Tag: sermon

Jeremiah 1: 4-8, John 15:12-17

“Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against taste, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over their schoolmasters.”

This complaint describes how a certain group of people thought about their kids. 

It’s the grandfather of darn kids these days.  Whether they’re too soft, too uncaring, too dependent, too independent and willful, or somehow, all of these things at once, everything that’s going wrong these days is all the fault of those darn kids.

This sentiment is not new. Indeed, that opening statement I started with? It’s a summary of how the Ancient Greeks viewed the darn kids those days. 

Some of those kids ended up being Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, the Grandfathers of the Western intellectual tradition.  Not bad for a bunch of punk kids who crossed their legs.

But does the Bible have the same message about children and youth? I would pointedly argue: No, it does not.

Throughout the Bible, children are often shown to be moral actors, thoughtful and faithful, capable of being called by God as much as any adult is. As we celebrate confirmation tomorrow, we should keep that in mind.

Our children and youth are not our future, they are our present, and we would do well to listen to their calls and prophetic voices.

This is the case with our first bible reading which is the call story of Jeremiah. Jeremiah is special among prophets in that his prophecy is not just something that happens when he’s old, but something that has been a part of him since before he was even born.

Jeremiah’s prophetic nature is especially needed in his own time: his forty-year prophetic career, mirroring that of Moses, happens during some of the most turbulent years in Isrealite history.

It’s important to take a step back and note the world that Jeremiah is born in to. Jeremiah is born toward the end of the existence of any sort of independent Israelite Kingdom. 

The good times under Kings David and Solomon are long past. After Solomon, the Kingdom of Israel split into two, the northern kingdom of Israel, and the southern Kingdom of Judah, centered on Jerusalem.

About a hundred years before Jeremiah was born, the northern Kingdom of Israel had been invaded by the Assyrians and its people exiled and scattered to the winds.

If you’ve ever heard of the “Lost Tribes of Israel”, they were the folks who lived there and never were able to reconnect with their homeland or religion.

The people of Judah-Judeans- would become the primary torchbearers of the worship of God.  It is through them that Jewish people today are descended.

By the time of Jeremiah, the Judeans are trying to do the best they can in a seemingly impossible situation; they are a tiny kingdom with few resources, surrounded by some of the great empires in history, names you might remember from history books: Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia.

These are empires of vast wealth and territory, with mighty and seemingly invincible armies.

How could Judah stand a chance?

This is the world that Jeremiah steps into as a boy.

It is into this world that he argues with God that he should not be a prophet, speaking the words of God, for he is only a boy.

This is deliberate parallel to Moses, who also tried to argue with God that he should not be a prophet because he didn’t speak well, but God doesn’t take the bait.

No, God instead says, ““Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.”

God says to Jeremiah, “That you’re young- possibly as young as pre-adolescent in this case-doesn’t mean a darn thing.” But although Moses was a grown adult, and got the help of Aaron, God doesn’t even give Jeremiah that sort of concrete immediate help.

God just says, here figuratively, and then literally in verse 17, to gird up your loins and buck up, kiddo.  P eople will listen to you, for I have appointed you.

Girding one’s loins, by the way, is a process of turning a robe like garment into something like shorts, allowing for more mobility, as a way of preparing for battle. There’s a diagram online if you want to see how to do it. 

But anyways, God is not saying to Jeremiah, in ten or twenty years I will turn you gradually into a prophet after you get done with school and get a job, God is saying to Jeremiah, go, gird up your loins and prophesy to the people.

God is reminding us here that the prophets in our midst sometimes come from unexpected places.  They come in unexpected forms.  God is reminding us that children are not our future, they are our present.

Jeremiah’s prophetic task is to rally the Kingdom of Judah to reform, to call them back to God to survive the coming tempest.

That tempest, by the way, would be realized with the sacking of the city of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple of Solomon, and the exile of the priests and many of the elites to Babylon.

The so-called Babylonian exile.

This is something that happens toward the end of his career, although he is active afterwards.

But his work doesn’t happen immediately. Work of this sort takes time. 

A whole generation, a lifetime even.

Folks who were kids like him when he started his prophetic call became the leaders who would guide the people during the trauma of the exile.

Not the folks who were elders, when he started, as many of them, especially in a period when the life expectancy was in the 30s or 40s, would be dead, but kids like him.

They would be the ones to carry the burdens of the future…and the present.

Thinking about this makes Jesus’ words about children make a little more sense.  Imagine believing that all children have a prophetic call to tell the truth about the world around them; and if there’s anything children are good at; it’s calling out us adults about their lies.

No wonder Jesus tells us woe unto him who stands between a child and God.

It’s not a maudlin call for a children’s time in church, but a real recognition of children’s importance in our lives and communities and to God.

So on this week that we celebrate the commitment that our youth have made to the church, let us honor our children and youth in another way. 

By listening to them, and how God speaks through them.

Amen.

Psalm 67, Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5

There are few things that stir me up just as much as the Battle Hymn of the Republic does.

Whether it’s sung by a congregation, or my favorite recorded version- sung by the folk singer Odetta, it’s one of the most emotive and powerful songs ever written by an American.

It was, you may know, written by Julia Ward Howe, who was born in New York and who spent most of her life in Boston, so being in between those two cities, I think we should be able to claim her.

She wrote the song in November 1861, as the United States Civil War was beginning to ramp up into one of the first industrial wars of mass slaughter.

The first battle of Bull Run had taken place in July, resulting in a confederate victory that shocked the Union. Nor would things get much better for some time.  Mrs. Howe would have heard about the battle of Ball’s Bluff in October, another humiliating defeat for Union forces that resulted in the death of a sitting US senator, Senator Edward Baker, who was leading an army regiment.

So things were dark.

This might be why Mrs. Howe needed to included such…apocalyptic imagery in her poem.  The famous first verse draws on language from the book of Isaiah, which depicts the wrath of God as trampling on a wine press- the metaphorical grapes of wrath, with the spraying of the juice staining an otherwise clean robe just as blood stains bodies.

We see this imagery again in the 19^th chapter of the book of Revelation, 3 chapters before our reading from today, describing The Word of God, who has a robe dipped in blood, leading the armies of heaven. There, the book of Revelation tells us that Jesus Christ will “tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.”

If you think this imagery is mighty bleak, powerful, and a little bit scary, you aren’t alone. It’s one of the reasons I don’t often preach from that part of the book of Revelation. Without proper social and political context, and spiritual preparation, it can be quite frankly, terrifying. 

Apocalypses, after all, are like revolutions: there is no going back from them.  When God sets things right, and punishes the wicked, we better all hope not that God is on our side, but that we are on God’s side.  And like revolutions, depictions of divine justice and intervention in an apocalypse do not bode well for people in power. 

Like a revolution, an apocalypse reveals that the control that people with power believe they have over the world around them is nothing more than dust in the wind. See the American, French, and Russian Revolutions.

Because these images are so powerful, they’re not something that we should invoke lightly.  Mrs. Howe did so in writing her song when her country’s future- and more than that, the future of a world without slavery, seemed to be in grave peril.

