I'm using much of a previous Transfiguration sermon, but I made it a point to incorporate a quote from a YouTube video of Peter Rollins. Also, I expanded the Gospel reading to include the healing of the epileptic youngster. I hope the Lectionary Elves will find it in their heart to forgive this transgression.
I have a strong feeling that the original thoughts for this sermon are not my own, but it seems I did a poor job of keeping track of the influences when I did it originally. So if some of this sounds familiar, rest assured no one has stolen ideas from me; rather vice-versa. I read the same TextWeek resources as you do, and love them dearly.
Finally, though it does not appear on the blog, I am again indebted to World in Prayer, whose prayer I modify and use in the Prayers of the People immediately following the sermon.
So...
Was the Transfiguration for Jesus, or was it for us? And as we are transformed and transfigured through the love of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, is it for us, or is it for the world around us?
To say "all of the above" is not a bad answer...
Matthew 17:1-20
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.” And the disciples asked him, “Why, then, do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” He replied, “Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but they did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man is about to suffer at their hands.” Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist.
When they came to the crowd, a man came to him, knelt before him, and said, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and he suffers terribly; he often falls into the fire and often into the water. And I brought him to your disciples, but they could not cure him.” Jesus answered, “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him here to me.” And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and the boy was cured instantly. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
One of the strange by-products of taking our readings from the Revised Common Lectionary is that, sometimes, the text seems to be starting off in mid-thought, or leaving something important out of the story. “Six days later …” the reading starts, and we have to be wondering, “Six days later than what?”
Today’s reading takes place immediately following the familiar account of Jesus asking the disciples “who do you say that I am?” Peter replies “You are the the Christ of God ,” which signals a turning point in their understanding of Jesus. No longer merely “Rabbi,” “Teacher,” “Man from God,” “Maybe/possibly 'The One Who Is To Come,'” but the Messiah, Christ, the Son of the Living God. Jesus warns them to silence, then says, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life... If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”
So eight days after these challenging, these explosive words, Jesus takes Peter and James and John to the mountaintop.
So it’s no wonder that some people wonder if this passage is factual, or if it’s some kind of holy myth that developed later and was inserted into the Gospel, or a resurrection appearance of Jesus that has somehow got misplaced and re-located, back in the middle of Jesus’ ministry instead of right at the end. Neither of these, of course, is my opinion. I think, rather, that the event takes place at the perfect point in the narrative. Jesus has said some very hard things to the disciples. He had made some challenges that, quite literally sounded like a death sentence.
Deitrich Bonhoeffer, one of the authors of The Theological Declaration of Barmen in our Book of Confessions, wrote this elsewhere: “When Christ calls a man to come and follow, he bids him come and die.” That is, after all, what “taking up your cross” meant to people under the rule of the Roman Empire. It meant you were going to die the slow, horrible, painful and embarrassing death which is crucifixion.
So, yes, this story shares some clear links with other passages of Scripture. For example, our Old Testament reading today, Moses’ encounter with God on Mount Sinai when he received God’s law. Later we read that when Moses came down from the mountain, his face was shining with the radiance of God. Or there is the passage where heaven and earth overlap as Elijah is carried away into heaven.
There is, however, another Biblical account that this story can be linked with. As well as looking back all those years to Moses and Elijah, this story also points us forward… to Jesus’ death on the cross.
Unlike the accounts of Moses and Elijah, however, it is more in the contrasts than the similarities that we see the striking links between the Transfiguration and the Crucifixion.
In this story of the transfiguration, Jesus’ clothes shine with the glory of God; at the crucifixion, the soldiers gamble for Jesus’ clothes. Here in this story, Jesus is accompanied by two great heroes from ancient history; there, on the cross, Jesus is joined by two common criminals. Here, at the transfiguration, Jesus is witnessed by three male disciples - Peter, James and John; there, at Golgotha, three woman are named as witnesses: two Marys and Salome. This scene of transfiguration is one a scene of dazzling light, while at the crucifixion Matthew tells us that darkness came over the whole land. Here, in this scene, Jesus basks in God’s presence, there on the cross He cries out, ‘My God why have you forsaken me?’ Here on the mountain God confesses Jesus as God’s son as a voice sounds forth, ‘this is my son, the beloved!’ There it is left to a Roman centurion to blurt out, ‘truly this man was God’s son.’
So many contrasts. It’s as if the horror of the Crucifixion account were a deliberate inversion of the splendor of the Transfiguration. And if so, then what is God’s written Word trying to tell us?
At this point in the Gospel Jesus is on a journey - a journey that will take him to Jerusalem and to death and beyond, to Easter. Jesus has spoken candidly about the painful, humiliating death that awaits him, and what this transfiguration story is doing is showing us what is beyond, at the end of that journey. It gives us a preview of Jesus’ destination. The cross, the crucifixion, Golgotha, is one stop on the way, but it’s not the end of the journey. We are not left, thank God, with Christ disfigured, naked, abandoned and bloody, nailed up like a scarecrow. Beyond that is the risen Christ who can only be glimpsed here.
But of course, - and this is an important point - what we see revealed here is not just the goal of Christ’s journey, but the goal of our journey too.
Or to put it differently, what Peter, James and John are witnessing here is not just Christ’s destination, but their own destination too, and ours, yours and mine. We too will shine like the sun.
Christ came to transform us. He came to transfigure us with the light of God’s grace. And the cross is, in many ways, part of our journey just as it was part of Christ’s journey (the discussion of what it means for a 21st-century American to take up the cross is a long one, and for another day), but because of Christ the Cross is not the end of our journey.
There, on the mountaintop, Jesus is the Christ of the journey’s end, our journey’s end. The Transfiguration is Christ’s destination… and our destination.
And as much as Peter wanted to stay, and as much as you and I would want to stay on the mountaintop, down the mountain, of course, we must go. The four of them come off of the mountain and find a crowd, and a young boy who has convulsions.
Here a different image of our humanity - not the transfigured humanity that is our destination, but our disfigured humanity. Here in this fearful scene we are closer to the hill of Golgotha than we are to the mountain of transfiguration. This world is the one we are all too familiar with.
It’s a world where lives are preyed on by evil forces. It’s a world where humanity is denied. It’s a world where people’s destiny is a cruel parody of what awaits us when, with Jesus, we are risen.
And when we look around us we see life lived at the foot of the mountain rather than at the top. We see lives that, in the light of Transfiguration, were clearly never meant for us. Yes, ours is a faith forged in the suffering of the cross, but lived in the transfiguring light of the Resurrection.
