Easter 2011: The Small Bang Theory

Rembrandt's Painting of Jesus and Mary Magdalene

Acts 10:34-43, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, Colossians 3:1-4, John 20:1-18

Welcome to Easter. I am glad that you are here. Members and friends, visitors, passers-by, whatever your belief or unbelief, Christian or not or something else, you are welcome here today. Easter is public, Easter is not church property, Easter is a gift of God to all of you, so it’s good for you to be here to receive this gift.


If Easter were church property we would have done it differently. We would have been keeping vigil at the tomb so we could witness the moment of his rising and watch him actually come out. We would have brought along some impartial witnesses and even some hostile witnesses, like those who were present at his crucifixion, who could substantiate our claims. We’d have him go show himself to the opposition, not just to his followers.

His followers did witness him alive again, and ate and drank with him, but they missed his actual rising, because none of them expected it. They didn’t believe it either, not at first. So I don’t blame you if you find it hard to believe. This belief at the center of the Christian faith is maybe the hardest to believe of our beliefs. And it raises questions which we cannot fully answer.

If Easter were church property we would have arranged it to answer the questions which it raises. We would have held on to him, like Mary Magdalene wanted to, and kept him close for observation. But he kept departing, and came back only for six Sundays, until forty days after his rising he ascended bodily into heaven. What does that mean? It’s not a problem if he’s purely a spirit, but his witnesses all claim that he rose again in his body, a real body, with real physicality. Well then, where in the real universe is his body now? What is he standing on? What does he eat? Who cuts his hair?

Such impossibilities have led some theologians to suspend their belief in his bodily resurrection, like suspending the writ of habeas corpus. They say that Jesus does live on, but spiritually, not bodily. Well, that’s just Plato. We didn’t need the gospels for that. That means that God did nothing really new and different in the world, and that there was no gift, just flowers and a card.

It takes some faith to receive this gift, to choose improbabilities, to choose a different wisdom than the wisdom of the world. It also requires your imagination: for you to imagine the new world generated by his resurrection, a new kind of life, a new kind of ethic, a new kind of wisdom, a new way of loving your enemies, a new way of imagining what God wants from you and what God wants for the world, a new way of imagining your own body and your soul.

When I say imagination I don’t mean like, “just my ’magination, runnin’ away with me.” I mean as the physicist Arno Penzias imagined the Big Bang from the background radiation picked up by his telescopes, as Albert Einstein imagined the theory of relativity from looking at the town clock in Zurich, as Copernicus imagined a heliocentric universe from the same celestial evidence that gave everyone else to believe the earth was at the center, and as our dancer today imagined a resurrection both spiritual and physical, with physical strength and physical speed. I mean that kind of imagination which leaps forward from the evidence to make real advances in the world.

We may imagine the resurrection as long as we do not presume to capture it. Some of our images are better than others. The gospels correct our images as much as they inspire them. That Mary Magdalene did not recognize him at first suggests there’s something new about him, but then she recognized his voice immediately, which suggests the same vocal cords. That evening he showed his followers the same hands and feet, with holes in them. So our images have to be of his having his very same body, but somehow transformed.

We’ve been trained to imagine him up there in heaven. This seems confirmed by our epistle, Colossians 3:1, which says, “Seek the things which are above, where Christ is.” But that word “above” in the original Greek is not υπερ but ανω. Which means above, not like straight up over us, but above the horizon, upward and forward, like the dawn, like the rising of the sun. Let yourself imagine Jesus in the future, already in the future. Imagine that his appearances to his followers on those six Sundays are his coming back from the future to enter into their time and space. The future he comes back from is the new heaven and earth, the new creation, which already is, a gift of God, a Promised Land, which waits for us.

If you watch the sky, it looks so obvious that the sun is moving through it over us. Copernicus had to imagine that the sun is still, and that our earth is turning toward it. Just so let yourself imagine the new creation as already there, where Jesus is, and that our time and history are turning toward it. We are approaching it because its light and energy are drawing us to it. That’s where Jesus is, already, in his resurrected body, the firstborn of the dead, not floating in the heavens, but standing on the pavement of the New Jerusalem, eating the food of the great celestial banquet. Imagine and believe that you too, when you die, will jump there forward, to join him in the final future, and join each other too, in the company of all those who have gone on before you, from death to enter into life.

This new creation started on that first Easter Sunday, inside the old creation, a new heaven and earth, within the old heaven and earth. This new creation was a small bang, not a big bang. It was only the size of a human body. Of course, even the Big Bang began quite small. Scientists suggest that the original singularity might have been no larger than a basketball, it just got very big very fast. We don’t know for sure, because no one was there to witness it. Arno Penzias had to imagine it from the extra radiation in the universe. If we had been there maybe we could answer many questions still outstanding, like the unsolved problems of dark matter and quantum gravity. Yet we believe in the Big Bang because we trust the scientists, and if it’s true it does explain a lot The resurrection is like that. You can believe in it, you can trust its witnesses, and if doesn’t explain everything it does explain a lot. Which questions are the ones that you want answered?

Easter is not church property. The gift was such a surprise to us because we did not see it as in our interest. We keep looking for confirmation of ourselves, and this gift offers transformation. We are bothered by guilt and fear and death, and we seek to be excused and preserved and kept alive. This gift does not excuse us, it rather judges us and forgives us and sets us free for love. This gift does not preserve us but it reconciles us and set us free for joy. This gift does not keep us alive, but it is in dying that we are born into eternal life.

That life is already born in you, a very small bang inside you. It comes from the future, here into your life right now, the future you that you will be, you can start already living here right now, in this world, living by the physics and the science and the laws of that new world. Already. Maybe you can’t see it directly, but you can sense the extra radiation in your life, the reverberations of reconciliation, the hints of healing, the counter-intuitive selflessness, the unfathomed forgiveness, the unlikely love, even in all the dark matter that remains. You can live your life right now by making the choices which anticipate the future that began on Easter. You cannot generate it on your own, it is a gift of God to you, but it will give you joy.

Dearly beloved, this gift is for you. I invite you to give your life to it and seek in it your transformation. I invite you to imagine your life as an example of its evidence and to make real on your images. I invite you to seek the signs of it in the people you deal with in the world around you. And I invite you, whatever your belief or doubt, simply to receive this gift for the joy of today, to take the pleasure of God’s love for you, to accept the privilege of God’s irrepressible and unfathomable love for you.


Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

April 10, Lent 5, Keys of the Kingdom: Opening Your Grave

Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45


Martha told Jesus that she believed that Lazarus would rise again on the last day. Martha and Mary and many Jews back then (except the Sadducees), believed in a resurrection like in Ezekiel 37. This vision of Ezekiel is the first suggestion of resurrection in the Bible, and it comes late, from the time of the Exile, when the Jews had been carried into exile by the Babylonians.

The Old Testament has no interest in the afterlife. It rejects the fixation on immortality that it saw in Egypt, with its pyramids and mummies and treasure chambers for the dead. Not once does the Torah mention the immortality of the soul and not one prophet suggests that your soul goes to heaven after you die. The Israelites believed that when your body died, your soul did too, and then nothing but a passive shadow of yourself went down to Sheol, where it wasted away until the last of your loved ones died, and then even your shadow ceased existence altogether.

The hope of Israel was not for heaven, but for the Promised Land, the land, the land, the land. Not immortality in heaven, but generations of their descendants enjoying their inheritance, sitting under the fig trees they had planted, keeping their names alive throughout the generations. Not immortality in heaven, but to live in comfort and die in peace in the literal Kingdom of God.

So the exile to Babylon was a theological catastrophe. To be removed from the Promised Land was a contradiction of their faith in God. An answer to this catastrophic contradiction was the vision of Ezekiel. The vision was a metaphor of returning to the Promised Land and the restoration of the population in the Promised Land. But the metaphor was so graphic and so powerful that it took on added meaning by the time of Mary and Martha. They believed that one day in the future, every Jew who ever lived would rise again bodily from the dead, and finally get the life that they were promised in the Promised Land. Like being born again. That’s the resurrection that Martha believed in for her brother Lazarus. Some day.

But Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Here and now, when you listen to his voice. You live right now the life you hope to live some day. The Kingdom of God is here with him, right now. Listen to him, and be born again into it right now. Lazarus was dead, but listened to him, and was born again. Like the beggar born blind. Like the woman at the well.

His voice is the key. His voice unlocks the door of the grave. But even with the door unlocked, how can a dead corpse have the energy to hear the voice of Jesus and obey it? His voice conveys the power you need to listen to his voice. His voice is the key that ignites the life it opens up. We have his voice today. We hear it every week, right here, in different voices but a single voice. Just listen to that voice and let it generate new life in you. Listen to it even silently at home. The voice will come through, to open you and to energize the new life that is in you.

For the last few weeks I have been saying that there are two of you, that you simultaneously live two lives, your old nature and your new nature, the old you dying-away and the new you coming-to-life. Your two natures are as distinct as life and death but also are inseparable as life and death. They are both in everything you think and do. Your new you has to deal with your old you all the time. Much of the virtue of your new you is precisely in how you deal with your old you. Much of the joy of your new you is in dealing with the misery of your old you.

I am inviting you to believe that there is a new you rising in you by the gift of the Holy Spirit. But the old you still remains a part of you. You can’t just discard your old nature. You know the Bible never uses the metaphor of a butterfly for being born again, as if you leave the caterpillar behind and fly away. Your old nature remains a part of you, for your new nature to deal with, to process, and to forgive. Contending with your old nature is one of the good works of your new nature. Some Christians suggest that the new life in Christ is free and pure and happy and victorious. So when you feel your old self still so much in you, you start to doubt your faith, you doubt your salvation, you doubt the promises of God. You get cast down into the depths, like Psalm 130. What’s wrong with me, that my old self is still so strong in me?

One of the chief good works of your new nature is to keep on loving your old nature, even though it has to die away. It was for love that Jesus wept. The people saw him weep and said, “See how much he loved him.” Jesus wept for the death of Lazarus even though he knew that he would raise him from the dead. Jesus loved the old life of his friend, even though it had to die.

During the ten years of my ministry here I’ve made mistakes and done dumb things and hurt some people and had conflicts I should not have had. There are people who when I see them on the sidewalk, I feel myself turn red, and I think, boy did I blow that one. My old nature clings to me, and I often myself getting wrapped up in my grief and guilt.

And then I have to listen to the voice of Jesus when he says, Come out. I have to believe in my own resurrection, already, I have to believe in the new life that is in me. My new nature has to forgive my old nature, seven times, seventy times seven times, because of God forgiving me. Not excuse myself, not justify myself, but forgive myself in Jesus’ name, to unwrap myself from the negative power of what I’ve done, and to live within the positive power of the life which God is opening up to me. I have to believe in my new life in Christ. I don’t believe in my old life, and I do grieve it, but I can love it. Not to try to keep it alive, but as I love a dying relative.

I believe that part of the power of my new nature is for loving my old nature. Not liking it, but loving it. Not indulging it, not protecting it, but staying with it, working with it, engaging it. Sometimes it’s like there is a war in you, you have a lover’s quarrel going on inside you, but you still have to love the one that you are quarreling with. Faithfully dealing with your old nature is one of most important good works that your new nature does in the world.

Here’s a take home: One of the most important good works of your new life in Christ is to love the old and dying nature that lives on in you. Some of the most important forgiving that you do is to forgive the sin and guilt that lives on in you.

The fruit of this is that as you deal with your old nature, so you will deal with other people, so you will deal with all the pain and suffering and ugliness that is out there in the world. Also this: if you love it your old nature, you can let other people help you deal with it, you can let the Christian community help you unwrap yourself. Jesus told the community to unwrap Lazarus, it’s part of the sign, it’s an image of what the community of saints must do for each other. Your new life is not your life alone, it’s in community and for community. You don’t offer the community just your best self, just your new nature, you also offer it your old nature, not to be defended and preserved, but to be touched and loved and wept for and helped to die. And in return, to have to keep on forgiving the old natures of others in the community does not prevent your believing in their new natures too.

When at last you die, what dies is your old nature. Your new nature will live on. In the mind of God the new you is already living in the new heaven and new earth. The world of time and space may take some time to get there, but the mystery of the resurrection is that, in Christ, you are already there, where there are not two of you but one of you, simple and single, in body and soul, to live with integrity and internal harmony and love. It is be the victory of love, and we have that victory already.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

April 3, Lent 4, Keys of the Kingdom: Opening Your Eyes

1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9

I have good news and bad news. Well, actually it’s good news and good news. It’s all good news, it’s bad news only if you don’t take the good news as good. That’s how it is with the judgment of God. The judgment of God is always good. There is a single judgment. God does not have one judgment which is merciful and another judgment which condemns. The single judgment of God is good if you accept it, but if you refuse it, then you condemn yourself by it. When we confess that Jesus, in heaven, judges the world, it’s not that he is approving this and condemning that, rewarding this and sending down some punishment for that, like Zeus or Jupiter. The judgment of Jesus is right down here with us, it is public and open and laid out clearly for us in the gospel. The gospel is the public judgment of the world, and as we read it and hear it and respond to it, we judge ourselves by it. It’s not just for the end, it’s for everyday. It’s not a final doom, it is a daily gift. As it judges us, it opens up to us the kingdom of God. If you accept the judgment, the gate swings open, and you enter the kingdom, and you look around and you see that you were in it all the time. If you don’t accept it, it means you can not see the kingdom of God. You’ve built a wall around yourself, a shell, a dome of hardness like the hardness of your heart, a fortress, and you look out through your periscope. Your vision is sharp, but narrow, and without perspective. All you see is what you’re looking for, and you miss the signs you are not looking for. The kingdom is closed to you if you don’t want it. Why wouldn’t anybody want it? Fear of exposure? Fear of looking weak? Fear of needing help? Fear of other people disappointing you and failing you, of the community not being a community of saints? Fear of admitting how helpless you are? How hard you’ve worked to get to where you are; you protect your achievements and accomplishments, your convictions and commitments, you protect the control you think you have. So you say, “No thanks, I’m fine. I don’t need it. I’ve got it.” I hear myself say that all the time. The advantage of the beggar was that he knew he needed help. The beggar knew that he was powerless to help himself. So, as helpless as a baby, he is being born again. Like a newborn, he is learning to see the world without control of what he’s looking at. Like a newborn, things happen to him; he doesn’t do things, but he learns to see from what is done to him. We watch him gain insight and perspective, and how to read the signs. He can see his parents now. He’s always known how his parents sound and smell, but he can see them now and he learns the signs of fear upon their faces, their fear of being tossed out of the synagogue. He watches the Pharisees. Their confidence in knowing what God wants, their vision of how to get the kingdom of God to come back, the hardness of their faces, and their judgment against this sign from Jesus, a sign of healing which points away from their vision of the world. He sees the anger of the Judean elders. They fear the synagogue’s disruption. They fear the insurgency of Jesus, like the insurgency of David which Samuel ignited against King Saul. The elders have worked it between Moses and the Romans, they saw it as the best that they could get, they saw themselves as realists, and their vision of the world was pessimistic and defensive. In anger and fear they judge against the sign of a new world in their midst. The beggar is thrown out. He’s been judged and condemned. He’s gained his sight but lost his place. He’s in a crisis now. (To be born again is not all peaches and cream.) And where is Jesus in all this? Out of sight, off stage. That is how it is with Jesus, in our lives as well. Whatever he might have done for you, you cannot prove that it was him. You can argue it away, what he does for us. Especially if his doing is beyond the scope of your expectation, outside the perspective of what you’re looking for. Your periscope is focused very sharp, but you cannot see around you or behind you. The beggar is cast out, we find him out back in the alley, downcast, tempted to prefer the old familiar darkness. Jesus comes to find him. Of course he isn’t recognized, the beggar hasn’t ever seen him yet. Jesus speaks to him, but with an unexpected question. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Why that question, why that specific title for himself? From the prophecy of Daniel 7, the vision of “one like a Son of Man,” lifted up to heaven to share with God the judgment of the nations and the government of the world. What does that heavenly and global vision have to do with this poor beggar here in the alley? The beggar says, “Who is he?” Jesus says, “You’re looking at him.” The beggar says, “I believe you.” That must make sense of everything, because he worships him, and Jesus accepts it. Who does Jesus think he is? Rather an exalted view of his own identity. It looks for all the world like he’s just another Jewish rabbi in an alley in Jerusalem, but the vision we’re offered is that the Kingdom of God has come, on earth as it is in heaven, and that the beggar is in it, and he can start to see it, and he can see the world around him in terms of the Messiah, the Son of Man. The irony is that the Pharisees and the elders of the synagogue are in the Kingdom too, but they choose not to see it and they are in the dark. They have made their judgments and they will keep them. They judged who was wrong and who was right, who was the sinner and who was not, who was at fault and who can be assigned the blame. That’s the way we judge each other all the time, in order to justify our own decisions and desired actions, to justify our preferences and prejudice and how we see the world. Jesus does not judge like this. He is not interested in who sinned, the beggar or his parents. His interest is in what we do with what we see. You will say, “That depends on what I see.” And because of our inclination to see only what we’re looking for, and because we need to own up to our helplessness, we need the good news to help us see the good news. Does that sound circular? How about this: You can see the world correctly if you see it in terms of Jesus as the Son of Man. I mean that you can see the world accurately if you look at it in terms of Jesus judging it. I mean that you can regard the world with hope if you see it in terms of Jesus calling it to where he wants to take it. I mean that you cannot see the world accurately unless you look at it in terms of Jesus as the Son of Man. You have constantly to correct your vision. You have always to look for signs of Jesus in the world. One reason you come to church is to learn the signs of Jesus here in order to discern the signs of Jesus in the world. You learn to see the world as God sees it. You could see the world as dangerous and fearful; it shows itself as painful and alienating, and it touches your own pain and alienation inside you, encased within the iron chest of your anger and your fear. Your own insides tell you that your vision of the world is sharp and accurate. But if you worship Jesus as the Son of Man, like a beggar, needing help, in the wisdom of your helplessness for your own life, his judgment of the world is the judgment of you, which is the key that opens up that iron box. He reaches in, and holds your pain in his hand, and on your angry alienation he puts his spit and mud to humble you and soften you. You hold your breath, and then you give in. You couldn’t see him do it, because it was inside you, but you can feel the signs of Jesus in your life, and you can look for the signs of Jesus in the world. Even when the world is dark, you can see into it, because the light you need to see it with is shining out from your own face, not a light you need to generate yourself, but the light of Christ reflected off your face. In his light you see light. And you can find his signs in the world. You can go out into the world, as it says in Ephesians 5:10, and “find what is pleasing to the Lord.” It’s like learning to see, it’s like being born again into the world. “Wake up, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

