Prayer 101: Ask. Seek. Knock.

Luke 11: 1-13
17^th Sunday in Ordinary Time/ 25^th July 2010

It’s probably the one issue people of faith struggle with most:  prayer.  In many surveys over the years here at CPC, the adult education committee almost always receives requests to do a workshop or offer a seminar on prayer.  The PrayerFest we offered last spring flowed from those requests.  The PrayerFest was a great success.  We had a great response; received good feedback; and we were told to do it again.  One thing most noticeable about the event was that there were mostly women in attendance.  I’m not sure what this says about the prayer life of men, because I know men do indeed pray – actually, we need a lot of prayer.  Maybe some guys are just reluctant to admit they need help.

            I’ll confess, though.  I’ll put myself in that category.  I need help.  When I hear the disciples ask Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray,” I can resonate with that.  I need help.   I pray, but I wouldn’t call myself a “prayer warrior.” I know people who can spend hours at intercessory prayer, praying over every aspect of their lives.  I don’t do that.   I pray and know the power of prayer.  Prayer changes things.  It makes a difference in my life.  And, according to Jesus, our praying has the capacity to change the world.  I pray regularly, but I don’t have a pattern or rhythm or a set-schedule.  I know people who go into their “prayer closets,” a special place to pray with God.  I don’t have such a place.  I have shelves of prayer books, books on the theology of prayer, spirituality of prayer, you name it, but I wouldn’t say I’m an expert.  Many of these books were purchased during a season in my life when I said, “I need to deepen my prayer life,” and then the rest of life gets in the way of my plans, the half-read book is placed on the shelf until the season comes around when I say, “I need to deepen my prayer life,” and I buy another book.  It’s a great way to build a library!  But it’s a lousy way to learn how to pray.

            In the schoolhouse of prayer, we’re all students, we’re all disciples, and we all have much to learn.  But, I’m beginning to be a little suspicious of all the books about prayer on the market these days, books about the secrets of prayer, books on the techniques and methods of prayers, or yet another collection of someone else’s prayers.[1]  Jesus didn’t need prayer manuals or prayers written by others.  Jesus – prayed.  He didn’t learn about prayer, he prayed.  He didn’t worry about deepening his prayer life, he prayed.  He got on with it.  For Jesus, prayer wasn’t an option; it wasn’t something he got around to after the end of a busy day or something he turned to in a time of crsis.  My guess is he never went very long between prayers; it was a constant in his life.  In Mark’s gospel, in particularly, there is a clear rhythm of prayer and minister, prayer and ministry, throughout his life.  Jesus  prayed.  He just did it.  A lot.  His disciples knew he prayed, for he was forever going off by himself to pray.  They knew how central it was in his life, in his ministry.  They didn’t know how to do it.  So one day they asked him.  And he told them – tells us.  This is how you pray….

            “When you pray, say:  ‘Father, hallowed be your name…’”   We know how the rest goes. We pray these words every week in worship.  “Every day, in countless languages, in public and private, in virtually every country of the world, this prayer ascends to God.  It could be argued that no single minute passes when it is not being uttered.”[2]  Yet, it’s used so often and it’s so well-known (like Psalm 23 or 1 Corinthians 13), that we might say the words or hear them said without really connecting with what they say, without really hearing them.  It’s so easy to miss what’s contained in this prayer, the only prayer we have from Jesus. For example, try praying the Lord’s Prayer some time, whether here in worship or at home, being attentive to every word.   Concentrating on the meaning of every word, see if you can get through the prayer without being distracted, without having a wayward thought (such as, I wonder what I’m going to have for lunch?) or any other association.  It’s not easy.

            What Jesus gives us in his prayer is both simple and profound at the same time.  He shows us that, on the one hand, the structure of prayer is not really all that complex.  The “how” of prayer is really very simple.   There are two accounts of the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament, Matthews’s version and Luke’s version.  Both authors are quoting from an earlier source biblical scholars call “Q,” for the German word, Quelle, meaning, “Source.”  Matthew’s version is wordier than Luke’s.  His version of the Lord’s Prayer consists of seven imperatives or demands of God (they’re more than petitions).  Luke’s is simpler; there are only five imperatives.  Let’s look at Luke.

            After the address to God as Father, suggesting an extraordinary intimacy between Jesus and God, Jesus makes five imperatives that are amazingly comprehensive and far-reaching.  That’s how we start in prayer as well, in our address to God.  The kind of relationship Jesus had with God, as son to Father, is the same kind of relationship with all of God’s children.  We are all son’s and daughter’s of God who can be assured of a similar kind of human-divine relationship.   With just one word, “Father,” Jesus echoes his use of the Aramaic, “Abba,” Daddy, for God, signifying an extraordinary intimacy.   Suggesting level of closeness between humanity and God was unheard of in First Century Judaism.

            And notice, Jesus “didn’t respond by suggesting some technique or regimen.  He said that genuine prayer depends upon knowing the character of God rather than human effort.” [3] Knowing God as Father (the best, possible Father), as kind and benevolent parent, as Daddy then shapes the way we pray (and we can push this, I believe, to include Mommy, because the point is parental trust).  How we view God, our own personal images of God, have considerable power over how pray and when. 

            Then pray this way:  Imperative 1:  Hallow the name of God.  Sanctify the name.  Remember to set the name of God above and apart of all names.  It declares God’s absolute difference from all created things, God’s otherness.   The sense of this imperative is:  God show up!  God be holy!  God be God!  Remember who you are! 

            Imperative 2:  Ask for the kingdom.  “God, bring the kingdom.  Bring the rule of God into the world of humans.”  The term “kingdom” is used 123 times in the four Gospels.  It’s at the heart of Jesus’ ministry.  He was unique among his peers to see that the kingdom represents God’s rule of love and justice not in some far-off distance, but in the present.  In many ways, this imperative sets the tone for all the others; it establishes the horizon or purpose of every prayer uttered to God, that God’s kingdom of love, healing, justice come and be real among us.  That was the core teaching of Jesus’ ministry.  Every healing Jesus offered, every teaching, every parable points to the importance of God’s kingdom. Even the way we understand the cross and resurrection must be seen in light of the central of the kingdom of God.  Although there’s no petition for God’s will to be done here, “on earth as it is in heaven,” as we find in Matthew’s version, it’s implied in this simple request:  “Your kingdom come.”

            Imperative 3:  Give us each day our daily bread.  It’s a challenge to make sense of this, to be honest, because there’s a Greek word [epiousion from epiousios] Luke uses which in the vast body of Greek literature available to scholars today is only found here.  It means more than: may there be food on the table or may we have a well-stocked refrigerator or freezer.  It could be translated, “daily” bread, “future” bread, or “necessary” bread.  But perhaps the best understanding suggests “the bread we need.”[4]  This is not a request for God to help us live a simpler life and reduce our caloric intake. Instead, it suggests a plea that God remind us that the future is not in our hands, that so much of our lives are beyond our control; that sometimes we have to trust that indeed the Lord will provide, that we have to count on the hospitality of strangers in order to find the food we need to survive.  It’s to live knowing that the things we most need come from God and not from amassing our own resources.

            Here, perhaps, is a good illustration of this.  A year ago at this time there was an article in The Washington Post about six Franciscan friars, dressed in their long, brown robes and sandals, who made the trek from their abbey near Roanoke, Virginia, to Washington, DC, more than 300 miles.  They didn’t have a plan, they didn’t have any money.  For six weeks they walked relying on the providence of God and the kindness of strangers to feed and shelter them.  Each day they didn’t know where they were going to spend the next night.  Each morning they didn’t know where the next meal was going to come from.  The people they met responded with considerable curiosity (and suspicion) and a lot of generosity.  People pressed dollar bills into their hands, provided shelter.  One mother of three saw them walking along Lee Highway in Fairfax, so she pulled over her minivan and offered to buy them lunch at Chick-fil-A.   Everyone was staring at them, the brothers said.  “The high point was when the guy dressed up like a cow came out and gave us all high fives.  He was in costume. They were in robes.  A lot of people were wondering what was going on.”[5]  They were living out the meaning of “give us this day our daily bread.”  Living this way makes us odd. When we get glimpse of the oddness of the kingdom, people often wonder what is going on, because it makes no sense.  Yet, from the perspective of most kingdom living is odd.