We weren’t meant for this. Every time we see a homeless person begging in the streets, we know: We are Resurrection people, we were not meant for this. Every time we hear of a child dying of a preventable disease, we know: we are Resurrection people, and we were not meant for this. Every time we see our terrible capacity for inhumanity paraded before us on the television, we know: we are Resurrection people, and no, we were not meant for this. Every job lost, every home foreclosed: we were not meant for this. Every flood and earthquake and shooting and scandal: we were not meant for this.
Maybe that’s why, knowing, as he came down from the Mount of Transfiguration that the next time he’d climb a hill it would be with a cross on his back, Jesus still took time to heal the epileptic youngster. Maybe that’s what motivated Jesus to heal every other poor person he came in contact with, whose life was disfigured by disease or disability or injustice: we were not meant for this!
And what are we to do about our world? I said before that the Transfiguration was not simply an event that happened in the life of Jesus, a pushpin in the map of Christ's journey, but an indication of our own ultimate destination as well.
Taking it a step further, in the same way that the Transfiguration was an event in Christ's life, we too are transformed and transfigured by the ongoing work of Christ in the Holy Spirit in our own lives.
We can, of course, see this transformation in the lives of the Apostles. Though it didn’t happen until after Pentecost, Peter and James and John, along with the rest of The Eleven, dedicated their lives to spreading the Gospel, to healing the sick and ministering to the poor and the forgotten… telling the world this great Good News that we were not meant for this!
These eleven, who had been cowering, aimless, and silent, were transfigured into bold evangelists, powerful speakers, gifted leaders, fearless martyrs. They spoke truth to power, and cared for the lost, the forgotten, the marginalized.
We, too, have been transformed by a God who, in the words of Max Lucado, loves us just the way we are, but too much to let us stay that way. Moreover, the transformation, the transfiguration, is an ongoing process in our spiritual journey.
Celtic Christians speak of “thin places,” places in our faith journey where the separation between the divine and the human is narrowed, and where God and man make contact. And while we Christians are fond of “mountaintop experiences;” be they Charismatic encounters with the Gifts of the Spirit, spending a week at a Montreat youth retreat or a weekend on a Walk to Emmaus, I want to suggest to you this morning that God desires to transform and transfigure us more often and in more ways than we realize.
As we begin the season of Lent, some of us are planning on fasting from something – chocolate or caffeine or the Internet. That’s the traditional way to greet Lent, by taking something out of our lives.
The goal, though, is not to somehow simply experience this lack as a kind of sharing in the sufferings of Christ. As much as I enjoy coffee, I can’t compare going without caffeine to dying on a cross.
No, the point of taking something out of our lives during Lent is so that God can put something in – a spiritual discipline, a closer walk with Christ on our faith journey, extra time for prayer and study, and so on.
Whether you participate in Lent by abstaining from something or not, let me suggest that we spend the forty days leading up to the celebration of Christ’s resurrection by paying attention to the ways in which God seeks to transform and transfigure us.
Make no mistake; God is in the business of transfiguration. For most of its early existence, Christianity was considered the religion of slaves. People who had been excluded from fellowship with the Living God, whether because of the place they were born or because of some disease or defect, were being welcomed into relationship, were being transformed and transfigured by the love of God in Jesus Christ, and were being brought to the place of response to the Good News by people like Peter and James and John, people who had denied Christ, who had hidden in fear in the dark days following the Crucifixion, who even though they had spent years living with and listening to Jesus didn't understand what it was all about, but who had themselves been transformed by the Holy Spirit.
And it still goes on today. Men and women from every walk of life – rich and poor, in boardrooms and prison cells, in high-rise apartments and mud huts, in living rooms and in homeless shelters, in cathedrals and nightclubs – are transformed by the saving message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and are brought to that transformation by men and women just like you and me. Not well-known evangelists or powerful speakers, but “regular folks” who have experienced the transfiguring work of the Holy Spirit and are sharing it, in word and in deed, with the world around them.
Sharing it because in this wonderful vision of an alternative reality, where streets of gold replace unpaved streets and reeking alleys, where death and sickness and poverty are replaced by glory shining like the sun, in this wonderful promise of the here-and-now, as well as of resurrection and the end of the journey, there is hope. There is transformation, there is transfiguration, there is resurrection.
Peter Rollins is an author and speaker, and known in Christian circles, along with folks like Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo and Jay Bakker as part of the Emergent Church movement. With its openness to asking questions and examining doctrine and theology, the Emergent Church gets a bad rap sometimes, and the more well-known people are often accused of denying the divinity of Christ and the resurrection.
Someone once asked Peter Rollins if he denied the Resurrection, and in his thick Iris accent, he replied, “Yes, I do. Everybody who knows me knows I deny the Resurrection. Every time I do not serve my neighbor, every time I walk away from people who are poor. I deny the Resurrection every time I participate in an unjust system.
“And I affirm the Resurrection every now and again, when I stand up for those who are on their knees. I affirm the Resurrection when I cry out for those people who have had their tongues torn out, when I weep for those people who have no more tears to shed.”
So yes, let’s take this Transfiguration into the season of Lent, looking for the ways in which God will transform and transfigure us, but let’s not stop there. Christianity is, after all, community. How is God calling on you and I to live a transfigured life, living like Resurrection People, affirming the Resurrection in our community and in our world?
Showing posts with label Emergent Church. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emergent Church. Show all posts
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Sunday, March 7, 2010
The Sermon (I never thought I'd) Preach
This is the text of the sermon I shared on Pastor Nar's "Losing My Religion" podcast. I welcome constructive criticism and dialogue.
Mark 1:40-45
A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean."
Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Back in the mid-1980’s, I worked at a local television station as a studio manager and camera operator. One of the shows we did was a daily talk show, with tons of guests, comedians, musicians… I got to meet folks like Rita Mareno, Fannie Flagg, James Gregory, Sinbad, even Harlan Ellison – which for a science fiction nut is a really big deal.
One morning, though, we got news that one of the guests was a nurse who worked directly with AIDS patients.
Now, you may remember that back in the mid-‘80’s we didn’t have a lot of information about AIDS and HIV. I can’t speak for the scientific or medical communities, but we in the general public weren’t too sure of how easy it was, or how many ways there were, to “catch” AIDS. It sounds kind of stupid now, but we were afraid to one degree or another of salad bars, toilet seats, door handles… and when we found out this person was coming to the studio, some of us got nervous. One of our jobs, you see, was to put a lavaliere microphone on the guest, which meant, by design, close contact – touching. This person was surrounded by AIDS every day… what if we could “catch” AIDS by miking her?
You have no idea how much I wish I could stand here and say that I was the heroic one who stepped up and told the others how ridiculous they were… I mean, honestly. Touching someone gives you AIDS? Please. I wish I could tell you that I boldly went and miked the guest and got on with my day.
No… the heroic one was a tiny little blonde with big 80’s glasses and hair. She heard what we were talking about and just blew up! I don’t think I have been as effectively ripped to shreds before or since.