March 20, Lent 2; The Keys of the Kingdom: Opening the Border

Genesis 12:1-4a, Psalm 121, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17


I want you to use your imagination. Imagine that on a clear day, you’re high up in the air, and you’re looking out over a great wide landscape, of farms and roads and villages and a city or two. But there you see a round valley, maybe a couple miles across, not very deep, a shallow depression in the landscape. The valley has its own towns and farms and such. Then notice there’s the circle of a wall around it, just below the rim of the valley, and the wall is just high enough to block the sight from inside of the land outside.

You zoom in closer. You notice that the wall is painted with scenery, lifelike, like a movie set, so that it doesn’t look like a wall, but like you’re looking out into the wider world. Imagine now that you were born in this valley and that you live in it. It’s all you know. You can’t see the world outside. In the wall there is a single gate. And in the gate there is an iron door. The door is locked. You cannot open it. You do not have a key. You are locked inside this valley, this depression, although you are so used to it you think it’s all the world. You have never seen the great outside, you cannot even imagine it.

The world outside is the Kingdom of God. Jesus says, “You cannot enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the spirit.” What does that mean, “born of water and the spirit?” Jesus says, “You cannot even see the Kingdom of God without being born from above?” What does that mean, “born from above”? Or does Jesus mean “born again”? His Greek words are ambiguous, they could mean “born from above,” or “born again.” Either way, what does he mean? He speaks in puzzling metaphors.

Nicodemus cannot track what Jesus means. After his third question he falls silent, like he can’t stay in the conversation. What could Jesus mean? Even for us, it takes the whole remainder of the gospel of John to track what Jesus says, because Jesus will work on these metaphors all the way through chapter 21.

I can tell you this. The Kingdom of God is right here, it’s not a far off country, which you have to journey far to go to, like Abram had to do. The Kingdom of God is not distant up in heaven or far off in the future, that you have to die first to get there. The Kingdom of God is right here, all around us, only you can’t see it from the perspective of the world, which is all closed in on itself. You can’t see it unless you are already out in it You have to enter it to see it, and you have to be born again to enter it.

Nicodemus was looking for it but he couldn’t see it. He spend his whole life working for it but he could not enter it. Nicodemus was a scholar and a politician, and a member of the council of Judea. His political party was the Pharisees, which, like most Middle Eastern political parties, was both political and theological. The Pharisees were looking for the political restoration of the Kingdom of God in Judea, and the removal of the Romans. The Pharisees believed that the Romans were in power because God was angry at the Judeans and therefore had abandoned them. The Pharisees believed that the way to get God to forgive them and come back was for every last Judean to be scrupulously righteous, which perfect righteousness would win them God’s forgiveness, and bring God back, and the Messiah would come and kick the Romans out like David did to Philistines, and take the throne David, and the Glory would come back to the Temple and the Kingdom of God would be reality.

But the political party in power was the Sadducees, and they were in the way. The Sadducees were the limousine liberals. They controlled the temple and had worked it out with the Romans. The Pharisees hated the Sadducees. So when Nicodemus saw Jesus cleanse the Temple, which is in the previous chapter of John, which was an insult to the Sadducees, Nicodemus thinks it’s time to go under cover of the night and make an alliance with this new guy.

He’s diplomatic in his opening, and Jesus comes back at him like this. “You want the Kingdom of God? You don’t even know what you’re looking at. You couldn’t even enter it, you of all people who assume you have the right to it, just by virtue of your birth. Nope, you’d have to be born all over again.” Jesus is saying that the issue is not the Sadducees or the Romans, the issue is yourself, Nicodemus. The Kingdom of God is already here, indeed, it’s sitting right across from you, only you can’t see it, the Kingdom of God is already here, only you can’t enter it, unless you deal with the issue of yourself.

So what’s the key, and what’s the gate, and what’s the wall? The wall is inside you. The border of the Kingdom of God is inside you. It’s not out there. The Kingdom of God reaches into you, but you have a wall against it, a wall that’s built of fear, like all encircling walls. So what are you afraid of? You do have much to be afraid of. If you look at the scenery on your wall, you can see what you’re afraid of. What people might do to you, based on your real experience. The dangers out there you are painfully aware of. Or how you might end up if things go on like this. The mistakes you’ve made that you might repeat, the mistakes that you are paying for.

The gate is guilt, a bastion of great strength, which we have talked about at other times. And the iron door is unbelief. And the key, the key is belief, according to John 3:15&16. But unbelief is closer and tighter and safer and easier. But your belief will open the iron door into the world, the whole world, which is your proper inheritance, according to Romans 4:13, the whole world as the territory of the Kingdom of God.

So what’s belief? What is it to believe? Well, you can believe in Jesus as the Messiah, and the kind of life he offers. Start there. And you can believe in the promises of God he offers, the promises we summarize in the Apostles Creed. We often say that we believe the Apostles Creed, but actually the Creed is a shortcut. It’s the promises of God we believe in, of which the Creed is the summary. Here’s a take home. If someone asks you, what do Christian believe in? You can say, we believe in the promises of God which Jesus has offered us. What Christians believe in is the promises of God that Jesus offers us. If you ask me what I believe, I can say that it’s not in ideas about God but promises from God which Jesus has conveyed to us. The key is belief, and the lock is the promises, and when the door swings open it lets you out to find your place in the world.

You can also believe in something about yourself. You can believe there is another you. There’s the you that lives on one side of the wall and the you that lives on the other. When you are baptized you become a dual citizen, it’s like being born again in another country, so that you are a citizen there as well. And you have to grow up into it, and it takes time. It’s not like you immigrated into it as an adult, but that you came into it like a newborn baby, and you have to learn it from the ground up like a child.

