Proper 25, Joel 2:23-32, Psalm 65, 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18, Luke 18:9-14
This morning’s parable follows directly on last week’s parable in Luke 18. That was the parable of the widow and the unjust judge. I will interpret this morning’s parable in light of that one. I’m going to stay with the problem of prayer.
Last week I told you to pray for anything that comes into your mind. I told you not to filter it, and not to worry if it is right to pray for it. I told you to be candid in your prayers to God. Go ahead, go to it. But then I told you also to remember three considerations.
First, you learn from scripture what God prefers to give you. There is a lot of false teaching in the world about what God offers, teaching which is attractive and appealing and misleading. You don’t have to believe what many people tell you about what God wants, even people who claim to know.
God lets us know quite clearly, really, in the very public documents of scripture, and though some parts of scripture are notoriously difficult to understand, there are many other parts of scripture that are as obvious as the Ten Commandments. It’s usually less the case that we can’t understand than that we can’t hardly believe it. Scripture is public documents, which despite their lack of spiritual glamor are quite sufficient for your equipment and proficiency.
Second, you may ask for whatever comes into your mind, but also remember that the directly opposite may be what God wants for you. God answers every prayer, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, and sometimes that answer is No. Good thing, right?
Third, you can ask for whatever comes into your mind, but we’re not talking about instant messaging. We’re talking about patience and persistence. We’re not talking about asking for candy, we’re asking for justice, and for peace, and so on. Ask for whatever you want, but stay with it, day and night, year after year. Ask for anything, but if I were you I would specialize in those kinds of requests that require years and years to ask for. You know what I’m saying?
Today I want to add two more considerations. They come from our Psalm and our gospel. Our fourth and fifth considerations are these: you can pray for whatever comes into your mind, but then also pray with thanksgiving, and also pray with repentance.
Thanksgiving is the vision of Psalm 65. I love Psalm 65, and I love to sing it in Hungarian and Dutch, using the old Genevan tune, but unfortunately we don’t have a good version of it in English. The tune is majestic and a little minor, suggesting an awareness of the darkness that is in the world, a knowledge of the negativity that is real but that is also really dealt with.
The Psalm imagines a song of thanksgiving that rises from the depths, and not just from the depths of human experience, but also from the world of nature, from the earth itself, from the landscape, from the soil and the pastures and the hills. I heard the meadows singing, each to each. Thanksgiving is not only what people do, but what all nature does, even in the awareness of darkness and negativity, the whole creation rejoices in the gift of its existence, giving thanks to God.
I have been emphasizing this thanksgiving in my sermons recently, because it’s such a big theme in the Bible, and what I’m talking about is not the feeling of thanksgiving but the discipline of thanksgiving, the art of it, the training of it, the commitment of thanksgiving.
And so then, when you pray, you should ask for whatever you want, but always with thanksgiving. Not just for what you have, but where you are. You get the point. No matter what you are asking for, you are thankful for what you have already. You are already satisfied. You know where you are. You know where the world is. You recognize and understand how much you have received, how much has been given you. This helps your asking then to not be coveting but rather proposing, projecting, envisioning, hoping.
We’re not talking about thanksgiving as instant messaging, as in mentioning what you feel good about today. We’re talking about long, slow, patient, persistent thanksgiving, night and day, year after year. Like what comes up from nature, like the patient and persistent thanksgiving that rises from the soil, when the farmer comes through with a plow and opens up the furrows to the air and to the sun and the new rises up from them. And most deeply we’re talking about the thanksgiving that rises from the forgiveness of our sins, as in verse 3 of the Psalm.
Which brings us to our fifth consideration, which we get from our gospel. That when you pray, you can ask for whatever you want, and do not filter it, but at the same time remember to repent. I don’t mean that you have to be sure to mention some recent particular sin, but rather that you confess that you have not loved God with your whole heart and you haven’t loved your neighbors as yourself, by what you have done and by what you have left undone.
Don’t misunderstand the parable. The pharisee was not a bad guy, he was a good guy. He was praying a prayer of thanksgiving. Once again, the word Luke uses for his prayer is the word "eucharist," a real prayer of thanksgiving. Yes, that prayer was a little pompous and proud, but let’s not judge him too harshly, because of the beam in our own eye.
He was a good man, generous and devoted, he practiced what he preached, and at some cost. Fasting twice a week is nothing to sneeze at, and neither is tithing ten percent. We emphasize tithing in this church, especially in the coming weeks, and we say that the point of tithing is that you give back to God the top percentage of your income, and if you can’t make ten percent, then start at two or three or four percent, give that much back to God, to the church you belong to and also to other religious charities, and we challenge you to raise your percentage by one step every year. That’s good, that’s what the Pharisee did. He was a good man, and he gave good gifts.
The publican was a bad man. Jesus is by no means praising his profession or suggesting he was a good guy compared to the pharisee. That’s not the point. The difference is in the sacrifice that each one offered up to God. The pharisee offered up ten percent of his money and two days out of seven of his time. The publican offered up himself. His whole self, not his good self, his bad self. The pharisee offered his good works to God and the publican offered his sins to God. He put his whole self in. He had nothing to offer God but his own self.
And that is the most intimate connection you can ever have with God. You can ask anything of God you want, don’t filter it, but can you also keep from filtering what you say about yourself to God? Another word for this is simply integrity, and candor not only about what you want but what you are.
Psalm 65 envisions the wagon tracks of God’s chariot cutting through the surface of the earth, and the richness rising up. It tells of the furrows which the farmer has cut into the soil, softened with showers and bearing life and giving growth. Our prayers of confession and repentance are how we plow the furrows through the surfaces of our lives, it’s how we open up to God what was hidden underneath, and it’s from that plowing open that new life comes forth.
So pray for anything you want, don’t filter it, but always include these words as well, "God be merciful to me."
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
The Bobs Lake Gang
This Sunday through Tuesday I will be attending the 31st session of the Bobs Lake Gang. Our name doesn't say much for our imaginations, but hey, we're guys, and we're pastors, so who expects imagination?
In October 1992, a Canadian pastor friend of mine, Rev. Dr. Orville James, had the idea of starting a small pastors' group to meet on retreat at his cottage on Bobs Lake in Ontario. We were joined by Bob Ripley, whose star was just rising. We talked, prayed, smoked cigars, read scripture, played air guitar, repeated Monty Python scripts, did dishes, prayed some more, and failed to shower and shave.
On Monday night, we lay on the floor in the dark and listened to the Blue Jays play their first World Series. It was a tiny old AM radio, and the woodstove was on to keep us warm.
We met again in the spring, and three more pastors joined us, Drew and Andrew and Orville's brother John. Or did Andrew come the next time? Or was John there the first time? We've been going long enough to need an historian.
Since then we've added new members, three of them, and we've had vacancies and visitors along the way, but there's no question that we have forged ourselves into something; just what that something is I am not sure I want to know.
We are all Canadian pastors, mainline denominations, United and Anglican, except for me, a Dutch Calvinist from the States (though I am a dual citizen, and a subject of Elizabetha Regina and her heirs-by-law). I used to say that they wanted me in so that I could buy the single-malt Scotch at the Duty Free at the border. Then my wife and I bought the cottage next door to Orville's, and if they kicked me out I could just go up any and blast my radio like at General Noriega. And now some of the other guys are bringing the Scotch.
Fifteen years, now, or 31 sessions, without a break. We're the only group we know to have endured so long. Orville is the leader, and the rest of us have different roles to play. Andrew makes breakfast, Ripley cooks a formal dinner on Monday night (despite our lack of shaving and showering). John and I fight over the control of the coffee. We've been fighting over the coffee for years. It's what we do.
Sunday night we kick back and let loose. We report the news, and we tell the stories that pastors never dare tell anyone else but pastors. I always try to have a long joke ready. Early on I told the one about the Lutheran pastor who wakes up in hell. It remains the unbeatable standard, like Johnny Vander Meer's back-to-back no-hitters.
Monday, after breakfast, we spend all morning in scripture and prayer. We use the Anglican service for morning prayer, and whatever lessons that come up in the lectionary. We try to do that sitting outside on the deck above the lake, if it's not too cold. It's never too cold for me; I love to wrap myself in blankets like a sachem and talk about the Eternal, and then talk to the Eternal.
Soup and sandwiches for lunch, then we split up for exercise and naps and conversations, and golf or hiking or canoing on the bright, cold lake. Monday dinner is nice with napkins and wine. Monday night, the talk is quieter and calmer.
Tuesday morning, prayers and scripture again, but less intense. A quick lunch and then off home.
We have prayed each other through many difficulties. We have prayed each other through broken marriages and tough times in the ministry. Wandering children and troublesome staffs. Clergy stuff. We challenge and support each other. We probably should use more soap.
