet God gives Gideon and his ragtag band the victory over the mighty Midian.

SO...why is this strange passage, referencing these long-ago places and events from Israel's history, the one Matthew chooses to reference as Jesus begins his public ministry? Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali— fulfilling what was said through the prophet Isaiah: “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles— the people living in darkness have seen a great light." Jesus, it seems, has chosen intentionally to set up his initial camp and call out his community not from the power center of Jerusalem, or from among a more prestigious neighborhood in Judah, but from among these fishing communities located along the sea. The band of followers that Jesus would gather together out of this region would not look powerful or formidable: like Gideon's crew that took on Midian, they would be small in number and not act in traditional ways...but they would pull something off that could only be done by God's power as they dropped their fishing nets to go follow Jesus in his incredible mission. Jesus chose to gather his disciples in a neighborhood that was off the beaten path, full of working people, vulnerable--and to gather not hundreds of them, but a dozen who would grow in knowledge, faithfulness, and eventually number to transform the world.

OK...so maybe this is a stretch. But I couldn't help but notice...Cape St. Claire is a bit of a seaside community, isn't it? Broadneck is located in community much like Naphtali and Zebulun in many ways...a coastal, water-centered community of people working hard, located somewhat outside of the city center and Annapolis' center of power, an assortment of ordinary people trying to get by. It's a community that may look idyllic on the outside but that has also known the darknesses of prejudice, mental illness, economic hardship, and violence in its day. In the midst of this community, here we have intentionally planted ourselves, just as Jesus did--not to be a mega church, but to be a Gideon-like community of committed people living in non-traditional ways, seeking to let God work through us against all odds. I wonder what kind of power Jesus' choice for where to begin his ministry--in the traditions of Naphtali, Zebulun, and Midian--could have for how we continue to define ours?

Like I said, it may been too much of a stretch. But when we get to know our Old Testament Geography, it sure can give us interesting food for thought as we consider our own geography in this time and place.

Are We Answering to the Wrong Name?

2011-01-13T12:13:00.006-05:00

Our Lectionary Readings this week are Isaiah 49:1-7, 1 Corinthians 1:1-9, and John 1:29-42. You can read this week's passages here.

I'm starting to wonder if we've gotten it all wrong. I mean...has anyone noticed that this will be the fourth Sunday out of our past seven that we've had to deal with John the Baptist? He keeps showing up, as one commentator put it, "like the cat who refused to take the hint when I've thrown him off my lap for the twentieth time."

We've gotten a lot of different pictures of John over the past few weeks: one preaching in the wilderness of the one who is to come; one who wonders if it is legit for him to baptize Jesus when Jesus is so much greater than him; but perhaps it is this week's picture of John that brings all the pictures together. If you were to Google pictures of John the Baptist, in almost every picture he is pointing away from himself, towards something else: whether it's a photograph reenactment, a Sunday School picture, or an icon of John, his index finger, nine times out of ten, is pointed away from himself. One person suggested that if John had a Facebook page, his Profile Picture would be a long finger, pointing away from himself, and every response to a Wall Post from his friends would be something like, "Go on over to the Lamb's page." This is because if John was certain of anything, it was his place: "I am not the One," John kept saying. "Don't look at me; look at him." Or, as he will say elsewhere in John's gospel, "He must increase, as I decrease." This, perhaps, is why this is pretty much the last time we'll meet John in our lectionary year after his prominence at the beginning.

John knew his place: He was not Jesus. He was a messenger, a witness, one sent to testify that others may see and follow Jesus. In this way...I wonder if John is a better model for our calling than Jesus is? After all, what John does is what we are to do: use our lives to point towards Christ, being willing to give up our own prominence that Jesus' true place may be honored, doing the work of baptism not for our own sakes or glory but as a way to testify about this One who baptizes with the Spirit? Maybe we've taken the wrong model for our life of faith...maybe, instead of calling ourselves Christians, we should call ourselves Baptists.

Oh, wait. We already do that. Johnians? Well, you get my point, hopefully: John models for us what following Jesus should look like in terms of how it shapes our lives.

Except for one thing: one really, really, really major detail. John, as best as we can tell, never follows Jesus...not physically, at least. He doesn't follow Jesus out of the desert and into the cities like his disciples do; he is not found with him on the Mount for the Sermon, he is not sent out with the 72 into all the towns to share the good news, he is not around to receive Jesus' post-resurrection commission nor the Pentecostal gift of the Spirit. As best as we can tell, John never actually follows the pointing of his own finger: he sees who Jesus is and declares this, but never changes the pattern and path of his life to actually follow him.

So I take it back. I have nothing but respect for John's witness in the desert; but why did he never take his witness beyond this? Why did he not lay down his title and follow Jesus, too? Why was he never transformed from John the Baptist into John the Christian?

All of this, I think, can raise questions for our discipleship. How are our fingers pointing to Jesus? This is a part of John's witness that we want to imitate--we want to invite people to behold Jesus. But we want to follow the wisdom of John's disciples, too...being aware enough to go where that finger points, to go on the hard journey of following Jesus out of the wilderness and into the world, even when we do not know where Jesus is leading. How can the movement of our lives point to Jesus as well, making us truly Christians as we walk in his dusty footsteps?

What's In a Voice?

2011-01-06T09:34:00.004-05:00

Our readings for this week are Isaiah 42:1-9, Acts 10:34-43, and Matthew 3:13-17. You can read them here.

What's in a voice? I found an amazing answer to that question this week as I perused my favorite news source, ESPN.com. There, amidst stories about the NFL playoffs and Baseball Hall of Fame elections, was the story of one of the countless homeless men who roams the streets of Columbus, Ohio. This man, however, had something that set him apart: before falling into addiction, Ted Williams had been a radio announcer, and he still possessed a silky deep voice that literally had the power to stop traffic as he stood beside the road asking for help. As he demonstrated his voice off of an interstate exit ramp, a local news videographer stopped and shot some footage of Williams that took the internet by storm, much as the voice of Susan Boyle did when she unexpectedly blew away the panel of "Britain's Got Talent" with sounds that seemed to belong more to an angel than a plain middle aged woman. Williams' voice appears to be landing him a second chance: the Cleveland Cavaliers, upon seeing the video and hearing his amazing golden tone, have offered him a job in announcing work with their NBA team--a job that could very well help him get off the streets and turn his life around. (You can read the whole article here).