            Imperative 4 is simple.  Forgive.   The gospel is all about forgiveness.  Demand forgiveness of God, because forgiveness is the way of the kingdom.  Then we demand God to help us forgive those who are indebted to us, either because of the wrong we have done them or they, us. 

            Imperative 5 is probably the most confusing.  We say, using Matthew’s versions, “Lead us not into temptation,” and probably think this means protect us from the temptation of Satan.  Here, the term is not “temptation,” but “trial,” or literally, “testing.”  What trial?  What testing?   The trying of followers of Jesus who are up against a world of injustice and cruelty, who are up against a world of people who do not seek first the kingdom, who resist the kingdom, who can’t stand the kingdom, who can’t stand justice and peace, love and forgiveness and will do whatever it takes to thwart the work of God.  The testing refers to Christians who are tested, put to the test because of their trust in God by people who are not receptive to kingdom ways.  Jesus assumes here that this imperative is needed because to be his follower means we will experience hardship, persecution, peril, and maybe even, for some, the sword.   This imperative is saying – God, give us the power to endure, to thrive, to not fail the test, but be equal to the challenges facing the struggle for the kingdom that is coming.

            Simple, right?  The structure is pretty simple.  The implications of such a prayer are radical and even revolutionary.  To pray for God’s kingdom is perhaps the most radical part of this prayer, for us and for the world. We we utter these words we are being drawn into the work of the kingdom. We are being incorporated into the very life and work of God.  That’s why Karl Barth (1886-1968) could say, “To claps the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

            And then Jesus says, keep doing it over and over and over again.  Never give up.  If parents who are evil (Lk 11:13) – as Jesus says – can still give good things to their children, then how much more will God, who is not evil, be more parent-like in providing for the needs of God’s children?  By calling parents evil and then comparing them to God’s benevolence might sound hard, but this is actually a rabbinic and Greek rhetoric device (qal wehomer, meaning “from the lesser to the greater”), comparing from less to more, with an emphasis on the more.  In this case, the emphasis is on the nature of God. The point here is:  there’s no malice or trickery in God.  There’s no deception.  God’s trustworthy; worthy of our trust, the one we can trust with the worth of our lives, our hearts, and passions.  And the more we pray, the more we realize who God really is.

            That’s why we are told to ask, to seek, to knock again and again – to request, to search, to hunt, to pound on heaven’s door demanding of God these very things.  Biblical scholar Walter Wink says, “Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous.  It is more like haggling in an outdoor bazaar than the polite monologues of the churches.”[6]  

            That’s why Jesus tells us to ask, to seek, to knock, go after the very things that God wants.  It’s about struggle, wrestling with God, over and over again, engaging God in a profoundly personal, passionate, potentially transforming way.  For what we ask for –if we ask, not for anything we might desire, but to ask for these things – such as the kingdom, forgiveness, daily bread – they will be given.  For the kingdom has come and is on its way.  What we search for – if we search after these things that matter most to God – we will indeed find.  And when we knock away on a closed door, if that door is the threshold into the wider kingdom of God – it will open.    And it’s clear that God wants us to ask, and search, and bang away at prayer.  Gregory the Great (540-604) once said, “God wishes to be asked, he wishes to be forced, he wishes, in a certain manner, to be overcome by our prayers.”   For the more we ask, and the more we search after and pound away at the things that matter most, if we strive after these things the more we will find ourselves being changed, the more we will find the content of our prayer changing, the dimensions of our hearts changing, the choices we make changing, the things that matter most to us changing, the things that we hope for changing. 

            Maybe this is why prayer mattered so much in Jesus’ ministry and why we all need to be schooled in it.  The fear and resistance are great because at some level we know that to take the Lord’s Prayer seriously, to take prayer seriously means at some level we will be changed, the world will be changed.  This scares us.  Yet, the more we pray this way, as Jesus’ prayed – asking, seeking, knocking – the more our lives might actually reflect the glory, the love, the justice, and the forgiveness of God. 

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[1] I’m thinking here of John Wilkinson’s best-seller, The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to a Blessed Life (Multnomah Press, 2004).  For a wide and wild sample of the variety of books on prayer available, just type in “prayer” using the search engine at Amazon.com.

[2] John Koening, Rediscovering New Testament Prayer:  Boldness and Blessing in the Name of Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 40.

[3] Dan Clendenin, Journey with Jesus, http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20100719JJ.shtml

[4] Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville, MN:  The Liturgical Press, 1991), 177-178.

[5] William Wan, The Washington Post, July 29, 2009.

[6] Walter Wink quoted in Richard J. Foster, Finding the Heart’s True Home (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 247.

The One Thing Needed

Luke 10: 38-42

 16^th Sunday in Ordinary Time/ 18^th July 2010

            Are you the Martha-type or the Mary-type?  Are you Martha or Mary?  I’m also talking to the guys here:  which one are you?  Martha is the doer, the organizer, the planner, the busy-one, flitting about (to use a good Scots word); she gets things done.  Martha is also the servant, the care-provider, extending hospitality and welcome, attending to the needs of others.  Mary is the opposite of Martha; she’s the contemplative, the listener, she’s casually spending her days in conversation.  The way the story is told, Jesus obviously lifts up one way of being over the other, rebuking Martha and applauding Mary.

            Now, if you’re a Martha-type, Jesus’ words can sound pretty cruel and unfair, particularly because this story follows on the heels of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a story that calls for sacrificial service to one’s neighbor as the way of the kingdom.  In fact, this is a theme throughout Luke’s gospel, the importance of diakonia, that is service.  It’s from this word diakonia that we get the word deacon, the one who serves (literally, a deacon is a servant who waits on tables).  Martha has just extended hospitality to the guest, to Jesus.  Shouldn’t Martha be applauded for her service?  She is sweating away in the kitchen getting the meal together.  And what is her sister doing?  She’s not helping at all, she’s extending no hospitality.  Mary’s sitting on the floor, at Jesus’ feet, listening to Jesus.  Apparently, from Martha’s perspective, Mary’s doing nothing.

            Mary is listening to Jesus when Martha comes by, obviously agitated, and tells Jesus to tell Mary to get her but off the floor and help.  This is a classic example of triangulation.  Instead of communicating directly with someone, we turn to a third person to say or do what we’re reluctant to say or do directly.  Very often a lot of interpersonal damage is done when we triangulate or find ourselves being triangulated.  Actually, Jesus allows himself to be triangulated here.  Martha approaches Jesus assuming that he would be on her side, assuming that she was in the right, doing the proper thing, the proper thing for a woman to do in his time (prepare the meal), while Mary was being neglectful of her responsibilities.  That’s when Jesus rebukes Martha.  Jesus probably wouldn’t have said anything to her had she not complained to Jesus about Mary.

            Are you Martha or Mary?   Who wants to be Martha if you’re going to be rebuked by Jesus?   Is Jesus really saying that Martha was in the wrong?  Shouldn’t we be like Martha?  Isn’t the Christian life about service to the Kingdom, serving the needs of our brothers and sisters?  Shouldn’t we be extending hospitality and welcome to everyone in God’s name?  The kingdom needs doers, planners, people who care and provide for the needs of the saints, building homes, teaching church school, visiting hospitals and care centers, caring for the homeless – and because we love to eat, we need people to make the tuna fish casseroles and Jell-O molds for potluck suppers and people to bake brownies and cookies for fellowship hour.  Where would the church be with Martha-types?         

            Where would be without Mary-types?  The reflective listener, the contemplative, the thinkers and dreamers, those willing to engage in conversation around ultimate things. 

            But we have to be careful here.  It’s not a matter of either-or, Martha or Mary, although I’ve intentionally set it up like this.  In fact, this dualist way of thinking is not helpful and leads to a misreading of the text.  It might appear to be this way, given Jesus’ rebuke of Martha.   Again, Jesus probably wouldn’t have said a thing to Martha but for her complaint of Mary.  What Martha was doing matters.  What Mary was doing also matters.    Both ways of being matter in the kingdom.