The nicest thing she said to us was, “You guys are idiots! Never mind – I’ll put the mike on her!” And as she walked off she was muttering, “Stupid, stupid, stupid…”
The guest got miked, the show went on, and of course no one got sick. I honestly hate to tell that story, because it does nothing to improve either my self-image or my dignity before others. It is not at all an example of being Christ-like, and what is worse; it isn’t even the worst example from my life of being un-Christ-like. But whenever the Gospel discussion of leprosy comes up, this is what comes to mind.
Our Gospel reading paints the picture of Jesus traveling all around Galilee, preaching and casting out demons. Somewhere on the road, or in some town, a bell dingles, and a voice cries out “unclean!”
The people surrounding Jesus recoil in horror at this stinking, walking pile of dirty rags and festering sores. You can almost hear the voices hissing in revulsion, “leper!”
This leper then did something that was strictly forbidden by the Law – he approached Jesus. He got close. He fell to his knees in the Galilean dirt and said something astounding: “If you choose to, you can make me clean.” What an interesting phrase – “you can make me clean,” not “you can heal me.”
What he was asking for was healing, yes, but in fact he was asking for so much more.
Leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, still exists today. According to the World Health Organization, over 212,000 cases exist worldwide, though those numbers are dropping.
The disease is not very contagious, is quite curable with multiple-drug therapy, and while no one is sure what exactly causes Hansen’s, experts agree across the board that it is unnecessary to ostracize the infected person. Even so, leper colonies still exist in countries like India, Japan, Egypt, Nepal, Somalia, South Korea, Vietnam… and the United States.
Saying all of that gives us some modern perspective, it’s true, but it kind of talks around what was going on in the Gospel reading today. Isn’t it interesting that Mark doesn’t call him a man, or a person, or give him a name; he is identified only by his disease, a “leper.” This removal of humanity from a human being is, to say the least, instructive.
For the Jews in Jesus’ day, the discussion of leprosy began with the book of Leviticus, the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters. In the thirteenth chapter you’ll find a very detailed discussion about identifying leprosy. You’ll also see the words “clean” and “unclean” used a lot.
You see, the word that has been translated as “leprosy” is “Tzaraath,” and it’s a very generic term that is applied to humans, clothing, and houses. It got translated as “leprosy” about 250 years before Christ when the Hebrew Bible was translated from Hebrew to Greek.
“Tzaraath” comes from the Hebrew word for “smiting,” because – and this is important – in the Jewish understanding of the day, the skin diseases and, well, mildew described in Leviticus were thought to be punishment for sin.
Thus a person was not “diseased” or “healthy,” they were either “clean” – meaning acceptable to take part in the community and its worship activities – or “unclean” – meaning unacceptable to the community, untouchable, dirty, sinful, and ostracized from that community and prohibited from worship. These people were required by the Law to mess up their hair, wear rags, and live away from friends, family, and prohibited from taking part in the worship of God. As the children of Israel inhabited the Promised Land, and city populations grew, these people were required to ring bells and cry out “unclean, unclean” wherever they went. They could not be touched, could not come into close contact of any kind with any other – “clean” – human being, until they died, or until they were somehow cured.
I have to confess to you that I really, really have a problem with this. I know, yes, it’s in Leviticus, for the most part, and yes, Leviticus is part of the Scriptures, and yes, the Scriptures are the written word of God.
And I guess I should understand, because I remember full well the terror over the AIDS epidemic, and not knowing if you could catch the disease from mosquito bites or being sneezed on.
Yet it still turns my stomach to think of someone being denied their family, their life, their livelihood, and their hope because of something that might well have been a nasty case of psoriasis, we don’t know, and in any case it wasn’t at all about the lepers being sick – it was about the lepers being the walking, talking, embodiment of sin. Keep them away lest their sin infect you through their speech or through their actions or through the very air. Don’t touch them lest the sin rub off on you. They are no longer humans, they are lepers, and their very existence is an abomination!
“If you choose to, you can remove this sin from me. You can let me go home to my family. You can let me work for a living again. You can let me go to the Temple and sing Psalms again.”
There’s something fascinating about what happens next. You see, many ancient manuscripts say what our reading this morning says, that Jesus was “moved with pity.” However, there are a lot of ancient manuscripts that use a very different word, a much more uncomfortable, challenging word: they say that Jesus was not moved to pity, but moved to anger.
Jesus saw this disheveled man, reduced to wearing rags and bells, utterly cut off from all human contact, hated, loathed, and feared by everyone, robbed of his humanity, reduced to groveling in the dirt, and begging not for healing but for forgiveness… and it made Jesus mad!
I wonder – why anger? Of all the emotions one might feel when confronted by this stinking, diseased mass of humanity, groveling in the dirt – revulsion, disdain, compassion, horror, perhaps love – anger? Why was Jesus angry… and with whom was Jesus angry?
The possibilities are intriguing. Could Jesus have been angry at the way a simple set of instructions, meant to keep a nomadic people safe from disease on a long sojourn, had been corrupted and maligned in order to make scapegoats of people who may well have suffered from Hansen's or any variety of skin conditions? Power loves to scapegoat, after all, even when that power is a king of Israel or Judah, or a group of powerful priests. Even a cursory glance at history will prove that when a regime wants to bolster its power, it finds someone to focus their people's hatred upon – Jews or the Irish or African-Americans or Asian-Americans or Muslims or gay and trangendered people...
I wonder if Jesus was angry about how things were about to change for him? After all, up to this point he had enjoyed a moderate fame, enough to garner a group of listeners whenever he came into town and spoke, but not so many as to impede his progress or put him in danger of being pulled off-message. Could it be that the leper presented Jesus with a choice – respect the status quo, keep the oppressed in their place, stay in a comfort zone and do just enough to get by with fulfilling his calling, or break through the barriers, rip wide the curtain, and open the floodgates of healing and hope for all humankind. Respond to the leper's plea, and nothing will ever be the same.
The narrow streets of the towns and cities won't hold the crowds straining to see, hear, and touch this healer-prophet, he'll have to spend all his time out in the countryside; people will be more and more interested in seeing a miracle than in hearing the healing words of the Kingdom of God; those in power will become more and more interested in, and threatened by, this itinerant Rabbi from Judean flyover country, and events will be set in motion which will culminate with a cross.
I don't know why Jesus got angry, but I know that his anger produced an astonishing response.
Well, “astonishing” is probably the wrong word. More like “shocking.” He did something which was horrifying, unthinkable, repulsive to everyone around him.
This kneeling leper said, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”
And Jesus did the one thing that a person in first-century Palestine must never, ever do, no ifs, ands, or buts, no discussion groups about the pros and cons, no opposing views on a split-screen on CNN, no questions, just do not do this ever: Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him!