This story resonated with me this week in particular because of the powerful ways voice is at the center of our lectionary readings. Isaiah speaks of a servant whose voice stands in contrast to so many of the ostentatious voices of his world: this voice will not break the wounded, but will bring about justice. God's voice is heard in this passage as well: it is calling God's people in righteousness and declaring God's good intention to do a new thing, to turn things around.

Voices take center stage in the Matthew reading as well: the voice of John the Baptist no longer confidently crying out in the wilderness, but confusedly wondering why Jesus is coming to him to be baptized. In response, we hear Jesus' voice for the first time in the New Testament, a voice of absolute trust and obedience even in this act that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense: "let it be so," Jesus says. A voice that rips open the sky confirms that Jesus has done the right thing in acquiescing to God's strange leadings: God's voice affirming Jesus as God's Son and the one with whom God is well pleased likely became a memory that sustained Jesus during some of the darkest times of his ministry, and that gave him an impetus for the difficult actions that lay before him.

Acts brings us the voice of Peter, seeking to interpret for his audience all of the unusual things that God was bringing to pass around them. Speaking with bold confidence, Peter tells them the great story of what was begun when Jesus came out of Galilee to be baptized: a ministry of healing and help that ended in death, but was made whole in resurrection--a ministry that now belongs also to those who enter the baptismal waters after Christ.

As we move further into this new year and consider the meaning of Jesus' baptism this week and of our own call to baptism as well, it seems like a good time to pay attention to voices--to the voice of God and its call in our life; to the voices God has given us and the ways we are called to exercise those voices in this world; to the voices of those around us questioning and crying out for mercy. That God spoke at Jesus' baptism is a detail all of the Gospels agree upon...what is God speaking over us as we begin this new year as disciples, and what is God calling us to use the gift of our voices to do?

Past Present Future

2010-12-30T13:32:00.004-05:00

This First Sunday in the New Year is also the Second Sunday of Christmastide (i.e. the 12 Days of Christmas!) and the Sunday that can be celebrated as Epiphany, the day of the Wise Men's visit to Jesus and the revelation of Jesus not just to the Jews but to the Gentiles (traditionally observed on January 6, which this year falls on a Thursday). The readings for this day remain fairly consistent every year: Isaiah 60:1-6, Ephesians 3:1-12, Matthew 2:1-12...stories of light, mystery, and strange visitors from far away. You can read them here.

So as we finish up our Advent/Christmas Series on time, perhaps no passage in its very word choice asks the question of "What Time Is It?" more than the appointed Old Testament reading for Epiphany from Isaiah 60. Now, I confess that I do not know a lot of Hebrew; but one of my regular sermon preparation practices is to read each passage in several different translations. All it took was reading this passage in a couple of different English translations to raise questions for me about time. This passage would have gotten slaughtered by any of my English teachers in high school because the writer could not seem to pick a consistent verb tense...is Isaiah speaking of something present, or past, or future? The passage seems to switch randomly between times, often not being clear enough on verb tense for translators to agree on whether the prophet was referencing something that had already happened, is presently happening, or will happen at some time in the future.

Check out this parallel with translations in the NRSV and the NIV: I highlighted what appear to be future verbs in purple (though these appear to just be kind of boldfaced here, I guess), and present verbs in orange. You can see that this is a bit of a mess:

As we enter this day of closing out the Christmas season and moving into the Epiphany season of celebrating the revelation of God in Christ, this conjunction of times and tenses brings up a series of interesting questions for people of faith, questions that can help shape our seeking and living in a new year. What has already happened in Christ, and what are we still waiting for? What has God already done, and what do we need to implore and watch for God yet to do? This passage from the Old Testament was at least partially fulfilled through Christ, yet anyone who observes our world knows that all nations of the earth are not yet praising in one accord the Lord. So how do we live in this strange meantime, caught somewhere between fullfillment and really full full-fillment? Are we to live waiting on things that are yet to come, or in light of what God has already shown? Can we live both ways? How do we live in the now while also living towards the not-yet? These are questions we need to visit again and again...because they go to the heart of the great tension of living in the upside-down kingdom of God that has already come among us in Christ, but that is seeking now to break in once again.

It Makes Me Wonder...

2010-12-22T23:07:00.005-05:00

This week we get two sets of lectionary texts: one for Christmas Eve, and one for the First Sunday in Christmastide. Our readings for Friday night are Isaiah 9:2-7, Titus 2:11-14, and Luke 2:1-20 and can be found here. Our readings for Sunday are Isaiah 63:7-9, Hebrews 2:10-18, and Matthew 2:13-23 and can be found here.

Our Gospel readings for Christmas Eve and the first Sunday in Christmas (that's right--Christmas is more than a day, it's a whole season! Ever heard of the 12 days of Christmas? December 25 to January 6=Christmastide...this celebration is by no means over) show us two very different sides of Jesus' birth: the way it is announced, and the way it is responded to and received. Both of these sides are peculiar...the only ones who get Jesus' birth announcement are some shepherds in a field and a few scholars who happened to be paying attention to the night sky. The only ones who recognize what is going on enough to respond are those shepherds and magi, as well as chronically insecure King Herod--and they react in vastly different ways.

A great observation was made in the title song to the musical "Jesus Christ, Superstar": If you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation, Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication. Maybe this is a silly thing to consider when reading a story as significant as the Christmas story, but it makes me wonder...

If Jesus were born today, in this age of mass communication even beyond what "Jesus Christ, Superstar" could have imagined, how would God have shared the good news? Would God have sent out one of the nice photo birth announcements like the one at right to everyone God knew...meaning, I guess, to everyone? Would God have posted pictures on Facebook, or notified all God's followers on Twitter using 140 characters or less? With new technologies available, would God have changed the way God announced this birth so that more people could find out quickly?