Indeed, the war that happened after this song was written was even more brutal than what happened before it. This was industrial scale warfare, with tens of thousands dead through combat, and many more dead through disease.

Being from the South, I can name some of those battles by heart, and we all should know some of them- they are the bloodiest days on American soil by far. Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Petersburg.

I say all this not as a pure history lecture, but because this is the background for our observance of Memorial Day, which started in Decoration day services, which involved local churches and individuals laying flowers on the gravesides of soldiers on Sunday afternoons and evenings.

Of course, people have been laying flowers on graves since time immemorial.  But in the aftermath of the civil war, this took on new meaning for a nation that was nearly cleaved in half, and was very slowly mending its deep wounds.

Many historians would say that it would take a full generation- until the outbreak of the Spanish American war in 1899, for things to really heal in the United States.

But I think the practice of Memorial Day- then known as decoration day- played a major role in this healing, even if on a local level. We can see this change happen through the period, moving from honoring just the dead on one’s side, to memorializing the war dead on both sides.

The first national commemoration of Decoration Day took place in 1868, at Arlington National Cemetary. Future President, but at the time Ohio Congressman and Brigadier General James A. Garfield, had this to say in the company of 5,000 living, and 15,000 dead:

“I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung. With words we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept; plighted faith may be broken; and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue. For the noblest man that lives, there still remains a conflict. He must still withstand the assaults of time and fortune, must still be assailed with temptations, before which lofty natures have fallen; but with these the conflict ended, the victory was won, when death stamped on them the great seal of heroic character, and closed a record which years can never blot.”

In that statement, Garfield commemorates the dead- the Union dead.

Compare this to one of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s last poems, written in 1882, 14 years later.  If you’ve heard that name before, he was a New England Poet and hymn writer- he wrote #208 in our hymnal, and more famously, the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

Here’s his poem, decoration day:

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest On this Field of the Grounded Arms,

Where foes no more molest, Nor sentry’s shot alarms!

Ye have slept on the ground before, And started to your feet At the cannon’s sudden roar, Or the drum’s redoubling beat.

But in this camp of Death No sound your slumber breaks;

Here is no fevered breath, No wound that bleeds and aches.

All is repose and peace, Untrampled lies the sod;

The shouts of battle cease, It is the Truce of God!

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!

The thoughts of men shall be As sentinels to keep Your rest from danger free.

Your silent tents of green We deck with fragrant flowers;

Yours has the suffering been, The memory shall be ours.

Longfellow’s poem honors all the war dead, no matter which side they fought for- The shouts of battle cease, It is the Truce of God.

In their deaths, the soldiers from opposing sides do not continue to rage their battles. There is no union or confederate, Johnny Reb or Billy Yank in the embrace of God.

For there is no Jew or Greek, male or female, Slave or Free, for all are one in Christ Jesus.

This represents a big shift in thinking, maybe one that’s only possible in retrospect, after the wounds of war have healed some, and transformed into scars.

It also begs the question, “Why is the truce of God only for the dead?”

That’s a darn good question.

Perhaps it’s our human frailty at work; the power of the sin of pride, greed, gluttony.

Perhaps is the lack of justice and righteousness on earth.  I don’t know, I’m not a political theorist or sociologist.

But what I do know is that the striving for peace on earth, goodwill toward all is a Biblical perspective, and probably the primary Biblical perspective.  It’s the subject of our Psalm today, and a key line in our reading from the book of Revelation.

Part of that cry for peace comes from the perspective that God is the God of all the nations.

While it is true that God is our God, our psalm, psalm 67, reminds us that God is not just the God of the Kingdom of Israel, or the United States, or Canada.  God does not just bless those people who live near me or who look like me.

For God judges all the nations of the earth with equity. God would not be able to do such if they weren’t under his jurisdiction.

After all, Revelation tells us that the kings and rulers of the nations will come to the heavenly city to pay homage to God.  This isn’t to weaken God’s judgement in any way, or to defang God.  There will be judgement- the New Testament is clear on that.  As Christians, we will be judged as well, but thank God, Jesus will act as our advocate during that time of trial.

But back to this idea of the truce of God, the peace of God. It’s a powerful idea, and it enchanted Mrs. Julia Ward Howe- remember her? So much so that after the civil war, she became an ardent peace activist. Her second project that she’s remembered for today started as an outgrowth of her movement for peace.

And although it’s changed a bit since then, it still reminds us of the difficulties and commonalities of parenthood, and the work of being a parent.

Yes, Mrs. Howe was one of the originators of Mother’s Day, which, as complicated as it is, reminds us that we all come from common sources, and share in a common destiny before the Lord our God.

So may we on this day, this sacred day to remember the dead, honor them and their memories. Remember that just as Christ died to make us holy, they died to make us free, and that even those who were not on our side might have been on God’s side as well.

For eventually, all will pay homage to God.

Amen.

Scripture: Psalm 30; Revelation 21: 1-6

Christ is Risen!

So what?

I don’t that mean that in a sacrilegious way, but I think it’s an honest question.

Last week, we proclaimed in almost all of the different ways that we know how to in the church- through song, that Christ the Lord is Risen Today, through preaching, hearing a 1600 year old homily originally preached half a world away in ancient Greek, and through the sacrament of communion, where we proclaimed Jesus’ death and resurrection in bread and the fruit of the vine.

So, we have named it and proclaimed it.So what’s next? What are we to make of this epochal historical event?  What does it mean for us in both the immediate, and the ultimate scheme of things?

Over the past Lenten season, one of our overarching themes in exploring the United Church of Christ statement of faith has been that that how we consider the ultimate- be that in appearance of God, who Jesus Christ is, how the Holy Spirit works, or today, what the meaning of the resurrection is- has an impact on things that are immediate.

For a brief recap of what exactly we talked about- I know that I had to look them exactly what I said, and I preached the darn things.

We talked about how the focus on the non-biblical image of God as a white man was used in the past, and sometimes still, in the present, to justify harm to women and non-white people.

We considered that God is described in the bible in ways that emphasize his non- maleness and non-humanity and otherness from us.

We realized that in the midst of all of that difference, God is most concerned with the goings on in the human heart, and maybe, in the midst of our differences, we should be too.

A little later, we talked about Jesus Christ, as the Logos, present from the beginning with God, who we also recognize in the Old Testament as divine Wisdom, that which binds the universe together. 

We considered Jesus’ title of “Son of Man”, as both a marker of his humanity and his being a bridge between humanity and divinity.

We learned that calling Jesus the “Son of God” was a direct challenge to the Roman Emperor, who also considered himself Son of God, and that Jesus presented an alternative way of life and being, a new structure of order to the universe and society that advocated fraternity and equality, serving others before serving oneself in the service of a God who is Love.

After that, we talked about the Holy Spirit, present from the moment of creation, the wind from God that blew above the face of the deep in the first chapter of Genesis.

We considered our role as objects of the Holy Spirit’s power, that is to say, it is the Holy Spirit who acts upon us, and although we can ask for the Holy Spirit to visit us, like the wind, sometimes it stops and goes on its own, as it wills.

We realized that because of this, when we do feel those Holy Spirit moments, sometimes calming, sometimes inspiring, and sometimes agitating, to trust them and to do the same when we recognize it in others. 