“I do choose. Be made clean!”
He knew what would happen to his ministry, he knew that this one touch would end with the scourge and the cross, he knew this!
He touched anyway.
I wonder if we who are in the institutional Church have ever really read this passage of Scripture?
Now, please understand that I am a card-carrying member of the mainline Protestant Church, the fully organized and institutionalized and westernized and homogenized and sanitized-for-your-protection middle-class North American Church.
I have been a member of evangelical, Fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and mainline churches, and have taken part in worship with Catholics and Episcopalians of both traditional and charismatic stripes. I have been to faith healings, baptisms of varying degrees of wetness, tent revivals, prayer vigils, and meetings too numerous to count. I am in the club. I know the password and the secret handshake.
And I am here to tell you that somewhere along the way, while we were debating theology and doctrine, arguing and fighting and suing and splitting up over the nature of Christ and the meaning of the Eucharist and the importance of baptism and the rightness of slavery and of segregation and of excluding women from ordination, while we were whoring ourselves out to this political cause or that candidate, we lost our way. We forgot who we are and Whose we are, and it may well be too late to fix it, I don't know.
I know, I know, I'm coming in too hot on this, but hear me out. I am an utter and unrepentant theology and church history geek. Ask me about Reformed Theology or about the Council of Nicea and I can bore you to death for hours talking about it with gusto and passion. Historically speaking, the institutional church is the best possible vehicle to determine orthodoxy, direct orthopraxy, provide structure and accountability and offer support for local church bodies.
Yet when theology and doctrine becomes not a stepping-stone to a closer relationship with out Savior, but a checklist to determine who is in and who is out, when theology and doctrine becomes not a beacon of hope to the lost and marginalized but a bludgeon to all who dare disagree with our obviously perfected understanding of all things God, when we have divorced our first love in favor of a nice, safe, predictable set of mental assertions and codes of conduct, we have become little more than one of the hundreds of pagan temples dotting the first-century Roman empire, where one's outer performance was everything and one's inner spiritual state was irrelevant.
We no longer reach out to touch, because we know who is clean and unclean. Touch this one and you might get AIDS, or that one and you might catch the gay. Our youth groups are more concerned with making sure the students we have are well-behaved and properly entertained than in reaching out to the freaks and geeks and the malcontents and ne'er-do-wells. Our pastors are more concerned with making sure the stewardship campaign and the building program is healthy and the PowerPoint is working and the Praise Team is on cue than in shining the light of Christ into the city's darkest corners. As long as our numbers are good, as long as our Christian Clubs on the high school campus are well-attended, as long as the paychecks cash and our people say all the right things and vote the right way and write their congressman when we tell them to, we are all good. No reason to reach out to the leper. We don't need the leper.
Oh, we talk a good game, we do. Every now and again, one of us preacher types will pop up and wish aloud that we could be like the first-century Church. I admit that I always laugh at that, because when we say that we generally want to pick and choose the ways in which our modern, westernized church should imitate the earliest believers. Do you really, really want to be like the first-century church? Do you, pastor, want to give up your salary and your staff and your buildings and your support structure? Do you want to meet in secret in people's homes, do you want to have to sneak around and be in constant fear of getting caught? Do you really want to be in danger of being imprisoned, of being tortured in ever-more-imaginative and horrifying ways, of seeing your family slowly and carefully killed before your eyes?
Well, of course not, but I must admit that there are elements of the first-century church that we could very well embrace, which very well might save the institutional church from obsolescence, if there is still time.
See, the thing about the first-century church is, once the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples, all bets were off. People were coming to faith in Christ all over the place, in greater and greater numbers, and for these disciples, born and raised in Judaism, they were struggling to deal with the fact that many of those receiving the Holy Spirit were people who had always been excluded – sometimes with solid Scriptural backing – from worshiping Jaweh. There were Samaritans and Gentiles, women, even a eunuch!
No one was left out, no limits were placed on how and when and where and to what degree God's Spirit could move. The Apostles may well have looked at one another and said the same thing that Adam said to Eve: “Stand back, honey, I don't know how big this thing's gonna get!”
All of this was happening not because their doctrine was precise or their theology flawless – quite the opposite, in fact. As the letters and Gospel accounts were being written – the books that would, several hundred years later, be canonized as New Testament Scripture – what you believed about atonement and the nature of Christ and his deity depended not on your denomination but on which letters and Gospels your section of the world had access to. The test of faith was not mental assent to a set of core beliefs, but a dangerous declaration which, when uttered, placed you in direct opposition to the mores of the society you inhabited, and in immediate conflict with the governmental authorities. That declaration was simply “Jesus is Lord.”
Yet even not knowing where the road was leading, except to certain persecution and conflict and torture and death, the church reached out, grew, thrived. Despite the dangers, they touched anyway.
Look, I know that we in twenty-first century Western Christianity have our lepers, our groups and people and thought patterns and belief systems which are repugnant, frightening, off limits, despicable – things that strike us with the same level of revulsion as the thought of drinking raw sewage. The tendency has always been, when threatened by danger, to circle the wagons, strengthen the things which make us unique, find safety in people who are like us. Yet this has never been what the description of “church” should be. We are the Body of Christ, and as such, we are called, commissioned, depended upon to be like Jesus, our Head. We are called to break through the personal and societal barriers and mores and limitations and expectations and to reach out to the very people and institutions and places and belief systems which threaten us.
We are called to touch anyway.
Reverend Carlton Pearson was a well-known pastor, a protege of Oral Roberts, whose church boasted attendance of over 5,000 people every Sunday.
He had everything a minister could hope for, all the fame and adulation and power and creature comforts, until one day he lost it all. He didn't embezzle money or have an affair, no. But one evening he stopped believing in Hell, which, for an Evangelical, is tantamount to praying to Satan. He lost his church, and his denomination ousted him and labeled him a heretic. No one reached out to him, no one tried to listen or to just be his friend through this journey.
He became a Universalist, which is another matter altogether – one wonders if a more gentle approach from his denomination would have influenced him differently – but he was utterly alone. He took whatever speaking engagements he could, and tried to find his way.
One of the speaking engagements was with a group he would not have been caught dead with before – a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Christians. After he spoke, the woman who had asked him to the conference invited him to go down into the audience, the congregation, and let them minister to him. There were touches, warm embraces, healing words... and then, from the stage, the woman reappeared with a bowl of water. Right there, in that auditorium, she washed Carlton's feet.
The lesson of the story, for me, at least, is this: If we, the Church, are counting on the lepers to touch the lepers, it is already too late. We should stop right now, take the cutesy sayings off the marquee out front, nail the doors shut and paint “Ichabod” across the threshold. We're done.