            What Jesus cautions against is not the many ways Martha is serving, but the spirit behind the way she serves.  It’s difficult to see this in the English translation, but embedded in the Greek we find a Martha who is, yes, the doer, but she’s running in ten thousand different directions at the same time; she’s being pulled and dragged away from the things that matter most.  As a result, she’s nervous, concerned, anxious, and agitated.  She’s worried.  She looks over and sees her sister calm, unbothered, without a concern in the world, talking away with Jesus.  Then she explodes, “Lord, don’t you care?”  Or, “How careless can you be?  Don’t you see what she’s doing?  She should be in the kitchen with me.  Tell her to help me.  It’s not fair.  Tell her.”  At that point I can imagine Jesus standing up, placing his arms on either side of Martha, hold her arms down, gently but firmly, calmly, looking her in the eye and saying,  “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;  there is need of only one thing.”   Yet, implied in this statement is that Mary, not Martha, knows what it is.

            So what has Mary chosen?  What is Martha missing?  What is the better part?  What has Mary done? That’s the point of the story.

            I’ll get right to the point.  There are two themes here, both inter-related.  Both require us to remember that when Mary sits at Jesus’ feet that they are very human feet, but also the feet of God.  In other words, she’s not engaged in idle chatter with a stranger-as-guest who shows up at one’s house.  They both know who he is.  They call him, “Lord.”  If we probe a little deeper here, we see that this is really a story about hospitality or welcome:  it’s about how we receive the Lord.  How do we live in the presence of of God?  How do we welcome the Lord’s presence in our lives on a daily basis?  How do we welcome the Lord where we live – in our lives, in our households, in the life of the church?  Are we running about, flitting about, distracted, worried, anxious, busy-bodies with our to-do lists, always on the go, and thus failing to be attentive to the guest in our midst, of the Lord in our midst?  Mary recognized the nature of the guest and she throws protocol and tradition to the wind.  Jesus is more important than tradition.  Mary takes advantage of the occasion, of the visitation, sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to him.  To be like Mary is to listen to him.  To choose the better part is to choose to take the time to listen.

            Go a little deeper; Luke depicts Mary in an unconventional way for his time.  The women would have been in the kitchen or outside by the ovens cooking, while the men stayed inside to talk.  (I saw this in the Congo.  The women cooked and talked outside.  Only the men ate indoors at the table.)  But here Mary is welcomed into the world of men, as it were, and, what is more, the fact that she is listening to Jesus suggests that she is being attentive to his teaching.  Luke depicts Mary as a disciple – as a student who sits at the feet of Rabbi Jesus to learn from him.  And that’s what matters most.  Martha is missing out on this opportunity because of all her distractions – distractions that prevent here from being a student of the Lord.

            And to go deeper still – and this is easy to miss in the English – the text says, Mary “listened to what he was saying.”  This might sound like idle chatter or a generic conversation before supper, but it’s not.  The Greek is singular, ton logon – literally, the word. Mary was not listening to words, but to “the word,” as in “The Word,” with a capital “W.”  Not the Word, as in the Bible, but the Word as in, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was with God (John 1:1).”   The same Word made flesh in Jesus; God’s Word spoken in the flesh to us.  “Word” in both the Old and New Testaments refers to the divine, creative speech of God that creates, redeems, restores, and renews creation and God’s people.  The Word is the dynamic, purposeful presence and power of God.  The Word is active; it does something, it moves us and allows us to move.  It’s the Word, the creative divine voice, that’s found in the pages of scripture; it’s the Word embedded in the sermon and released by the Holy Spirit.  When you sense God speaking through the words of the sermon, it’s not me; it’s the Word in the words at work.  It’s the Word, the creative divine speech embodied in Jesus, so that to hear his word is to hear the Word of God.  The Word of God is creative – it offers new vistas, new horizons, new ways of living and being and serving.  As Karl Barth (1886-1968) said, “The Word of God always tells us something fresh that we had never heard before from anyone.”[1]  Mary knew this, that’s what she chose and nothing will distract her from hearing the Word.

            Marys and Marthas are both needed in the kingdom, but what takes priority is being attentive to the Word of God.  Both Mary and Martha’s way of being need to be undergirded by the Word of God – the very Word Mary took time time to adore and ponder at Jesus’ feet.  She took the time to listen for the Word of God – the very Word of life that grants meaning and purpose to our lives. When the focus is on the Word of God, then everything else falls into place, then we have the energy for everything else; when the focus is not on the Word – on God’s vision, God’s purpose – we might be busy and productive, but toward what end, for what purpose? 

            My friend, Tom Long, teaches at Emory University and tells the story of years ago being part of an advisory group to the chaplains at a major university.  Their job was to meet, to listen to reports from the chaplains about their work, and to offer support and counsel.  At one point they were asking questions of the chaplains.  One member of the group, an older gentleman, asked, “What are the university students like morally these days?”  The chaplains looked at each other, wondering how to answer that question.  Finally, one of them took a stab at it.  “Well,” she said, “I think you’d be basically pleased.  The students are pretty ambitious in terms of their careers, but that’s not all they are. A lot of them tutor kids after school. Some work in a night shelter and in a soup kitchen for the homeless.  Last week a group of students protested apartheid in South Africa…” As she talked, the Jewish chaplain who was listening to her began to grin.  The more she talked, the bigger he grinned, until finally it became distracting.  “Am I saying something funny?” she said to the Jewish chaplain.  “No, no, I’m sorry,” he replied.  “I was just sitting here thinking.  You are saying that the university students are good people, and you’re right.  And you’re saying that they are involved in good social causes, and they are.  But what I was thinking is that the one thing they lack is a vision of salvation.”  They all looked in shock at the Jewish chaplain.  “No, it’s true,” he said.  “If you do not have some vision of what God is doing to repair the whole creation, you can’t get up every day and work in a soup kitchen.  It finally beats you down.”[2]

            Without that vision of God’s salvation, without a grounding in God’s Word, it’s easy for us to become anxious, frenetic, distracted Marthas, going about our business and busy-ness, getting things done, but frustrated and maybe even resentful of others and not taking delight and joy in the work before us.  It’s so easy in our lives to be go, go, go, and forget the reason why we go, go, go.  It’s so easy in the church to get caught up in all the activity, with our committee meetings filled with motions and minutes, but missing the Spirit, missing the joy and passion.  It’s so easy for church folk to get burned out.  Sometimes that’s caused by the circumstances in the church; other times it’s because the work has become an end in itself, the work has become divorced from the worship. That is, we have forgotten why we do what we do and for whom. 

            Mary knew what mattered most – hearing the Word, being attentive to the presence of Christ, drawing upon his love and grace and then in love being graceful to a world in need.  If you don’t have some vision of what God is doing, it finally beats you down and burns you up.  Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to his Word, listens to his vision.  Without that Word we won’t last long in the Martha-like work required of us in the kingdom.  “It will finally worry us, distract us, anger us, exhaust us, and beat us down.  With that Word, though, we can prepare meals for the hungry, care tenderly for the sick, show hospitality to the stranger and keep on loving and living in the name of Christ.”[3]

            The one thing needed is the Word of Jesus who continues to speak to us all the time.  Although we often fail to hear because of our distractions; our distractions hinder us from listening.  But to listen to his Word – that’s the better part, the good part, the best part that once received can never be taken away.  The one thing needed is the Word, the Word of Jesus, whose word to us is the very Word of Life.

           

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[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.5.ii (Edinburgh:  T & T Clark, 1975), 133.

[2] Thomas G. Long, “Mary and Martha,” sermon online at http://day1.org/1052-mary_and_martha.print.

[3] Thomas G. Long, “Mary and Martha.”

Facing our Liberation

Luke 8: 26-39

11th Sunday in Ordinary Time/ 13th June 2010


The Roman Catholic priest, Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) was troubled by all the interruptions in his day which kept him from doing ministry. That is until one day he realized that the interruptions were his ministry. One afternoon, several years ago, I was busy working in my study in the Church House, trying to do a dozen things all at once before rushing out of the office to attend presbytery, when Shirley Winters called and said someone was here to see me.

