Amazing Grace: A sermon for 21 March 2010

So here we are, rounding the bend and heading down the home stretch of Lent. Today begins the fifth week of our annual journey into the wilderness, following the example of our Lord.

This week culminates with Palm Sunday, a moment of celebration that kicks off the somber events of Holy Week, leading up to the ultimate joy of Easter. Thus today’s lessons not only help us to look back at our Lenten journey, but also offer us a glimmer of what is to come, both the somber and the celebratory aspects.

The prophet Isaiah (43:16-21) is quite explicit in bridging past and future, and placing the emphasis on hope. The context of this poem or hymn is that the Israelites have been exiles in Babylon for nearly 50 years. By the 43rd chapter of Isaiah, they have heard that they will be allowed to go home.

But Babylon and Jerusalem are a long ways apart when travel is by foot and camel. The way is rough. It goes through wilderness, where food and water is scarce and animals of prey do their thing.

And so Isaiah begins by reminding the Israelites that the Lord has seen them through danger before. He made a way for them through the sea, the same sea that then “extinguished” the Egyptian chariots and warriors that pursued them.

But then Isaiah makes an about face. Don’t dwell on that, he says. The Lord is “about to do a new thing.” Notice how the poetry switches into future tense: The Lord will make a way in the wilderness. The Lord will provide water. The wild animals will honor the Lord their God.

Had I begun preparing this sermon a little earlier last week, I might have e-mailed Ed and asked that we sing “Amazing Grace” today. For the most significant, unifying factor that ties together all of our lessons this morning is the good news of the amazing grace of our God.

My study Bible suggests that Psalm 126 was most likely written after the Israelites have returned from Babylon to Jerusalem. It is a hymn of thanksgiving that also begins in the past tense, but on an even more upbeat note: “[T]he Lord restored the fortunes of Zion” and we were so happy we had to pinch ourselves to make sure we weren’t dreaming. We laughed and shouted for joy, and bragged about our Lord to anyone who would listen.

Then the psalmist too turns to the future. This will happen again, he says. We can count on the Lord our God. Tears and weeping are part of the human condition, but with God’s help we will “come again with joy.”

The apostle Paul’s testimony in his letter to the Philippians (3:4b-14) is a very personal variation on the theme of God’s amazing grace. Paul’s look backward is at his own life and accomplishments. He enumerates them: circumcised on the 8th day, an Israelite of the esteemed tribe of Benjamin, not just a Jew but a Hebrew, a Pharisee who knew and followed the law flawlessly, a zealous protector of the faith as he understood it, even to the point of persecuting the church of Jesus Christ.

But now, Paul says, all of that is worthless. It is rubbish. Again, my study Bible says that the Greek word Paul used here actually has a stronger connotation, the connotation of “excrement.”

Having come to know God in the risen Christ, Paul turns his back on such egoistic claims and attempts to earn righteousness through the human worthiness competition. Instead, he says, righteousness is a gift made possible by the amazing grace of God. It is given and accepted through faith by all who have been made God’s own, through Christ Jesus.

Notice two things about this passage. First, suffering itself is transformed. It is no longer something to beg God to relieve us of at the first possible moment. Rather, it is precisely that which draws us closer to Christ. “I want to know Christ,” Paul says, “and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.”

Second, human striving is no longer a worthiness competition. It is no longer directed at being more religious or more pious or more moral or better behaved or whatever… in relation to other people. Rather, Paul says, let us keep our focus on the only worthy goal, which is the heavenly call of relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Thereby we will receive the only gift worth having, which is the righteousness of God.

And so we come to today’s Gospel lesson (John 12:1-8), and it is here we find most explicitly the foreshadowing of the somber events of Holy Week.

Jesus sits at table in the home of his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. We have met these people before. The presence of Lazarus, who was dead and now lives, foreshadows what is to come for Jesus, although none of those at dinner save Jesus have an inkling of what is to come.

Martha serves, as usual. Mary expresses her extravagant love and devotion to Jesus, as usual. She takes a pound of costly perfume, anoints Jesus’ feet and dries them with her hair. For this she is criticized by Judas Iscariot. Why wasn’t that perfume sold and the money given to the poor? he asks.