So what then of Easter, the moment of moments, the Empty Tomb?

In one way, it feels like the end of our religious narrative.  The resurrection is at the end of each of the Gospels.  It’s the last we hear from three of the four Gospel writers- Mark, Matthew, and John.

Our homily last week from St. John Chrysostom made such grand pronouncements, that hell had been annihilated, that forgiveness had been raised from the grave, that everything else seems like such a well, disappointment.

It’s really hard, at least for me, to think about hell having being annihilated some two thousand years ago, especially when so many go through hell on earth.

For me, the resurrection is not the end of the story, but the beginning.

There’s been a lot of debate in mainline protestant churches- churches like ours, like Presbyterians and Episcopalians, whether or not the we should see the resurrection as a “real” historical event.

These folks, many of whom are my friends and colleagues, would say that it’s too supernatural, not provable, and flies in the face of modern science and medicine.  It’s absurd, they say. Instead, those folks say, the resurrection should be seen as a metaphorical event- one popular Unitarian formulation is that Jesus died a man, and rose as a church.

I disagree. Paul counsels us in his First Letter to the Corinthians, the fifteenth chapter, that if Christ was not raised from the dead, then we are to be pitied most of all.

I think he’s right.  Without the resurrection, Jesus is just one of many traveling rabbis and miracle workers. I believe in the resurrection for a number of reasons, and I had to move toward that point over the last few years. 

But I believe now that the resurrection serves as the lynchpin of the Christian faith, the clearest sign of Christ’s divinity, the reconciliation of heaven and earth. I do believe that. 

But that’s not the only reason. I also know that if I am to believe, truly believe, in the little resurrections, happening around and inside us, in the budding of new life in the face of death, both literal and metaphorical, I need to believe in the big resurrection.

For I also believe that the immediate needs to be grounded in the ultimate.

I know that in order for me to be able to hope eternally and immediately, for the embrace of God to always be there when I need it the most, I need to believe that the power of God is stronger than the power of death, not just in metaphor, but in reality.

I need to know that there is no place so low that I can go that the grace of God cannot bring me back from it into God’s embrace.

I need to believe that in the midst of catastrophic environmental degradation, with some estimates that 30-50% of all species on the Earth going extinct by the middle of the 21^st century, that the Earth will be reconciled to God and be made whole.

I need to believe that in the midst of a season of interreligious violence, where the most radical and violent voices seem to be the ones being heard, that the reconciliation of all peoples is not only possible and worth working for, but also inevitable.

I need to believe in the resurrection so I can believe in the heavenly city that awaits us, as foretold in the book of Revelation.

That there will be a time when God will dwell with us, not just metaphorically, not just in our hearts, but in flesh and spirit. 

I need to believe that when the first things have past away, when all of creation has suffered death, that resurrection will happen. 

That God will wipe away our tears for mourning will not happen anymore, but in the meantime, while we still mourn, that we have a duty to wipe away tears and be present to those who do.

That the tree of life will stand next to the river that flows by the throne of God, and all the rulers of the world will do homage to God, serving not themselves, but the people, as the prophets commanded, ruling with equity, fairness, and mercy, knowing that Christ is Lord of the Earth.

And that until then, we have the right to demand leaders who will serve the people, who will lead with equity, fairness, and mercy.

That’s why I need to believe in the resurrection- not to pass a purity test of belief, but so that the rest of my faith, or possibly even my life, makes any bit of sense.

If we are to have a faith that transforms us, that asks us to do good works, to build a better world, as its fruits, it must be on a sure foundation. 

It must stand on a foundation of the resurrection faith of the apostles and the prophets, that sin is ultimately, but not necessarily immediately defeated, that the game is rigged, that Satan never had a chance, that God has already won, and that love is stronger than death.

And for me, that faith starts at the resurrection, and ends at the heavenly city. 

Thanks be to God for such a sure foundation.

Amen.

Ephesians 3:14-21, John 6:1-21

Communion is serious business.

I have never seen my fellow pastors, normally kind and patient folks, get quite so upset as when there’s a Facebook fight, not even debate, but always fight, over communion.

People who I normally really respect get downright mean and nasty when there’s any question concerning communion. And most of our disagreements aren’t over matters spiritual, but physical, about process. 

Our fights about communion almost entirely center on what might seem like the least theologically important questions about communion, centering mostly around process- intinction, small cups, or common cup.

More mean and nasty things have been said about the fact that I find intinction to be a bit gross than any other theological opinion that I hold.

Upon reflection, I believe that although the questions surrounding communion are manifold, the form and process do matter.

They matter because one of functions of communion is that it acts as foretaste of the kingdom of heaven.  It is what we call a “sign”- a visible foretelling – of the heavenly banquet.

Because of this, everything from who can participate in communion, what happens during it, and what effects it has on us, matters.

The question of who should partake in communion is a particularly thorny one, and I’ll outline three views.  In many churches, communion is only for members of the denomination, or sometimes, the particular local church or parish. The priest or deacons will act as gatekeepers for communion, determining who can participate.

The congregational churches used to be like this, and currently, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and many conservative protestant groups.

On the other end, Christians, especially Methodists, but more and more progressive protestant churches no matter their heritage, have a different view.  They see communion as a “converting” sacrament, and that communion should be open to all people, whether or not they are baptized. They believe that the grace of God will work through communion to change the heart of the unbaptized, and make them want to become baptized.

They look at stories like our gospel story, the feeding of the five thousand, and note that none there were baptized, even though there’s some connection to be made there- the words that the Gospel writer uses to describe what happened –

“Jesus, therefore, took the loaves and, having given thanks, distributed them”…echo or are the same as the ones used to describe the last supper- indeed, they’re supposed to remind us of the last supper accounts we’ve read in the other gospels and help us to foreshadow and reimagine this miracle story in that same vein.

Our church takes a more moderate view: we celebrate what is called “open communion”, welcoming all baptized Christians to partake in the feast of Christ.

Baptism being a precursor to communion is part of the earliest traditions of the church; we have documents going back to the first and second centuries that tell us of this movement, from the fount to the table. 

The reason we do this does make sense, but it takes a little bit of explaining.

We need to go back to John Calvin, the protestant reformer who is most influential in our Reformed theology.

In his view, sacraments, those visible signs and public acts of God, are seals of the grace of God that already lives inside of us.

The grace must already be here, Calvin says- taking communion without faith is at best ineffective- eating a piece of bread and drinking a sip of juice.

The best metaphor for this might be cilantro.  To me, cilantro is fantastic- however, to those who don’t have certain genes, cilantro tastes like soap.

But to those who do have faith, communion causes us to remember and grow even closer to God and to each other, forging new bonds of love. This is why John Calvin called for weekly communion- just as Sunday dinners draw us closer to one another, so to does Communion draw us closer to Christ and to one another.

What actually happens during communion to the elements is another question that we have, and I suspect that if you ask five congregationalists, you might get 7 different answers.

Partly that’s because many of us grew up with different religious backgrounds: there’s an estimate that something like 40% of the United Church of Christ is formerly Roman Catholic. But even within folks who trace their theological heritage back through Protestantism there’s a variety of views.