You know the old you, you know it so well, and, for all the grief you cause yourself, you love yourself. You don’t know the new you near as well, but you can believe in it, you can believe the promise that the Holy Spirit has given birth to it in you. You can live into your new self, even as your old self is still with you. And you can even love that old self, that old troubling self. You regard your old and sinful self not in hatred but in love. Because the kind of people who live out there in the Kingdom of God are people who have learned to love even the unlovely, as God so loved the world.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Lent 1, March 13: The Keys of the Kingdom: Unlocking Satan's Riddles

Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 83.
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11

The serpent in the garden is not evil by nature. The serpent is innocent until we give it power, until we believe it. The serpent gives voice to the attraction of the world, to the allure of nature, to the mystique of our desires and the seduction of our potentials. Our appetites distract us from the special devotion of our species to God, our flesh diverts us from the obedience to God which comes with the special station of Homo sapiens on the earth. The voice confuses good and evil. The voice makes a riddle of our meaning in the world and of our relationship to God.

The Genesis story is always true. It’s a paradigm story, we repeat it all the time. In the Garden the voice was a serpent, today it is the good life, or economic growth, or the best for our children, whatever. It is attractive and reasonable. It never actually lies; it just never tells the whole truth. It speaks for the wisdom of the world, and for the certainties of experience, and for social science in the expertise of its small capacity. You can never answer this voice from within the world. The Genesis story is always true: from our life within the world we keep failing to solve the riddles of our existence and the riddle of good and evil. The only way to solve these riddles is from a perspective from outside the world but which still includes it, the perspective of the Kingdom of Heaven. The keys of the Kingdom unlock the riddles of good and evil in the world.

Our gospel lesson takes place just after Jesus’ baptism, just after he heard the voice from heaven call him the Son of God. That title confirmed him as the Messiah, the heir of David, the rightful King of the Jews in whose reign the Living God would come again and dwell with them. Okay, so now what? Do it like David? Like Alexander the Great? Solomon began his reign by going on retreat to a lovely place to seek the will of God. Jesus went into the desert to fast and pray. More like Moses and Elijah.


His temptations are not three easy choices. The hardest temptations are not the ones to do what’s clearly evil, but to choose the wrong good, which might be good by other rules. The devil dares him, “If you’re the Son of God, then act like it. Shouldn’t you be doing miracles? Back in the Exodus, didn’t your Father make bread in the wilderness? If you saw 5000 hungry people and you had on hand only five loaves and two fishes, wouldn’t you do a miracle?” Your followers will pray to you for help when they are suffering. Wouldn’t you use your power to help them?

Jesus is determining the policies of his Kingdom. Yes, he will do miracles but not to save himself or win his people’s loyalty. He will prove himself in the world not by breaking the laws of nature but by simple obedience, by faithfulness to the Word of God, even at great cost. Jesus’ perfection is a moral perfection—not in being a superman or invulnerable, but in his faithfulness to the Word of God. He believes that the Word of God is the moral diet of ordinary human beings. That’s the first key of his kingdom, the key that is the word of God, which opens many riddles in the world, by which we know what’s good and evil in the world, which opens the mysteries of our own lives and our experience.

But opening this riddle leads right to another. Satan says, “Oh, ‘every’ word of God? Well, how about this one: it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you.’ Live by that word, Jesus, abandon yourself to God’s incredible promises, I dare you. Why aren’t you jumping? Do you doubt the promise of your Father to rescue you?” Where is your God? Where is your faith?

The riddle uses scripture, but it’s a trick. This is not a true-to-life example of how we have to put our trust in God. It’s not for getting rescued whenever we’re in a scrape or for having a nice and easy life. To use our tie with God to play with God for a comfort of our own is “tempting God,” as Jesus calls it here. The special care of God for us is for the purpose of enhancing our mission. God’s special care for us is our incentive to risk a life of love and service, which love and service will probably lead to what, from the perspective of the world, might look like an increase in our suffering. The purpose of God’s special care for us is to get us through the suffering that comes with our mission, not to keep us comfortable.

Jesus does not accept this dare, this artificial test. But three years later, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he will pass an even harder test in this same subject. He will take the test upon the cross, he will have to enter the cold, dark door of death as if it’s his Father’s warm and loving care. He will trust in a silent and distant God without resorting to the supernatural. He will submit to all that we endure, and he will ask no miracle of God to free him from the burden of ordinary human existence. Because he has a key—the key that God’s will for us contains God’s care for us, and that God’s care for us does not exempt us from the realities of our humanity, but gets us through the realities of our humanity for the sake of our mission and to do God’s will.

Unlocking the second riddle leads you to the third. “Okay, so you’re not going to resort to any special power, you’re going to accept your limitations and be righteous within them. That means you’re going to lose. Our side has the power, we are in control. We will beat you, we will bury you. So be realistic and make your peace with the powers of the world. I’ll even make you Number Two, I’ll let you run the whole thing. You can save your people just like Joseph did in Egypt when he was Number Two. It’s Biblical. I’ll be Pharaoh, you be Joseph.”

The voice that every single politician listens to. The voice of the powers and principalities that tell you they control the world. In the Bible, the devil is not a voice from hell, he doesn’t even live in hell (that will be the place of his punishment). The devil dwells on the surface of the ground, like the serpent in the Garden, but the original innocence of the serpent has been corrupted by all the human evil since Adam.

The voice now has the pride of its misery, it has sophisticated doubt and well-developed deconstruction, it has angry ingenuity and bitter independence. It seems more real, while obedience is less glamourous, less heroic, less cool. It feels that way to me. I don’t want to be out of it with the world. I want to fit in. I want to enjoy it, I want to be included.

The third key is to worship God. To honor God and pledge to God your absolute loyalty, to confess your other loyalties and be released from them. The worship of God is not just praise, but also the of confession and absolution. This key unlocks so much. Because you have riddles in your life that Adam did not have, the riddle of your guilt, the problem we hold up high in Lent. Look, we have just read the Sermon on the Mount, and heard the teachings of Jesus, and we’ve had described the way of life that we must live inside the Kingdom of Heaven, and we recognize that we fall short, and we confess our guilt. And even by the standards of the ordinary world you feel your guilt. Your guilt and frustration can drive you to even greater doubt and unbelief than if you’d never heard of God. The voice of the serpent is most powerful when it reminds you of the truth of your guilt, as the problem you cannot solve. But it’s not the whole truth.

The whole truth is only known from the news that comes beyond the world, the good news that Jesus not only taught us but also suffered for our redemption and forgiveness. The weekly promise of the gospel is the theme of our worship, the key that unlocks this riddle to open the mystery of grace in our own lives, the mystery of Christ in our place, the mystery of lavish love, the mystery of the world that finds its meaning and its truth in the love of God which overcomes the world.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

February 27, Proper 3, "I Just Want to Do God's Will"

Isaiah 49:8-16, Psalm 131, 1 Corinthians 4:1-5, Matthew 6:24-34

Why did you come here today? What do you want? I know what I want. I just want to do God’s will. More or less. Oh, and in ten years or so I’d like to have safe and secure retirement. I’d like to not worry about anything. And I’d also like to live a long life. "Longevity has its place."

What do you want? Personal health and happiness. Well-being. How do you get it? Can you guarantee a good life for yourself? A good job? Good pay? Good benefits? A good pension? Good investments? Home ownership? This is the kind of wealth that Jesus means in verse 24, what “mammon” means in the old translations. Not the wealth of the rich but ordinary people who are planning their finances to insure their security and their comfort. Of people like me.

So I am challenged by this gospel no less than I am comforted by it. As usual. It always does both simultaneously, it comforts and it challenges. It challenges my strategies for my comfort. It questions my patterns of control. How much can I really control my life? Who is in control? What of my life should I surrender my control of? And to whom? Do I dare surrender some of my control to you, the Christian community, this village in the Kingdom of Heaven, when I think I know more than you do? Do I surrender my control to God, when I can see so much evidence that while God may feed the birds of the air there are millions of people who are underfed.