In October 1992, a Canadian pastor friend of mine, Rev. Dr. Orville James, had the idea of starting a small pastors' group to meet on retreat at his cottage on Bobs Lake in Ontario. We were joined by Bob Ripley, whose star was just rising. We talked, prayed, smoked cigars, read scripture, played air guitar, repeated Monty Python scripts, did dishes, prayed some more, and failed to shower and shave.
On Monday night, we lay on the floor in the dark and listened to the Blue Jays play their first World Series. It was a tiny old AM radio, and the woodstove was on to keep us warm.
We met again in the spring, and three more pastors joined us, Drew and Andrew and Orville's brother John. Or did Andrew come the next time? Or was John there the first time? We've been going long enough to need an historian.
Since then we've added new members, three of them, and we've had vacancies and visitors along the way, but there's no question that we have forged ourselves into something; just what that something is I am not sure I want to know.
We are all Canadian pastors, mainline denominations, United and Anglican, except for me, a Dutch Calvinist from the States (though I am a dual citizen, and a subject of Elizabetha Regina and her heirs-by-law). I used to say that they wanted me in so that I could buy the single-malt Scotch at the Duty Free at the border. Then my wife and I bought the cottage next door to Orville's, and if they kicked me out I could just go up any and blast my radio like at General Noriega. And now some of the other guys are bringing the Scotch.
Fifteen years, now, or 31 sessions, without a break. We're the only group we know to have endured so long. Orville is the leader, and the rest of us have different roles to play. Andrew makes breakfast, Ripley cooks a formal dinner on Monday night (despite our lack of shaving and showering). John and I fight over the control of the coffee. We've been fighting over the coffee for years. It's what we do.
Sunday night we kick back and let loose. We report the news, and we tell the stories that pastors never dare tell anyone else but pastors. I always try to have a long joke ready. Early on I told the one about the Lutheran pastor who wakes up in hell. It remains the unbeatable standard, like Johnny Vander Meer's back-to-back no-hitters.
Monday, after breakfast, we spend all morning in scripture and prayer. We use the Anglican service for morning prayer, and whatever lessons that come up in the lectionary. We try to do that sitting outside on the deck above the lake, if it's not too cold. It's never too cold for me; I love to wrap myself in blankets like a sachem and talk about the Eternal, and then talk to the Eternal.
Soup and sandwiches for lunch, then we split up for exercise and naps and conversations, and golf or hiking or canoing on the bright, cold lake. Monday dinner is nice with napkins and wine. Monday night, the talk is quieter and calmer.
Tuesday morning, prayers and scripture again, but less intense. A quick lunch and then off home.
We have prayed each other through many difficulties. We have prayed each other through broken marriages and tough times in the ministry. Wandering children and troublesome staffs. Clergy stuff. We challenge and support each other. We probably should use more soap.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Update on the Homeless Men
In the words of the Leonard Cohen song, "It's come to this, oh yes, it's come to this."
First, I thank you all for your participation in this conversation. I thank you for your comments and your interest. In particular I thank the Park Slope Civic Council for their desire to be part of a solution, and I thank Rabbi Andy Bachman and Congregation Beth Elohim for their offering to support us and assist us. ("Love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things.")
Second, now that this conversation has started, it needs to keep developing. If Park Slope was just voted the best neighborhood in NYC, then why shouldn't homeless people want to live here too? A truly diverse community needs to embrace its FULL diversity. Old First wants to be part of the continuing conversation, especially with Beth Elohim and the Civic Council.
Third, because this is a developing story, let me update you on the weekend. There are some new facts on the ground. On Sunday afternoon, the cops were called in twice by neighbors. I have to say the cops were great.
As left the church on Sunday evening, I found a steel bar the guys were keeping as a weapon. On Monday morning I learned that the men had been urinating in front of nursery school children and into their play-yard. On Monday evening a deacon confirmed to me that the men had exposed themselves in front of children while urinating.
Yesterday Frank showed me his face, very badly bruised. He told me had fallen, but I don't believe him. His face tells a different story. This morning I removed a blanket with blood stains on it.
"It's come to this, oh yes, it's come to this." (I guess I always expected it would come to this.)
I have been denying them permission to sleep on our grounds since last July, but I found it impossible to enforce. As of this morning, the Commander of Precinct 78 agreed with me that the police would enforce it.
The story isn't over. What's going to happen next, I don't know. But now that the community seems to have woken up I want it to stay involved. The men were sleeping and hanging out at Old First because Old First is public space for the community, and because, like anyone, they want a short commute, and they work on Seventh Avenue.
So please don't give them money. Give them food. Address them by name. Robert, Will, and Frank.
It's not over for us with them either at Old First. We have three deacons who will work on this with me. We'll get back to you.
Meanwhile, you might check the Brooklyn Paper for a story this weekend.
First, I thank you all for your participation in this conversation. I thank you for your comments and your interest. In particular I thank the Park Slope Civic Council for their desire to be part of a solution, and I thank Rabbi Andy Bachman and Congregation Beth Elohim for their offering to support us and assist us. ("Love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things.")
Second, now that this conversation has started, it needs to keep developing. If Park Slope was just voted the best neighborhood in NYC, then why shouldn't homeless people want to live here too? A truly diverse community needs to embrace its FULL diversity. Old First wants to be part of the continuing conversation, especially with Beth Elohim and the Civic Council.
Third, because this is a developing story, let me update you on the weekend. There are some new facts on the ground. On Sunday afternoon, the cops were called in twice by neighbors. I have to say the cops were great.
As left the church on Sunday evening, I found a steel bar the guys were keeping as a weapon. On Monday morning I learned that the men had been urinating in front of nursery school children and into their play-yard. On Monday evening a deacon confirmed to me that the men had exposed themselves in front of children while urinating.
Yesterday Frank showed me his face, very badly bruised. He told me had fallen, but I don't believe him. His face tells a different story. This morning I removed a blanket with blood stains on it.
"It's come to this, oh yes, it's come to this." (I guess I always expected it would come to this.)
I have been denying them permission to sleep on our grounds since last July, but I found it impossible to enforce. As of this morning, the Commander of Precinct 78 agreed with me that the police would enforce it.
The story isn't over. What's going to happen next, I don't know. But now that the community seems to have woken up I want it to stay involved. The men were sleeping and hanging out at Old First because Old First is public space for the community, and because, like anyone, they want a short commute, and they work on Seventh Avenue.
So please don't give them money. Give them food. Address them by name. Robert, Will, and Frank.
It's not over for us with them either at Old First. We have three deacons who will work on this with me. We'll get back to you.
Meanwhile, you might check the Brooklyn Paper for a story this weekend.
Monday, October 22, 2007
With Apologies to Frost
Nature’s last green is brown,
Her tints are going down
To blend in with the earth
From which we rise in birth.
Prospect Park is finally changing color now, though the temperature is still too warm. Most of the trees just go to brown, while a few are beginning to show off their yellows, golds, and reds.
Not the white pines on Lookout Hill, above the Nethermead, the white pines that I love. Their needles are even greener than a month ago. They have groomed themselves for winter. It is not so that they do not loose their leaves like other trees. They do.
In September we went to our cabin in Ontario, and my wife Melody said, "Look, the white pines are turning brown." And they were. Their branches were all dead brown needles. She worried for our trees, but she needn’t have. Those brown quintuplet clusters hid the tiny new growth needles behind them.
When I went back in October, the ground was thick with needles, and the white pines were bright and fresh and green. For white pines, Easter should happen in October. Oaks and maples celebrate Passover as the New Year, but conifers keep true to Rosh Hashanah.
White pines like the winter sun. And so in wintertime, when I walk from my apartment to the church, I take the long way, up and over Lookout Hill, so that I can say hello to the white pines, especially when there is snow on the ground.
I haven’t started that yet. And Sunday I was running late, so I took the Center Drive. And as I walked past the Friends Cemetery I saw what I had seen before, that most of the gravestones were in shadow from the trees, but some of the stones were brightly lit in the low rays of the autumn sun.
What’s better for gravestones — sunlight or shadow? I mean, what hastens their decay, the algae that grow in shade, or the heating and cooling of solar energy? Those stones that are brightly lit, do they mark the graves of specially righteous Quakers, whose spirits leave an energy behind to greet the sun, or of specially sinful Quakers, unhappy ones, whose souls are not at rest, and cannot abide the sweet decay of shadow and shade? Is there anyone who can come back from the dead to tell me?
Time is linear for Quakers, and for the rest of us Christians. What has been has been, there is no return, and we are praying for the future, which is a fulfillment of the past, but also therefore essentially different from the past. That's a fundamental belief of Jews and Christians and Muslims.
But trees are Taoists or Buddhists, I think. Trees believe that time is circular, and that everything will come around again. I have no desire to convert the trees to Christianity. Certainly not the white pines. They have no need of redemption.
Her tints are going down
To blend in with the earth
From which we rise in birth.
Prospect Park is finally changing color now, though the temperature is still too warm. Most of the trees just go to brown, while a few are beginning to show off their yellows, golds, and reds.