Part of me hopes not. Because, though it seems incredibly inefficient, part of what I love about the announcement of Jesus' birth is how intimate it is...how personal...how God is giving this gift to the whole world, but it is being unwrapped (or seen wrapped in its swaddling clothes, more accurately) by just a few witnesses whose testimony will become part of how God shares the good news of love and grace. After all, God could have unleashed those angels on all of Bethelehem...all of Israel, for that matter...but for some reason, God didn't: God chose a quiet way, a particular way, and God chose to involve other humans in the announcement. I think there must be something to that...enough to ponder for many future Christmases.

Then, I look at the contrasting reactions to the birth of the Christchild. On one hand we have the shepherds--the lowliest of society--trying to outrace each other to see who can get to the baby first. On the other hand we have a king--the most powerful of society--terrified by this new bundle of alleged joy, a bundle he fears could grow up to threaten his security and power. This baby is such a threat that Herod kills who knows how many innocents just to protect himself. I wonder how we would respond if we got news that this promised king was born among us this day...would we trip over each other trying to get to him with haste...or scurry to insulate ourselves from anything that might uproot our worlds...or, worse yet, would we fail to respond at all?

The questions of the first Christmas remain potent more than 2000 years later: the technologies have changed, but our God hasn't...and nor, it certainly seen, has human nature. Jesus comes again among us...silently...without much flash or dazzle...often unrecognized. Will we respond with joy or with fear? And will we be aware enough to respond at all?

Lost in Translation (or, perhaps, Found)

2010-12-16T11:57:00.003-05:00

Our Lectionary Texts for this final Sunday of Advent are Isaiah 7:10-16, Matthew 1:18-25, and Romans 1:1-7. Read them here as we prepare for our final days of preparation.

Here's the dilemma of this week's readings: I hate it when people take scripture out of context and try to bend it to whatever point they're trying to make. It's one of my pastoral pet peeves...always pay attention to the context, people. Though they have rich applications for life today and can still be faithful guides, these texts were originally written for specific communities in specific times, and we have to approach them always with this in mind.

So what do we do, then, when one biblical writer seems to misquote and take out of context another biblical writer? It makes me squirm a little...but that seems to be what Matthew is doing in quoting the now-famous and much-debated prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 within the narrative of his gospel.

Isaiah had a very specific context in mind when he offered this sign to Ahaz more than 700 years before the birth of Christ. The original Hebrew of this passage reads something like this: "Here, the young woman is pregnant, and is giving birth to a son. She will call his name Emmanuel, meaning 'God with us.' And before this child is three or four, these two kings you presently live in fear of will have been dethroned." Matthew, apparently drawing upon the Greek version of this passage which uses a word that could be translated "virgin" as well as "young woman," takes the liberty (prompted again by the Greek) of projecting this passage out of the present tense into the future, saying this virgin (now understood as Mary) "will give birth," and claims this son, too, will be called "Emmanuel"--even though the angel, clearly, had just told Joseph to name him not Emmanuel, but Jesus, or "God saves."

So what gives? Is Matthew being a bad interpreter of scripture? If so, Lord help us all.

But I don't think he is. Perhaps what Matthew is doing is reinterpreting Isaiah in light of God's new action...no one expected any further fulfillment to Isaiah's prophecy, you see. That Emmanuel had been born, the years had passed, and the kings had gone down just like Isaiah said they would. The prophecy was over. But here we see God doing something unexpected...that prophecy had been fulfilled, but perhaps it has not yet been full-filled, if you get what I mean. That child was named "God with us"; but here is a child who actually is "God with us." Now it's not just a young woman, but a virgin--the prophecy is taken a step further. And now it's not just two kings who will be deposed, but all the kingdoms of the world will be superceded by this baby who is himself a king, one introducing a new sort of kingdom that will have no end.

Perhaps what Matthew is doing here is not interpretive unfaithfulness; perhaps he is doing the most faithful thing an interpreter can do with a text: seeing the God who is lurking behind it and animating it, and imagining how God might, again and again, do a new thing that no one expects. It's having the imagination to dream of new ways that God's promises might be even fuller in the future than they were in the past. I really like how commentator Fred Gaiser described such imaginative dream work:

"It takes a daring reinterpretation to make this one work. The word of God is not a simple prediction that will "come true" in a latter day or an equation to be solved to get one final answer-it is a living word that kills and makes alive in every generation, always needing to be proclaimed anew, always carrying both continuity and surprise: continuity in God's steadfast love and mercy, which never change; surprise in God's enduring penchant to do a new thing (Isaiah 43:19), which always stirs things up. And now, says Matthew, Jesus is that unexpected new thing: Jesus is Immanuel, God with us, even if they didn't get his name right. The details are not the point; the promise is."

Are we free to dream about the story of God in this way? Or does Matthew need to go back to school and take another class on proper biblical interpretation?

Thoughts on this one welcomed...

Apparently, Spring is Coming

2010-12-09T11:20:00.007-05:00

Our Lectionary texts for this Third Week of Advent are Isaiah 35:1-10, Luke 1:46-55 (we get this second gospel text in place of a Psalm, because Mary's song reads very much like one!), and Matthew 11:2-11. Read them here, along with a reading from James that, though fabulous, won't be among our readings this week.

When February rolls around, some people look towards the infamous groundhog to find out if winter is finally over. For me, as a child February's progression meant that, every time I walked out the back door of my family's home, I would peer into the mulchy bed to the right of the steps, straining to see the first glimmer of purple. Usually, right around my birthday at the beginning of March, it would suddenly appear: sometimes poking up through snow, sometimes responding to a burst of warm air, a single crocus--the first visible sign that, apparently, spring was coming...and coming soon.

Isaiah tells us that the crocus' time has come: this crocus strains not through mulch or through ice but through the harsh wilderness landscape of the desert--a rocky land where nothing blooms. Yet here we find not just a single crocus, but crocus(crocuses? croci? Not sure on the plural...) that "blossom abundantly," signaling the unlikely dawn of a new season. It's a day when everything from the physical environment to the human heart will be miraculously transformed, where it's impossible to get lost even if you left your GPS at home--and all because God is here, a God who has been as absent to the people during exile as water is to the desert.

Mary sings of the crocus, too--of another glimpse of what it looks like to be able to say with confidence, "Here is your God." Mary sings of a social order transformed, of oppressed people put on an even playing field, of economic justice, of promises fulfilled--all because of this unexpected baby beginning to kick in her womb, the first signs of a new season in her life and the life of her people.