“Do not worry about anything.” Telling an anxious person not to be anxious is useless. Telling a hungry person that God feeds the birds is an insult. Think how challenging this was to Jesus’ initial audience. Someone who’s got to go home after this and find some food for her kids, or cook a meal for her mother-in-law, or take out another loan to buy seed for this year’s crops.

There’s a lot of surplus in this gospel. There’s a lot left unresolved by what Jesus says. You could extend his metaphors to contradict him. You could find lots of examples to counter him and easily offer reasons to dispute him. Which would be pleasing because it would keep you in control. You protect yourself and your way of life against the challenge that Jesus offers here.

You need to consider this gospel as an invitation. Jesus invites you to come inside his kingdom. He invites you to live inside this village with its way of life. He invites you to the choice of serving God. You will accept his invitation, and then you will be tempted to think you can serve God and also keep control of your own security and comfort, but you’ll find you can’t do both, you’ll hate the one and not the other, and so to accept his invitation to live inside his kingdom means you have to look at your own wealth, your own middle class wealth, as like birdseed, and your security as like wildflowers, which flourish and are gone, and your comfort as nothing you own but as a mystery of which you are a steward, your own life as not your own but as a mystery you are a steward of. Do you want that? Can you abide that? That’s what it means to live inside this kingdom, that is the lifestyle of this village. He’s inviting you to make his Kingdom the priority of your life, the medium through which you get your other benefits, the medium of all your pleasures and your comforts and even your security.

Yes, choose it, yes, accept the invitation. You will find here glories and pleasures that are closed off to you when you seek your comfort on your own. You will find freedoms and liberties from which you are excluded when you seek your own control. All these things will be added unto you when you seek first the kingdom, and its righteousness. Not the things you wanted from on the outside, but the things you learn of from the inside, as the kingdom has its way with you, and you learn the lay the promised land, and you learn to speak its dialect, and you learn to use its currency. “Oh, these are the benefits of its citizenship. I didn’t know. But now I see.”

The old translation was better. Not “strive for the kingdom,” that’s not what the Greek word means, but “seek the kingdom,” seek it out, seek to find, like hide and seek, seek to see, to notice and discover. It’s not about striving and exertion, it’s about seeing and receiving, or finding and learning, it’s not about achieving but giving in, surrendering, coming in from the cold, coming in like an immigrant, a refugee, except that the frontier is in yourself, because this kingdom claims the whole territory of the world. The kingdom of heaven is come on earth, can you see it? Be as humble as a sparrow to receive it, and as free.

There’s a further invitation here as well. Not just to enter it, but to exhibit it. To serve it, to share it, to develop it, to flourish within it. Jesus calls us not to passivity but to activity, activity free from anxiety because it is free from our own self-control, it is free from anxiety because we acknowledge that our own lives are mysteries even to ourselves, and yet that we are stewards of the mysteries of our lives which are fully known to God, which means we can rest in his Lordship and control, and live our lives in freedom and creativity and beauty. In doing his will.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. We pray that every day. The Lord’s Prayer comes in Matthew 6, just a few verses before the gospel we read today. The Lord’s Prayer is at the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, it’s the high point that it rises to and comes down from. Our gospel lesson is an implication and application of the prayer. You can pray the prayer because your Father in heaven knows you need these things. The birds get their daily food from God, so Give us this day our daily bread. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, so that we not be anxious about anything. You can manage to live the sermon by praying the prayer.

You pray the prayer to live the sermon, because living it means depending so on God, and God invites your dependence. God tells you that if you accept the invitation to live this way, God will supply you with what you need to do it. It will not be what the world thinks you need, and you will hear voices that tempt you to those other sorts of comfort and control, but God will be with you as you pray the prayer. The Lord’s Prayer is the mountaintop of the sermon on the mount. When you pray that prayer, you can open your eyes, and look out on the promised land like Moses did, when you’re praying that prayer you can see the kingdom you are seeking.

So here’s the take home. To seek the kingdom is to do God’s will. To do God’s will is to see what God is doing and to do it too. To see God’s will is to learn the kingdom, and to learn the kingdom is to find out what God’s will is. God’s will is a whole way of life, a way of living in a village, a community of Jesus, which gives witness and healing to the community around it. To seek the kingdom is to see what God is doing and to do it too. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

[From MLK’s last speech:] “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Renewing the Chandelier

Old First has this magnificent chandelier. We lowered it a couple weeks ago (a complicated process requiring steel cables, a geared windlass, and a number of ropes) in order to clean it and change the bulbs. Then we built scaffolding around it in order to reach its higher parts. Working in these pictures are Michael, Daniel, Rachel, William, and Christina. Photos are by William and Michael.

February 20, Proper 2, Gleaning, Love, and Deacons

Note: This sermon speaks of two men, who because of my wife, became very important in my life. They were flawed, but yet better men than me. I loved them and they loved me, for which I will be always grateful.

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18, Psalm 119:33-40, 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23, Matthew 5:38-48

My father-in-law Phillip Takken died five years and five days ago in Hudsonville, Michigan. I loved him and he loved me, though he blamed me for his daughter liking to live in Brooklyn. His life’s work was a baby clothes factory in Grand Rapids. He wasn’t the owner, but he was the vice president in charge of production, and over thirty years he brought that factory from twenty operators to four hundred. He didn’t like labor unions, so he gave his employees better conditions and benefits than a union could bargain for. He gave jobs to Viet Nam refugees, and they worked hard for him. He got licenses from the Smurfs and Disney and the NFL and they churned out the sleepers and pajamas by the truckload. One day the owners informed him that they had sold the factory to a conglomerate. A few weeks later he was told the factory was being closed down. They had been bought to get their licenses and then be taken out of production. My father-in-law had to lay off every one of the four hundred workers he had hired over the years and close down the production he had given his life to. The owners walked away with buckets of money. My father-in-law prized loyalty, and he said, “Well, it’s all about the bottom line.”

But in the kingdom of heaven that’s not the bottom line. It’s a top line, it’s a superficial line, it’s a line in the breeze, it’s the conventional wisdom. It’s not the wisdom of God nor the law of God. The real bottom line is the love of neighbor as yourself. I don’t mean love as feeling or affection but actions and practices, even when they cost you or reduce your profits.

Jesus is not talking about charity or generosity. Those things are great, but they are voluntary. He’s talking about something obligatory. It’s obligatory not as a burden but as an attitude in tune with the very deep structures of creation as God designed it. The other mammals have the bottom lines of their appetites or their rank within the herd or their survival. But to choose against your natural appetites and your self-interest in order to love your neighbor is what makes you a human being as God designed you. That’s not charity, that’s actually in keeping with the hard realities of the world, although we keep fooling ourselves against it with our pretended wisdom of the world.

My father-in-law’s father-in-law, that is, my wife’s maternal grandfather, Gerrit Boldt, was a very successful farmer. He grew carrots on forty acres of muck in Grant, Michigan. Muck is black dirt, very fine and fragile; it’s what remains when you drain a swamp. Grandpa Boldt told us once that he was losing a foot of soil a year to erosion from the wind. He told us the main reason was that they had cut down all the trees along the edges of the fields. They had done this to make it easier to turn around their tractors and get a few more rows of crops. But when they cut down the trees they lost the birds who ate the bugs, and they had to start using lots of insecticide, which burned the soil and made it powdery and dry, and as there were no more trees to break the wind, the soil just blew away.

When Leviticus talks about not reaping to the edges of the field, it’s representing the deeper laws of existence, which we think we can ignore, but only for so long. When Leviticus talks about loving your neighbor as yourself and Jesus adds to even love your enemy, they’re telling us the deep laws of existence that we keep ignoring at our peril. The kingdom of heaven is not come on earth to lift us away from real existence, but to bring us back to reality, to get us back into harmony with the deepest structures of creation, the only source of true and lasting prosperity, the great shalom under the great and arching firmament of the sovereignty of God.

People fear that this kind of life will reduce them or disempower them. But if you work out what Jesus says about turning the other cheek, you see that it’s the opposite of that. He most certainly says to not strike back if someone strikes you first. But notice he does not say to roll over. He does not say submit. He says to offer up the other cheek. “Did you call me Roy?” To offer up the other cheek communicates something like, “I don’t believe you hit me,” which the striker might read as “I dare you to hit me again,” and he might think, “Only this time harder.” It takes the power of great self-discipline to act this way. It takes greater courage to turn the other cheek than to strike back, it takes more courage to be non-violent than violent in your resistance to abuse, and you will be tempted to listen to those voices that tell you its less realistic. But Jesus is following Leviticus to call you to the deeper structures of reality, and the long term vision, that “the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,” because it is the will of God.