The divergence in doctrine is something we can best understand thanks to former President Bill Clinton: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”

More specifically, in the words of institution, Jesus picks up the bread and says, “This is my body, given for you.”

The Roman Catholic church believes in what is called “transubstantiation”.  Basically, it says that the bread and the wine of communion become essentially- and this important- essentially- the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

This doesn’t mean that the bread actually turns to meat, or the wine becomes filled with hemoglobin. In that system, none of the physical properties of the bread and wine change- but the internal essence does.

If this seems nonsensical to us, that’s because it kind of is to us now.  Back when this theory was formulated though, it was based on the teachings of Aristotle- the best science of the day.

It would be like us using the works of Neil De Grasse Tyson and Quantum physics to describe how communion works.

In the protestant reformation, some folks decided that this was not necessarily the best way to think about theology. Unfortunately, however, we couldn’t come up with one way to understand communion: if we did, there might be a united protestant church today. 

The two major views held by reformed Christians were set out by Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin.

Zwingli and his followers looked at the words of institution, “This is my body, given for you…Do this in remembrance of me”, and said that the “is” was completely metaphorical.

For him, it is the second part of the phrase- Do this in remembrance of me- that tells us what we need to know about the first part of the phrase- This is my body.

This view, because it emphasizes the remembrance, is called “memorialism”, and in this view, we do communion in order to remember Christ, his sacrifice on the cross, and the love he has for us.

Calvin steers a middle course between these two definitions of is. 

He calls the Roman Catholic doctrine “superstitious” it’s belief that the bread and wine “become” the body and blood of Christ. 

Calvin says the key to understanding what happens at communion is for us to read not only the first part of the words of institution, but the second as well- Not only “this is my body, given for you, do this in remembrance of me,” but also “this cup is the new covenant sealed in my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.  Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.”

Calvin says that this is not a pure metaphor, nor is it to be read literally.  Instead, he identifies this as metonymy.

A Metonymy is a figure of speech that we use to substitute one thing for another in speech.  For example, We might say “The White House said today…” when speaking about the actions of the President or his staff making a point about something.  It doesn’t mean that the house itself spoke. It’s a stand in for the staffers.

A Christian example would be, that Jesus is the lamb of God.

We don’t actually think that Jesus is a sheep. Or at least I hope we don’t. But rather, that Jesus does take away the sin of the world, just as the sheep does.

Thus, when Christ says that the body is given for you and the blood is the new covenant shed for you for the forgiveness of sin, it doesn’t mean that the bread is the body or wine or juice the blood.

It means that when we partake of communion, we receive with them those gifts that Christ promises to us.  

Christ becomes present to us, not literally, but spiritually, strengthening us in faith, for the journey ahead.

I think this strength for the journey is important. 

I think it’s why the story of the disciples floundering in the stormy sea happens right after the feeding of the five thousand.

They sail and struggle through the treacherous waters, unable to reach the opposite shore until Christ appears, seemingly out of nowhere, and they soon find their way across.

Christ enables us to have strength for the journey.  Whether you find him in the bread and cup, in the words of God in scripture, in prayer, through the blowing of the holy spirit, or in the strains of music, Christ is with you.  How you receive him, however, is up to you.

Amen.

Pity the Holy Spirit, if one can do such a thing for God.

For the Holy Spirit is the one who binds, or attempts to bind, us as a church into covenant faithful.

And if you’ve ever been at a church meeting with a budget fight, you know how hard that job that can be.

The Holy Spirit is, for us non Pentecostals, the most forgotten member of the trinity. Partly this is because we have a little bit of trouble placing the Holy Spirit.

God, our Father, source, fount, Creator of all things that are and will be, the ultimate, the Great IAM, etc., is if not fully conceivable, then well, at least archetypally so.

Jesus is of course the God-Man, fully human and fully Divine.

But then what is the Holy Spirit?

The words we translate now as Holy Spirit- or as the King James Bible did as Holy Ghost, are the Greek Theos Pneuma. Theos refers to the holy, to God, etc., but the word Pneuma is more interesting. 

For Pneuma, in addition to meaning spirit, means breath or wind.  If you’ve heard of a pneumatic drill, or press it’s propelled by air, it’s the same Greek root word.

And the Holy Spirit is a bit like the wind; It is everywhere, but sometimes it flows a bit more freely. The Holy Spirit goes where it pleases, and we know it mostly through its effects and presence in our lives, both individual and communal.

Christians understand the Holy Spirit, along with Jesus Christ, as being co-eternal with God, present from the beginning. We see this in Genesis 1:2- “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

That wind of God is the Holy Spirit, who is co-equal and co-eternal with God, as much God as Jesus or God the Father.

The Holy Spirit, the breath of God, gets a renewed emphasis in the New Testament, and especially in the Gospel of John and in the book of Acts.

Although yes, the Holy Spirit gets a mention in the accounts of the baptism of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, usually described as descending like a dove, and in the great commission, where we are told to Baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but it’s in the gospel of John and the book of Acts that Holy Spirit starts to take on a distinctiveness.

We especially see this in Jesus’ famous conversation with Nicodemus that begins chapter three of the Gospel of John.

Nicodemus is a Judean leader, a rabbi, who meets with Jesus in the cover of darkness, in secret, presumably to not be associated with Jesus.

Nicodemus doesn’t even start out with a question.  Instead, he starts out with one a statement that’s simultaneously full of faith and full of doubt.

“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”

It’s one of those statements that has an unspoken but… or yet… after it.

But Jesus doesn’t allow for those doubts to be fully spoken.  Instead, Jesus says something that’s puzzling for Nicodemus.  He says, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

That word that we translate as “above” also means “again”- I believe that this is a wordplay from Jesus, and he fully intends both meanings: both that the Holy Spirit, sent metaphorically from above, is the one that gives birth to our new re born Christian selves.

These metaphors are a bit difficult for Nicodemus- this sort of religious language was not common in this time.  It would be like Christians today talking about Nirvana or something similarly outside of our religious vision.

Nicodemus takes this literally:  Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”

And Jesus’ response to this tells us much about what and who the Spirit is.

Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.

We feel the Holy Spirit when we feel God’s presence as something like the wind, that comes down, flows about, that comforts and agitates us, and then moves on.

We are not the instigators of the Spirit’s work.  We are the object of work of God, not the subject.  The Holy Spirit goes where it will, like the wind, and though we might harness it or direct it, ultimately, we cannot control it.

Later, the Gospel of John describes the Holy Spirit as our comforter and our advocate, and I would add, our inspiration, who Christ says will be with us even when Christ himself in body is gone from the Earth.

If you’ve ever felt a comforting presence blow through you like a gentle breeze, from somewhere outside of yourself, you might have felt the Holy Spirit.

We know from the book of Acts that the Holy Spirit has a special affinity to the church, as the Holy Spirit was the cause of the miracle of Pentecost, the birth of the church, which allowed each person to understand the message of the Gospel in their own language.

Honestly, I don’t know how to explain the success of the church without the power of the Holy Spirit.

And I believe many of our failures as the church come from our inability to listen to it, to feel it in our midst. Especially when that spirit called out to us from people we might not like, or who we thought were lesser than.