Or, we can resolve that, whatever the cost to us in membership and prestige and political clout, even if we lose the high-five- and low-six-figure salary, even if the denomination disowns us and people talk bad about us on the radio, we will touch anyway.
Yeah, it'll be dangerous. It'll be dirty. And we don't know how big this thing is gonna get. But if the institutional Church is going to put truth to their claims of caring about the lost and the hungry and the homeless and the naked and the imprisoned and the fatherless and the marginalized and the misunderstood, there is only one choice.
Be like Jesus.
Touch anyway.
Mark 1:40-45
A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean."
Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Back in the mid-1980’s, I worked at a local television station as a studio manager and camera operator. One of the shows we did was a daily talk show, with tons of guests, comedians, musicians… I got to meet folks like Rita Mareno, Fannie Flagg, James Gregory, Sinbad, even Harlan Ellison – which for a science fiction nut is a really big deal.
One morning, though, we got news that one of the guests was a nurse who worked directly with AIDS patients.
Now, you may remember that back in the mid-‘80’s we didn’t have a lot of information about AIDS and HIV. I can’t speak for the scientific or medical communities, but we in the general public weren’t too sure of how easy it was, or how many ways there were, to “catch” AIDS. It sounds kind of stupid now, but we were afraid to one degree or another of salad bars, toilet seats, door handles… and when we found out this person was coming to the studio, some of us got nervous. One of our jobs, you see, was to put a lavaliere microphone on the guest, which meant, by design, close contact – touching. This person was surrounded by AIDS every day… what if we could “catch” AIDS by miking her?
You have no idea how much I wish I could stand here and say that I was the heroic one who stepped up and told the others how ridiculous they were… I mean, honestly. Touching someone gives you AIDS? Please. I wish I could tell you that I boldly went and miked the guest and got on with my day.
No… the heroic one was a tiny little blonde with big 80’s glasses and hair. She heard what we were talking about and just blew up! I don’t think I have been as effectively ripped to shreds before or since.
The nicest thing she said to us was, “You guys are idiots! Never mind – I’ll put the mike on her!” And as she walked off she was muttering, “Stupid, stupid, stupid…”
The guest got miked, the show went on, and of course no one got sick. I honestly hate to tell that story, because it does nothing to improve either my self-image or my dignity before others. It is not at all an example of being Christ-like, and what is worse; it isn’t even the worst example from my life of being un-Christ-like. But whenever the Gospel discussion of leprosy comes up, this is what comes to mind.
Our Gospel reading paints the picture of Jesus traveling all around Galilee, preaching and casting out demons. Somewhere on the road, or in some town, a bell dingles, and a voice cries out “unclean!”
The people surrounding Jesus recoil in horror at this stinking, walking pile of dirty rags and festering sores. You can almost hear the voices hissing in revulsion, “leper!”
This leper then did something that was strictly forbidden by the Law – he approached Jesus. He got close. He fell to his knees in the Galilean dirt and said something astounding: “If you choose to, you can make me clean.” What an interesting phrase – “you can make me clean,” not “you can heal me.”
What he was asking for was healing, yes, but in fact he was asking for so much more.
Leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, still exists today. According to the World Health Organization, over 212,000 cases exist worldwide, though those numbers are dropping.
The disease is not very contagious, is quite curable with multiple-drug therapy, and while no one is sure what exactly causes Hansen’s, experts agree across the board that it is unnecessary to ostracize the infected person. Even so, leper colonies still exist in countries like India, Japan, Egypt, Nepal, Somalia, South Korea, Vietnam… and the United States.
Saying all of that gives us some modern perspective, it’s true, but it kind of talks around what was going on in the Gospel reading today. Isn’t it interesting that Mark doesn’t call him a man, or a person, or give him a name; he is identified only by his disease, a “leper.” This removal of humanity from a human being is, to say the least, instructive.
For the Jews in Jesus’ day, the discussion of leprosy began with the book of Leviticus, the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters. In the thirteenth chapter you’ll find a very detailed discussion about identifying leprosy. You’ll also see the words “clean” and “unclean” used a lot.
You see, the word that has been translated as “leprosy” is “Tzaraath,” and it’s a very generic term that is applied to humans, clothing, and houses. It got translated as “leprosy” about 250 years before Christ when the Hebrew Bible was translated from Hebrew to Greek.
“Tzaraath” comes from the Hebrew word for “smiting,” because – and this is important – in the Jewish understanding of the day, the skin diseases and, well, mildew described in Leviticus were thought to be punishment for sin.
Thus a person was not “diseased” or “healthy,” they were either “clean” – meaning acceptable to take part in the community and its worship activities – or “unclean” – meaning unacceptable to the community, untouchable, dirty, sinful, and ostracized from that community and prohibited from worship. These people were required by the Law to mess up their hair, wear rags, and live away from friends, family, and prohibited from taking part in the worship of God. As the children of Israel inhabited the Promised Land, and city populations grew, these people were required to ring bells and cry out “unclean, unclean” wherever they went. They could not be touched, could not come into close contact of any kind with any other – “clean” – human being, until they died, or until they were somehow cured.
I have to confess to you that I really, really have a problem with this. I know, yes, it’s in Leviticus, for the most part, and yes, Leviticus is part of the Scriptures, and yes, the Scriptures are the written word of God.
And I guess I should understand, because I remember full well the terror over the AIDS epidemic, and not knowing if you could catch the disease from mosquito bites or being sneezed on.
Yet it still turns my stomach to think of someone being denied their family, their life, their livelihood, and their hope because of something that might well have been a nasty case of psoriasis, we don’t know, and in any case it wasn’t at all about the lepers being sick – it was about the lepers being the walking, talking, embodiment of sin. Keep them away lest their sin infect you through their speech or through their actions or through the very air. Don’t touch them lest the sin rub off on you. They are no longer humans, they are lepers, and their very existence is an abomination!
“If you choose to, you can remove this sin from me. You can let me go home to my family. You can let me work for a living again. You can let me go to the Temple and sing Psalms again.”
There’s something fascinating about what happens next. You see, many ancient manuscripts say what our reading this morning says, that Jesus was “moved with pity.” However, there are a lot of ancient manuscripts that use a very different word, a much more uncomfortable, challenging word: they say that Jesus was not moved to pity, but moved to anger.
Jesus saw this disheveled man, reduced to wearing rags and bells, utterly cut off from all human contact, hated, loathed, and feared by everyone, robbed of his humanity, reduced to groveling in the dirt, and begging not for healing but for forgiveness… and it made Jesus mad!
I wonder – why anger? Of all the emotions one might feel when confronted by this stinking, diseased mass of humanity, groveling in the dirt – revulsion, disdain, compassion, horror, perhaps love – anger? Why was Jesus angry… and with whom was Jesus angry?