You need to learn this, because you will have enemies. Especially if you live by love. Do you get that? People seem to think that Christians should have no enemies. But it’s the following of Jesus that will make you enemies. The world resists the holiness of God. But if Jesus loved his enemies who are we who wear his name to do otherwise? Do you want a miracle? Love your enemies. Do you want to work a miracle? It’s easy. Love your enemies. I believe in miracles.

Of course what he calls you to also depends on your having neighbors like yourself who in turn look out for you, who join in your cause, and join you and support you in your obedience. His ethic is not an ethic for heroic individuals, but an ethic for a community of love. It’s an ethic of holiness, because of the holiness of God, and this is the holiness which God requires of us. God says that a village in the Kingdom of Heaven is holy when we consider the fortunes of our neighbors to be essential to the fortunes of ourselves. And who is your neighbor? Well, since this Kingdom claims the whole territory of the world, that means even our enemies are our neighbors. Even your enemy belongs to God, and is therefore holy to you. It doesn’t matter how you feel about them, but what you owe them. You know that’s true, to the deepest structures of the world.

And so we have deacons in the church. They lead us in our intercessory prayers, not only for our own community, not only for the poor and the needy, but also for our enemies. And after they lead us in the offering of our prayers, they lead us in the offering of our money. They collect our money and they count it, and while they may spend most of our money on our own community, they have to make sure that the gleanings and corners of our money go the poor and the aliens, because “God is the Lord.” How large will they make the edges of our fields? How many grapes will they purposely let fall to the ground? You can support them. You can support the deacons by going the second mile with them, and by not refusing them when they beg you for your money.

Jesus got it from Leviticus, that we love our neighbors as ourselves. Yes, it means we have to love ourselves. There is great self-love implied in the command to stand up to the evils and injustice done against you, there is self-respect required in the expectation of self-discipline and self-control. But to love your neighbor as yourself also requires you to treat your neighbor with the same indulgence that you always give yourself. You know how you understand yourself in the best possible light even when you do wrong? Indulge your neighbor as you do yourself. It doesn’t mean to take your enemy’s violence lying down, but it does mean to understand your enemy as you desire to be understood.

This all means that we don’t believe that evil is built into the universe. It means we believe that evil is temporary, and passing, and should never be invested in or given more credit than it deserves. It means to believe that the victory of God is inevitable. It means we believe that we are called to holiness, not a holiness that we can earn or have to earn, indeed, we are holy even in humble repentance, because our holiness is a gift that absorb by having a holy God among us. And God promises to be among us, because God loves us.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

February 13, Proper 1, Elders Choosing Life: On the Ordination of New Elders at Old First

Deuteronomy 30:14-20, Psalm 119:1-8, 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, Matthew 5:21-37

"Choose life.” Deuteronomy 30:19. Keep choosing life. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, choice after choice, judgment after judgment. By many small choices and judgments. But how do you know what to choose?

The paradigm case is Adam and Eve. God had given them a daily choice for life and not for death. Their choice was between two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They could know the difference between good and evil by trusting in God’s commandment to eat from the first and not from the second.

Not that the fruit of the second was evil or poison; it was good and lovely, and I’m sure other creatures ate it with no problem, but for Adam, God had commanded against it. And so every day Adam had to walk past that tree and choose against his natural appetites and choose for God’s commandment. He had to exercise his judgment and his trust in God, even against his natural appetite, which no other creatures have to do, and to choose against it day after day is what made him and kept him a human being. He had to keep choosing life according to the words of God.

That story is at the beginning of the Torah, the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, and at the far other end, like the other foot of a rainbow, is our lesson from Deuteronomy 30, from the very last speech that Moses gave the Children of Israel, just before they entered the Promised Land. It was for these people (and their parents) that the story of Adam and Eve was first recorded, because they will need it on this occasion. The Promised Land is their own Garden of Eden, and the Laws of Moses are an expanded version of the commandment of the trees. Every day they have to keep on choosing life by choosing to trust God and obey. And their doom will be the same as Adam’s if they make the same kind of choices.

The Children of Israel move into the Promised Land in order to “set forth a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” so to speak, because all men and women are equally in the image of God. This new nation is quite literally the Kingdom of God, the only nation in the world without a human king. Its only king is God, so this new nation is, quite literally, “thy Kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven.”

As they enter the Promised Land, God is giving them responsibility, they’re given responsibility to develop a culture and an economy. They’ll have to make many choices. They’ll have options and possibilities, and many temptations to do it like the other nations do. How will they know what to choose? Short answer: follow the instructions. Do you want God’s blessing? Follow the instructions. Don’t pray for God’s blessing if you’re not following God’s instructions. God doesn’t play games with us, God is straightforward and rather pragmatic. The blessings come from following the instructions, which for Israel, as a political unit, take the form of laws and decrees and ordinances. They describe a way of life. They are the gift of God that calls us to maturity and responsibility. There needs to be at least a little bit of Jewishness in every Christian.

The Laws of Moses left room for judgment calls. How do you apply it here, how do you apply it there, especially as the centuries wore on and the culture developed new situations that were unknown in Moses’ day. The scribes and pharisees dealt with this by ever more detailed applications—where this law counted here for this and but did not count there for that, which Jesus touched on in our gospel lesson. As if you could keep it perfectly by being scrupulous with the precise details. As if you could escape the risk of making judgment calls. Jesus has a very different strategy: he makes it a matter of your heart. Every law always counts every where; not one of them shall ever pass away. But what they count for is your conscience, and your freedom, and your love. Every law always convicts you and every law guides you and every law inspires you. For Jesus the law is the means and not the goal. The goal is life, abundant life, and the goal is love, the love of God.

What Jesus began, the Apostles continued. It was their well-considered decision that the Law of Moses was not binding on the church. What is binding on the church is the Lordship of Jesus. The way that we choose for life is by choosing for him. We cleave to him, we bind ourselves to him, we put our trust in him. We obey him, not as a letter, but as a living Lord. That kind of choosing is harder to define than doing it by the law, but it’s also more personal, and it brings us closer to God. We go so far as to bind ourselves to strong name of the Holy Trinity.

So you, yourself, as an individual believer, are wonderfully empowered and responsible. You are responsible to make judgment calls and daily choices, week after week, year after year. You have the word of God to inspire you and guide you. Not just the law, but also the prophets. And the gospels, and the epistles. Every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And all these words are made so easily available. Not in secret codes, not in priestly mysteries, but in this book, this book that children read. So many of the words in here are sweet and wonderful and as obvious as Mother Goose. So many of the words in here are challenging and daunting and as hard to understand as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But if we are patient and humble we can help each other understand them. A congregation does this when we’re a living community of Jesus.

A congregation is like a village in the kingdom-of-heaven-come-on-earth. In this congregation we live together as a community of Jesus. As I said last week, by our life together we illuminate the kingdom of God for the neighborhoods around us. And how we live together depends upon our constant choices in behavior and how we treat each other. We do this organically all the time in many ways.

But sometimes we have to make judgment calls. Difficult choices. Risky choices. Some of them requiring sensitivity and confidentiality. And that’s why we have elders in our church. A board of elders, in whose spiritual sensitivity we have confidence. We appoint them and anoint them because we trust them and we trust their judgment. We empower them to make choices and judgment calls about our common behavior and our common expectations, with one eye on the Lordship of Jesus and the other eye on our witness to our part of the world.

Next week I’ll preach about our deacons. Our deacons here work very hard and the work they do is very obvious to you. Our elders here work just as hard, but much of what they do is harder to see, and it must be so, for much of what they do is done confidentially. They have to carry burdens in their consciences and their hearts. They deal with the kinds of jealousies and quarreling that we read about in the epistle, the kind of things that develop in a community as naturally as Adam’s appetite. These things are natural and deadly. And the elders have carefully to choose among them in order to choose life for this congregation.