I didn’t know Jason, but he needed to talk. (1) I invited him upstairs to my study, sat down, focused, and then listened. Jason said he was very troubled, anxious, worried. He told me that he suffered from mental illness and lived in a group home. His former wife also worked there and it seems she was preoccupied with the occult – Ouiji boards, tarot cards, witchcraft. He told me of his love for Jesus and it disturbed him to see her going down this path. She was influencing others in the home and Jason was worried. I asked him if he talked with the director and he said no because he was afraid word would get back to his ex-wife and then she might put a curse on him or something. I listened carefully and took his concerns seriously because he did. Then we talked about Jesus. We remembered how Jesus is more powerful than any other force in this universe. In Jesus we’re safe. His ex-wife could do him no harm. He was praying a lot and I encouraged him to continue to pray. And we prayed together. Then Jason went on his way, feeling a little better (I hope).

It was all a little surreal, to be honest. That was a first in my ministry. Jason comes to mind when I hear this text, the story of the Gerasene demoniac. Now I’m not saying Jason was not in his right mind. And I’m not saying he was some kind of modern-day demoniac or that his ex-wife was. In our text, Jesus exorcises demonic spirits from out of this poor, troubled soul. However, this text is not a training manual on how to deal with demons or perform exorcisms. I remember one day, when I was serving the Mendham church in New Jersey, I received a phone call from a neighbor who just moved into an old house next to the church (beside the church’s cemetery) and discovered that it was haunted. Her teenage daughter freaked out and didn’t want to live there. She wanted to know if I would do an exorcism. I said, “Wrong department. You need to call my friend Father Lasch at St. Joseph’s. Let me give you his number. Presbyterians don’t know anything about this. He’ll know what to do!”

Both Jason’s situation and that of the demoniac in Luke have to do with power. Stories of exorcism in the New Testament are about power. Who is in control? Jesus comes and asserts his authority over every other authority in the world. When Jesus conducts exorcisms he is making a statement about power – God’s power. It’s a statement about who is in control. Jesus comes and gently, yet forcefully, demands that every influence of power yield to the redeeming power of Yahweh. And Jesus as Savior asserts his power because he knows there are other, lesser powers in the world which were and even now oppressing God’s people. Under the pressure of these forces people are diminished and debased, forces that try to steal our humanity away, which dehumanize and make us into animals, forces that dismantle our identities and take us very far away from the truth about ourselves. There are forces out there which make us sick, which make us violent, which make us self-destructive, full of self-hatred and self-loathing. There are forces in the world which can make us crazy, which disturb and disrupt our sense of well-being. And then when the forces have done their worst to us, we take all that anger, that violence, that self-hatred and project it out upon a world in outward destructive acts that only mirror the chaos of the mind, of the self. This is what happens when people are dehumanized. When we are dehumanized, we dehumanize others.

This account of the Gerasene demoniac is one of my favorite stories in the New Testament because it is so rich and profound and opens up new vistas regarding the power and purpose of God’s love and redemption. This is one of the most concrete demonstrations of the gospel for me: this is what Jesus came to do and continues to do in the lives of his people. He brings liberation. As contemporary theologian James Alison put it, “Jesus empowered the demoniac to become a human being, sitting, clothed and in his right mind, going home to his friends.” (2) This is what the gospel is about – freeing us to be human, to be ourselves, to be authentic, so that our lives might give glory to God. One of my favorite quotes, one that shapes my life, is a statement by Irenaeus’ (c. 115-190), who claimed, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” God is glorified, is praised when the human person is fully alive! Or, to put it a different way, one of the best ways we can worship God is to do whatever it takes to come more fully alive. The great theologian and ethicist of the last century, Paul Lehmann (1904-1994), said that God’s work in Jesus is to restore humanity back to human life. I believe the Holy Spirit takes up this work and invites all of us to join in “keeping human life human.” (3) That’s what Jesus came to do for us and continues to do with us.

But in order to come to life, we need to become aware of those powers that seek to take away our life, forces that try to dehumanize us, which can make us sick, which disturb and destroy us.

But from what is the Gerasene liberated? That’s the question. To talk of “forces” might sound antiquated to our ears, but if we think we’re not being shaped by all kinds of forces in our lives, then we’re being deceived. To talk of demons is simply an antiquated way of talking about someone who is mentally ill or socially unfit to function in society. We might say he’s mentally ill. Maybe. Maybe this text is good news for the mentally ill. But, if this is a text about mental illness (and I’m not sure it is), Jesus is also asking a deeper question: What makes one sick? Not all mental illness has biological origins. Sometimes it is caused by terrible trauma to the psyche. Sometimes it is life itself that sends us over the top and reality starts to crack. So how do we relate to this story? I think it’s easy to take this text and say, “Well, I’m not mentally disturbed like this guy, therefore it’s not about me.” Generally speaking, we probably find it difficult to identify with this man. He’s not like us. We’re socially well-adjusted, secure, with family and friends, and a roof over our heads. We’re not living in the cemetery. Sure life is tough, but our lives are nothing like his. We’re not sick. We’re in control of our lives. There’s nothing or no one oppressing us.

To which Jesus replies, “Oh really?” The problem is very often we’re not even aware of those powers that continually try to dehumanize us. The powers are legion or many. I want to lift up three powers we find in the text.

I.
Jesus the liberator comes to free us from sick religion. Even though Jesus is now in a Gentile community here, in the land of the Gerasenes or Gerasa, he is still making a strong statement about the nature of religion. According to the complexities of Jewish law at this time, the person demon possessed was considered ritually unclean and was set apart from the community. This man lived among the tombs. He was “dead” – the living dead. He was unacceptable through and through because he lived in a place that was unclean, impure. Judaism at this time had an obsessive dread of dead bodies. After touching a dead body one had to be purified. This man was surrounded by death and no one could release him without being made unclean. It is striking that Jesus completely defies all the rules, ignores the purity codes, and goes right to the heart of this person lost in death. Although this is in a Gentile country, the Jewish reader hearing this story would have been astonished, shocked, and maybe even offended that Jesus would act in such ungodly way.

Now I’m not saying Judaism is sick or causes one to be sick. But all religions, including Christianity, have the capacity to exchange grace for legalisms. Instead of freeing people, all religions can become toxic, destructive. But Jesus, having no regard for religious platitudes and false morality goes right to this man and faces him, sees him as a child of God and addresses his needs and heals him and reclaims his humanity.

II.
Jesus the liberator comes to free us from sick politics. For centuries Christians have tried to depoliticized the gospel and divorce it from the rest of our public life. We often hear that religion and politics don’t mix. You may even believe this. But no biblical writer ever believed that. Jesus never separated religion from politics because both have to do with power and Jesus was concerned for people burdened by the destructive influence of abusive power. It is absolutely clear that Jesus did not think this way – and he never said that. He cleverly said, “Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and render unto God what belongs to God (Matthew 22:21).” But the point of that statement is that nothing belongs to Caesar and everything belongs to God! Bad politics, bad government, oppressive states make people sick – they dehumanize and destroy. Political structures can serve the common good. In fact, John Calvin (1509-1564) believed political forces must serve the needs of the common good. But we must always be leery as Christians for signs when political powers are being abused and people are suffering.

A very strong case can be made that in this text the fundamental demon that needs to be exorcised from the minds of the people – both Jewish and Gentile – are the legions of Roman troops brutally occupying Israel. Our clue here is the name of the demon, Legion – a legion is 6,000 Roman troops. It’s the only meaning of the word at that time. The Romans were brutal, ruthless towards the people of this region. They defiled the temple in Jerusalem. They murdered people in the temple. Jerusalem was full of violent protests. The countryside was full of communities of resistance who used every opportunity to attack and kill the Roman soldiers. The greater the resistance, meant the greater the abuse. The oppression was killing the people. The people of this region were forced to worship Caesar as greater than Yahweh, were forced to pay tribute to the emperor through grain offerings and others goods. People were heavily taxed. This is political-economic oppression that always dehumanizes people. (4) The reign of terror was so bad that some, no doubt, lost their minds. I wonder what the demoniac witnessed. What kind of brutality did he have to endure? This is not God’s will and so Jesus comes to give us our minds back – he gives us our minds back. He gives us our lives back. But once healed, where does one then live?