The possibilities are intriguing. Could Jesus have been angry at the way a simple set of instructions, meant to keep a nomadic people safe from disease on a long sojourn, had been corrupted and maligned in order to make scapegoats of people who may well have suffered from Hansen's or any variety of skin conditions? Power loves to scapegoat, after all, even when that power is a king of Israel or Judah, or a group of powerful priests. Even a cursory glance at history will prove that when a regime wants to bolster its power, it finds someone to focus their people's hatred upon – Jews or the Irish or African-Americans or Asian-Americans or Muslims or gay and trangendered people...
I wonder if Jesus was angry about how things were about to change for him? After all, up to this point he had enjoyed a moderate fame, enough to garner a group of listeners whenever he came into town and spoke, but not so many as to impede his progress or put him in danger of being pulled off-message. Could it be that the leper presented Jesus with a choice – respect the status quo, keep the oppressed in their place, stay in a comfort zone and do just enough to get by with fulfilling his calling, or break through the barriers, rip wide the curtain, and open the floodgates of healing and hope for all humankind. Respond to the leper's plea, and nothing will ever be the same.
The narrow streets of the towns and cities won't hold the crowds straining to see, hear, and touch this healer-prophet, he'll have to spend all his time out in the countryside; people will be more and more interested in seeing a miracle than in hearing the healing words of the Kingdom of God; those in power will become more and more interested in, and threatened by, this itinerant Rabbi from Judean flyover country, and events will be set in motion which will culminate with a cross.
I don't know why Jesus got angry, but I know that his anger produced an astonishing response.
Well, “astonishing” is probably the wrong word. More like “shocking.” He did something which was horrifying, unthinkable, repulsive to everyone around him.
This kneeling leper said, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”
And Jesus did the one thing that a person in first-century Palestine must never, ever do, no ifs, ands, or buts, no discussion groups about the pros and cons, no opposing views on a split-screen on CNN, no questions, just do not do this ever: Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him!
“I do choose. Be made clean!”
He knew what would happen to his ministry, he knew that this one touch would end with the scourge and the cross, he knew this!
He touched anyway.
I wonder if we who are in the institutional Church have ever really read this passage of Scripture?
Now, please understand that I am a card-carrying member of the mainline Protestant Church, the fully organized and institutionalized and westernized and homogenized and sanitized-for-your-protection middle-class North American Church.
I have been a member of evangelical, Fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and mainline churches, and have taken part in worship with Catholics and Episcopalians of both traditional and charismatic stripes. I have been to faith healings, baptisms of varying degrees of wetness, tent revivals, prayer vigils, and meetings too numerous to count. I am in the club. I know the password and the secret handshake.
And I am here to tell you that somewhere along the way, while we were debating theology and doctrine, arguing and fighting and suing and splitting up over the nature of Christ and the meaning of the Eucharist and the importance of baptism and the rightness of slavery and of segregation and of excluding women from ordination, while we were whoring ourselves out to this political cause or that candidate, we lost our way. We forgot who we are and Whose we are, and it may well be too late to fix it, I don't know.
I know, I know, I'm coming in too hot on this, but hear me out. I am an utter and unrepentant theology and church history geek. Ask me about Reformed Theology or about the Council of Nicea and I can bore you to death for hours talking about it with gusto and passion. Historically speaking, the institutional church is the best possible vehicle to determine orthodoxy, direct orthopraxy, provide structure and accountability and offer support for local church bodies.
Yet when theology and doctrine becomes not a stepping-stone to a closer relationship with out Savior, but a checklist to determine who is in and who is out, when theology and doctrine becomes not a beacon of hope to the lost and marginalized but a bludgeon to all who dare disagree with our obviously perfected understanding of all things God, when we have divorced our first love in favor of a nice, safe, predictable set of mental assertions and codes of conduct, we have become little more than one of the hundreds of pagan temples dotting the first-century Roman empire, where one's outer performance was everything and one's inner spiritual state was irrelevant.
We no longer reach out to touch, because we know who is clean and unclean. Touch this one and you might get AIDS, or that one and you might catch the gay. Our youth groups are more concerned with making sure the students we have are well-behaved and properly entertained than in reaching out to the freaks and geeks and the malcontents and ne'er-do-wells. Our pastors are more concerned with making sure the stewardship campaign and the building program is healthy and the PowerPoint is working and the Praise Team is on cue than in shining the light of Christ into the city's darkest corners. As long as our numbers are good, as long as our Christian Clubs on the high school campus are well-attended, as long as the paychecks cash and our people say all the right things and vote the right way and write their congressman when we tell them to, we are all good. No reason to reach out to the leper. We don't need the leper.
Oh, we talk a good game, we do. Every now and again, one of us preacher types will pop up and wish aloud that we could be like the first-century Church. I admit that I always laugh at that, because when we say that we generally want to pick and choose the ways in which our modern, westernized church should imitate the earliest believers. Do you really, really want to be like the first-century church? Do you, pastor, want to give up your salary and your staff and your buildings and your support structure? Do you want to meet in secret in people's homes, do you want to have to sneak around and be in constant fear of getting caught? Do you really want to be in danger of being imprisoned, of being tortured in ever-more-imaginative and horrifying ways, of seeing your family slowly and carefully killed before your eyes?
Well, of course not, but I must admit that there are elements of the first-century church that we could very well embrace, which very well might save the institutional church from obsolescence, if there is still time.
See, the thing about the first-century church is, once the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples, all bets were off. People were coming to faith in Christ all over the place, in greater and greater numbers, and for these disciples, born and raised in Judaism, they were struggling to deal with the fact that many of those receiving the Holy Spirit were people who had always been excluded – sometimes with solid Scriptural backing – from worshiping Jaweh. There were Samaritans and Gentiles, women, even a eunuch!
No one was left out, no limits were placed on how and when and where and to what degree God's Spirit could move. The Apostles may well have looked at one another and said the same thing that Adam said to Eve: “Stand back, honey, I don't know how big this thing's gonna get!”
All of this was happening not because their doctrine was precise or their theology flawless – quite the opposite, in fact. As the letters and Gospel accounts were being written – the books that would, several hundred years later, be canonized as New Testament Scripture – what you believed about atonement and the nature of Christ and his deity depended not on your denomination but on which letters and Gospels your section of the world had access to. The test of faith was not mental assent to a set of core beliefs, but a dangerous declaration which, when uttered, placed you in direct opposition to the mores of the society you inhabited, and in immediate conflict with the governmental authorities. That declaration was simply “Jesus is Lord.”
Yet even not knowing where the road was leading, except to certain persecution and conflict and torture and death, the church reached out, grew, thrived. Despite the dangers, they touched anyway.