The kingdom of heaven is not something separate way up there. In the Lordship of Jesus the kingdom of heaven is come on earth. Its territory covers everything. It blesses everything and judges everything. This is why our elders have to have daily jobs not in the church but in the world. Our elders make constant subtle choices and judgment calls on how our church can help our human lives receive the Kingdom of God and bear witness to it by our common life. The office of elder is the distinctive office of the Reformed church. Other versions of the church have pastors and deacons, but the office of elder is what makes us Reformed. Our elders have been meeting together for 356 years, as pastors have come and gone, meeting together and choosing life for this community of Jesus. All that we ask of them today is that they keep their watch of three more years, and leave the next 300 up to God. I believe that God will continue to be just as faithful to us as God has always been, because God has chosen life for us, because God loves us.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

February 6, Epiphany 5: Light and Salt and Beds and Water

Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20

Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world.” Old First, you are the light of Park Slope. You are not the only light, and you are not only for Park Slope, but also for Prospect Heights and Windsor Terrace, etc. You are to illuminate your part of the world. By your good works.

Last week I ended my sermon by saying that in our life together as a congregation we could help little Schuyler Orr learn to see God, and that we can help each other see God. This week I’m going one more step by saying that we can help our community see the Kingdom of God, and what is in it. We can illuminate “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” And today I want to give two very practical examples of how we can do that. Both of them are from Isaiah 58.

First, Isaiah 58:7: “Is it not to bring the homeless poor into your house.” Here is a very clear message for us at Old First, to bring the homeless poor into our house. Look, a few months ago I got a request from a local service agency called CAMBA. (Check the link.) The CAMBA agency asked me if this July and August our church could host a respite shelter for the homeless right here in this room. I think this is something it would be good for us to do, so I passed the request to our deacons, and they are now considering whether the congregation would support it.

The homeless population of New York City is now the highest it’s been since the Great Depression. Our homeless shelters are packed to their capacities. The homeless who sleep in the city’s gigantic public shelters are more likely to stay homeless than those who sleep in the small shelters run by churches and synagogues. These small shelters are being opened up again after the city tried to close them all down. But most of the small shelters shut down for the summer, and there’s a great need for beds during July and August.

A “respite shelter” is a flexible shelter of five to twenty beds that is set up at night and taken down every morning. The agency screens the guests and brings them to the church at 6 pm. The volunteers make an evening meal, and they serve it and eat it with the guests, and then the guests set up their beds and most of the volunteers go home except for a couple folks who stay on all night. At 6 am the guests wake up for coffee and they pack up their shelter into storage and they’re out by 7, with the room completely cleared for other use all day.

We’d need to recruit volunteers. I have no doubt we would find them. I’ve already had expressions of interest from other parishes and civic groups. We have the space, we have the need, and we have Isaiah 58:7: “Is it not to bring the homeless poor into your house?” We can do this. We can respond to God’s call on us. Let the deacons know that you support it. If the deacons approve it, I’ll need six people to serve with me on a steering committee to get the whole thing going.

Second, Isaiah 58:11: “You shall be like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.” I am proposing we install a public drinking-water fountain right outside the front of our church. And let me tell you why: Water is a gift of God for the life of the world; flowing water it is a powerful symbol in the Christian faith; public water is a human right; and a public water fountain can be a wonderful illumination to our community of what’s included in the kingdom of heaven come on earth.

Two years ago I read a book called Bottlemania, by Elizabeth Royte. (Check her link; she lives in Park Slope.) The book describes how public water is being privatized. In our public schools, the water fountains are being removed and replaced by vending machines which sell bottled water and give a cut of the profits back to the administration. In September of 2009 I attended a conference in South Africa and I heard stories of third world governments in the global south which were selling their public water sources to international conglomerates, and the poor no longer have the free use of it, and now they have to buy it, for which they need our foreign aid. At this conference, they said that this is an issue for the churches, because water is a gift of God.

Last spring Elizabeth Royte called me up and said, “How about a public water fountain outside Old First?” Both for the real public need of it and for the message it would represent. I said I liked it but I needed time. Last summer I went to Grand Rapids for the General Council of the World Communion of Reformed Churches (check their link), and they had a workshop on water justice and the church. I thought of Elizabeth’s idea, but it seemed like such a small thing, compared to the realities of India and Africa. But then I mentioned it to the leader of the workshop, who is a theologian from Switzerland, the home of Nestle, which owns Poland Spring. He’s a leader in what’s called the Ecumenical Water Network. (Check their link.) He told me he thought it was a very good idea and we should do it, and they wanted to be part of it: they want us to share with them the process of our doing it and any problems we might face. He said it might seem like such small thing, but it’s a very important thing to do.

We’ll involve the community. We’ll need the support of the Park Slope Civic Council, of which I am a member, and its Committee on Livable Streets. We’ll need the support of our city councilmembers, Brad Lander and Steve Levin; both of them are good friends of Old First. We’ll need to celebrate this thing, and to publicize why we are doing it, and we’ll need creative ways to use the fountain liturgically. We want it to express our faith. So, I’ll need six volunteers to work on this with me. I think I might have two already.

Beds and water. These two things are being asked of us. And Isaiah 58 is telling us to go ahead. You will ask what real difference do these things make? Well, what difference does a light make in the house? It doesn’t move the furniture, it doesn’t clean the dust, it doesn’t fix the walls. So how needs light, right? What real difference does salt make in the soup? What difference does salt make in the omelet? How small a thing is salt, how little it does, but you put it right there on the kitchen table, because it opens up the taste of everything you eat. It is the same with light, it opens up the sight of everything. We need to be salt and light, and we can do it with beds and water.

Look, Old First, you can’t change the world. You can’t even change this neighborhood. But Jesus doesn’t ask you to. He reserves that for himself, and he does it in his own way, by the power of his word and his spirit, which you must be patient with. He is the one who is perfectly in control of his kingdom, he is the one who makes his kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. That’s why you pray to him about it, because it’s in his power to do it and not in yours. You can’t build the kingdom of God, and you are not expected to. But you can certainly receive it, and share it, and be witnesses to it, and point to it, and let people know what’s in it, and by your words and your good works you show the world around you what it means and what it stands for. When you host a respite shelter, you illuminate the kingdom of heaven. When you host a public water fountain, you open up the kingdom for anyone who wants to drink of it.

A skeptic might say that things like this are meaningless, but there are two more reasons that we do them. First, as our epistle suggests, not for the approval of the wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age, but as Jesus says, for the glory of God. If these things are God’s ideas, then we do them for the glory of God. And the second reason is to enjoy them. To enjoy them. To enjoy the light as God’s light, to enjoy the salt, to enjoy the water, and even to enjoy the beds. That’s how you know it’s the kingdom of heaven, by how much joy you get from living in it.


Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

January 23, Epiphany 3: On the Shore and In the Hills

Isaiah 9:1-4, Psalm 27:1, 4-9, 1 Corinthians 1:10-18, Matthew 4:12-23

Jesus moved out of his home town of Nazareth, up in the hills, and rented a house down at the lakeshore, in Capernaum. Imagine Jesus in his house: in the mornings doing carpentry, making furniture for the merchants, or going out to frame houses for Gentile settlers. He makes his mid-day meal, takes a nap, and then he goes out for his walk. He loves to be out among the people. He likes to walk along the lakeshore. One afternoon he comes back from his walk with four other men. They sit down in his front room, he makes them all coffee, and they talk. More coffee, more talk. Late that night, they go back home. I wonder, how many days a week do they come back? How much do they keep fishing, in order to feed their families?

On Fridays they go with him up into the hills. Every week another synagogue, arriving at sundown, repeating the prayers with the people, socializing overnight, going to service on Saturday morning, preaching and teaching, getting invited for coffee, healing the people, then still more coffee, and then walking back downhill, and home to Capernaum.

The campaign platform was the same as John the Baptist’s. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near," but the emphasis was more on the second part. For John, you had to go down to the water and repent, to get clean and ready for the kingdom soon to come. With Jesus the kingdom has come, ready or not, and he was taking it up to the people, in their ordinary lives, and just to accept that kingdom is the same thing as repentance.