But John makes sure we see the falseness of Judas’ piety. Of the four Gospel accounts, John’s is the one most preoccupied with making a case against Judas by seeing signs that lead up to his betrayal of Jesus.

Jesus, on the other hand, is rather gentle in his rebuke. He reminds Judas that the poor aren’t going away. They will always be here.

I have actually heard this passage used by people to excuse not helping the poor and to justify opposing social safety nets for the poor. “Jesus said the poor will always be with us,” they say. And their piety is as false as that of Judas.

It is always possible for the self-righteous to take something out of context and make it mean whatever serves the selfish interests of the moment. Jesus’ teaching about how we are to love and care for the poor, as recorded over and over again throughout the Gospels, is eminently clear.

In this story, what Jesus most likely means is that the apostles can take care of the poor tomorrow and the next day and the next, but at this very moment, what they need to do most is begin to come to terms with what will soon happen. And what will soon happen are the somber events of Holy Week.

I like to think that somehow, through her devotion to Jesus, Mary intuitively collaborates with him in this scene by anointing his feet with burial perfume.

The Lord is indeed about to do a new thing. That new thing is, by the grace of God, the most amazing gift of all time. It is no less than the salvation and reconciliation of the world to its Maker. But it comes through the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

AMEN.

This fellow, Jesus: A sermon for 14 March 1020

“This fellow welcomes sinners and he even eats with them.” (Luke 15:2, NRSV)

The “fellow” is, of course, Jesus, who is once again in today’s Gospel demonstrating his refusal to conform to the norms and standards of polite society.

Today we think little about who is partaking of food with us. We go to dinner parties where we don’t necessarily know the name of the person seated to our right, much less whether they live a moral life. We go to receptions and buffets, take food from a common table, and eat while sitting or mingling with people we’ve never met before. We eat in restaurants and fast food joints within earshot and arm’s length of complete strangers.

It was not so in the time of Jesus. The rules for meals, food and what is called “table fellowship” were detailed and complex. They had to do with “purity” as the Jews understood God to have demanded it. But they also had to do with social identity, social boundaries and social conflict.

And the Pharisees were quite right to have been scandalized by Jesus’ behavior, because he rejected those rules over and over again. Whenever Jesus was at the table, regardless of whose house he was in, all who had come to hear him preach and teach—tax collectors and sinners, truly immoral people—ALL were welcome.

Moreover, Jesus not only modeled radically inclusive behavior, he taught it. The parable of the prodigal son is one such teaching, and I daresay its message is difficult for us to swallow.

We certainly like parts of it: The father’s compassion warms our hearts, and we pray that we might be similarly compassionate. Most likely each of us has gone astray at some point in our lives, in a way that helps us identify with the wayward son, and we repent and pray for forgiveness.

And if the story stopped there, we’d most likely be fine with it. After all, it’s a pretty familiar and reassuring picture of the Christian faith. We have a loving and compassionate father who gives us good things, and even though we fall short and go astray, again and again, we’re pretty good at repentance. We confess our sins most every Sunday, with confidence that we will be forgiven once again. And we go to sleep at night trusting that we will be welcomed to that grand and glorious feast our father has prepared for us—the feast we call “the Kingdom of God.”

But the story doesn’t end there. Jesus just couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had to introduce the troubling matter of the elder son, the one who was faithful, who tended the flocks and worked the fields and did all he was supposed to do… while the younger son squandered his inheritance.

Here’s the picture: We are standing outside a huge tent in the ancient Middle East. A fabulous party is going on inside. We can hear musicians playing and people laughing. The smell of roasted calf wafts on the evening breeze. A steady stream of servants carrying trays piled with fruit, baskets of bread and jars of wine enter the tent.

The elder son stands outside, refusing to go in. He is indignant, and who can blame him? Even though he has been faithful, good and hard working, the father has never thrown a feast in his honor! He feels cheated, disgraced, angry, resentful.

The father comes out and pleads with the son. I really do love you, he says. In fact, everything I have is yours. But that’s your brother in there! He was dead and now he’s alive again. Come, celebrate with us!

Who does each of us identify with in this picture? Or, perhaps the better question is when has each of us been in each of those positions?

I doubt any of us has any trouble remembering when we have been the younger son who has sinned and needs forgiveness. I’m sure each of us has also been the one to forgive and to invite someone who has sinned against us back into fellowship.