Not the white pines on Lookout Hill, above the Nethermead, the white pines that I love. Their needles are even greener than a month ago. They have groomed themselves for winter. It is not so that they do not loose their leaves like other trees. They do.
In September we went to our cabin in Ontario, and my wife Melody said, "Look, the white pines are turning brown." And they were. Their branches were all dead brown needles. She worried for our trees, but she needn’t have. Those brown quintuplet clusters hid the tiny new growth needles behind them.
When I went back in October, the ground was thick with needles, and the white pines were bright and fresh and green. For white pines, Easter should happen in October. Oaks and maples celebrate Passover as the New Year, but conifers keep true to Rosh Hashanah.
White pines like the winter sun. And so in wintertime, when I walk from my apartment to the church, I take the long way, up and over Lookout Hill, so that I can say hello to the white pines, especially when there is snow on the ground.
I haven’t started that yet. And Sunday I was running late, so I took the Center Drive. And as I walked past the Friends Cemetery I saw what I had seen before, that most of the gravestones were in shadow from the trees, but some of the stones were brightly lit in the low rays of the autumn sun.
What’s better for gravestones — sunlight or shadow? I mean, what hastens their decay, the algae that grow in shade, or the heating and cooling of solar energy? Those stones that are brightly lit, do they mark the graves of specially righteous Quakers, whose spirits leave an energy behind to greet the sun, or of specially sinful Quakers, unhappy ones, whose souls are not at rest, and cannot abide the sweet decay of shadow and shade? Is there anyone who can come back from the dead to tell me?
Time is linear for Quakers, and for the rest of us Christians. What has been has been, there is no return, and we are praying for the future, which is a fulfillment of the past, but also therefore essentially different from the past. That's a fundamental belief of Jews and Christians and Muslims.
But trees are Taoists or Buddhists, I think. Trees believe that time is circular, and that everything will come around again. I have no desire to convert the trees to Christianity. Certainly not the white pines. They have no need of redemption.
Sermon for October 21, Praying For Justice (The Parable of the Unjust Judge
Proper 24, Jeremiah 31:27-34, Psalm 119:97-104, 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5, Luke 18:1-8
The widow in this story — I don’t want to be like her. I expect that you don’t want to be like her either. You don’t want to be so demanding. You don’t want to cry to God day and night. Who wants to be so needy, so dependent, so tiresome.
Don’t we all understand that we have to get real and accept the realities of life? If you expect justice all the time you’re going to be a very frustrated person, and probably not much fun to be with. We all put up with many daily injustices. Parking, your place of employment, your family. Your medical insurance.
If Jesus were telling the parable today it would be the widow against her insurance carrier. I recently received two medical bills, both for treatments from a year ago. Both of the doctors were supposedly in my network, and I paid my co-payment, and now one is asking for fifty-eight dollars and the other for five hundred odd dollars, so I’ll hold off on the latter bill as long as I can, and keep on making phone calls, which is a pain, but the first one I’ll just pay off to get rid of it. I don’t have any expectation that the system is fair. So I deal with it.
In America our justice is relatively good. In much of the world it’s a given that a bribe is the only way to get consideration. They would tell the widow that the judge is only waiting for his money. Lots of people make the same assumption about God. Not necessarily money, but something in return, like a good life, or good behavior, or going to church. They want something from God, so they offer something in exchange. Dear God, if you give me this, I promise I’ll be a better person, or I’ll do this or that, whatever.
But according to the parable the widow offers nothing to the judge except her pure demand; so when you pray to God for something, it doesn’t help if you offer something back. That would be a bribe. You should just ask for it and ask for it and ask for it, for no reason other than that you think it’s right for you to receive it.
Now let me ask you this. Why do you come here on Sundays? Do you come here because you’re looking for justice? I’ll bet not. In other times and places that is what congregations were praying for. Like in Montgomery, Alabama, in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
Or like in East Germany, in 1989, in the city of Leipzig, while the Communist police had encircled the Nicolaikirche, some 5000 people were gathered inside and were praying for peace and justice. That same year in Rumania, in the city of Timasoara, inside the Hungarian Reformed Church, one night, all night, the whole congregation was praying, and outside, all night, hand-in-hand, their friends had made a circle around the church as a barrier against the Securitate of Cauçescu. Outside, holding hands against the guns, and inside, folding hands against the heart of God. Of course, in all three cases, these people had been crying to God for justice day and night for many, many years.
I’m wondering if we ask enough of God. Do you think we demand enough of God? Do we expect enough of God? Do we keep our expectations minimal, limited, and well-controlled? If we don’t ask much, we won’t be disappointed. We are modern people after all, we are not superstitious, nor fundamentalist, we don’t go round saying God did this for us and God did that for us. We know what life requires and what life offers and we deal with it.
So we do not ask too much of God, we let God off the hook. In this regard, then, I have three things for you to keep in mind. One from the epistle, one from Jeremiah, and one from the gospel.
First, the epistle is recalling us to scripture, to the trustworthiness of scripture, the necessity of scripture, and the discipline of scripture, for our proficiency and equipment in the world. The epistle reminds us that there is sound doctrine and bad doctrine, and the bad doctrine is often more attractive and appealing than the sound doctrine. And a great deal of bad doctrine purports to tell you what God offers and what God expects, and what you should pray for and what you might as well forget about. And we need to learn what’s right in this and what is wrong, and the way to learn is through the mature and responsible study of the public documents of scripture.
So you need this balance. You should allow yourself to make every request of God that comes into your mind. You should not filter your requests to God. If you think it, ask it. But, at the same time, commit yourself to long-term learning what it is that God desires to offer and expect.
For example, if you want to be wealthy, ask for it. Be true to yourself and be honest in your relationship with God. If you want justice, ask for it. And if you are doing the long-term learning of what God truly offers and expects, then you learn that God is a lot more interested in giving you justice than wealth. The goal is that by long-term spiritual training your deepest requests begin to conform to what God truly offers and expects.
Second, from Jeremiah. Just as there is a time when God builds up and plants, there is also a time when God plucks up and takes down, when God overthrows and destroys. There are times when what God has for us is definitely not what we would pray for. There are times when the justice that God gives us might mean a penalty for us. I mean, right?
So you should keep on praying exactly what’s on your heart, but you need also to understand that God may answer you with the very opposite. And understand also that God is not impressed by our sense of immediacy or necessity. And that the fullness of what is good for us is not known to ourselves, and is known to God much better than we know ourselves. Good thing.
And finally, from the gospel. You should pray exactly what’s on your mind, and do not filter it, but we’re not talking about a couple of prayers, or what you are asking for this week, we’re talking about long-term prayer, we’re talking about months and months of prayer, years and years, we’re talking about prayers that wear God out, like the Civil Rights Movement, like the churches in Eastern Europe. If that’s what you’re willing to do, and stay at it, then go ahead, tell God exactly what’s on your mind.
We have to consider the possibility that we have an influence on God. Philosophically I know that’s difficult, and the strictest Calvinists say that it’s illogical, but let’s be sloppy Calvinists, and say that we have an influence on God, who wants us in a partnership.
But at the same time, God has an influence on us. If you keep at it, your long-term discipline of prayer starts to convert you, so that two things happen: your mind begins to merge with God’s mind, and you also become part of the answer. The answer to your prayer starts to flow right out of you into the world. Onto the street. Into your world. Your prayers and your answers come together in you, because God’s Word and God’s Spirit live in you.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
The widow in this story — I don’t want to be like her. I expect that you don’t want to be like her either. You don’t want to be so demanding. You don’t want to cry to God day and night. Who wants to be so needy, so dependent, so tiresome.
Don’t we all understand that we have to get real and accept the realities of life? If you expect justice all the time you’re going to be a very frustrated person, and probably not much fun to be with. We all put up with many daily injustices. Parking, your place of employment, your family. Your medical insurance.
If Jesus were telling the parable today it would be the widow against her insurance carrier. I recently received two medical bills, both for treatments from a year ago. Both of the doctors were supposedly in my network, and I paid my co-payment, and now one is asking for fifty-eight dollars and the other for five hundred odd dollars, so I’ll hold off on the latter bill as long as I can, and keep on making phone calls, which is a pain, but the first one I’ll just pay off to get rid of it. I don’t have any expectation that the system is fair. So I deal with it.
In America our justice is relatively good. In much of the world it’s a given that a bribe is the only way to get consideration. They would tell the widow that the judge is only waiting for his money. Lots of people make the same assumption about God. Not necessarily money, but something in return, like a good life, or good behavior, or going to church. They want something from God, so they offer something in exchange. Dear God, if you give me this, I promise I’ll be a better person, or I’ll do this or that, whatever.
But according to the parable the widow offers nothing to the judge except her pure demand; so when you pray to God for something, it doesn’t help if you offer something back. That would be a bribe. You should just ask for it and ask for it and ask for it, for no reason other than that you think it’s right for you to receive it.