In prison, however, it's hard to see a crocus--or anything--growing outside of the dark concrete walls. In his cell, John is filled not with song but with one piercing question, the question of one who thought they'd seen spring beginning to dawn but who now can't see a sign of any blessed thing breaking through the ground: "Are you the one who is to come, or should we be expecting someone else?" It is the question of one who has seen his shadow and scurried back into his hole, this life of being a prophet far more difficult than he'd imagined and whose dream Messiah has turned out to be a little slower than his heart had hoped. Nothing was turning out like John had imagined...so would the crocus ever bloom? Would spring ever come?

It's cold as all get out in Annapolis this week...the time for crocuses to bloom could not feel farther away. But hang in there, friends. If we believe these promises of God...then apparently, spring is coming. And as we ask our heartbreaking questions of that promising God, we might begin to see glimpses of budding miracles of truth: the blind can see, the lame can dance, and the most helpless among us learn God is on their side.

A Parting Poem to reflect on:

"Waiting for It," by R.S. Thomas

Now
in the small hours
of belief the one eloquence
to master is that
of the bowed head, the bent
knee, waiting, as at the end
of a hard winter
for one flower to open
on the mind’s tree of thorns.

John the Baptist's Time in the Spotlight

2010-12-02T00:42:00.003-05:00

Our scripture texts for this Second Sunday of Advent are a motley crew of beauty and bizareness: Isaiah 11:1-10, Romans 15:4-13, and Matthew 3:1-12. Click here to give them a read.

The picture at right is too good not to use, and I figured I probably could not get away with using it as the bulletin cover this week, SO...meet Lego John the Baptist. As I was searching for a picture of John the Baptist to use on our blog this week this was not the picture I was expecting to come across...but then again, when is John the Baptist ever what we expect? He shows up at the beginning of all four gospels, preparing the way for Jesus...and he shows up in the lectionary for the Second Sunday of Advent every single year...he is Advent's prophet. Yet he always catches me a little off guard and makes me wonder, what is it with this guy? What makes him so significant that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all give him serious face time...that Luke gives us as many details about his conception and birth as he does about Jesus'? What makes this season of Advent a particularly poignant opportunity to pay attention to such an odd character? Why is he the right prophet for this season of preparation? What makes this the right time, to continue our theme, for John to show up and disrupt our lives with his cry of, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is near"?

Beyond this plethora of questions about John the Baptist, the other question I had rolling around in my head as I read our texts for this week had to do with all the tree imagery found in these passages. In this season where we put up trees in our homes as a means of preparation, these passages speak of a shoot coming out of a stump, of a root rising to rule over all people...such images of growth and new life are rich in Isaiah and Romans. In Matthew, however, we hear of an axe prepared to chop trees down at their roots, leaving those that don't bear fruit as decimated stump. We hear of cut-down castoffs added as fuel to the fire by a sort of Lumberjack Lord. How do these seemingly contrasting images, powerful in their rich detail, hold together? When we put them side by side, what kind of forest can we make out from these trees?

Good questions for us to ponder as we head into this Sunday...

What Time Is It?

2010-11-26T11:55:00.003-05:00

Our lections this week are Isaiah 2:1-5, Romans 13:11-14, and Matthew 24:36-44. Check them out here as we begin a new season and a new lectionary year together with a new Gospel writer (welcome, Matthew!) who will be our companion, with the exception of a little relief pitching from John on occasion, from now until next November.

You might notice that the blog is showing up a couple of days later than usual this week (or maybe, lost in a turkey coma, you didn't notice this at all!). This is not because of the holiday per se--it's because I've had a hard time shifting gears! How can we do Christ the King, Thanksgiving, and move to Advent all in the same weekend? It's been hard for me to figure out what time it is when it seems like so many different times of such rich significance are overlapping and intersecting, catching us breathless in their dizzy swirl.

My family is working to put up their Christmas decorations today and tomorrow in these post-Thanksgiving days at home, which makes me feel like perhaps this Sunday is time to start talking about angels and the manger and shepherds and the like. But on the first Sunday of the Advent season--our four weeks of preparing for the coming of Christ into our world once again--our lectionary texts don't lend themselves to stables and sheep. Rather, on the first Sunday of Advent our texts are apocalyptic in nature--pointing us to visions not of Christ's humble first coming, but of some future time where Christ will break again into our world to make all things new and inaugurate a new day.

Isaiah's image of this day, perhaps, is one we can get behind--a vision of peace, of humanity in unity, of people "walking in the light of the Lord"--an apt vision for this season where lights appear all around us to cut through winter's growing darkness. Matthew's, however, is a little more troubling. I laughed out loud at the response of one of my favorite lectionary websites, http://www.thehardestquestion.org/, to the seemingly anachronistic selection of this passage: "Nothing raises my holiday spirits like the anticipated threat of Jesus kidnapping someone at work and then breaking into my house and robbing me. And the fun part is, it will all be a surprise! Yeah!" This passage doesn't seem to fit with our warm fuzzy desires to go ahead and start singing "Joy to the World" since we've been hearing it in stores for weeks now; rather, it brings to mind images of how this passage has been interpreted (not correctly, in my opinion) in the Left Behind books to instill fear in people and lead them to "get right with God or get left," and led others (in direct violation of what Jesus is saying here, actually) to think they can interpret the signs of the times to say exactly when "the rapture" is going to happen--something Jesus says that not even he can do.

I think all of these things weave together, somehow, to disorient us and reorient us as we move into this season. We think we know what time it is--time to think about the baby Jesus in the manger, time to sing carols around the fire--but our scripture invites us into a different time altogether--a time of waiting and not knowing, a time that doesn't look like anything we've seen before, a time that is not to be feared but to be anticipated with great expectation and attentiveness--because in the midst of our spinning time, God is about to break into our world again and do something new. Join us as we enter into this season this Sunday and consider what time it is in our lives, in our world, and for our God who was before time, who dwells among us in this present moment, and who is to come again.

If I Was the King...