III.
Jesus the liberator comes to free us from sick communities and relationships. Sociologists have identified the way some communities and families create scapegoats. (5) Often communities and families take all their anxieties, all their worries, all their dysfunction, their shadows, all their fears and place them on particular people in the community or a person in the family and then these people act out, usually self-destructively, what they see going on all around them. To what extent was this “sick” man infected by the sickness of the community? They needed him in his place. They needed him to be sick. If he remained sick, they could define themselves as healthy, “normal,” sane (when they probably weren’t). We can feel better when it is the other person who is worse off. All communities and families have the potential to make us all a little sick. There is no such thing a perfectly healthy community or family or church. There are varying degrees of health. But there are toxic communities, toxic families, toxic churches from which individuals need to be freed.

Jesus heals this man, releases him from his demons. But then what happens? The townsfolk are horrified and scared. Jesus is over-turning the way they have structured their lives and they don’t appreciate it. They see the man healed, and they become afraid. They get mad. The owner of the pigs was probably not too happy, either! Then they want Jesus to leave – sick societies don’t want health. They might say that they do, but they don’t. They don’t want the presence of the healer because he reminds them of their disease. The resistance to transformation, to healing in our lives is usually enormous, powerful. It’s a power which needs to be redeemed by the liberating word of Christ. Yet, they want Jesus to leave and the demoniac wants to go with him. He doesn’t want to go back to those sick people! Can you blame him? Jesus tells him to go back to his family and friends. What family? What friends? This almost sounds cruel. He wants to go with Jesus because he’s afraid of going back to them.

But the gospel calls him to be himself, a human being, in his right mind, clothed, sane, healthy – this is what the New Testament calls being saved – out there in the midst of the sick people who are not healed yet. The gospel grants reconciliation in the midst of alienation. That’s what we’re called to do. Go and tell the people how God has been merciful to you. Freed from the destructive forces of sick religion, political oppression, and toxic communities, he is free to be himself in a world that resists, despises, and fears his very existence. This is the gospel of the kingdom. This is what kingdom living looks like.

This is the kind of power that Jesus yields. This is the power of the Living God who will do whatever it takes to free us from everything that tarnishes or seeks to remove the image of God in us. This is what happens when we face our liberator. Or more correctly, when we’re not looking for it, this is what happens when a small boat carrying our Lord sails up on the shore of our lives, faces us and asks, “What is your name?”

_______________
Sources:
1. Jason is not his real name.
2. James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment, pp. 131-133. Alison’s reading is based on the work of René Girard in “The Demons of Gerasa,” The Scapegoat found on the Girardian Reflections on the Commentary website.
3. Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 99. See also Nancy J. Duff, Humanization and the Politics of God: The Koinonia Ethics of Paul Lehmann (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992). This idea of humanization was central to his theological ethics.
4. See Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), pp. 15ff.
5. The term scapegoat or pharmakos has its origin in Greek tragedy. Tragedy literally means “goat song,” or it can be translated “scapegoat song.” Terry Eagleton writes: “The pharmakos is symbolically loaded with the guilt of the community, which is why it is selected from among the lowest of the low. It is then thrust out into the wilderness, the symbol of traumatic horror which we dare not contemplate. … In the figure of the scapegoat, the borders between power and weakness, sacred and profane, central and peripheral, sickness and health, poison and cure, are accordingly blurred. …The scapegoat incarnates dirt, deformity, madness and criminality, and rather like the insane of classical antiquity, it is both shunned and regarded with respectful awe. This unclean thing is a substitute for the acts of a displacement for their sins…. In burdening it with their guilt, the people at once acknowledge their frailty and disavow it, project it violently outside themselves in the slaying of the sacrificial victim or its expulsion beyond their political frontiers.” Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 277-279.

Winds of Change: In Us

Acts 1:3, 6-9 & Romans 8: 12-18

Pentecost/ 23rd May 2010

Winds of Change. The last two weeks we looked at the winds of change blowing through the world and the church. We identified some of the ways the Holy Spirit might be at work extending the presence of Christ in our time, reforming the church and the world. On this Pentecost Sunday we turn personal. We’ve looked outward the last two weeks, this week we turn inward to reflect upon the winds of change blowing in us because of the Spirit of the Risen Christ. Yes, the Spirit is in the world and in the church, but the Spirit also abides deep within us, closer than our breath. Perhaps when we’re more attentive to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the depths of our spirits, when we care for and cultivate this primary relationship, we might be better equipped to face all the changes and demands facing the church and the world today.

Romans 8: 12-18 is a good guide here. Although the opening verses of the text, where Paul talks about being debtors of the flesh and putting to death the “deeds of the body,” might sound confusing, if not Puritanical. When Paul refers to “flesh” he doesn’t mean our physical body; it’s his term for our natural existence, or human existence apart from God. Human existence divorced from God means to be of the flesh. Flesh is placed in contrast to Spirit, because the Spirit is the one who turns our natural lives, bound by sin and alienation from God, and transforms them into something new, lives that participate in the Spirit of Christ. Then we might come to see ourselves, “led by the Spirit of God” and thus God’s children. That’s the point here: it’s about change, transformation from one way of being to another, it’s about conversion —not once, but over and over and over again as the Spirit pulls us into the life of God.

He continues, “For you did not receive [from Christ] a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.” That is, in Christ we have been, and are, and ever more are being grafted into the life of God, adopted by God and called into God’s life. This is because, as the cross and resurrection made abundantly clear, God desires to be close to us and our heart’s deepest desire is to be close to God. It’s this connection between God and humanity and humanity and God that stands at the heart of the gospel. It’s why Paul wanted the Romans to know, as we find in the culmination of this sublime, majestic chapter eight, that, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, …nor powers, nor height, or depth, nor anything in all of creation, will be able to separate us form the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8: 38-39).” It’s the connection that matters, so that knowing in Christ we are very close to God we are able to cry out, “Abba! Father!” Abba means, “Daddy.” It’s a term of endearment, of intimacy – so intimate in fact that our human spirits can cry out to the Spirit of God. Indeed, as Paul suggests, it’s the Spirit who allows us to become like children again in the presence of God, crying out, trusting, and praising God. That’s what the Holy Spirit does.

While we have been playing around with the winds of change metaphor we have to remember that all metaphors breakdown, that is, they’re all inadequate. One of the weaknesses of the wind metaphor for the Holy Spirit is that it’s far too impersonal. The Holy Spirit is not a force; the Holy Spirit is not an “it.” When Jesus and Paul talk about the Holy Spirit, they describe a person, with characteristics and functions, who comes either alongside us or dwells within us in order to relate to us – face-to-face, the personhood of God to our personhood. You see, the Holy Spirit is God, the Holy Spirit is the personal agent of God’s relationship with us who not only draws us into a deeper relationship with Christ, but who then in and through our ongoing relationship with Christ changes us. That’s what happens when we face Christ; we’re changed and never left the same again. We’re changed, again and again, when the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit, our souls, our hearts, the depths of our being, the core of who we are and tells us who we are; and from the depth of those places we live out a profound relationship with Christ. To be baptized means that the Holy Spirit is at work in us, participating in us as, we participate in Christ. Christ is not some distant historical figure that we believe in; he’s a present historical presence who deals with us personally.(1)

While in God’s grace we’re accepted where we are, God never leaves us there, but takes us to somewhere else. Part of that journey treks out over the landscape of the human spirit. Listening to the voice of the Spirit to get direction includes listening within. Part of that journey includes discovering who God is and who we are – seeing ourselves as God’s children. Part of the journey is done through our relationships, with this community of faith, with our families. But the journey has to also take place within.

In the depths of the relationship we discover that God is ever seeking us as we are ever seeking God, driven by love. The Spirit through the depths of our spirits seeks to draw us deeper and deeper into relationship with God (which is what Jesus came to do). And in the relationship, through this love, we are indeed changed, transformed. For in love and through love Christ wishes to change us – not to make us into something we’re not, but wants us to see ourselves as the people he already knows us to be, that we might see something of what God sees; that we might be more authentic and real and honest about who we are as God’s own, that we might be more loving and just and forgiving and hopeful, that we might have the heart of God.

Life in the Spirit is about transformation – of deepening our capacity to love and to be loved. In love the Spirit is forever trying to nudge us or kick us out of ego-zones, that we might discover God in the other, that we might discover empathy. The Spirit pushes us to do things that we resist because of fear. The Spirit, in love, calls us to listen to the depths of our souls to give up living on the surface and challenges us to go deep. In love, the Spirit prays for us, companions us, walks beside us, like a friend, and takes us where we need to go – not where we necessarily want to go, but need to go to do God’s will. In love the Spirit gives us an experience of God – the reality of God, the mystery and wonder of God – and that’s what matters most in the church and the world. In love the Spirit helps us to remember who we are and whose we are and connects us with the Source of our Being.