Now let me ask you this. Why do you come here on Sundays? Do you come here because you’re looking for justice? I’ll bet not. In other times and places that is what congregations were praying for. Like in Montgomery, Alabama, in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
Or like in East Germany, in 1989, in the city of Leipzig, while the Communist police had encircled the Nicolaikirche, some 5000 people were gathered inside and were praying for peace and justice. That same year in Rumania, in the city of Timasoara, inside the Hungarian Reformed Church, one night, all night, the whole congregation was praying, and outside, all night, hand-in-hand, their friends had made a circle around the church as a barrier against the Securitate of Cauçescu. Outside, holding hands against the guns, and inside, folding hands against the heart of God. Of course, in all three cases, these people had been crying to God for justice day and night for many, many years.
I’m wondering if we ask enough of God. Do you think we demand enough of God? Do we expect enough of God? Do we keep our expectations minimal, limited, and well-controlled? If we don’t ask much, we won’t be disappointed. We are modern people after all, we are not superstitious, nor fundamentalist, we don’t go round saying God did this for us and God did that for us. We know what life requires and what life offers and we deal with it.
So we do not ask too much of God, we let God off the hook. In this regard, then, I have three things for you to keep in mind. One from the epistle, one from Jeremiah, and one from the gospel.
First, the epistle is recalling us to scripture, to the trustworthiness of scripture, the necessity of scripture, and the discipline of scripture, for our proficiency and equipment in the world. The epistle reminds us that there is sound doctrine and bad doctrine, and the bad doctrine is often more attractive and appealing than the sound doctrine. And a great deal of bad doctrine purports to tell you what God offers and what God expects, and what you should pray for and what you might as well forget about. And we need to learn what’s right in this and what is wrong, and the way to learn is through the mature and responsible study of the public documents of scripture.
So you need this balance. You should allow yourself to make every request of God that comes into your mind. You should not filter your requests to God. If you think it, ask it. But, at the same time, commit yourself to long-term learning what it is that God desires to offer and expect.
For example, if you want to be wealthy, ask for it. Be true to yourself and be honest in your relationship with God. If you want justice, ask for it. And if you are doing the long-term learning of what God truly offers and expects, then you learn that God is a lot more interested in giving you justice than wealth. The goal is that by long-term spiritual training your deepest requests begin to conform to what God truly offers and expects.
Second, from Jeremiah. Just as there is a time when God builds up and plants, there is also a time when God plucks up and takes down, when God overthrows and destroys. There are times when what God has for us is definitely not what we would pray for. There are times when the justice that God gives us might mean a penalty for us. I mean, right?
So you should keep on praying exactly what’s on your heart, but you need also to understand that God may answer you with the very opposite. And understand also that God is not impressed by our sense of immediacy or necessity. And that the fullness of what is good for us is not known to ourselves, and is known to God much better than we know ourselves. Good thing.
And finally, from the gospel. You should pray exactly what’s on your mind, and do not filter it, but we’re not talking about a couple of prayers, or what you are asking for this week, we’re talking about long-term prayer, we’re talking about months and months of prayer, years and years, we’re talking about prayers that wear God out, like the Civil Rights Movement, like the churches in Eastern Europe. If that’s what you’re willing to do, and stay at it, then go ahead, tell God exactly what’s on your mind.
We have to consider the possibility that we have an influence on God. Philosophically I know that’s difficult, and the strictest Calvinists say that it’s illogical, but let’s be sloppy Calvinists, and say that we have an influence on God, who wants us in a partnership.
But at the same time, God has an influence on us. If you keep at it, your long-term discipline of prayer starts to convert you, so that two things happen: your mind begins to merge with God’s mind, and you also become part of the answer. The answer to your prayer starts to flow right out of you into the world. Onto the street. Into your world. Your prayers and your answers come together in you, because God’s Word and God’s Spirit live in you.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
The Homeless Men at Old First
Their names are Robert Royster, Will Franklin, and Frank. They cause me a great deal of trouble, and lots of anger from our neighbors, and I do wish they would go away, but, whatever else, they remain human beings, images of God, and they need to be treated with respect.
People keep asking why don't we get rid of them. We can't. We've tried. Believe me, we have tried. They have abused our hospitality, they piss on our building, they leave food around, they leave garbage all over, they play their radio at great volumes (God forgive me, I have had to resort to theft against them to deal with that one). They are a pain in the neck. But we will not treat them as less than human beings.
We have tried to get rid of them. We've discovered the hard way that we can't do it, we can't beat them. Whenever I chase them away, they just wait an hour, two hours, and they come back. I go home at night, and they come back. No matter what we do or say, they come back.
I will confess a strong desire inside myself to just let them be. It's Jesus' church, not mine, not ours, and the New Testament is very clear about our hospitality to the poor. "The poor you will always have with you." The parable of Lazarus. Etc. You get the point. And there is no asterix pointing to a codicil that says, "the nice poor."
But at the same time I recognize we belong to a community, and the church has the responsiblity to be a good neighbor, and if the guys scare the kids, and make lewd comments at women and passersby, and if they leave food scraps around for vermin to get at, etc. etc., then, well, I know that the church has to be a good neighbor. So we decided this last July that they absolutely had to go. We tried to get rid of them. As I said, we couldn't.
We chased them away every morning. They came back every night. We threw out their stuff. They found new stuff. Only now they started getting even more hostile, to us and to other passersby. We finally found that we couldn't beat them, and the only thing was to try to control it. Yes, they beat us.
The cops can't do anything either, apparently. If you call them, you have to wait there, on the spot for about half an hour till the cops come, and all they can say is "Scram," and they give you dirty looks for taking up their time, and half an hour later the guys are back.
The cops have to catch them in the act of public urination or public consumption of liquor, which are misdemeanors, and mean nothing to anyone, or catch them inside the building, which is trespassing, and might mean a trip to Rikers Island, but Rikers is already over-crowded and they don't want to put vagrants there.
Why are they there at Old First? Easy. The money is good on Seventh Avenue. The money dries up, the guys go. Where I grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant there are no panhandlers. Up at Ethical Culture the front porch is deeper and drier, but people don't give out money on PPW.
Old First is the only church on Seventh Avenue without a fence. That's important to us, we love it that people sit on our steps and that kids run on the top of our little wall. And that's also why they are at Old First.
Today, again, I cleaned up their garbage. Waddayagonnado. But I will not remove their sleeping bags. Some of our neighbors think I should do that. But that's a moral line I will not cross. The Torah is very clear, that you should not take from a poor man what keeps him warm at night. Leaving their filthy sleeping bags there is my little attempt to be moral in this whole thing, and honor the basic dignity the Torah assigns them.
I used to talk to them and pray with them. I used to be able to reason with them. That's no longer possible. They're drinking 24/7 lately. They are nasty to me too. How long this will go on I do not know. In the short term, it's people giving them money that keeps it going. In the long term, they are killing themselves. If they manage to get arrested, they will get cleaned up at Rikers, and we'll have them back in February!
Before Robert had descended to his current condition, and when he had sober moments, he used to pray very moving prayers for certain people in the area. for poor children, for illiterates (such as himself), for soldiers, for forgiveness of his sins. I hate what has become of him. I always knew it would be coming.
It's a grief, and we're at our wits end. We have been unable to find any solution. In a strange way, the three of them are in control. Robert, Will, and Franklin.
They have names. They have souls. They belong to our community. They tell us something about ourselves.
People keep asking why don't we get rid of them. We can't. We've tried. Believe me, we have tried. They have abused our hospitality, they piss on our building, they leave food around, they leave garbage all over, they play their radio at great volumes (God forgive me, I have had to resort to theft against them to deal with that one). They are a pain in the neck. But we will not treat them as less than human beings.
We have tried to get rid of them. We've discovered the hard way that we can't do it, we can't beat them. Whenever I chase them away, they just wait an hour, two hours, and they come back. I go home at night, and they come back. No matter what we do or say, they come back.
I will confess a strong desire inside myself to just let them be. It's Jesus' church, not mine, not ours, and the New Testament is very clear about our hospitality to the poor. "The poor you will always have with you." The parable of Lazarus. Etc. You get the point. And there is no asterix pointing to a codicil that says, "the nice poor."
But at the same time I recognize we belong to a community, and the church has the responsiblity to be a good neighbor, and if the guys scare the kids, and make lewd comments at women and passersby, and if they leave food scraps around for vermin to get at, etc. etc., then, well, I know that the church has to be a good neighbor. So we decided this last July that they absolutely had to go. We tried to get rid of them. As I said, we couldn't.
We chased them away every morning. They came back every night. We threw out their stuff. They found new stuff. Only now they started getting even more hostile, to us and to other passersby. We finally found that we couldn't beat them, and the only thing was to try to control it. Yes, they beat us.