2010-11-17T22:05:00.003-05:00

And just like that, our last Sunday of Ordinary Time is here--a Sunday known in the Christian world as either Christ the King or Reign of Christ Sunday...a Sunday that bridges us from these many weeks of following Jesus' long journey to Jerusalem to the new "looking forward" that will take place the following week as we begin the Advent season. It's a whirlwind of time, just as we talked about last week, and the readings are powerful: Jeremiah 23:1-6, Luke 1:68-79 (in place of Psalm), Colossians 1:13-20, and Luke 23:33-43. Read them all consecutively and the impact is pretty powerful...you can do so, as always, here.

One of the many things I love about worship at Broadneck is that I get to do a Children's Sermon every Sunday. I love this for lots of reasons, but I love it because, in thinking about how to make these texts accessible to our kids, I find entry points and insights into the texts that I might not have found otherwise. As I've been thinking about our children's sermon for Christ the King Sunday, I've been considering posing to the kids this [admittedly dangerous, but which ones posed to kids aren't?] question: "If you could be king/queen for a day, what would you do?"

I can only imagine how our kids will answer this question...knowing them, I can guess three things: their answers will be honest, they will be creative, and they will be likely not what we expect.

In our Old Testament lesson for this week, God announces, "The days are coming..." and then begins to outline what it will look like on the day when God raises up a ruler to reign over God's people the way God would reign over them. God's people have known some REALLY BAD rulers (imagine that...human rulers who fall short?), some of whom claimed to have been sent by God...so I could see how Jeremiah's prophecy could elicit some skepticism. But as God begins to describe this "righteous Branch," the ruler sounds like no one they have experienced before: one who deals wisely, who acts justly and does what is right, one who actually brings about safety for the people and brings them together. In describing what will happen in the day God's ruler takes the throne, the answer God gives, like the one I anticipate from our kids, is honest, speaking the heart of God's hopes and dreams.

In our Epistle lesson, we hear what things look like on the day when God has "transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son" (Colossians 1:13). Consider this description of Christ's reign offered by Eugene Peterson in The Message:
"We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God's original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body. He was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the end. From beginning to end he's there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies."
What does it look like when Christ, as the image of God, is Ruler over all things? All things find their beginning...all things find their place...all things are brought together in wholeness. Certainly sounds creative to me...quite literally.

Finally, in Luke we get a picture of that day--literally--when Christ was revealed as king. He was revealed not in a coronation, but in a humiliation--mocked by the leaders of his day, silently undefended by the crowds and his friends, his lordship genuinely realized only by a powerless criminal who hung on a cross beside him. In his day of being "raised up" as king, Christ forgave his mockers and abusers and welcomed a criminal into God's paradise. Christ the King chose not to save himself, but to give himself up freely. What kind of king is this? I can tell you one thing...it's certainly not what we would have expected.

Honesty...creativity...unexpectedness...all of these things grip us and shred our perceptions on this day as we see what it might really look like to call Christ the King and to accept the Reign of Christ in our world and, even more frighteningly, in our lives. Join us on Sunday as, appropriately enough, our kids will lead us to consider...what would we do if we had the chance to be king? And what did Christ do when Christ actually did?

Spinning in the Vortex

2010-11-10T22:53:00.006-05:00

Our Lectionary Readings for this Sunday, which is technically our last Sunday of Ordinary Time (!), are Isaiah 65:17-25, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, and Luke 21:1-19. You can read them here (though you'll notice that I added four verses to the beginning of the Luke reading...not because I didn't think there were enough verses there, but because I think they are somehow important to understanding what Jesus is talking about here! But more on that later).

So as I was reading our texts for this week, an image came to mind. It was the image of those spiral vortex things that always used to be around the checkout areas of restaurants when I was a kid--those big, yellow plastic funnel contraptions you could drop a penny into and watch it spin its way to the bottom (see picture at right if you have no idea what I'm talking about). I was fascinated by these things--how the coin would spin slowly at first, then faster and faster and faster as it moved towards the narrow part of the funnel until it became a noisy whirring blur and finally dropped to the bottom, where it became still.

Why is this the image that came to mind here? Well, see if you can follow this logic: I like to think of the church year is a cycle, a spiral of sorts. We move through this long, long season called Ordinary Time from early summer to late fall, five to six full months of time to meander through a gospel (in this year's case, the Gospel of Luke) and dawdle about in some Old Testament stories (in this year's case, those fun guys called the Prophets). This is where we've been since I arrived at Broadneck in June on the second Sunday of Ordinary Time--just moving through these stories at a steady pace, but really without an end in sight. We're with Jesus on his long road to Jerusalem, and with the Israelites on their long road into exile, so to speak...a journey that is far more tortoise than hare, that's like the endless time the coin rolls around the top of the funnel before it drops, time that tests both our endurance and our gnat-like twenty-first century attention spans.

Now, however, suddenly we've hit that narrow end: we are spinning rapidly, rapidly, rapidly towards our final Sunday of this Church year (Christ the King Sunday next week), and then beginning a new Church year with the first Sunday of Advent the following Sunday. We're spinning so fast that, in this week's lections, it is almost like we've lost track of where we are--for this week's readings, in many senses, seek to keep us not in our present Ordinary Time for one more week, but to launch us prematurely into some sort of Extraordinary Time. In the Old Testament reading, we suddenly encounter a new heaven and a new earth that God is creating, where it seems that the Book of Revelation is suddenly thrust back into Isaiah's prophecy. In the New Testament readings, people are looking ahead to things to come, spinning rapidly and sometimes acting foolishly out of their hopes of God finally putting all things under the reign of Christ. The themes that will emerge in the coming weeks--Christ's kingdom beginning to be established on earth, God breaking into human history to do something new--seem to be bursting in upon us a little early this week...like that coin spinning down the spiral, we are being launched out of this slow journey we've been on into something new altogether, something disorienting in its difference.

As we encounter these texts this week, however, here's a question to ponder, one that has been on my mind this week that can perhaps help us think around how these texts that seem to speak of future other worlds might ground us in our present realities: when we dream about, talk about, and consider the new future God is working to bring about among us--what is our role in that process as God's people, and what rests in God's hands alone? How can we be faithful and passionate participants in God's future without trying to become the god of that future? It could be an interesting exercise to read these texts this week with these questions in mind...questions that, maybe at least a little, can slow down the rapidly spinning spiral and help offer some perspective on the journey.