Paul reminds us in our passage from Romans that all who are led by the Spirit of God are our siblings, for we are all adopted by God as his children. Now, we are going to experience one of the ways that we invite the Holy Spirit into our church through the commissioning and blessing of our search committee.

In all three of our services, we’ll be asking the Holy Spirit to be with search committee, in their deliberations, in their searching, in their listening to one another and the church.  We will pray for the Holy Spirit to soften their hearts, open their ears, and let their words and work be pleasing to God.

Thanks be to God, and to the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Scripture: Ephesians 1:3-14, John 1:1-5,14-18

“Who do you say that I am?”

The Word- The Logos

Son of Man

Son of God

The Anointed One

The Messiah

Prince of Peace

The Good Shepherd

The Suffering Servant

The man of Nazareth

He who is seated at the right hand of the father

God

Lord

Savior

The Way, The Truth, and the Life

Yeshua ben Josef

All of these are names that either were used to describe Jesus or how he described himself.

Yet, yet, That question from the gospels, “Who do you say that I am?” Still calls out to us across time and place.

Of all the questions that Jesus asked, this one is the most enigmatic, and some theologians have noticed, quite possibly the most important one.

Any of those titles or names capture a piece of whole of who Jesus Christ was, is, and will be, but none of the words that we use to describe him describe the whole of the nature of the birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Who do you say that I am?

The Word- The Logos- Wisdom.

We know from the first chapter of the gospel of John that Jesus is intimately connected to God in some way, together with God from the beginning.  The Greek word that’s used to describe Jesus is Logos.  It’s usually translated in English as “The Word.”

But that doesn’t really translate everything that word means. Dr. Cornelius Plantinga Jr, a Reformed theologian, tells us that for the Greek speaking audience of the Gospel of John, the word Logos “had deep resonance within Greek philosophy, representing the rational principle or power that is the glue of the universe.”

For Jews and others who more situated in the Old Testament scriptures, the description of Jesus Christ as being with God from the beginning hearkens back to the divine Wisdom, a female character in the book of Proverbs, who calls out to the people to avoid foolishness and live prudent lives. 

Wisdom, like Jesus, was present with God from the beginning.  From the Book of Proverbs, chapter 8:
Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth; … When [the Lord] established the heavens, I was there, … when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always,.

That wisdom is characterized by the author of the book of proverbs as a woman and that Jesus was a man didn’t bother ancient audiences, nor should it necessarily bother us. 

As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, trying to fit God into boxes like the human conception of gender is a relatively fruitless task, considering the enormity of God and his ultimate nature.

That character Wisdom, who has too often been hidden to us in the church, does come to us in one way. The Greek word for Wisdom is Sophia, a quite lovely woman’s name in the English language.

The Gospel of John does introduce some new information about the Logos, this Wisdom.  John tells us that not only was the Logos with God, but the Logos was God.  The Logos is God.  The structure and binding force of the universe, is God, the one who delights in God’s Creation.

If this sounds confusing and doesn’t make any sense, don’t feel bad. I don’t either. Trying to understand that which is ultimate is always going to leave us unsatisfied in some way.

But I do think it is important to note that in the beginning, God was not alone.  Even before creation began, if we can speak of such a time, God was more than a lone individual on the throne, God was a community. 

And if you think I’m getting a little off track, remember that we’re also talking about Jesus Christ, who kind of loved the idea of community and togetherness. But this exploration of cosmic and philosophical concepts is not the entirety of who Jesus Christ was.

Who do you say that I am?

For Jesus Christ was also the human one, the son of man, the mortal one.

This phrase is used in two different ways in the Old Testament by God talking to the prophets. Remember that weird passage from Ezekiel from a couple of weeks ago that talked about God with the Fire and the Rainbows and everything?

Right after it, in Ezekiel Chapter 2, verse 1, God refers to Ezekiel as a mortal one, seemingly to contrast their might and majesty.  God is God, while Ezekiel is…not. It contrasts the yawning gap between divinity and humanity.

In the book of Daniel, the phrase mortal one or son of man is used to refer to one who will rule the Kingdoms of the Earth at the behest of God.  It is a title of honor, a bridge between humanity and divinity. I suspect that both readings are important when we think about Jesus. Jesus Christ, fully divine and fully human, was born as a child, to the virgin Mary, who because of this bears the title Mother of God.

The Gospel of Luke tells us that as a child, in some ways he acted as any child would.  Luke recounts a tale of Jesus getting separated from his parents in the big city of Jerusalem and he ends up at the temple, arguing with the scholars and rabbis there.

When Joseph and Mary turned around and came and got him, he responded with a level of sarcasm that only 12-year olds can muster toward their oh so clueless parents. And this is paraphrasing here, but Jesus basically responds with a, “Jeez mom and dad, where else would I be but in my father’s house?” One can almost picture the eye roll.

Luckily, after this, the gospel reports that Jesus increased in wisdom, and was a good kid. Although he did maintain, I would argue, an ironic and humorous streak through adulthood.

To any 12-year olds out there, I welcome the opportunity to talk about the Bible with you.  Just not in the middle of worship, please.

Unfortunately, we have little biblical evidence for what Jesus’ life was like between the ages of 12 and 30.  Perhaps he followed his father Joseph’s profession and became a craftsman of some sort. Others have suggested that perhaps he was a farmer, or farm laborer for many of his parables involve farm life and farm stories, although this might be because most of the people he interacted with were farmers.

It would be like going up to the Boston suburbs and having stories that involved the patriots and the red sox.  Farming would have been the common language and sports metaphors of his day.

We do know about what happened when he was aged 30-33 though.  Those three years that would change the world, beginning with his baptism by John and ending with the empty tomb.

But who do you say that I am?  Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

That verse, in the Gospel of Matthew, is one of the turning points of that Gospel story.  Narratively, it confirms what we already know, but have yet to have directly stated in the gospel.

Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the anointed one.  He is the suffering servant, the unblemished lamb who takes away the sin of the world. The one who died on the cross, yet whose tomb is empty. The King of Kings and Prince of Peace.

Our previous two ways of referring to Jesus, as the Logos and the Son of Man had some background in Jewish thought, as does the title of the Messiah. The title of Son of God, however, had no counterpart in Jewish thought or Greek Philosophy.

Indeed, the title is from the ancient Roman religion. We know of one other person alive at the time of Jesus, who also claimed that title. The Roman Emperor. The Roman Emperor, the dictator who ruled terribly over the Jewish peoples and all the other peoples of the known world, with the backing of the mighty and powerful Roman Legions, who said he was descended from the Gods themselves.

The Roman Emperor said he was the Son of God.

Jesus said no. Jesus said it in that cheeky way that drew people out to demonstrate their faith. Simon Peter answered “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” But Jesus didn’t mean it in the same way that the Emperor did. Jesus did not seek to rule the kingdoms of the earth through force and violence.

Satan tempted him with this during his time in the desert, in the Gospel of Luke, the fourth chapter, saying, “Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

This tells us that the way of the Prince of Peace is different.