Look, I know that we in twenty-first century Western Christianity have our lepers, our groups and people and thought patterns and belief systems which are repugnant, frightening, off limits, despicable – things that strike us with the same level of revulsion as the thought of drinking raw sewage. The tendency has always been, when threatened by danger, to circle the wagons, strengthen the things which make us unique, find safety in people who are like us. Yet this has never been what the description of “church” should be. We are the Body of Christ, and as such, we are called, commissioned, depended upon to be like Jesus, our Head. We are called to break through the personal and societal barriers and mores and limitations and expectations and to reach out to the very people and institutions and places and belief systems which threaten us.
We are called to touch anyway.
Reverend Carlton Pearson was a well-known pastor, a protege of Oral Roberts, whose church boasted attendance of over 5,000 people every Sunday.
He had everything a minister could hope for, all the fame and adulation and power and creature comforts, until one day he lost it all. He didn't embezzle money or have an affair, no. But one evening he stopped believing in Hell, which, for an Evangelical, is tantamount to praying to Satan. He lost his church, and his denomination ousted him and labeled him a heretic. No one reached out to him, no one tried to listen or to just be his friend through this journey.
He became a Universalist, which is another matter altogether – one wonders if a more gentle approach from his denomination would have influenced him differently – but he was utterly alone. He took whatever speaking engagements he could, and tried to find his way.
One of the speaking engagements was with a group he would not have been caught dead with before – a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Christians. After he spoke, the woman who had asked him to the conference invited him to go down into the audience, the congregation, and let them minister to him. There were touches, warm embraces, healing words... and then, from the stage, the woman reappeared with a bowl of water. Right there, in that auditorium, she washed Carlton's feet.
The lesson of the story, for me, at least, is this: If we, the Church, are counting on the lepers to touch the lepers, it is already too late. We should stop right now, take the cutesy sayings off the marquee out front, nail the doors shut and paint “Ichabod” across the threshold. We're done.
Or, we can resolve that, whatever the cost to us in membership and prestige and political clout, even if we lose the high-five- and low-six-figure salary, even if the denomination disowns us and people talk bad about us on the radio, we will touch anyway.
Yeah, it'll be dangerous. It'll be dirty. And we don't know how big this thing is gonna get. But if the institutional Church is going to put truth to their claims of caring about the lost and the hungry and the homeless and the naked and the imprisoned and the fatherless and the marginalized and the misunderstood, there is only one choice.
Be like Jesus.
Touch anyway.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
What Does Faith Cost?
This has been an interesting week. I've been called out on a Fundamentalist blogger's website as a member of the "sinfully ecumenical" Emergent Church movement (which, as an active member of a mainline denomination, is a little strange, but OK). Strangely enough, I wasn't angered or insulted at all - I got mentioned in the same breath with my friend Jay Bakker, and it gave me something for a small part of the sermon - we Christians (at least in the West) persecute one another far more than we are persecuted from outside.
Here it is, not so much a sermon as an unresolved chord. Comments, criticism, etc. are welcomed.
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, "Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us." When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God, you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me." You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God.
Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.
Luke 4:1-13
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'"
Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"
Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
Romans 10:8b-13
"The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart" (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, "No one who believes in him will be put to shame." For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved."
This is the Word of the Lord.
I want to say at the outset that this is not so much a sermon as it is a Lenten meditation. What's more, if you're expecting a well-constructed set of arguments with a neat and compelling conclusion, you're going to leave disappointed today. If I can use an analogy from a few weeks back, this morning's meditation is going to leave the chord unresolved.
This is not because I ran out of time writing, or because I just got lazy, but because our readings this morning ask us a question – and while much of Christianity is corporate and is to be understood and undertaken in the fellowship of believers and in the context of the Body of Christ as a whole, the question these texts ask is individual. Personal. Undeserving of an easy, quick, trite, prepackaged answer, and in any case, really unanswerable from any honest pulpit.
With that having been said, let's jump in.
There is nothing easy about the book of Romans. It is a complex and fairly systematic theological treatise, often controversial, and always instructive. Anytime a passage is lifted out of Romans, either to use as a prooftext or as a Lectionary reading, I wonder what was left behind.
And in our series of Lectionary texts this morning, it kind of stands out like a sore thumb. In Deuteronomy, the Israelites are instructed to bring their best – the first gleanings of the harvest – and surrender them to God. To forfeit the profit and forgo the benefit of their labors in order to remember that the source of their harvest, the foundation of their success, is God. That without God on their side they would be lost in the wilderness at best, and still enslaved to Egypt at worst.
In Luke, Jesus endures the harshest of tests, plumbing the depths of his soul and the limits of his humanity in preparation for the task before him – namely, our salvation.
Then here's Romans, saying if you think and say the right things, poof, you're a Christian, you get to go to heaven! Now, I'm no Horatio Caine, but either the band of elves that put the Revised Common Lectionary together is crazy, or there's more to the story.
Rome was an interesting place – well, not so much a place as an entity. Bent on world domination, the Roman Empire in the first century AD encompassed most of the known world. While whole cultures were assimilated, governed with an iron fist and heavily taxed, the Empire was remarkably lenient when it came to religion. You could worship whatever gods your culture offered, and were not at all required to acknowledge or accept Roman gods, with one key exception: once a year, every citizen and subject of the Roman Empire (with the exception of Jewish people) were required to burn a pinch of incense to the god Caesar, and to acknowledge Caesar as Lord. You then received a certificate which showed, in effect, that you were politically compliant and not a threat to the Roman Empire. To refuse to make the offering was to announce yourself as an opponent of and a danger to that Empire.
To say “Jesus is Lord,” rather than “Caesar is Lord” was to directly challenge the sovereignty and divinity of the leader of the Empire. It was, in effect, to declare war on Rome.
But there's more to it even than that. Every religious culture in the ancient world was an attempt to reach out to or appease some god or set of gods. Prayers had to be said precisely. Sacrifices had to be made faithfully. Altars and images occupied every corner of the house, the marketplace, the crossroads, and temples to an endless variety of gods and goddesses dotted the landscape. Any natural disaster, failed harvest, or invasion by a foreign army was seen as a failure to properly appreciate the corporate gods.
And while a careful reading of the Law of Moses will show that the God of the Hebrews never intended it to be this way, even the Jews had come to regard their system of laws and sacrifices in much the same way – an effort to reach a distant and sometimes disinvolved Creator.
Contrast this with a God who not only does not require strict adherence to law and ritual, does not require burnt offerings or blood sacrifices, but who has reached out to a disinterested and even openly hostile humankind for reconciliation. It was a completely foreign concept both to Jews and to the Gentile world!
It adds up to grace which is both free and costly. Salvation, a free gift to Jew and Gentile alike, could cost you your home, your family, and could very well get you tortured and killed.