In the meantime...I love the irony of the fact that, in the midst of this spinning coin imagery, our Gospel text opens with the reading about the widow giving her two coins. Somehow I think this could be part of the grounding we need to dive into these texts faithfully this week...

See you Sunday for a time that promises to be anything but ordinary!

Sidenote: not familiar with the seasons of the church year? Check out the diagram below for a refresher on this worship cycle in which we as Christians dwell...

BBC Blog, Special "Dreams" Edition

2010-11-09T14:26:00.009-05:00

Hello Friends!

Our usual Wednesday lectionary blog will still be coming your way tomorrow...but as a follow up to our Dreams Session on October 24, I wanted to share with you some "word pictures" you painted of our church's present and possible future.

These images were created by Wordle--a site where you can enter text and these "word clouds" will be created with the words that show up the most being largest in font. Check out our word pictures--which words jump out at you? What emerges from these pictures for you about who we are at Broadneck and who we might be called to be in the future?

Feel free to comment on this blog, to comment to one another at church, and check out the bulletin board with more feedback from our Dreams Session coming soon to a Broadneck Baptist Church near you! Keep dreaming, friends, and if you didn't make our session on the 24th, there's still time for you to answer the question: "I dream of a Broadneck Baptist Church where _________." What are God's dreams for us? Let's seek them out together!

Broadneck Baptist Church 2010

A Vision of Broadneck Baptist Church 2015

"I Dream of a Broadneck Baptist Church where..."

Possible Priorities emerging from our Ministry Groups:

For All the Saints...

2010-11-03T23:18:00.005-04:00

In honor of All Saints' Sunday, we are going partially off lectionary this week. Our Old Testament reading will be Genesis 35:16-21 and our Epistle reading will be 1 Peter 2:4-10; our Gospel Reading is the appointed lectionary text for this special day, Luke 6:20-31.

So, what are Baptists doing talking about saints? All Saints' Day (which technically is November 1, but is celebrated in most traditions on the first Sunday in November) is not a day that has gotten a lot of attention in Baptist circles. In fact, though I've been in a couple of churches that light candles on this day to remember those who have died or maybe sing a few verses of the hymn for which this blog post is named, I don't know that I have ever heard a sermon geared towards this particular day of remembrance, reflection, and celebration in the life of the church. Perhaps this is because the exact meaning of All Saints' is a little ambiguous. This day was originally made part of the life of the early church to remember all the unnamed martyrs who had died for their faith in Christ. Over time, the day expanded to a time to remember all those who have been part of the community of faith but have now passed on to be part of the heavenly "communion of saints" of which many Christian creeds speak.

It is a day, however, that I think has power us in this particular day on several levels, which is why it is a day we will embrace in our worship on Sunday. First, loss is an unavoidable and, in many senses, integral part of human existence. Precious people have been part of our lives on this earth who walk this soil no longer, and their absence radically alters the way we move through this world. How do we find hope and meaning amidst such loss as people who believe in a Christ who even the grave could not keep away from us?

Second, we are not the first generation of Christ-followers to walk this earth, nor (hopefully) will we be the last. We are part of a "communion of saints," a "cloud of witnesses" that was begun long before we took our first breath, that extends beyond our church buildings and communities, beyond even this earth through time and space. We are part of a family that is bigger than we can get our brains around...and this reality should affect how we understand ourselves as a congregation in this day and time.

And third, as we are seeking to live on this earth, we are not having to completely reinvent the wheel. We should and can gain wisdom from those who have gone before us, those who have struggled to live faithfully and in the process become for us models of faith.

In light of these observations about this day, it is interesting that one of the traditional readings for All Saints' Day is the Beatitudes. Since we are spending this year in Luke's gospel, Luke's rendition of the Beatitudes is the one we are given this week rather than Matthew's more well known account. Whereas in Matthew Jesus delivered his description of the blessed life from a mountaintop, here in Luke Jesus preaches on a plain, among the people right where they live. Whereas Matthew's Beatitudes are lengthier, more poetic, and in some senses more "spiritual," Luke's beatitudes are harsh in their contrast and almost uncomfortably direct. A life of holiness--of being a saint blessed in the eyes of God--does not sound like a comfortable one, nor a glamorous one. Rather, it is an uncomfortably embodied one--a life of being poor, hungry, grieved, excluded, hated, and defamed. Such a list of what blessed life on earth could entail should not make us hurry to be among the "saints", for to live a life blessed in the eyes of God is to live on the margins among hardship.

Yet is this not what it is to be a saint, at least in the biblical definition? To be "in Christ," as Paul so often described the saints, is to share in Christ's life and death as well as in Christ's resurrection--to discover that the life we live on this earth will be a trail fraught with hardship, just as Christ's was. Who have the saints been who have modeled such faithful living "in Christ" for us? How could connecting our journeys with theirs help us find a bit more of the blessedness of which Jesus spoke, help us (in the words of Ephesians 3) "have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God?" Join us on Sunday as we celebrate this unique day together and consider its power to shape our lives as a community of faith living among a communion of saints.

An Interpretive Field Day...or Obstacle Course.

2010-10-27T23:29:00.004-04:00

Wow, wow, wow to our readings this week. SO many interpretive choices that we must wrestle with as we read them, things that can both trouble us deeply and lead us to laugh out loud (which I actually did when I learned something new about the Luke reading this week!).

Our readings this week are Psalm 32, 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12 and Luke 19:1-10. Read them here...though you may want to go to this site and look up Psalm 32 in its entirety (since we'll be dealing with the whole prayer in worship on Sunday) and look up 2 Thess 1:1-12 in its entirety including the verses the lectionary omits since we'll be addressing that interpretive choice below.

I'll briefly address issues around the 2 Thessalonians reading (though we likely won't be spending much time on this text on Sunday) since a curious tension in these verses was pointed out at Bible Study this past Saturday as something people would like probed a little more fully. In a classic move by those who assembled the Revised Common Lectionary that we (and churches around the world) use to outline our scripture readings each week, the middle portion of the opening greeting and thanksgiving of 2 Thessalonians is cut out of our suggested reading this week. When one looks up these verses, it is no wonder: 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10 includes some of the most vitriolic language in the New Testament--language that sounds much more like the Old Testament God of vengeance than the New Testament God of grace. How do we deal with this omitted text that's at the heart of our passage?