Our reading from the book of Ephesians summarizes for us that the way of the King of Kings is not to rule over, but to gather up all the kingdoms and republics and democracies and tribes and communes and states and peoples of the world unto himself to reunite them with God. 

The way of the Son of God is not separation of putting people above one another, but of drawing each and everyone of us into the embrace of a God who loves us so dearly. The reconciliation of all things, both human and non-human, plant, animal, and otherwise, is the ultimate goal of the Gospel.  This is the Lordship we recognize when we say that Christ is Lord.

Who do you say that I am?

Jesus Christ is all of these titles, The Logos, the Son of Man, the Son of God, our Lord and Savior, and so much more. Sometimes its easy for us to get fixated on one of these things, and forget the others, but we must try not to.

For to do so would put up barriers where none should exist, to reduce Jesus so much that we could fit him into a box that we might have the illusion of control over. If there’s anything we should know, it’s that we are not God’s shepherd, but God is our shepherd.

Amen.

Scripture: 1 Timothy 1:12-17, Luke 15:1-10

Sheep get a bad rap these days.

Calling someone a sheep is a common political insult to hurl at folks at the opposite side of the political aisle. An accusation that the other person is just following blindly, incapable of making their own decisions, unable to show leadership and independent thought.

But there’s something about sheep for us as Christians that shouldn’t be so quickly overlooked. The humble sheep is one of Jesus’ best-known metaphors for those who follow him, and for good reason.

The imagining of God and Jesus Christ as our Good Shepherd hearkens back to the book of Isaiah, the psalms, and throughout the Old Testament. This image of our God not as a warrior king, and more a shepherd is an important one for us.

And if we have a shepherd, than we must be God’s sheep.

Sheep themselves aren’t as aggressive as some other similar animals- a good model for those of us who follow the prince of peace.  They tend to stick together in their flocks, and although there are some hierarchical behaviors, they tend to share leadership.

They’re actually pretty smart too, remembering faces and can be trained just like dogs can. They produce things that keep us warm and fed.  They eat invasive plant species, allowing native grasses to recover.

So pity the poor sheep, who has unfairly become another insult to call those people who refuse to listen to facts and logic, while people who think like me show independent thought and principled leadership.

Speaking of which, that word leadership…

We have an obsession with leadership. Maybe it’s because its associated with self-sufficiency, independence, apple pie, and the American way. Leadership, Leadership, Leadership, is everywhere these days. 

In your local library there are rows and rows and stacks and stacks of books on leadership. To be a good person, it seems that you have to be a good leader.

There’s a thousand and one different ways to lead, taking from examples of nature, sports, film, fictional stories and myths, not to mention religion. Colleges and universities, not to mention seminaries, offer classes in leadership.

You can go on three-day retreats to connect with your inner man, woman, child, or superhero who will show you how to lead, with a small upfront payment of $2,500.  There’s a whole sub-industry of Christian leadership self-improvement books and workshops. I always found this last category to be the most amusing.

Because many of our examples of leadership in the bible that we have aren’t so good.  Indeed, as we explored in February, many of the great leaders of the Bible do so in spite of their gifts and efforts, not because of them.

I would argue that both the Old and New Testaments are much more concerned with our ability to listen, to follow, to learn, rather than our own abilities to lead.

One of the words that we translate as disciple is in the Greek “Mathates”, which means “one who learns.” This shares a common greek root with another word that is enough to inspire terror in some of us- Mathema- from which we get the word Mathematics.

Discipleship, that desire and work to make us better followers of Jesus Christ, is a process of learning. It’s that reorientation away from that which separates ourselves from God and our neighbors and toward that which is ultimate and good and Beautiful. That which is God.

This is a process which not only begins with God, but that also continues with and constantly involves the work of and grace of God. I would argue that there is no higher calling for the Christian than discipleship, the calling to learn to listen and serve, to love God and to learn to love others as Christ loved us.

Our Gospel reading this week concerns one aspect of this process. This is the famous parable of the lost sheep, about how our Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, is always there to seek out the one sheep who has wandered away, and how the shepherd rejoices at our coming back.

This shepherd who comes back to the flock with the sheep on top of his shoulders, because sometimes, but for the grace of God go I. Something I find interesting about this parable is that often while we often interpret it as what happens with someone has not yet begun their Christian journey.

That it makes a clear distinction between sinners, who have yet to know Jesus, and those that do know Jesus, those good and faithful sheep who never get lost. That somehow getting lost is a rare event, there is ever only one sheep at a time that is getting lost.

It implies that once our journey with Christ begins, the path of discipleship is one that is ever and always upward and onward pointing toward God, progressing in holiness and sanctification.

I don’t know about you, but for me, this hasn’t seemed to be true. Sometimes it seems more like a rollercoaster, with ups, downs, loop de loops and freefalls. Nor does this really fit in necessarily with the parable logically.

For the sheep who was lost was not a new sheep to the flock.  That sheep was not previously a goat. That sheep was already Jesus’ sheep! That sheep is not someone else, that sheep is all of us, who even when we try to follow Jesus as well as we can, can’t help but do some aimless wandering.

We can’t help but separate ourselves from God at some point. It’s in our very nature.  We wander around sometimes. We’re a people on the move. Sometimes that wandering is ultimately led by the Holy Spirit and it can lead us in a new direction.

Sometimes it takes one or two sheep to lead us toward the civil rights movement, or the fight against systemic poverty. Or maybe in this church, toward a Saturday evening worship service when it was thought to be too Catholic, or having our children with us in worship every Sunday in our biggest worship service.

But sometimes it is the case that we do wander away from God in harmful ways. Sometimes we see something that doesn’t seem all that bad at first but which eventually leads us away from God; desire for financial comfort and security that transforms into a love of money which separates us from God..

An inability to make immediate sense of the world through the lens of Jesus Christ might take us down following a different leader, in seeing someone else or some other idea as lord of this world.

 At some point, we will all be that sheep who wanders away. That’s ok. It’s what we do. Luckily, we have a Savior that goes after the sheep.

Our reading from the first letter of Paul to Timothy reminds us of that. We must remember that Paul, that early Christian missionary who started churches among the non-Jewish population of the Greek and Roman World, had a past that involved the persecution of many of Jesus’ earliest followers.

And even after his conversion, Paul referred to himself as the chief among sinners, and especially to a thorn in his flesh. Paul reminds us though, that Jesus Christ came in this world to save sinners.

In the book of Romans, Paul puts it another way: Jesus Christ died for the ungodly. Jesus made the journey of human life, death, and resurrection for those who do not deserve it.

And although Paul is a leader among the early Christians, he makes it clear that it was not his own efforts or inherent goodness that made him a leader. Rather, he speculates that God chose him because there was so much to him that needed to be transformed that he would be a good example for others.

Paul did not need to learn how to succeed or excel, but how to diminish, how to listen, how to follow, and how to serve. Can you imagine that book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble or Walmart? How to be a better sheep?

It’s chapters might include:

How to listen more.

How to take the lead sometimes, just by go ahead and doing it.

How to support others when they take the lead.

How to be protective and peaceful.

How to continue in lifelong learning of the way of Jesus.

How to be an easier sheep to carry back home when we do get lost.