Our confirmands this morning began their journey with a quote from Lewis Carroll’s, Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (1865): “Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” Who in the world am I? Who in the world are you? That’s the great puzzle, whether one is 14, 44, or 84. Yet, we don’t solve the puzzle alone. This is what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. God knows who we are. The Spirit reminds us time and again, who we are and whose we are. Who in the world am I? Who are you? With the confirmands we can say, with the Apostle Paul we can say what Jesus came to show us once and for all: we are children of God. We are children of God!

_____________
Sources:

Image: “Pentecost,” by online digital/fractal artist known as Jacqui “Purple Whirlpool.”

1. Cf. the quotation from the worship bulletin: “The personality of the Spirit is important for faith… because… in the Spirit meets us and deals with us personally. Without the personal work of the Spirit we could have Christ only as an impersonal memory. It is the living person of God, present in his Spirit, that unites us with Christ and through him deals personally with us.” George S. Hendry, The Holy Spirit in Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), 42.

Winds of Change: In the Church

Winds of Change: In the Church
Ezekiel 37: 1-14

Seventh Sunday of Easter/ 16th May 2010


Last week in this sermon series we identified some of the winds of change facing the wider world in which we live. We are immersed in it. Some of the change is good, very good; but not all of it. I left us last week with the question: How do we discern this season? How do we know what’s going on? Is it of “the world” or is it “of God?” Is the Spirit of God actually blowing the winds of change moving through the world? In fact, what if some of the change we’re experiencing is actually the work of God who is trying to teach us something about ourselves, about our neighbor? What if God is trying to teach us something new about what it means to be the church in order to wake us up, to form and transform us to be more faithful, more committed to the redemptive work of God in the world? If the winds of change blowing through the world have something to do with God’s sovereign plan for creation, then we better do a better job figuring out what is and what isn’t of God, because we run the risk of actually resisting and restricting the very work of God. For who wants to stand in the way of the Spirit? And by “we” here, I mean the church. Last week we looked at changes in the world; this morning we turn our focus on the winds of change in the church.

A lot of folks are asking: What’s happening to the church these days? Something has changed. Several years ago the Ford Motor Corporation, in an attempt to get a younger generation to at least consider looking at a Ford, had the tag-line: “It’s not your grandfather’s Ford.” Things have changed at Ford. The same can be said of the church: “It’s not your grandfather’s church,” today. Or, given the notoriously slow pace of change in the church, we should probably say, “It’s not your great-grandfather’s church.” Comparing the vitality of the church to the fate of the Ford Motor Company is probably not a good idea either, but the point is clear: Ford knows we’re in a new world. A younger generation of Americans looks out and sees the world from a different perspective. The church is discovering that we’re in a new world. Something has changed and is changing on the landscape of American Protestantism – actually, all of American Christianity.

How do we describe the landscape? That’s what I hope to do this morning, paint a picture of the landscape. Let’s start with some numbers. Last week I shared this statistic: depending upon the survey, either 52% or 58% of Americans under the age of 30 have never been inside a church.(1) Yet, when asked, the North American landscape is overwhelmingly Christian: about three in four adults identify themselves as Christian, with the next largest groups being Islam and Judaism. Did you know, by the way, that there are more Muslims in the United States than there are Presbyterians? Although the importance of religion is on the decline in most developed countries, worldwide, it remains strong in the United States; we have the highest level of church attendance than any other country at a comparable level of development. 53% of Americans consider religion to be very important in their lives (16% believe this in Britain; 14% in France, 14% in Germany). (2)

But go a little deeper. The percentage of American adults who identify themselves as Christian dropped from 86% in 1990 to 77% in 2001 – an unprecedented drop of almost 1 percentage point per year. And it’s, no doubt, much lower now. In 2005, the percentage of American adults who identify themselves as Protestants dropped below 50%. All mainline denominations – United Methodist, Episcopalian, Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ, Lutherans, and Presbyterian – are facing significant decline. Theologically conservative churches gained in numbers, especially over the last twenty years, but some sociologists see signs that this pattern is changing too; and their mega-churches, although they garner much attention in the press, represent only 1% of the Protestant church landscape. From 1992 to 2003, average attendance at a typical church service has dropped by 13%, whereas the population of the United States has increased by 9%. A 2009 Gallup poll listed the top 10 states in church attendance: Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Utah, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. The bottom ten are: Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Hawaii, Oregon, Alaska, Washington, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. All of New England is included in the list. New England must be one of the most challenging places to do ministry and to be a minister. Maryland is somewhere in the middle. The number of “unchurched” has also increased rapidly. At the present rate of change, most Americans will identify themselves as non-religious or non-Christian by the year 2035 CE. (3)

Carol Howard Merritt is a Presbyterian minister in Washington, DC, and has written extensively on contemporary trends in American Christianity. In her book Tribal Church, she argues that the church is missing an entire generation – an entire generation under the age of 40. Of course, this age bracket has traditionally been underrepresented in churches. The pattern is familiar: get baptized, attend church school, grow up in the church, get confirmed, go off to college, stop attending worship, begin a career, get married, have children, and then return. But in the last couple of decades something has happened, the pattern is broken. Not as many are coming back. The question is, why? There isn’t one simple answer. The contemporary historian of Christianity, Philip Jenkins, ways, “when people cannot find miracle in their churches, they seek it elsewhere.” If you look to Europe, where cavernous cathedrals and ancient churches are empty on a Sunday morning, at the Taizé Community in France, thousands of youth from all around the world gather weekly to pray. Why? Because they’re looking for an experience of mystery – they’re looking for an experience of God.(4)

And, just to make us really depressed, the findings of a major new study were released just a few weeks ago, this Millennial generation, as they are called, 18-29 years old, are drifting away from the church. One commentator has said, they will see “churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships.” Here are some more statistics: 72% say they’re “really more spiritual than religious.” Many are unsure Jesus is the only path to heaven (about 50-50); 65% rarely or never pray with others, and 38% almost never pray by themselves either; 65% rarely or never attend worship services; 67% don’t read the Bible or sacred texts. Of those who claim to be Christian: 68% did not mention faith, religion or spirituality when asked what was ‘really important in life;’ 50% do not attend church as least weekly; 36% never read the Bible. (5)

Finally, in one of the most significant studies of the Millennial generation – which will have a profound impact upon the future of Catonsville Presbyterian Church and any other church – Christian Smith and Patricia Snell’s book, Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, have shown that something has shifted in American Christianity, particularly in Mainline Protestantism. It’s the surfacing of something Smith and Snell are actually calling a new religion, a pseudo-religion, a distortion of what it means to be Christian found within the church. After thousands of hours of personal interviews, their conclusion, which is being widely received by sociologists and cultural observers in the church, is that the common religious belief among our youth is what they call: moralistic therapeutic deism. Now, if you asked a 24-year-old what he believed, he’s not going to say, “I’m a moralistic therapeutic deist.” Yet, here are the five statues of this belief system: 1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life; 2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions; 3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself; 4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem; and 5. Good people go to heaven when they die.” On the surface, this might sound like a pretty good list of beliefs, it could be worse; however, there’s really nothing inherently Christian about this. It views God as “something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he’s always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.” (6) God is in the heavens; we’re here. We pull God down when we need God and then we send God away.

What’s missing? Discipleship with Christ, repentance, an understanding of the power of sin, a refusal to keep the Sabbath. There’s no understanding of being a servant of a sovereign deity, of entering into an ongoing relationship with God in prayer, no reference to observing special high holy days, or of the personal growth that comes through suffering –with and for one’s neighbor. What’s missing is the value of community, the church.

Given this context, combined with other contributing factors – such as, postmodernist thought with its complete collapse in confidence in God, in institutions, in humanity, in the truth, as well a battering (and sometimes a well-deserved battering) of the Christian image, harsh media criticism, “unchristian” behavior by church people, bad personal experiences people have had in churches, ineffective Christian leadership amid social crises – we should not be surprised that something has changed in the church. Should we be surprised that membership is on the decline? We should not be surprised that people are drifting away from the church. But we can also turn it around and say that if one is part of a healthy, active, vital church that is doing more than just hanging on and more than just looking to a gloried past then be very grateful. This congregation has its challenges, but we also need to be exceedingly grateful for what we have here and who we are and what we can do. This is a challenging time to be a Christian and to be part of the church of Jesus Christ.