I did some reading, and it seems there are several interpretive approaches we could take to these verses. One interpretation suggests that linking Jesus to such a final and fiery judgment was a way for the writer to help establish Jesus' full divinity--linking Jesus in the Thessalonians' minds to the images they had of God as final arbiter and judge of humanity and giving Jesus full power and authority over all things. Another suggests that this is in line with an ancient letter writing technique of gaining affinity with your audience by identifying with them in their situation--by going off against those who had been the root of the Thessalonians' suffering, the author could find solidarity with them in the midst of their struggle. Another way to encounter these words is to put them in context of the wider book--a book that addressed the fact that many in Thessalonica believed that the last days were already here and were now just sitting around on their rear ends, convinced the end was at any moment. Here the writer is from the beginning setting up the fact that redemption is still to come--and hence the Thessalonians need to keep living toward that not-yet future with faithfulness and expectation. Finally, it's possible that the writer is just furious about what the Thessalonians have had to go through and is letting some of that rage run unchecked before finally reeling it back in and returning to a more "proper" voice of thanksgiving in verses 11-12.

Are those enough interpretive choices for you? Phew. And I'm sure there are tons others I have not even thought of or encountered. For those of you interested in wrestling with this more, I'd recommend reading 2 Thessalonians all the way through (it's a short book)...I think context here is really important, as always--but perhaps even moreso than usual!

There are some really interesting interpretive choices to be made in Psalm 32 and especially in the Luke passage as well...but looking at how long this blog already is, those will have to wait for Sunday or some other time. Here's a teaser, though: who would have believed that there would be something new to learn about the Zacchaeus story after a whole lifetime of doing the story in Vacation Bible School EVERY YEAR that startled me so much I laughed out loud? But...you don't usually read the text in the Greek for Bible School, do you?

Stay tuned on Sunday as we continue this adventure of working to interpret scripture together! In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on the 2 Thessalonians passage...or any of the others, for that matter! Comment away!

Speaking Our Souls

2010-10-20T23:45:00.004-04:00

Our scriptures for this week are Psalm 84, 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18, and Luke 18:9-14. Give them a read (though be sure to look up and read all of Psalm 84, not just the 7 verses here--why the lectionary refuses to include full prayers, I do not know!) here.

Psalm 84 is a beautiful prayer--melodic, hopeful, full of emotion and joy and authenticity. But as I've begun living in it and studying it this week within the broader context of the book of Psalms, an interesting tension has bubbled to the surface for me. When considered in its content, Psalm 84 sounds like it belongs with the Song of Ascents--that is, among the 15 prayers found in Psalms 120-134 that are the cries of pilgrims going up to Jerusalem for festivals, travelling long distances until they finally come into view of the Temple at the top of the Mount...the place where the God and community they long for can at last be found.

Yet this is not where Psalm 84 is found contextually--rather, it is embedded among a group of prayers anticipating and dealing with the reality of exile, with impending separation from home and the Temple where God's presence can be felt most fully. The prayers on either side of it are cries of lament over gathering enemies, cries not of God's beauty but asking God to relent in God's anger.

How is our reading--and praying--of Psalm 84 enriched when we read it in a broader context? When we realize that the Psalmist was likely not actually seeing the Temple, but rather tasting the bittersweet fullness of perpetual longing and fainting spoken of in verse 2? What must it have taken for the Psalmist to keep praying his or her deepest longings even as it looked like there was little possibility of these dreams becoming reality in his or her lifetime? Why would the Psalmist persist in praying such impossible longings, persist in speaking his or her soul in such a deep way?

Before we get together on Sunday, try praying Psalm 84...pray it with the fullness of your heart, and see what happens. Which words or images reach your soul? What deep longings does it stir in you?

A REALLY Long Prayer

2010-10-14T22:24:00.004-04:00

Our lectionary texts this week are Psalm 119:97-104, 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5, and Luke 18:1-8. It's likely that none of these are super familiar passages...so be sure to read them for yourself by clicking here.

Prayer is the topic that has been on my mind this week more than usual. In part this has been brought on by watching, along with the world, the amazing rescue of the Chilean miners unfolding the past two days. As they emerged from the underground cavern where they had been trapped for the past 69 days, the first thing several of the miners did was drop to their knees in prayer. The return of the men to safety at the surface also set off a variety of religious commentaries about the power of prayer and the role it played in the rescue--a particularly interesting article reflecting on this was published here.

Prayer has also been on my mind because we are going to spend the next three weeks in worship talking about prayer together--about who we're praying to, what we're praying for, where we're praying from--asking hard questions about prayer and looking to scripture for sometimes hard guidance on this journey of being in relationship and dialogue with God. Our conversation is going to be guided by two of the most powerful resources we have for thinking about prayer--Jesus' own teaching, and the Psalms, which have long been called "the prayer book of the Bible."

Our first Psalm is a doozy--at 176 verses, Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible by a landslide. It goes on for pages. It's full of big, crazy words and ideas--the ones contained in the jumble of an image above. So you can imagine my chagrin when everything I read about the section of the Psalm we're looking at on Sunday--verses 97 to 104--said that to really get this Psalm, you need to read the whole thing. Not just that, but you need to pray the whole thing, internalizing its words as your own.

176 verses? Really?

But I did it. I read the whole thing, jotting down notes of my reactions and observations along the way. It was interesting to watch myself evolve as the prayer moved. For the first 20 verses or so, I felt annoyed at whoever penned this prayer; it is so redundant. Couldn't he have said all of this in 30 verses or so?

But as I continued to read, continued to pray, I found myself getting caught up in the surging current of this prayer, awash in its sometimes grandiose poetry. I found myself riding the ups and downs of the roller coaster the pray-er was on, soaring with unpredictable speed from begging to proclaiming to almost laughing outloud with delight to pleading to declaring with utter confidence. I found myself amazed at how this pray-er, no matter his or her emotion at the time, prayed with this utter, almost ridiculous boldness and confidence. I felt at times like I was eavesdropping on a conversation so intimate it should not be overheard even in snippets, let alone word to word by someone else.