How to live well in community with one another,

How to accept others back into the flock who’ve wandered away.

That would be a radically different kind of book. One I’d like to read.

For my part, I’m proud to be a sheep, or at least, trying to get more sheeplike.

Mostly not because of the qualities of the sheep though, as good as I’ve made them sound.  But because of the quality of the shepherd we have. The Good Shepherd, who is always willing to carry us home, no matter how lost we might be. Amen.

Amen.

Scripture: Genesis 1: 1-2, Psalm 8: 3-9

“If men had three sides, God would be a triangle.”

That quote is from Montesquieu, a French political philosopher is one of the funniest, and most true, quotes I know about religion. Although some people think this quote blasphemous at first glance, I don’t think it is.  I think that it actually profoundly confronts one of the great foibles of humanity. 

Indeed, it’s one of the truly ironic parts of the Bible and our Christian faith that one of the most theologically potent statements in the book of Genesis is that we are created in the image of God, yet we all too often create God in our own image.

This explains our tendency to imagine God as being just like us.

Our tendency to imagine that God might drive a pickup truck, listen to country music, and vote straight ticket Republican, or listen to NPR, drive a Prius, and vote straight ticket Democratic.

Heck, even in our tendency on a basic level to think about what God even looks like. In the 9 AM service, we will do an art exercise related to this, asking folks to draw what they think God looks like. 

I don’t know what people will draw. I know that our Western art traditions have often depicted God as an old white man with a beard.

We have tended to draw and conceive of God as looking like Zeus from the old Greek religion. It was what the artists in the Roman Empire were used to drawing. And it looks good on a statue.

As an aside, if you see any of the really old ancient Greek statues now starkly white, they were originally brightly painted with oranges and reds and blues. The paint just chipped off of them, it’s what happens after a few thousand years. Which left us with an impression of austere beauty which they didn’t have originally.

But this conception of God as a sort of Jewish Zeus is much more a cultural thing then a biblical thing. None of our descriptions of God in the Bible show him to have skin that looks like mine or that of a marble statue.

The book of Revelations, which has our most comprehensible description of God, tells of us of a being that has skin like Carnelian.  Carnelian is a reddish orange stone. It does not look like my skin. Nor honestly, does it really look like any human skin color.

The description of God’s skin as being like Jasper is a little bit more interesting. Because there’s a lot of different types of Jasper. There’s green Jasper and yellow Jasper, and blue Jasper and black Jasper and almost every color imaginable. But most of them don’t look like human skin colors. Remember too, that this is the most…comprehensible of the physical descriptions of God.

Indeed, the glimpses of God that we read in books like Ezekiel and Daniel, where prophets are transported in visions to the heavenly courts, paint fantastical images of not only God, but of the heavens. 

Ezekiel’s descriptions of angels in those visions are nothing like the adorable putti cherubs of renaissance art.  No, in the vision of Ezekiel, angels, although they do have “human form”, have four wings, four faces- a human, lion, ox, and eagle, if you’re wondering, and they move without turning, dashing about like lightning.

Indeed, if this is what angels look like, no wonder Gabriel has to tell Mary to not be afraid in the Annunciation story. The way that God is described by Ezekiel is a bit less…weird, but more…primal. 

Here’s Ezekiel’s description of God, from Ezekiel 1:26-28 “seated upon a throne: and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form. Upward from what appeared like the loins I saw something like gleaming amber, something that looked like fire enclosed all around; and downward from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendor all around. Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”

Upon seeing this, Ezekiel has no choice but to lay down and cover his face.

The upper half of God glows like amber, a fire contained, while the lower half of God is fire uncontained. God is the rainbow, the sign of hope after a rainy day. But something that’s interesting about this description is that this is not actually a description of God. This is a description of the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.  This is three levels removed from physical description.  And still it overwhelmed him utterly.

This reminds us that as much as we think we can categorize, philosophize, and understand God through complex metaphors, for humans, God is ultimately unknowable and incomprehensible.

This is why our God should not be thought of, or even drawn as, a Jewish Zeus.  For our God is ultimately that which is ultimate. God is the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and Omega.

When we deal with things that are ultimate, the metaphors we use for them become very important. This is the heart of the debate over why we should consider very carefully how we portray God.

After all, it’s part of our work and the work of faithfulness to align our desires to those of God.  Depending on our tradition, we might call it sanctification or holiness or theosis, but we still want to become like God. 

For folks who grew up with a particular image of God- something like the Jewish Zeus western image of God, it’s easy to become upset or confused when someone makes a statement like, “God is black” or “God is a woman.”

“That’s not what the Bible says!”

But can we then also imagine the anger and confusion that Native Americans and Enslaved Africans had when, encountering a God who looks like their conquerors and masters, and not like them. Because if God looks like one set of people, particularly if they’re powerful, maybe God is closer to them, and if there’s another group of people that don’t look like God, maybe they’re not as worthy of God’s love.

Maybe they’re not really people at all. This was a case of people using an image of God that they created to deny the image of God in their neighbors. This was all too commonly part of the logic that was used to justify a lot of bad things that happened in our past, and sometimes, in our present.

I will say that this doesn’t mean that we’re all going to become pagan and start doing sun dances and worshiping the mother Goddess or anything. The language that Jesus uses to describe God is that of a loving Father. I, for my part, plan on sticking to that imagery. 

Partly that’s because the image of God loving us like a father is a comfortable one for me: I lost my own father when I was six years old. I also believe that the word Father describes God’s role in the trinity imperfectly, but better than other words that have been suggested.

But it does mean that I’m not surprised when folks want to see themselves in the image of God by using female pronouns or other descriptions. It’s not as though, based on those descriptions of God from the book of Ezekiel, that God being a human male is really accurate either, unless I’m really confused about human anatomy and some dudes are actually beings of fire that shine like rainbows.

But, what if the image of God isn’t about the outside at all? What if the image of God is something spiritual, something inside of us, a capacity to love and connect with each other and with God?

What if the image of God does not concern outward appearance at all, but instead is a concern of the human heart? I’ll leave us with two stories about that illustrate God’s concern for our hearts.

The first involves the prophet Samuel, who would go on to crown King David.  This story takes place right before the confrontation between David and Goliath. King Saul has gone against God, and lost God’s favor. Samuel is frantically looking about for a replacement- it’s not good to have a King that God is mad at; it frequently causes death to those around them.

The prophet Samuel knows that one of Jesse’s sons is going to be the anointed king. But when Jesse comes around to show off his sons, Samuel sees Jesse’s first son, Eliab, and thinks, “This must be the guy.” Eliab is handsome and tall, Eliab is majestic, Eliab is the guy that all the guys want to be, and all the ladies want to be with.

But Eliab is not to be the anointed king. Because God in 1 Samuel 16:7 says, “ But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

And finally, in Psalm 51, which we heard at the Shrove Tuesday supper, one of the traditional readings at the beginning of lent, reminds us that event though God is beyond cosmic in scale, the thing that most interests him is the love found in the human heart.

It is the smallest of shifts that causes the unmoved mover, the alpha and omega, to be well pleased with us.

Hear these words from the fifty first psalm:

O Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise.