But the position of the older son is a good bit harder for us to deal with. After all, he is in the right! He earned his self-righteousness! He shouldn’t even be expected to share the same tent with his unworthy brother, much less a feast celebrating that brother’s return.

In fact, it’s not the older son and his behavior that makes us uncomfortable. What makes us uncomfortable is that Jesus didn’t make him the hero of the story!

In truth, even though our rules for sharing food have relaxed, we have invented all kinds of ways of separating ourselves from those we deem less worthy, and of drawing a wall of exclusivity around our precious righteousness. That’s self-righteousness. We take righteousness, a gift from God to be expressed in our love for each other, and turn it into self-righteousness, a thing of our own ego created by our uncanny ability to divide the world into us vs. them, good people vs. bad people, saved vs. sinner, right vs. wrong.

And we, dog gone it, are right! So.., we’re not going to give our money to that organization because it serves people who make irresponsible decisions. We’re not going to support that legislation because, no matter how many people it might help, it just might help someone whose manner of life we deem wrong. Or, we’re going to go over there and form our own church or order or club or whatever, because this church or order or club just insists on admitting unworthy people or just won’t behave the way we think it should.

A Presbyterian pastor and teacher by the name of David Bales summarizes the challenge Jesus poses to that way of thinking. He says:

Jesus is simply indiscriminate about whom he spends time with, and whom he even eats with. His fellowship isn't closed around the "good" or even those attempting to be good. Jesus accepts people before they're good. By word and deed Jesus undermines social boundaries. He challenges religious exclusiveness. His table fellowship is non-hiearchical [and] radically inclusive, and [it] demonstrates what he believes about the kingdom of God.

It seems to me that the main agenda of most Christians most of the time has been, and is, to tame the Gospel message. I think we really, really, really want Jesus to be middle class. We really, really wish we knew if he was Democrat or Republican! We are sure he is “on our side” in international conflicts.

And then we are confronted with teachings like this one, which portray the Kingdom of God as radically non-hierarchical and radically inclusive. The question is, what will we do?

Will we stand outside the tent, pouting and petulant, reassuring ourselves that we stand on principal and that we have earned our right to be offended? Or will we accept the forgiving love of the father, lay down our self-righteousness, and enter into the feast with all of the other sinners?

AMEN.

Called, but... to do what?: A sermon for February 7, 2010

When I was a child, perhaps 8 years old, the pastor of the Mennonite church my family attended retired. I do not remember the details of how a pool of candidates to replace him was chosen. But the culmination of the process is etched in my memory.

Five men stand at the front of the church. An elder of the church holds up to each man a row of matchsticks, all appearing to be identical. Concealed by his hand is the fact that one of the matchsticks is way shorter than the others. Each of the five takes a matchstick, and the man who chooses the short one is thereby “called” to be our next pastor.

Casting lots to determine God’s call was standard practice in Mennonite churches at that time. And it was based on scripture—specifically, the story in Acts 1 of how Mathias was chosen from between two candidates to replace Judas among the apostles.

Today’s lessons provide three examples of God calling humankind. The scene described by Isaiah (6:1-8) is high drama indeed. It appears to have been staged, not for Isaiah’s benefit, but to proclaim the glory of the Lord. Only when Isaiah realizes and proclaims the profound implication of what he is witnessing does one of the seraphs come with a glowing ember.

Every time I hear this story, I shiver in awe and apprehension. What must Isaiah have experienced in that vision to describe it as being touched on the mouth with a live coal!

Whatever it was, Isaiah is purified, his sins wiped out. And then he hears God’s call, and his answer reverberates through the centuries: “Here am I; send me!”

Simon, also called Peter, and his partners, James and John, receive their call from Jesus in person (Luke 5:1-11). The drama on this occasion surely makes the hearts of many a resident of this Sportsman’s Paradise, Louisiana, beat just a little faster: nets so full of fish that the boat begins to sink. Wow! What a catch!

The response of those Galilean fishermen was amazement, of course, mixed with a bit of apprehension. But most importantly, Peter falls to his knees and, like Isaiah centuries earlier, declares his unworthiness. Only then does Jesus first reassure him then issue the call.