If we’re going to continue to meet the challenges facing the church, the church has to change. This doesn’t mean we have to project images on a wide screen or introduce a rock band. It could. But that’s a technical change in response to a problem, not adaptive change. What’s the difference? You have an expanding church school attendance and you’re running out of space, so you build an education wing to accommodate the change (which is what we did back in the 1960s, along with countless other churches). Adaptive change is different: it’s making a deep systemic, paradigm shift. It means doing things completely different in order to face a new challenge. (7) Carol Merrit says, “Young adults do not need an entertaining experience that happens to them; rather, they need a connection, a place where they can be grounded in a spiritual community.” (8) The shift in focus that is needed is this: away from programs and institutional structure to relationships with one another and with God through Jesus Christ.

Yet, there are signs of hope. There is something new emerging within the body of Christ that will benefit the entire church; there is something new emerging in the world. Last week I attended a conference at Wesley Seminary on the Emergent Church phenomenon – the kind of church emerging from within the present church, the, twenty-, thirty-, forty-somethings, who are fully engaged with the spirit of the age, learning from technology, using it, critiquing it, forming something new. Two things were very apparent in the people I met, in what I heard, and in what I’ve been reading. These are things the entire church can learn. First: We’re moving toward an era beyond belief – that is, of seeing Christianity less as a body of ideas or beliefs (an ideology that we have to argue and defend), where we’re trying to “prove” the truth of our religion in order to prove the other wrong, toward see Christianity as a way of life. (9) Samir Salmonovic quote on bulletin cover get to this point. Samir spoke at the conference and I had a chance to talk with him. He writes, “We can either stay within the Christianity we have mastered with the Jesus we have domesticated, or we can leave Christianity as a destination, embrace Christianity as a way of life, then journey to reality, where God is present and living in every person, every human community and all creation.” (10) He’s point toward a way of being in the world that is rooted in a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and through that relationship we reach out to people, all people with love and mercy and forgiveness and work for justice. Millenials are really more interested in mystery – and the value of religious experience that is real.

Second, is the value of relationships. People are looking for a place where they can be real, honest, transparent, not fake or phony or pretentious. My friend, Jan Edminston, who led one of the workshops at Wesley, said, “They want a way to follow Jesus that isn’t fake.” Don’t we all? Don’t we all want that for the church? These folks are looking to make connections with other people who take them seriously in their desire to walk the way of Christ and live into the Kingdom. That’s where the winds of the Spirit are moving the church – if we’re willing. Perhaps we can see here the hand of God, ever so slowly reforming the church.

I’ve never ever preached a sermon in which the biblical text for the morning showed up in the last two minutes of the sermon. As we think of the contemporary landscape of the church it might seem, at times, that we are like that valley of dry bones in Ezekiel’s vision – “very dry” the text says, implying no possibility of life, no hope of resuscitation, no future, no hope. It might feel this way, particularly after hearing all of these statistics. Perhaps we can think of the statistics as dry bones. Or we might think of the current structure of Mainline Protestantism, of Presbyterianism, as a bunch of dry bones. But the point of this vivid vision is simply this: Yes, there are dry bones everywhere. Yet, never underestimate what the breath of God can do. God loves to bring new life out of death. Never allow the present moment determine what the future must be. Never assume that anything about the future is in our hands – when it comes to the world, or our lives, or to the church. These old bones of Protestantism might look “very dry,” but the spirit, the breath, the wind, the ruach of God – the same Spirit who moved over the chaos at the beginning of time – will breathe new life in us, will resurrect God’s people and will make skeletons dance! Why? Because God will not give up on God’s people. This new life won’t come about through church growth techniques or gimmicks or enticing programs – those days are over. It’s not the outcome of anything that we do. It’s the work of the Holy Spirit – the breath of the resurrected Christ – who will breathe new life into us — “that we may live” – and then form us and transform us into new people, so that others may live. That’s the work God requires of us today. This can only happen because the Holy Spirit is breathing through you and me and, together, through this body of Christ. This is the promise: “I will put my spirit within you,” says the LORD, “and you shall live (Ezekiel 37:14).” Then let us live into that promise.

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Sources:
1. Statistic quoted by Jan Edminston at the transFORM Conference at Wesley Seminary. She was quoting a Carol Merritt. I’m working on securing the exact source.
2. Trends among U. S. Christians. Religious Tolerance website: www.religioustolerance.org/chr_tren.htm.
3. www.religioustolerance.org/chr_tren.htm. See also the finds of the Barna Research Group of Ventura, CA.
4. Carol Howard Merritt, Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation (Alban Institute Books, 2007); Philip Jenkins, “Pilgrims of Our Time,” Christian Century (May 18, 2010), 45. For more information on the ecumenical Taizé Community in Taizé, France, see: www. http://www.taize.fr/.
5. Findings of LifeWay Christian Resources. These findings reinforce the recent study done by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Cited: USA Today, April 27, 2010.
6. See Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
7. See Anthony B. Robinson, Transforming Congregational Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 12ff.
8. Merritt, Tribal Church.
9. See Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards A Church Beyond Belief (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2008).
10. Samir Selmanovic, It’s Really About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 63.

Winds of Change: In the World

Acts 2: 1-21

Sixth Sunday of Easter/ 9th May 2010

Last week Dorothy Boulton preached these words; toward the end of the first sermon in our series on the Holy Spirit, a series about the changing winds of the Spirit, in a sermon on how the Spirit actually blows through sometimes as solid and true as tradition, this is what she said: “Encountering the Spirit is not a tame adventure. The church is always being called to see beyond itself. To live in the midst of challenges. To wrestle. To discern. To be changed. To be made new.” These sentences capture the themes of his series: Encounter. Adventure. Called. Challenge. Wrestle. Discern. Change. New. The Spirit of God is not tame and when the Spirit of God arrives in our spirits, or in the church, or in the world – nothing is ever the same.

That’s what the first Christians discovered when the Holy Spirit arrived on Pentecost. “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.” It was a violent, ferocious wind blowing into their lives. It was a wind that burned with tongues of fire. It came upon them – they didn’t go asking for the Spirit – and forever changed their lives – the lives of the people who were huddled together in one place. We say that on Pentecost the church of Jesus Christ was born through the gift of the Holy Spirit. When we think of the Holy Spirit – when we think about the Holy Spirit – he or she is the “orphan” of the Holy Family, as it were, we connect the Holy Spirit with the formation of the church. And that’s true. Or we might think of the Holy Spirit moving in the depths of the human spirit. And that’s true, too. But there’s something else going on here in the way Luke tells the story.

First, notice how the Holy Spirit gave the first Christians the ability to preach the gospel “in other languages.” The gospel of Jesus Christ was not good news for only a few people, huddled together. It was not simply the theological reflections of a closed group of people trying to organize themselves around a new religious experience. It was not a private experience because the gospel of Jesus Christ was not given just for them. It was given in order that it be translated from one language to another, from one people to another, from one time to another. The gospel was not given for them alone, as the church; the gospel was given to them for the sake of everyone else. The gospel was not their private possession, but entrusted to them that it might be shared.

Second, therefore, note that once the church spoke the word went out to every nation living in Jerusalem, to the immigrant population in the city, which beautifully symbolizes the way the gospel will be unleashed and given to the world. Everyone is here: Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, from as far away as Mesopotamia, Asia, Pontus (which is Turkey), Egypt, Libya, visitors from Rome, Jews and non-Jews who worship Yahweh, Cretans and even Arabs. It’s an amazing ethnic and religious diversity. Just about the entire reach of the Roman Empire (except Northern Europe) is represented here. It’s the world that’s found there, receiving the good news of God’s redemptive love.