The cops can't do anything either, apparently. If you call them, you have to wait there, on the spot for about half an hour till the cops come, and all they can say is "Scram," and they give you dirty looks for taking up their time, and half an hour later the guys are back.
The cops have to catch them in the act of public urination or public consumption of liquor, which are misdemeanors, and mean nothing to anyone, or catch them inside the building, which is trespassing, and might mean a trip to Rikers Island, but Rikers is already over-crowded and they don't want to put vagrants there.
Why are they there at Old First? Easy. The money is good on Seventh Avenue. The money dries up, the guys go. Where I grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant there are no panhandlers. Up at Ethical Culture the front porch is deeper and drier, but people don't give out money on PPW.
Old First is the only church on Seventh Avenue without a fence. That's important to us, we love it that people sit on our steps and that kids run on the top of our little wall. And that's also why they are at Old First.
Today, again, I cleaned up their garbage. Waddayagonnado. But I will not remove their sleeping bags. Some of our neighbors think I should do that. But that's a moral line I will not cross. The Torah is very clear, that you should not take from a poor man what keeps him warm at night. Leaving their filthy sleeping bags there is my little attempt to be moral in this whole thing, and honor the basic dignity the Torah assigns them.
I used to talk to them and pray with them. I used to be able to reason with them. That's no longer possible. They're drinking 24/7 lately. They are nasty to me too. How long this will go on I do not know. In the short term, it's people giving them money that keeps it going. In the long term, they are killing themselves. If they manage to get arrested, they will get cleaned up at Rikers, and we'll have them back in February!
Before Robert had descended to his current condition, and when he had sober moments, he used to pray very moving prayers for certain people in the area. for poor children, for illiterates (such as himself), for soldiers, for forgiveness of his sins. I hate what has become of him. I always knew it would be coming.
It's a grief, and we're at our wits end. We have been unable to find any solution. In a strange way, the three of them are in control. Robert, Will, and Franklin.
They have names. They have souls. They belong to our community. They tell us something about ourselves.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Sermon for October 14, We Are Called to Spiritual Wholeness
Proper 23, Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, Psalm 55:1-12, 2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19
Please notice that Jesus does not heal the ten lepers on the spot. They have to obey his instructions first, and in obeying they discover they are healed. Right here we are reminded of something important about what God offers and what God expects. In their obedience is their healing.
The purpose of healing is not that you feel good. The purpose of healing is that you can carry out God’s word, and in carrying out God’s word you are healed. It’s circular, isn’t it. So, if you experience any kind of healing in your life, it’s for the sake of your answering God’s call on you. We’ll come back to this.
Only one of the lepers came back, the Samaritan, but let’s not be unfair to the other nine. They could say they did not come back because they were heading for the priest as Jesus had told them to. Actually, the Samaritan disobeyed the instructions. Of course, no Jewish priest would have examined him, so what could he do?
You can hardly blame the other nine for racing back into life, and making up for lost time. How long had it been since they had seen their wives and kids and villages? In the words of Jeremiah, they had to go build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat the produce, take their wives back, have sons and daughters, and seek the welfare of their communities. Ordinary things, perhaps, but precious if you’ve been denied them.
Ordinary things, but what if you’re suffering the shock of war, the destruction of your nation, or the misery of ethnic cleansing, as many people are today. Many people today would hear the instructions of Jeremiah as close to hopeless.
It was a challenge to the Jews back then, and only the first time, being rounded up and carted off against their will. Shouldn’t you rise up, should n’t you resist? Shouldn’t you boycott, or demonstrate, or fight to get back home? How could you be at home in Babylon, take wives, have babies, and seek the welfare of the city of your enemies?
How could you do it? If you accept that the whole ordeal had been God’s will. If you could reconcile to your exile and your punishment as fair and just, and, though a terrible trial, a purgative, a discipline, a refiner’s fire, a flood that washes clean. If you could accept your situation as a challenge for new obedience.
Jeremiah is instructing them to be healed, be whole, start serving God in Babylon, witness to God in Babylon. That’s how the prophets understood the exile, as a cleansing of Judaism. The exile was an opportunity to be a blessing to the nations.
Cleansing is what God offers and expects, when what we ask for is healing. Yes, cleansing is a kind of healing, but we tend to want to feel good, but getting right is what God expects and offers. In the story of the lepers, healing is not the main point, cleansing is. And cleansing is to get right with God. It’s not just getting back to our homes and families, it’s getting right with God, which makes us able to enjoy God, and glorify God. And to glorify God and enjoy God is what it means to be a fully human being.
It’s possible to be a human being who’s not a fully human being, it’s possible to exist in the flesh, but to be a fully human being is also to be fully spiritual, in order to glorify God and enjoy God forever. And that is what God calls us to.
That’s what distinguished the tenth leper from the other nine. He completed the transaction, he carried it all the way through to its purpose. He achieved what he was made for. He was restored not only to the positively physical, but also to the spiritual. He became a fully human being. He ended up giving thanks to God.
The word in Greek for his thanksgiving is "eucharist." We still use that word in the Christian tradition for the Prayer of Thanksgiving at Holy Communion, the climax of our service every week. It’s for Biblical reasons we do our service this way. It’s a similar process and transaction as in the story of the lepers.
It’s not coincidental that it’s ten lepers. Ten is what constitutes a minyan, in Jewish terms a quorum for prayer. They cry out with a Kyrie, Lord have mercy upon us. Jesus responds with his word, which is like the sermon. They believe him and go, which is implicitly a Creed, and they are made clean, which is an absolution. When the one returns, he kneels before Jesus and offers his thanksgiving, which is like Holy Communion. Jesus ends it with a benediction, "Rise up and go, your faith has saved you." In other words, "Go in peace."
When we come hee to worship every week, it’s not just to hear a nice sermon and some music, it is to go through a process, a transaction. We come here to cleanse what makes us guilty and ashamed, to refresh our spirituality, and to renew ourselves as fully human beings, in order to glorify God another week and to enjoy God another week.
To be a fully human being is to be able to thank God. It is both our privilege and obligation "always and everywhere to give thanks to God." This is one of the main themes of the Bible and it’s one I keep repeating at Old First. When I say thanksgiving, it’s not just happy feelings, I mean the art of thanksgiving, the work of it, the task and burden of thanksgiving, even in exile and ordeal.
It takes rehearsing, it takes training, it takes discipline and commitment. It changes the way you live your life. It changes the way you spend your time and how your spend your money.
The gospel claims that to be a fully human being is to be a thanksgiving-maker in the world, to be able to interpret the world as giving thanks to God.
And just that kind of life is a healing life, even when we get sick and die. "Holy and right it is, and our joyful duty, at all times and in all places, to give thanks to God." And it takes faith to be able to do this, because sometimes you just can’t see one thing that is good. It’s usually when we are looking back.
It took faith for St. Paul to be reconciled to the suffering of his imprisonment in Rome, when he so much loved to travel and engage the world and visit his congregations. He had to reconcile to his chains as enhancing his mission. He had to serve his missions from afar, like a mafia don in the penitentiary. He spent a lot more time in writing and in prayer.
Every human being has both a particular and a general mission. Your particular mission is your individual vocation, your calling in the world, for which you have your talents and your gifts. Your individual mission is your privilege and your obligation, both.
Some of you are very clear on what your particular mission is, but for most of you it’s not a specific definition but a broader field of possibilities. Some of us change vocations midstream, and some of us take years to settle on what we should do, or to accept it, and we struggle against it, but the process of acceptance is an important part of healing.
That healing often comes with choosing not to obey many voices in our heads, typically the voices of our parents or some other early influence, but rather heeding the voice of God in the present, from the Christian community, or from those we serve. That obedience is healing.
Your general mission is the same as every other human being, which is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. That’s what people are for. That is our common obligation and our privilege. In Biblical terms, to carry out that mission is to be a fully human beings, and in order to carry out that mission we are called to spiritual wholeness.
That leper was called into spiritual wholeness and he was called out of shame. That is the greatest healing that God offers, to bring us out of shame and guilt. We can be open, we can literally be out. We can stand before God and enjoy God. And that means we can be at home where we live, and at peace with the community. That is what God offers and expects.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Please notice that Jesus does not heal the ten lepers on the spot. They have to obey his instructions first, and in obeying they discover they are healed. Right here we are reminded of something important about what God offers and what God expects. In their obedience is their healing.
The purpose of healing is not that you feel good. The purpose of healing is that you can carry out God’s word, and in carrying out God’s word you are healed. It’s circular, isn’t it. So, if you experience any kind of healing in your life, it’s for the sake of your answering God’s call on you. We’ll come back to this.
Only one of the lepers came back, the Samaritan, but let’s not be unfair to the other nine. They could say they did not come back because they were heading for the priest as Jesus had told them to. Actually, the Samaritan disobeyed the instructions. Of course, no Jewish priest would have examined him, so what could he do?