This is the first Sunday of Lent. These forty days, not counting Sundays, commemorate Jesus' forty-day fast in the wilderness. These forty days are not the only time Jesus will be tested. These aren't the only days he will be hungry, will be in pain, will be alone. What is unique about this series of tests is, among other things, that Jesus confirms that there will be no shortcuts in the plan of salvation for humankind, that nothing about his life or ministry is about himself.
It is difficult for many of us in 21st century America to imagine the dangers of being a Christian twenty centuries ago. And while millions of believers worldwide are persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and killed every day for their faith in Christ, our own confession of faith rarely causes us hardship. Yes, some Christians in our nation, and even in our communities, have been disowned by their family for confessing that Jesus is Lord, but for the most part, the worst we endure is evangelical athiests like Richard Dawkins saying we are stupid or comedians like Bill Mahr making fun of us in a movie.
It is a sad, but quantifiable fact, that we endure more persecution from one another, across denominational and ideological lines within the Body of Christ, than we do from those outside the faith!
We don't have to bring our firstfruits to the Temple; we're encouraged to tithe our income, yes, but no one is inspecting the quality of our gifts, keeping track of percentages, or issuing certificates of compliance.
So what does it mean for you and I to “confess with [our] lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in [our] hearts that God raised him from the dead?” How does both the fact and the ongoing process of being saved change us? Challenge us? Inconvenience us or even put us in harm's way?
What does our faith cost us?
Let us pray.
Here it is, not so much a sermon as an unresolved chord. Comments, criticism, etc. are welcomed.
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, "Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us." When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God, you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me." You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God.
Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.
Luke 4:1-13
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'"
Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"
Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
Romans 10:8b-13
"The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart" (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, "No one who believes in him will be put to shame." For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved."
This is the Word of the Lord.
I want to say at the outset that this is not so much a sermon as it is a Lenten meditation. What's more, if you're expecting a well-constructed set of arguments with a neat and compelling conclusion, you're going to leave disappointed today. If I can use an analogy from a few weeks back, this morning's meditation is going to leave the chord unresolved.
This is not because I ran out of time writing, or because I just got lazy, but because our readings this morning ask us a question – and while much of Christianity is corporate and is to be understood and undertaken in the fellowship of believers and in the context of the Body of Christ as a whole, the question these texts ask is individual. Personal. Undeserving of an easy, quick, trite, prepackaged answer, and in any case, really unanswerable from any honest pulpit.
With that having been said, let's jump in.
There is nothing easy about the book of Romans. It is a complex and fairly systematic theological treatise, often controversial, and always instructive. Anytime a passage is lifted out of Romans, either to use as a prooftext or as a Lectionary reading, I wonder what was left behind.
And in our series of Lectionary texts this morning, it kind of stands out like a sore thumb. In Deuteronomy, the Israelites are instructed to bring their best – the first gleanings of the harvest – and surrender them to God. To forfeit the profit and forgo the benefit of their labors in order to remember that the source of their harvest, the foundation of their success, is God. That without God on their side they would be lost in the wilderness at best, and still enslaved to Egypt at worst.
In Luke, Jesus endures the harshest of tests, plumbing the depths of his soul and the limits of his humanity in preparation for the task before him – namely, our salvation.
Then here's Romans, saying if you think and say the right things, poof, you're a Christian, you get to go to heaven! Now, I'm no Horatio Caine, but either the band of elves that put the Revised Common Lectionary together is crazy, or there's more to the story.
Rome was an interesting place – well, not so much a place as an entity. Bent on world domination, the Roman Empire in the first century AD encompassed most of the known world. While whole cultures were assimilated, governed with an iron fist and heavily taxed, the Empire was remarkably lenient when it came to religion. You could worship whatever gods your culture offered, and were not at all required to acknowledge or accept Roman gods, with one key exception: once a year, every citizen and subject of the Roman Empire (with the exception of Jewish people) were required to burn a pinch of incense to the god Caesar, and to acknowledge Caesar as Lord. You then received a certificate which showed, in effect, that you were politically compliant and not a threat to the Roman Empire. To refuse to make the offering was to announce yourself as an opponent of and a danger to that Empire.
To say “Jesus is Lord,” rather than “Caesar is Lord” was to directly challenge the sovereignty and divinity of the leader of the Empire. It was, in effect, to declare war on Rome.
But there's more to it even than that. Every religious culture in the ancient world was an attempt to reach out to or appease some god or set of gods. Prayers had to be said precisely. Sacrifices had to be made faithfully. Altars and images occupied every corner of the house, the marketplace, the crossroads, and temples to an endless variety of gods and goddesses dotted the landscape. Any natural disaster, failed harvest, or invasion by a foreign army was seen as a failure to properly appreciate the corporate gods.
And while a careful reading of the Law of Moses will show that the God of the Hebrews never intended it to be this way, even the Jews had come to regard their system of laws and sacrifices in much the same way – an effort to reach a distant and sometimes disinvolved Creator.
Contrast this with a God who not only does not require strict adherence to law and ritual, does not require burnt offerings or blood sacrifices, but who has reached out to a disinterested and even openly hostile humankind for reconciliation. It was a completely foreign concept both to Jews and to the Gentile world!
It adds up to grace which is both free and costly. Salvation, a free gift to Jew and Gentile alike, could cost you your home, your family, and could very well get you tortured and killed.
This is the first Sunday of Lent. These forty days, not counting Sundays, commemorate Jesus' forty-day fast in the wilderness. These forty days are not the only time Jesus will be tested. These aren't the only days he will be hungry, will be in pain, will be alone. What is unique about this series of tests is, among other things, that Jesus confirms that there will be no shortcuts in the plan of salvation for humankind, that nothing about his life or ministry is about himself.
It is difficult for many of us in 21st century America to imagine the dangers of being a Christian twenty centuries ago. And while millions of believers worldwide are persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and killed every day for their faith in Christ, our own confession of faith rarely causes us hardship. Yes, some Christians in our nation, and even in our communities, have been disowned by their family for confessing that Jesus is Lord, but for the most part, the worst we endure is evangelical athiests like Richard Dawkins saying we are stupid or comedians like Bill Mahr making fun of us in a movie.
It is a sad, but quantifiable fact, that we endure more persecution from one another, across denominational and ideological lines within the Body of Christ, than we do from those outside the faith!
We don't have to bring our firstfruits to the Temple; we're encouraged to tithe our income, yes, but no one is inspecting the quality of our gifts, keeping track of percentages, or issuing certificates of compliance.
So what does it mean for you and I to “confess with [our] lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in [our] hearts that God raised him from the dead?” How does both the fact and the ongoing process of being saved change us? Challenge us? Inconvenience us or even put us in harm's way?
What does our faith cost us?
Let us pray.
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