Third, Peter then stands up and begins to preach. The Spirit has moved through him and now he has something to say. He begins to proclaim to the crowd these words of the prophet Joel: “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh (Joel 2:28; Acts 2:17).” Not just to Jews, not just to a special group of Jews who follow Jesus, not just to a special group of Gentiles who follow Jesus. The Spirit unleashed in Jerusalem, the ferocious winds that blew through their lives cannot be contained in that space, in that location, to that city or even to that time. The same wind of the Spirit blows through the world – out there, even the doors of the church. Yes, God is at work in the church. But we have to also say that the Holy Spirit is at work in the wider world, extending the redemptive activity of Christ to all people. I’m reminded of the world of Harold Kurtz, who died last year; a Presbyterian minister, raised on a farm in Idaho, heard the call to ministry, listened to the Spirit, and eventually served as a mission worker in Ethiopia for more than twenty-two years and later director of Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship. He loved to say: “The gospel is out of control!”(1)

Yes, the Spirit of God is at work in the church, in our lives. But an overemphasis on this view has led some to think that the Spirit of God is only present in the church or can only be found through the church. If you want to find God, some believe, you have to find God in a church. There was a time when this was the prevailing view, that there could be no salvation apart from the church; and a major reason why church attendance and membership was so high, especially in the United States. As we know this is not the conventional view today. Those days are over; that world is gone. The church needs to acknowledge this, grieve it, and then move on. People who thought they would find God in the church have found, instead, petty arguments, political squabbles, and plenty of judgment and shame to go around. Can you blame some for leaving the church? How often have you heard people say, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual. I don’t believe in organized or institutional religion; I’m spiritual.” Just as many people feel they can commune with the divine hiking through nature or teeing off at a golf course or sleeping in on a Sunday morning. For those who have not given up on God or Christianity, for that matter, there are many ways to connect with the holy that does not include worship in pews at 10:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Now, I don’t recommend any of these, of course, especially staying away from worship, obviously. For the truth is, one cannot be a Christian without being in community. Someone got very mad at me years ago over this. He called to ask me a question about, I forget the reason. I happened to mention one can’t be a Christian alone and he got very upset. We can’t. We are called into community. It’s just a way of illustrating that the world has change and it’s changing – fast, exceedingly fast. The world has changed and it’s changing – fast, exceedingly fast.

Next week we’re going to look at the winds of change in the church. We see the church in decline, both here in the United States and in Europe. The drop in church membership is a major concern for many. We’ll look at these trends next week. But what the church in this age has to come to terms with is that, yes, people are leaving the church (and, again, sometimes with very good reasons), yet we inside the cocoon of the church have to realize its not all about us because beyond the church, all around us, is a wider world, a world that has changed and is changing outside our doors. Declining membership is not the issue. It’s just a symptom of something deeper going in the wider culture.

There’s a wonderful German word that refers to the spirit of the age or time: Zeitgeist. The ghost, the spirit, the winds of change blowing through our time is enormous. The Zeitgeist is in turmoil. The world is changing fast. It’s becoming increasing complex and calling from us a greater capacity to process complexity. These are extremely challenging times. Scientific and technological developments are far outstripping our ability to morally, ethically handle them. A growing trend toward secularization started back in the early 1800s, with considerable help from the likes of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), which continue to grow unabated. (2) Twenty years ago this year I graduated from seminary and left the United States to study in Europe. I soon came across a word at the University of St. Andrews I never remembered hearing or never registered in my thinking at Princeton Seminary: postmodern (or postmodernism). I was forced to study postmodern thought, a philosophical movement that was sweeping Europe at the time and having a profound impact upon theological studies. Today, postmodern or postmodernism is not a foreign word in America – although, most are not really sure what it means, with good reason because it’s notoriously difficult to define (there are many definitions of it). I would sum it up this way: it basically points to a collapse in confidence at all levels of human experience. It’s a collapse in confidence in God, in the existence of God; the collapse in confidence in humanity, the good in humanity; it’s a collapse in confidence in institutions, in the value of community and institutions (which has had considerable impact upon church membership decline); and it’s a collapse in confidence in reason, which means that truth must no longer be referred to as Truth (capital ‘T’), but small-‘t’-truth or truths. (3) Truth has become relative – you have yours and I have mine and if we share the same truth we can talk. I was trained to be a minister in the modern world (so was Dorothy Boulton), but we have spent most of our ministries trying to figure out and say why the church is really relevant in a postmodern world. My point here is to say that the intellectual challenges facing Christianity are enormous – colossal!

Add to all of this the massive sea-change in cultural, political, and religious perspectives throughout the world as a result of 9-11. Rising religious fundamentalisms combined with the rise in terrorism. There’s climate change and environmental disasters to contend with. It’s not surprising there’s a rise in fundamentalisms and reactionary political movements, for all this change (whether real or perceived) is scary. There are people playing around with traditions, trying to redefine marriage. Nothing seems to be sacred any more. We call BGE or Comcast cable and hear: Press one for Spanish; press two for English. For some, all of this is just enormously unsettling. Add to this the worse economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. No wonder so many people are fearful. For some just trying to figure out Facebook and Twitter is very unsettling and disturbing (I’m still trying to figure out Twitter).

I was at a conference at Wesley Seminary in Washington, DC, last weekend. I’ll say more about this next week. But I heard a statistic that really shocked me. Depending upon the study, either 52% or 58% of Americans under the age of thirty have never been inside a church building. (4) Now, immediately we can mourn this (and we should) and put the blame on the church. Or we can flip it around and use it as a wake-up call to the church to confess that while we were busy “doing” church,” doing our church-thing, running our religious institutions, the world around us was changing and we never noticed. Yes, we can be concerned about the decline in church membership. The more faithful concern, however, is trying to understand the culture, the wider-world in which the church finds itself today. The more pressing concern is whether or not we are really relevant. Perhaps we’re answering questions that people have stopped asking. To some extent the world is passing us by.

“There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards can find nothing. It’s always empty. Finally, one day, their eyes open: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves.” (5) Sometimes what should be most obvious is oblivious to us. Sometimes we think we’re seeing one thing, only to discover we were really blind to what was going on right in front of us. The church has to open its eyes.

We are immersed in a world of change. The winds of the Zeitgeist are ferocious. The church in its present incarnation might not be as relevant as it was fifty, twenty, even ten years ago, but Jesus Christ is just as relevant and the church needs to find the language to translate this truth, even if it’s a small ‘t,’ to the world. God hasn’t given up on the church, but the church needs to wake up and understand the world anew: to really love the world and not be afraid of it, to embrace the world in all of its wild diversity, to reach out from one place and touch the lives of “all flesh” with the good news of God’s love. Not all change is bad. In fact, if the book of Acts can be believed in this postmodern age where skepticism reigns supreme, then the Spirit of the Living God might actually be loose about the world, in the Zeitgeist, beyond the church. In fact, I want to know where the Zeitgeist ends and der Heilige Geist begins? That is, where does the spirit of the age end and the Holy Spirit begin? Are they intertwined together like a DNA-string? How do we discern where the Holy Spirit is at work in the world? If faith is, as Will Willimon puts it, “the breathless attempt to keep up with the redemptive activity of God,” then we as the church need to keep asking ourselves, “What is God doing, where on earth is God going now?”(6)

Next week I will risk being foolish by suggesting how the winds of change shaping the world might actually have the hand of God about them, how the winds of change in the world are actually forcing the church of Jesus Christ to be the church. I would push the question even further: some of this change (and certainly not all of it, but some) might actually be the work of God who is trying to teach us something about ourselves, our neighbor, and of God, trying to teach the church something new, to get us to wake up, to form us and transform us to be more faithful, more committed to the redemptive work of God in the world. This means that if some of this change is actually coming from God, the effects of the Spirit blowing through the world, then how do we know? Is it the spirit of the age or the Holy Spirit? And if we’re involved in resisting change, how can we be sure that we’re not in some way restricting the very Spirit of God? If so, who wants to be guilty of standing in the way of the Spirit? Do you?

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Sources:
1. Cited in Jerry L. Van Marter, Presbyterian News Service, December 21, 2009. http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2009/091094.htm.
2. For an intellectual tour-de-force charting this movement, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
3. For good summaries of postmodernism, see: Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987);
4. Statistic quoted by Jan Edminston at the transFORM Conference at Wesley Seminary. She was quoting a Carol Merritt. I’m working on securing the exact source.
5. Story told by Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador 2008), 1.
6. William Willimon, Acts: Interpretation Commentary (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), 99.