You can hardly blame the other nine for racing back into life, and making up for lost time. How long had it been since they had seen their wives and kids and villages? In the words of Jeremiah, they had to go build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat the produce, take their wives back, have sons and daughters, and seek the welfare of their communities. Ordinary things, perhaps, but precious if you’ve been denied them.
Ordinary things, but what if you’re suffering the shock of war, the destruction of your nation, or the misery of ethnic cleansing, as many people are today. Many people today would hear the instructions of Jeremiah as close to hopeless.
It was a challenge to the Jews back then, and only the first time, being rounded up and carted off against their will. Shouldn’t you rise up, should n’t you resist? Shouldn’t you boycott, or demonstrate, or fight to get back home? How could you be at home in Babylon, take wives, have babies, and seek the welfare of the city of your enemies?
How could you do it? If you accept that the whole ordeal had been God’s will. If you could reconcile to your exile and your punishment as fair and just, and, though a terrible trial, a purgative, a discipline, a refiner’s fire, a flood that washes clean. If you could accept your situation as a challenge for new obedience.
Jeremiah is instructing them to be healed, be whole, start serving God in Babylon, witness to God in Babylon. That’s how the prophets understood the exile, as a cleansing of Judaism. The exile was an opportunity to be a blessing to the nations.
Cleansing is what God offers and expects, when what we ask for is healing. Yes, cleansing is a kind of healing, but we tend to want to feel good, but getting right is what God expects and offers. In the story of the lepers, healing is not the main point, cleansing is. And cleansing is to get right with God. It’s not just getting back to our homes and families, it’s getting right with God, which makes us able to enjoy God, and glorify God. And to glorify God and enjoy God is what it means to be a fully human being.
It’s possible to be a human being who’s not a fully human being, it’s possible to exist in the flesh, but to be a fully human being is also to be fully spiritual, in order to glorify God and enjoy God forever. And that is what God calls us to.
That’s what distinguished the tenth leper from the other nine. He completed the transaction, he carried it all the way through to its purpose. He achieved what he was made for. He was restored not only to the positively physical, but also to the spiritual. He became a fully human being. He ended up giving thanks to God.
The word in Greek for his thanksgiving is "eucharist." We still use that word in the Christian tradition for the Prayer of Thanksgiving at Holy Communion, the climax of our service every week. It’s for Biblical reasons we do our service this way. It’s a similar process and transaction as in the story of the lepers.
It’s not coincidental that it’s ten lepers. Ten is what constitutes a minyan, in Jewish terms a quorum for prayer. They cry out with a Kyrie, Lord have mercy upon us. Jesus responds with his word, which is like the sermon. They believe him and go, which is implicitly a Creed, and they are made clean, which is an absolution. When the one returns, he kneels before Jesus and offers his thanksgiving, which is like Holy Communion. Jesus ends it with a benediction, "Rise up and go, your faith has saved you." In other words, "Go in peace."
When we come hee to worship every week, it’s not just to hear a nice sermon and some music, it is to go through a process, a transaction. We come here to cleanse what makes us guilty and ashamed, to refresh our spirituality, and to renew ourselves as fully human beings, in order to glorify God another week and to enjoy God another week.
To be a fully human being is to be able to thank God. It is both our privilege and obligation "always and everywhere to give thanks to God." This is one of the main themes of the Bible and it’s one I keep repeating at Old First. When I say thanksgiving, it’s not just happy feelings, I mean the art of thanksgiving, the work of it, the task and burden of thanksgiving, even in exile and ordeal.
It takes rehearsing, it takes training, it takes discipline and commitment. It changes the way you live your life. It changes the way you spend your time and how your spend your money.
The gospel claims that to be a fully human being is to be a thanksgiving-maker in the world, to be able to interpret the world as giving thanks to God.
And just that kind of life is a healing life, even when we get sick and die. "Holy and right it is, and our joyful duty, at all times and in all places, to give thanks to God." And it takes faith to be able to do this, because sometimes you just can’t see one thing that is good. It’s usually when we are looking back.
It took faith for St. Paul to be reconciled to the suffering of his imprisonment in Rome, when he so much loved to travel and engage the world and visit his congregations. He had to reconcile to his chains as enhancing his mission. He had to serve his missions from afar, like a mafia don in the penitentiary. He spent a lot more time in writing and in prayer.
Every human being has both a particular and a general mission. Your particular mission is your individual vocation, your calling in the world, for which you have your talents and your gifts. Your individual mission is your privilege and your obligation, both.
Some of you are very clear on what your particular mission is, but for most of you it’s not a specific definition but a broader field of possibilities. Some of us change vocations midstream, and some of us take years to settle on what we should do, or to accept it, and we struggle against it, but the process of acceptance is an important part of healing.
That healing often comes with choosing not to obey many voices in our heads, typically the voices of our parents or some other early influence, but rather heeding the voice of God in the present, from the Christian community, or from those we serve. That obedience is healing.
Your general mission is the same as every other human being, which is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. That’s what people are for. That is our common obligation and our privilege. In Biblical terms, to carry out that mission is to be a fully human beings, and in order to carry out that mission we are called to spiritual wholeness.
That leper was called into spiritual wholeness and he was called out of shame. That is the greatest healing that God offers, to bring us out of shame and guilt. We can be open, we can literally be out. We can stand before God and enjoy God. And that means we can be at home where we live, and at peace with the community. That is what God offers and expects.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
On Widows and Apologetics
I just had a little piece published in a theology magazine, under the title above. It's about how God seems to have set things up in such a way as to make God's self more credible to orphans, widows, and the poor than to intellectuals.
And I say a word of two about our desire for intellectual respect, which can be a kind of covetousness.
To get to the full journal, called Perspectives, go here: http://www.perspectivesjournal.org/index.html
There are some other worthwhile articles as well.
To get to my little essay, go here: http://www.perspectivesjournal.org/2007/10/seeit-widows.html
And I say a word of two about our desire for intellectual respect, which can be a kind of covetousness.
To get to the full journal, called Perspectives, go here: http://www.perspectivesjournal.org/index.html
There are some other worthwhile articles as well.
To get to my little essay, go here: http://www.perspectivesjournal.org/2007/10/seeit-widows.html
Babycoat
I love Julia Durgee's cartoon style, which is why I am happy to host her on this blog.
And this last one is my favorite. Because it's so real about the self-conscious, the zelf-bewustzijn in Dutch, the self-awarness that is often sharpest in the memory of dreams. I love her take on wimsy and how she touches what is just under the surface.
And I love how her drawing is essential to her little stories, and not a mere excuse for dialogue.
I don't want to say too much about this cartoon, because I should let it speak for itself, but it expresses for me the complexity of love. There is desire in it, humility, courage, grandiosity, childlikeness, great gift and great need. This is a Romantic cartoon in the classic Don Quixotic sense of High Romance.
And this last one is my favorite. Because it's so real about the self-conscious, the zelf-bewustzijn in Dutch, the self-awarness that is often sharpest in the memory of dreams. I love her take on wimsy and how she touches what is just under the surface.
And I love how her drawing is essential to her little stories, and not a mere excuse for dialogue.
I don't want to say too much about this cartoon, because I should let it speak for itself, but it expresses for me the complexity of love. There is desire in it, humility, courage, grandiosity, childlikeness, great gift and great need. This is a Romantic cartoon in the classic Don Quixotic sense of High Romance.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Sermon for October 7: Just Doing Our Job
Proper 22, Lamentations 1:1-6, Psalm 137, 2 Timothy 1:1-14, Luke 17:5-10
I get my hair cut at the Park Slope Barbers on Seventh Avenue. The barbers are three Italian brothers who are very entertaining plus one quiet Russian guy. They know who I am and what I do. The tall brother is Vito, and I was in Vito’s chair and Vito was telling me that on Sundays he and his wife don’t go to mass but they watch the TV preacher Joel Osteen, and isn’t he tremendous, and do I ever watch him? Vito, how am I going to watch him on a Sunday morning? And his brother Angelo says, Yeah, Vito, how’s he going to do that on a Sunday morning?
Actually I got off easy. Even if I were free on Sunday mornings I wouldn’t watch him. TV preachers don’t do anything for me. I have nothing against them, I’m sure they help some people, but I did tell Vito not to send Joel Osteen any money.
I just don’t need anyone telling me that if I have faith I can be healthier, wealthier, and happier. Of course I believe that believing is the best thing I can do for myself and that it promotes success, but the full story is that sometimes faith can actually increase our suffering. The epistle reminds us that it got St. Paul put in jail.
It’s a common theme in all religions, that goodness gets rewarded in the world. It’s common to humanity in general. That good comes out of good. Doing the right thing has benefits, and goodness has a payoff. You might not see it yourself, but sometime, somewhere, down the road, no good deed is unrewarded. Religions are systems of goodness and rewards for goodness.