For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Of all the miracles in creation, that one, might be the greatest.

Amen.

Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 1-11, Acts 11:19-26

God loves unsettled times. Throughout the Bible, most of the great events, laws and covenants, were given during times of transition and hardship.

In Genesis, God made a covenant with Noah, giving the world the sign of the rainbow in the aftermath of the great flood.  Moses gave the law to the Hebrew people not while the people were in Egypt, or in Israel, but in the wilderness, that in between place of wandering.

God would then send the great prophets to the Israelites in times of trouble and turmoil: Samuel while they were transitioning from the judges to kings, Elijah while the Kingdom of Israel was struggling with whether or not to keep to their worship of God or to worship Ba’al, a local God of storms. Jeremiah was sent while many of the people were being exiled from Jerusalem, and Ezra and Nehemiah while they were allowed to come back to the city.

Jesus, for his part, comes to the people while they suffer under the occupation of the cruel Roman Empire. This Roman Empire that was forcing people to choose their ultimate allegiance: either to Caesar, called the Son of God by the authorities, or to the God of Miriam and Moses, Jacob and Ruth.

While Jesus Christ is the prince of peace, there are disruptive and unsettling aspects to his ministry. He is both God and Man, breaking down the barriers that said that those two categories are completely distinct.  He even tells the disciples at one point that he does not come to bring peace but a sword, a sign of the hard decisions about allegiance and loyalties that the people would have to make.  Would they be for Rome? Or for Jesus?

Furthermore, although at first Jesus comes to spread the Good News to the Jewish people, it is not solely, or some argue, primarily, for them.  The Good News of Jesus Christ is for the whole world, joining all the peoples of the earth into a new covenant with God.

This becomes especially true after his death, resurrection, and ascension, and the era of the early church begins. This is a time of disruption, tension, and transition for those early followers of Jesus. Yet out of these times come the seeds which would allow our faith to flourish, to move to a decentralized faith focusing not on charismatic figures producing healing miracles but on making disciples who could witness through our words and faith to the power of Jesus Christ. This faith, this witness, calls to us, almost two thousand years later, to faithfulness.

Both of our readings testify to this.

We’ll start first with our reading from the book of Acts. Here we see the planting of the first seeds that eventually flourish that transform the followers of Jesus from an obscure Jewish sect into the Christian church which is open to all.

The first step in this journey is in the first verse, noting that because of persecution, Jesus followers would become dispersed over a relatively wide, for the time, geographical area. They had moved out from Jerusalem to modern day Lebanon, Cyprus and southern Turkey.

This was the first, not accidental, but incidental, step to transforming a tight knit geographically based religious community directly centered on Jerusalem to a network of churches that would eventually spread throughout the known world.

These communities, were unlike Jerusalem in one crucial way: they were not majority Jewish with a gentile (non-Jewish) minority, but minority Jewish with a Gentile majority. 

So while some of these followers of Jesus decided to focus spreading the gospel to their Jewish kin- remember that all of the apostles, and Jesus followers at this time were Jewish- some decided to do something different.  They decided to preach to the followers of the Greek and Roman religion- what the Bible calls the “Hellenists”.

This was new; this was innovative.  Religion, back then, as I’ve said before, did not cross ethnic lines, yet these early followers saw something in the power of Jesus Christ, in his sayings, in the story of the resurrection, that was necessary for people of every nation.

The church back in Jerusalem, still the mothership, the home base, gets word of this new development, and sends out someone to check in on what was happening. Although later there would be conflicts between the Jerusalem church and the churches founded by Paul, at this point, the book of Acts tells us that at this point that there was none.

Barnabas who comes out to the community, seeing this innovation, does not condemn it, but praises the Lord and provides them with an example of spiritual strength as he lives with them.  But also knowing that he could not stay there forever, Barnabas decides to, and pardon the baseball metaphor, call someone up from the minor leagues.

Barnabas calls up Saul, who was in the triple A town of Tarsus, compared to the Major League of Antioch, one of the major cities of the ancient world. Saul is different from the other apostles- he never knew Jesus during his earthly ministry.

He’s not known for healing ministries or miracles like Peter is.  No, Saul’s greatest strength, as we will see in our second reading, is his ability to empower people to spread the gospel themselves, instead of relying on him to do so.

Perhaps this is why these early Jesus followers start to call themselves “Christians”- the realization that in some way, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, they were as responsible for spreading the Gospel as any apostle was.

Jesus was not just another teacher, a good rabbi, but the one to whom allegiance demands a change in identity. We see this play out in our second reading, the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians.

The events in this letter take place about 20ish years after our Acts reading, and this letter is special because it is our oldest Christian writing in the New Testament, probably written about 25 years after Jesus died.

Saul, who by this time had taken on the name Paul, had planted churches in Thessaly, a region of Greece, some time before, and was writing to them in encouragement.

What I find really interesting about this letter for our purposes today was not just that the Gospel message spread, but how the Gospel was spread not only to this church, but through this church, to other places, surrounding towns and countryside that Paul never met. Paul notes “that our message of the gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction”

I believe this means that Paul spreads the gospel message primarily through words, accompanied with the power of the Holy Spirit. This is different from the way that Jesus’ ministry plays out, which is primarily a ministry of healing, food, and miracles.

Although Jesus uses his words quite a bit, especially in parables and stories, often these explain his purpose to those who already know his power. The words of Jesus need no special power of their own, for Jesus is, after all, the word of God.

Paul on the other hand, is someone who mostly has to rely on his spoken and written words. Paul has to preach, to convince, to testify to the power of Jesus Christ with the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul needs the words of God to testify to the word of God.

The problem though, to someone tasked to preaching to the nations is that any one person can only reach so many people in one place. Any one of us can only do so much. I mentioned earlier that Paul was an innovator, and that his innovation was that he was really good at empowering people, and that comes from this portion of the letter.

Let’s remember that Paul by the time he’s writing this letter has moved on from that community in order to start churches and spread the gospel in other places. For it is in verse 8, Paul says that “For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place your faith in God has become known, so that we have no need to speak about it”

This work is not Paul’s, but instead belongs to the church in Thessaly, as empowered by the Holy Spirit. Paul was so impressed with their faithfulness and witness, not only in their immediate communities, but in their region and as an example to believers everywhere that he felt he didn’t have to go on any further. This from Paul, who never misses the chance to use his words.

This group of believers don’t need the superstar Paul to be able to testify to their communities. They have been empowered by the Holy Spirit in order to do so. 

At this point I ask us, what could we do if we really believed that the Holy Spirit was on our side, as it was for this ancient church caught up in the throes of persecution. Although we do not face official persecution as the early church did, thank God, we live in a time of increasing secularization, of decreasing relevance, of great social upheaval.

But if God, as I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, that God loves the unsettled times, how then, is God acting in this unsettled time?  And then how are we to be a part of it? I don’t have the answer to that question for this congregation- I can help you ask the question, but it’s one y’all will have to figure out on your own through the grace of God.

But have courage, people of Wolcott Congregational Church.

Just as the love of God, the witness of Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit were with the Church in Cyrene, in Thessaly, and in Antioch and Jerusalem, so do they now reside with us. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.