I’m not sure why—perhaps because enough food for the table was never a sure thing when I was a kid—but I’ve always enjoyed imagining the peasants who had gathered to hear Jesus helping themselves to the boatloads of fish abandoned by the new apostles who went off to follow Jesus.

The reading we just heard from 1st Corinthians (15:1-11) does not describe Paul’s conversion, but we know that story. Paul is struck down by the light of Christ, the Resurrected One, and is left temporarily blind by the experience.

In his letter to the Corinthians, he too emphasizes his unfitness for The Call. But he emphasizes even more the divine source of his ability to answer the call. “But by the grace of God, I am what I am,” says Paul, “and his grace toward me has not been in vain” (NRSV).

The Bible offers many stories of God’s call to various people. In contrast to the drama of today’s three lessons, God’s call to the boy Samuel was so subtle that Samuel thought it was the old man in the next room. Perhaps it is only grown-ups who require supernatural phenomena to get their attention!

Or, more accurately, perhaps, when we actually hear God speaking to us, we experience it as supernatural. Back when I was in the process of discerning a call to the diaconate, I parked my vehicle one day in the middle of a Louisiana thunderstorm. Just as I opened the door and began to get out, thunder clapped… right in my face, so close and loud the sound waves pushed me back onto the seat of my car.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m listening, I’m listening!”

It is also clear from these stories that feelings of unworthiness in the face of God’s call have a long and honorable history. Nevertheless, those feelings do not constitute justification for avoiding that call. God’s grace is sufficient for all, and working through imperfect, unworthy vehicles like us is precisely the plan. Clutching our sins and gazing at God in disbelief is never a substitute for answering the call.

Now, at this point in building this sermon, I considered spending a few minutes on how Paul, the reluctant and by his own designation the “least” of the apostles, teaches us that ALL are called. Not just those who can prophesy and those who can preach, but also those who serve in the most humble capacity. All are called. And by the grace of God, all have something to offer God’s work in the world.

I also considered spending a few minutes on making a connection between “showing forth,” the theme of this season, and “going forth” in response to God’s call. And that would have made a decent sermon for this Fifth Sunday after the Eiphany.

But this week’s breaking news compels me to go briefly in another direction. Today, ten Baptist missionaries from the United States sit in a jail in Haiti, charged with kidnapping. They had gone to a remote area of Haiti and gathered up a busload of Haitian children. They were stopped by authorities as they were about to cross the border into the Dominican Republic.

The details of the story are not yet fully known. At least one version I read suggests the children, and perhaps some of their parents who were still alive, were seduced by pictures of a beautiful hotel with swimming pool and visions of a relatively luxurious future for the children.

But the part of the story that most gives me pause and compels me to speak to it today is the insistence of the missionaries that they were called by God to save those children by taking them away from their ruined homes and out of their traumatized country.

I believe them to be sincere. I believe they thought they were following God’s call. They might well have known what they were doing was illegal but took the risk willingly in their zeal to follow what they understood to be God’s call.

Countless times throughout human history, human beings have inflicted great cruelty and suffering upon each other in the name of God’s call. We do it because we are no less human for having been called. And so our own human motives, like piety, righteousness, and wanting our own answers to the mysteries of God to be the only answers—these things and more get all tangled up in our sense of God’s call.

Yes, we are called, but how do we know what we are called to do? How do we separate our own rich imagination, our arrogance, our wishful thinking about who we are… from our response to the needs of a hurting world?

As usual, it’s easier to come up with the questions than the answers. But one thing we can do to avoid going down a wrong-headed path is to test our sense of call in a community of faith. Today, not even the Mennonites use the system of casting lots to determine who is called to what. Both our individual calls to ministry and our ministries as a congregation merit discussion and evaluation from various points of view.

Another thing we can do is to bring those we would help to the table to participate in decision-making about how we can help them. It has too often been the vanity of developed nations and well-established religions to impose their beliefs and practices along with the charity they hand out. Bringing people to the table to change the way decisions get made requires a good bit more courage and faith in both God and humankind.

And so today let us give thanks for God’s call, let us accept the grace that enables us to respond to that call, and let us pray for wisdom in discerning how we are to carry out that call in ministering to the needs of the world.

AMEN.