But, then you get passages like Lamentations and Psalm 137, which mess it all up. The Book of the Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet is about the destruction of Jerusalem. You have heard of Nebudchadnezzar, the Emperor of Babylon. He demolished the Temple of Solomon, he devastated Jerusalem, he leveled its walls, and he ethnically cleansed Judea and carted them off to permanent exile in Babylon, which is modern day Iraq.
The Lamentations don’t deny that it was mostly their own fault, from the multitude of their transgressions. They understand that if goodness has its benefits, then the reverse is also true, that badness has its penalties. And they had been bad.
But still. Isn’t the goodness of God a greater goodness than our own? Isn’t God forgiving? God has forgiven us before. Don’t we believe that God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, that God does not deal with us after our sins nor reward us according to our iniquities? So why is God not merciful now?
And our children are not guilty, nor the orphans nor the widows, why should they suffer for the disobedience of the privileged and powerful? Even the remnant of those who are faithful to God have to suffer too, like everybody else. Is that fair? Jeremiah suffers for speaking up and then he still has to share the punishment like everybody else. Good grief, who needs it.
That’s why, in Babylon, by the rivers there, they hang up their harps. How can they sing the Lord’s songs in a strange land when so many of the Lord’s songs are about the Promised Land? How can they sing of the mercies of the Lord when those mercies have run out? So now what should we believe in? The gods and goddesses of Babylon we don’t want, so whom should we believe in? Where’s God now? Don’t tell us God is in our hearts. What about the world?
The message of the TV preachers is okay if you need to get your own life back on track. But it’s a message for the living room, and it doesn’t leave the house. It has little to say if you have to go to war, or march against a war, or if you have speak truth to power, or if you’re dealing with a loved one whose life is going from bad to worse, or if you’re a native Iraqi Christian and you’re caught between the Shiites and the Kurds, and your only option is exile. What can you believe in? Whom can you believe in? What can you expect from God?
The apostles asked Jesus to increase their faith. He answered with the opposite, decrease your faith. Make it small, very small. Concentrated, down to its kernel, its nucleus, get it nuclear. Not greater faith, but right faith. Not right in the sense that others are wrong and you should correct them, but right as right on target, right on the beam.
What’s important is not how much faith you have but in whom you put your faith, and if you know what it is God promises. Please understand that God actually doesn’t promise a lot of the promises floating around in popular religion.
In recent years I have been impressed at the remarkable level of theological ignorance on the part of otherwise sophisticated and educated people, both believers and non-believers. You can expect that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have only a sophomoric knowledge of religion, which permits their shallow arguments, but how come people who credit religion are also ignorant?
Is it an unintended consequence of the separation of church and state, so that theology has been removed from general education? Do we have an interest in keeping our religion superficial lest it put us out of synch with ordinary society or impinge on the conventional wisdom of the American way of life? Do we resist a deeper knowledge of God lest it threaten our own ideas of God? Or are we just plain lazy?
Now I do not mean to substitute "increase our knowledge" for "increase our faith." My point is that you need to know what God offers you and what God expects of you. Do you know what the promises of God really are? Do you have sufficient certainty what God is like?
No doubt sometimes what God expects from us seems as impossible as commanding a tree to be pulled up by its roots, and that what God offers us sometimes seems as useless as planting that tree in the sea. No doubt what God offers and expects is not always what we want.
And sometimes what God offers seems to have little reward. We do it because it’s right, but there isn’t much payoff. How are our lives better than anyone else’s? We all know non-believers who are wonderful people and we know some Christians who are, well, not very nice, so what’s the payoff in having faith?
Stacy Leigh keeps reminding me how much we are all conditioned by consumer religion, and we are tempted to be consumer Christians. What can the church do for me? What can God do for me? In this regard my own temptation is to try to offer back to consumer Christians what they want. How can I make this easy for you? How can I get you to buy it?
Well then, yes, the Christian faith is good for us. But even if it leads us to suffering it’s good for us. Of course, my own suffering has been minimal. But I wonder how much my fear of suffering keeps me from the greater riches of the faith? How much of my desire for recognition and for gratitude gets in the way of the profoundest pleasures of the faith? Of course, what God never says to us is "thank you." Yet it is very meet, right, and our bounden duty that at all times and everywhere we should give God thanks.
It’s one of the obligations of our church to be clear on who God is and what God expects and what God does not expect and what God promises and what God does not promise. These can be known, sufficiently, and it is helpful to know them. And to be reminded of them when we doubt them. Our congregation needs to be a community of sufficient knowledge and reinforcement.
But also this. The hard truth is the reason we have faith in God is that we are obliged to. It’s what we’re made for. Just as a tree is obliged to the sun, and a horse is obliged to run, and as a seed is obliged to lose itself in the earth and break open and sprout, so you are designed to live by your faith and you therefore are obliged to it. Faith in God is the obligation of our existence.. It’s also a privilege. By means of having faith we rise out of the flesh of merely animal existence. We become truly human beings. Your payoff is that you be a fully human being.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
I get my hair cut at the Park Slope Barbers on Seventh Avenue. The barbers are three Italian brothers who are very entertaining plus one quiet Russian guy. They know who I am and what I do. The tall brother is Vito, and I was in Vito’s chair and Vito was telling me that on Sundays he and his wife don’t go to mass but they watch the TV preacher Joel Osteen, and isn’t he tremendous, and do I ever watch him? Vito, how am I going to watch him on a Sunday morning? And his brother Angelo says, Yeah, Vito, how’s he going to do that on a Sunday morning?
Actually I got off easy. Even if I were free on Sunday mornings I wouldn’t watch him. TV preachers don’t do anything for me. I have nothing against them, I’m sure they help some people, but I did tell Vito not to send Joel Osteen any money.
I just don’t need anyone telling me that if I have faith I can be healthier, wealthier, and happier. Of course I believe that believing is the best thing I can do for myself and that it promotes success, but the full story is that sometimes faith can actually increase our suffering. The epistle reminds us that it got St. Paul put in jail.
It’s a common theme in all religions, that goodness gets rewarded in the world. It’s common to humanity in general. That good comes out of good. Doing the right thing has benefits, and goodness has a payoff. You might not see it yourself, but sometime, somewhere, down the road, no good deed is unrewarded. Religions are systems of goodness and rewards for goodness.
But, then you get passages like Lamentations and Psalm 137, which mess it all up. The Book of the Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet is about the destruction of Jerusalem. You have heard of Nebudchadnezzar, the Emperor of Babylon. He demolished the Temple of Solomon, he devastated Jerusalem, he leveled its walls, and he ethnically cleansed Judea and carted them off to permanent exile in Babylon, which is modern day Iraq.
The Lamentations don’t deny that it was mostly their own fault, from the multitude of their transgressions. They understand that if goodness has its benefits, then the reverse is also true, that badness has its penalties. And they had been bad.
But still. Isn’t the goodness of God a greater goodness than our own? Isn’t God forgiving? God has forgiven us before. Don’t we believe that God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, that God does not deal with us after our sins nor reward us according to our iniquities? So why is God not merciful now?
And our children are not guilty, nor the orphans nor the widows, why should they suffer for the disobedience of the privileged and powerful? Even the remnant of those who are faithful to God have to suffer too, like everybody else. Is that fair? Jeremiah suffers for speaking up and then he still has to share the punishment like everybody else. Good grief, who needs it.
That’s why, in Babylon, by the rivers there, they hang up their harps. How can they sing the Lord’s songs in a strange land when so many of the Lord’s songs are about the Promised Land? How can they sing of the mercies of the Lord when those mercies have run out? So now what should we believe in? The gods and goddesses of Babylon we don’t want, so whom should we believe in? Where’s God now? Don’t tell us God is in our hearts. What about the world?
The message of the TV preachers is okay if you need to get your own life back on track. But it’s a message for the living room, and it doesn’t leave the house. It has little to say if you have to go to war, or march against a war, or if you have speak truth to power, or if you’re dealing with a loved one whose life is going from bad to worse, or if you’re a native Iraqi Christian and you’re caught between the Shiites and the Kurds, and your only option is exile. What can you believe in? Whom can you believe in? What can you expect from God?
The apostles asked Jesus to increase their faith. He answered with the opposite, decrease your faith. Make it small, very small. Concentrated, down to its kernel, its nucleus, get it nuclear. Not greater faith, but right faith. Not right in the sense that others are wrong and you should correct them, but right as right on target, right on the beam.
What’s important is not how much faith you have but in whom you put your faith, and if you know what it is God promises. Please understand that God actually doesn’t promise a lot of the promises floating around in popular religion.
In recent years I have been impressed at the remarkable level of theological ignorance on the part of otherwise sophisticated and educated people, both believers and non-believers. You can expect that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have only a sophomoric knowledge of religion, which permits their shallow arguments, but how come people who credit religion are also ignorant?