But most of all...I found myself desperately wanting to know a God that you could talk to like this. I found myself yearning to know the psalmist's God, and to know that God in such fullness, with such depth and intimacy and realness and authenticity. I found myself wishing I could pour out 176 verses that reflected such knowledge and experience of God, that painted such a beautiful picture of who God is.

So as we prepare for Sunday...take this challenge. Read Psalm 119. The whole thing. Let its long, crazy stream of words wash over you. Pay attention to how they affect you. And think about the kind of God that they point to...is this the God you pray to? And what would it look like for you to pray to such a God with your whole heart?

Join us on Sunday morning and we can compare notes:)

A Week of Looking Back instead of Looking Forward

2010-10-06T15:04:00.004-04:00

This week's blog is going to be a little different! Since I am going to be away this Sunday, we will be welcoming a guest preacher to the pulpit, John Roberts, Pastor Emeritus of Woodbrook Baptist Church in Baltimore. Since John is going off lectionary this week (look forward to his sermon based on 2 Kings 2:1-14 and Matthew 4:18-22!), it seemed silly for me to blog on the lectionary passages...so instead, I wanted to offer some reflections on the powerful experience many of us at Broadneck and around the world shared in worship this past Sunday.

Since the 1930s and 1940s, World Communion Sunday has been celebrated by many Christian traditions across the globe on the first Sunday of October. It is a day when congregations of varied denominations, geographical locations, and backgrounds all agree to come to the Lord's Table as a symbol of our unity in Christ, of the one bread and one cup that we all share and that makes of us one body.

On Sunday, our usual circle of participants gathered at the front of the sanctuary to pass the bread and the cup to one another, to join hands and sing of God's Amazing Grace. But on this particular Sunday, thanks to the creativity of our Worship Ministry Group, our circle was much larger than our eyes could see. At the same moment (11:00 AM EST) that we were gathering to share the supper, a congregation in England to which some of our members have a connection and a congregation in the Czech Republic where some of our members are currently living and serving in ministry each gathered to break bread at the same time that we did, to pray prayers that members of our different churches had written, and to pray by name for those in the other churches gathered to worship.

Communion, on this day, took on a much broader scope: we were literally in communion with Christians from multiple other nations whose faces we may never see but who we are bound to as brothers and sisters in Christ. The opportunity to take the prayers that people in England and Prague had written and lay them beside prayers written here in Maryland, creating a liturgy together and knowing that each of our churches would be offering these prayers for our world and one another in unison, was one of the most humbling things I have ever done. How much bigger than all of us is the mission and love of this God that we serve!

The responses I received from the congregations in England and Prague about their experiences of this communion were so moving that I asked their permission to share them with you. Take a look at what happened in other places this Sunday:

“We loved being ‘with you’. Our main worship service is in the morning but an evening (6:30) more intimate affair does happen some weeks. This was re-scheduled for us today so we could meet at 11am EST (4pm here). Twenty of our folk gathered and during the liturgy, as a body, we read out the names of those listed from Maryland and Prague and the other places. St Cleers has many links with churches and smaller Christian communities around the world and your initiative has sparked a discussion here about their organising a ‘World Communion’ service some time. So thank you for making the first move and for thinking of us when putting together this partnership.” -Brian Pearson, Somerset, England

"Almost all our students joined us in the service. Our time of Silent Prayer was one of many voiced prayers in Russian, French, Lithuanian etc. We shared a loaf and drank tea. The students added chocolate candy. Conversation continued for over an hour. So lovely international worship. The time was precious. Our students really got into the prayer time and prayed in many languages for much longer than the three short litany prayers. They prayed for our church in particular. I know you are praying for them. Please continue." -Nancy Lively, Prague

On a week when we were reminded by Jesus that the faith we have is not so small after all, what a beautiful thing to be reminded of this larger story and community to which we are connected. May that connection--and the meal that we shared--nourish and sustain us for the work God has yet to call each of us to do!

Increase Our Faith

2010-09-30T10:59:00.003-04:00

Our Lectionary readings being focused on this week are Luke 17:5-10 and 2 Timothy 1:1-14. To read these two intriguing passages about faith and how we live it, click here.

There was a fascinating editorial in the Washington Post this past week that began with a compelling question: "What would you do if you got the chance to talk to the most powerful person on the planet?" Though this editorial was about the chance to talk to and ask questions of the President of the United States, the gospels are full of encounters that truly answer these questions: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John brim over with anecdotes of moments in time where people were face to face with Jesus and got to ask for or about what they wondered, wanted, needed.

I am completely intrigued by the things people chose to ask Jesus in the gospels.

Sometimes people asked questions to figure out who this Jesus guy is: the demons asked, "Have you come to destroy us?" John the Baptist's disciples asked, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?" Pilate asked in a moment of truth, "Are you the king of the Jews?"

People who met Jesus along the road asked for things that they needed. "My daughter has just died. But come put your hand on her, and she will live." "Lord, have mercy on my son, he has seizures and is suffering greatly." "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water." "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief."

But perhaps the questions we should pay attention to most are the ones asked by Jesus' disciples...the ones who saw the most of what Jesus did, who travelled with him constantly, who heard the fullest spectrum of his teaching and had the best chance of actually figuring out what Jesus was talking about and what was important to know. Many of the things the disciples asked , when you look at them closely, were kind of cowardly and dense, especially in light of all Jesus had taught them. Take, for example, James and John's request: "Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory." Or their shout in the middle of the storm on the lake: "Teacher, don't you care that we drown?"

Occasionally, however, the disciples hit on something good. For example, "Lord, teach us to pray" was a pretty good request--how else would we have the beautiful prayer we offer each week in worship? And it would seem, at first glance, that the disciples' request of "Increase our faith" in today's gospel passage is a holy and honorable request as well...after all, who doesn't want and need more faith, and why would Jesus not want them to have more faith?

But Jesus responds as sharply to this request as he does to some of the disciples' sillier ones. What's silly about wanting more faith? What's so bad about such a request? This seems to be the question this text is asking us, and this is the question that will pursue us into Sunday. Be with us as we ask this question of Jesus together.