Is it an unintended consequence of the separation of church and state, so that theology has been removed from general education? Do we have an interest in keeping our religion superficial lest it put us out of synch with ordinary society or impinge on the conventional wisdom of the American way of life? Do we resist a deeper knowledge of God lest it threaten our own ideas of God? Or are we just plain lazy?
Now I do not mean to substitute "increase our knowledge" for "increase our faith." My point is that you need to know what God offers you and what God expects of you. Do you know what the promises of God really are? Do you have sufficient certainty what God is like?
No doubt sometimes what God expects from us seems as impossible as commanding a tree to be pulled up by its roots, and that what God offers us sometimes seems as useless as planting that tree in the sea. No doubt what God offers and expects is not always what we want.
And sometimes what God offers seems to have little reward. We do it because it’s right, but there isn’t much payoff. How are our lives better than anyone else’s? We all know non-believers who are wonderful people and we know some Christians who are, well, not very nice, so what’s the payoff in having faith?
Stacy Leigh keeps reminding me how much we are all conditioned by consumer religion, and we are tempted to be consumer Christians. What can the church do for me? What can God do for me? In this regard my own temptation is to try to offer back to consumer Christians what they want. How can I make this easy for you? How can I get you to buy it?
Well then, yes, the Christian faith is good for us. But even if it leads us to suffering it’s good for us. Of course, my own suffering has been minimal. But I wonder how much my fear of suffering keeps me from the greater riches of the faith? How much of my desire for recognition and for gratitude gets in the way of the profoundest pleasures of the faith? Of course, what God never says to us is "thank you." Yet it is very meet, right, and our bounden duty that at all times and everywhere we should give God thanks.
It’s one of the obligations of our church to be clear on who God is and what God expects and what God does not expect and what God promises and what God does not promise. These can be known, sufficiently, and it is helpful to know them. And to be reminded of them when we doubt them. Our congregation needs to be a community of sufficient knowledge and reinforcement.
But also this. The hard truth is the reason we have faith in God is that we are obliged to. It’s what we’re made for. Just as a tree is obliged to the sun, and a horse is obliged to run, and as a seed is obliged to lose itself in the earth and break open and sprout, so you are designed to live by your faith and you therefore are obliged to it. Faith in God is the obligation of our existence.. It’s also a privilege. By means of having faith we rise out of the flesh of merely animal existence. We become truly human beings. Your payoff is that you be a fully human being.
Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Blackwater and Calvinist Considerations
Blackwater is the private security firm that's in the news. It's a private firm, privately owned, and today its owner, Erik Prince, is scheduled to appear before the House Oversight Committee.
Blackwater is a major donor to Calvin College, which I attended. Calvin is an avowedly Christian College, seeking to bring every aspect of cultural life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Calvin is the largest and most influential of all the colleges in the "Reformed" (or Calvinist) tradition in North America.
The Reformed tradition has never been pacifist like the Mennonites or Quakers. It has always discouraged war, but it has allowed that some wars can be "just wars." It shares this view with Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism.
There are a number of criteria for "just wars," criteria which our war in Iraq has never met, which is why the Pope opposed it from the outset. The various Reformed denominations in America, however, took no stand on it. Our American patriotism coupled with our fear of Terror trumped our historic "just war" criteria.
It strikes me that our continued presence in Iraq forces us to engage in practices that continue to violate "just war" principles, and the recent Blackwater killings are an example. While I have been impressed by the arguments, such as by General Petraeus, that a quick withdrawal from Iraq would be disastrous for everyone, it seems that our continued presence there requires us to keep violating "just war" principles. Can Christians of the Reformed persuasion support that we maintain this war, no matter what the outcome might be? Politically I can see the reasons, but morally I can't.
The fact that Blackwater takes civilian lives with impunity as part of its standard operating procedure, quite apart from any recent excesses, is a violation of "just war" principles.
In Reformed (and Lutheran and Catholic) thinking, because of human sin, the state is given the "power of the sword," and the state is required to have a monopoly on violence. The state is accountable for this monopoly. The state may not extend its monopoly on violence and the power of the sword to private persons or businesses-for-profit. And it may not do overseas what it may not do at home.
Our strategy in Iraq apparently runs counter to this. Because our armed forces are stretched so thin, we have to rely on private security forces to maintain our presence there. For the private security forces to be able to do their job, we have exempted them from the requirements of the law -- both Iraqi and American law. They have far more discretion for violence, and less accountability, than our own armed forces. They may kill Iraqi civilians with impunity, a privilege which we do not allow our soldiers and sailors. We have allowed Blackwater to operate outside of basic accountability for justice. (And we have denied the Iraqi government the monopoly on violence in their own land.) Apparently our situation leaves us little choice in this.
The further wrinkle is that Erik Prince is a major donor to the Republican party and to the Bush campaigns.
I am not at all suggesting that the owner of Blackwater donated to the Bush campaigns in order to be rewarded with contracts in Iraq. My guess is he supports and supported the President out of genuine conviction.
But we put ourselves in a very bad ethical situation when we grant the "power of the sword" to a private company which makes political donations. It sets up the temptation for the beneficiary of those donations to want to protect the donor. Not good. Neither for Iraqi civilians nor the American body politic. The awful right to commit violence in a just cause is a right in which the state has to maintain its monopoly, and those who bear the sword must have very high standards of training and accountability. Like among those who wear the uniforms of the Army and Navy, who serve whoever is President, whichever political party. The Armed Forces do not make political donations.
Postscript: Calvin College used to have the very strict principle of not naming buildings after donors. Its buildings were named after preachers, who only gave to the college through the collection plate. This has changed. Maybe the Board of Trustees had no choice, as the collection plate just no longer was adequate for the real expenses of a college. But now that one of its major complexes is "The Prince Center," will the college be able to project a stern Calvinistic scrutiny on the morals of the day?
Blackwater is a major donor to Calvin College, which I attended. Calvin is an avowedly Christian College, seeking to bring every aspect of cultural life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Calvin is the largest and most influential of all the colleges in the "Reformed" (or Calvinist) tradition in North America.
The Reformed tradition has never been pacifist like the Mennonites or Quakers. It has always discouraged war, but it has allowed that some wars can be "just wars." It shares this view with Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism.
There are a number of criteria for "just wars," criteria which our war in Iraq has never met, which is why the Pope opposed it from the outset. The various Reformed denominations in America, however, took no stand on it. Our American patriotism coupled with our fear of Terror trumped our historic "just war" criteria.
It strikes me that our continued presence in Iraq forces us to engage in practices that continue to violate "just war" principles, and the recent Blackwater killings are an example. While I have been impressed by the arguments, such as by General Petraeus, that a quick withdrawal from Iraq would be disastrous for everyone, it seems that our continued presence there requires us to keep violating "just war" principles. Can Christians of the Reformed persuasion support that we maintain this war, no matter what the outcome might be? Politically I can see the reasons, but morally I can't.
The fact that Blackwater takes civilian lives with impunity as part of its standard operating procedure, quite apart from any recent excesses, is a violation of "just war" principles.
In Reformed (and Lutheran and Catholic) thinking, because of human sin, the state is given the "power of the sword," and the state is required to have a monopoly on violence. The state is accountable for this monopoly. The state may not extend its monopoly on violence and the power of the sword to private persons or businesses-for-profit. And it may not do overseas what it may not do at home.
Our strategy in Iraq apparently runs counter to this. Because our armed forces are stretched so thin, we have to rely on private security forces to maintain our presence there. For the private security forces to be able to do their job, we have exempted them from the requirements of the law -- both Iraqi and American law. They have far more discretion for violence, and less accountability, than our own armed forces. They may kill Iraqi civilians with impunity, a privilege which we do not allow our soldiers and sailors. We have allowed Blackwater to operate outside of basic accountability for justice. (And we have denied the Iraqi government the monopoly on violence in their own land.) Apparently our situation leaves us little choice in this.
The further wrinkle is that Erik Prince is a major donor to the Republican party and to the Bush campaigns.
I am not at all suggesting that the owner of Blackwater donated to the Bush campaigns in order to be rewarded with contracts in Iraq. My guess is he supports and supported the President out of genuine conviction.
But we put ourselves in a very bad ethical situation when we grant the "power of the sword" to a private company which makes political donations. It sets up the temptation for the beneficiary of those donations to want to protect the donor. Not good. Neither for Iraqi civilians nor the American body politic. The awful right to commit violence in a just cause is a right in which the state has to maintain its monopoly, and those who bear the sword must have very high standards of training and accountability. Like among those who wear the uniforms of the Army and Navy, who serve whoever is President, whichever political party. The Armed Forces do not make political donations.
Postscript: Calvin College used to have the very strict principle of not naming buildings after donors. Its buildings were named after preachers, who only gave to the college through the collection plate. This has changed. Maybe the Board of Trustees had no choice, as the collection plate just no longer was adequate for the real expenses of a college. But now that one of its major complexes is "The Prince Center," will the college be able to project a stern Calvinistic scrutiny on the morals of the day?
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