In their villages, not in Jerusalem. In Galilee, not in Judea. In the Bronx, not in Manhattan. In the north, in the region that Moses had assigned to the tribes of Zebulon and Naphtali, a region that had always been a battlefield, one army after another marching through, pillaging their crops and ravaging their women. A region of Jews in poverty, and of Gentile settlers controlling the means of production. The Jews were in depression, and they felt like exiles in their own land.

The Jewish revolutionaries, the Zealots, had their headquarters in Galilee because it was more open and less controlled than Judea. Jesus had more freedom here to develop his campaign. Had he stayed in Judea, and announced in Jerusalem that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, he would have would been arrested with John the Baptist. But Galilee was also a better venue for Jesus’ new version of the kingdom of heaven. He didn’t bring it as a kingdom of independence, but a kingdom of interaction. It’s not for ridding our life of enemies, but for loving our enemies close at hand. It’s not for isolation but engagement. It’s not for getting rid of troubles, but for dealing with our troubles. The kingdom of heaven is for the mixed-up reality of our lives.

And to join him in his campaign he didn’t call priests or scribes or soldiers, but ordinary working guys. This was not the first time that he called them. Last week we read of the first time he called them, in the Gospel of John. They were down in Judea, standing beside the Jordan River, disciples of John the Baptist. And then when John pointed out Jesus to them, they went to him, and began to follow him. Then there was a gap. John the Baptist got arrested and his campaign was dispersed. The disciples went back to Galilee to fish. And now a second time they’re called, but instead of their looking for him, he comes to find them, right in the midst of their ordinary lives. And now they have to balance their fishing with the immediacy of discipleship.

Following Jesus is not magic. It’s usually gradual, in fits and starts, with gaps and hesitations, and with doubts and disappointments. It happened in stages that Peter and Andrew became disciples. That’s how we experience it. Following Jesus is rarely a sudden simple thing or one nice gradual evolution. You get an experience where you really take notice of God, which feels like a call. And then there is a gap, and you wonder if it was real, and if anything has really changed. Then you have another experience that takes you further, and you feel called again. Now God is asking more of you, a greater measure of devotion, God is calling on you to do something which may cost you, and you have to put down what you’re doing, and make new room in your life to keep on going where Jesus is calling. And when you think you’ve got it down, there’s more.

Jesus calls them on the lakeshore—not in the desert nor in Jerusalem. My favorite place on the planet is a rocky lakeshore up in Canada. In the summer I love to get up at dawn and just sit there for a couple hours. The lakeshore is a boundary, a limit, yet it’s not a wall, it’s an open boundary, the lake is open wide before me, and I can enter into it. And the lake is always right there all the time I’m doing whatever I’m doing on shore.

That’s what discipleship feels like to me, that’s what repentance feels like, not like putting yourself through fire or through torture, not punishing yourself, but like living along the lake, living along the boundary between two worlds, two realms of existence. The one realm is the one we’re born into and we’re used to it, where we can make our own way, thank you very much, where we don’t have to follow anybody. You make your bed, you cook your meals, you do the dishes. The other realm of existence is right there, always with you, as close as heaven is to earth, but it’s wide open, and I’m drawn to it but I’m unsure in it. When I look at this world I"m used to from within the air of heaven, the very same world becomes a different world, a strange world, in which all of my certainties are made uncertain, where all my confidence must be humility, where I need a leader and a guide, someone I can trust. And he says, "Follow me."

That’s very open-ended. I’d like to know first where he’s going. Why not just tell me where we’re going, give me the directions, and I’ll go straight there on my own? And why not just tell me what I have to repent of? I don’t mind repenting, just tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll say I’m sorry, and I won’t do that again. But Jesus doesn’t stand up in the synagogues of Galilee to say, "This is wrong, these thirty-seven things are wrong." If Jesus did that we could keep a list and check it off. He doesn’t tell us precisely what we have to repent of, he just says, "Repent," and then he says, "Follow me." He leaves it very open-ended.

Discipleship, repentance, the coming of the kingdom. These are all aspects of a single package. The kingdom is what Jesus brings, and to receive it is repentance, and to explore it is discipleship. The kingdom is what Jesus brings, and to receive it is repentance, and to explore it is discipleship. So then what is required of us?

On the one hand, everything is on the table, The boundary runs through all things. There are not some parts of life which are in the kingdom of God and other parts which are exempt. Every action, every possession, every relationship, every issue, every interest, every dollar, everything about you, everything you think or hope or say, it all belongs to the kingdom of God. The call is fully comprehensive. You must be ready to put anything down right now, from your plans to your possessions. In nothing are you self-sufficient, in nothing are you fully competent, in everything you need instruction, in everything you need healing, in everything you need forgiveness, and for everything you need repentance. Repentance as an attitude, not a self-evaluation or a listing of rights and wrongs you’ve done, but repentance as an attitude of full reception.

On the other hand, there is no stress to this. It is total but it is light. There is no pressure to this. Look how easy Jesus takes it. Look he patiently he campaigns, how much time he takes, how much room he gives. How just a little is a sign and seal of a whole new world. There is no pressure because the kingdom has already come, we don’t have to earn it or build it but receive it. You explore it by enjoying it. This is a kingdom where the law is love and the power is joy.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Eagle's Wings: From a John Donne sermon

This was just sent to me be a parishioner, and I love it:

Eagle's Wings. ". . . So are those words which are spoken of God himself, appliable to his Ministers, that first, The Eagle stirreth up her nest, The Preacher stirres and moves, and agitates the holy affections of the Congregation, that they slumber not in a senselesnesse of that which is said.

"The Eagle stirreth up her nest, and then as it is added there, She fluttereth over her young; The Preacher makes a holy noise in the conscience of the Congregation, and when hee hath awakened them, by stirring the nest, hee casts some claps of thunder, some intimidations, in denouncing the judgments of God, and he flings open the gates of Heaven, that they may heare, and look up, and see a man sent by God, with power to infuse his feare upon them;

"So she fluttereth over her young; but then, as it followes there, She spreadeth abroad her wings; she over shadowes them, she enwraps them, she armes them with her wings, so as that no other terror, no other fluttering but that which comes from her, can come upon them;


". . . And so the Minister hath the wings of an Eagle, that every soule in the Congregation may see as much as hee sees, that is, a particular interest in all the mercies of God, and the merits of Christ."

January 16: Epiphany 2, The Lamb and the Dove (for Christina Taylor Green)

Isaiah 49:1-7, Psalm 40:1-11, 1 Corinthians 1:1-9, John 1:29-42

We had our consistory meeting on Monday night. The consistory is the governing body of the church, the elders and deacons and myself. I’m always a little nervous before these meetings, because I am accountable to them, and I felt unusually vulnerable because we were discussing my salary, and also because I needed to retract some information I had given them the month before. But it was a very good meeting, and at the end we all felt very positive. We had many things to celebrate, because last year was a banner year for Old First. We want to share these things with you at our congregational meeting next week after church.

On Tuesday morning, as is my habit, I got up at 6 am to keep working on this sermon, studying the lections, trying to listen for a word from God for me to communicate to you today. At 8 am I took a break for breakfast, and turned on NPR, and I heard the latest report on the shootings in Tucson, and suddenly I found myself weeping, weeping for the congresswoman, and the judge, and the other victims, and for Christina, the little nine-year-old girl, weeping for our nation, and grieving our violence and our indulgence of our violence. I am usually inured to this, I try to be professional, but maybe I was still vulnerable from the night before.

"O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. O Lamb of God who takest the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace." Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, misere nobis. For many centuries the church has been singing this and praying this, especially when we face our violence and fear and misery, and the damage we do to each other and to the world.

"Behold the Lamb of God." John the Baptist was the first to say it. He was the first to identify the Messiah as the Lamb of God. Where did he get that from? That’s not what they wanted from the Messiah. They wanted a lion, a victor, a leader, not a lamb. Lambs get sacrificed, lambs get eaten, lambs are victims, lambs are like little nine-year-old girls.

I think I know where he got it from. He testifies that he saw the dove come on Jesus. He reports that he saw the Holy Spirit come down on the Messiah like a dove. That’s not what he expected. He was expecting the Holy Spirit to come down on him like fire. There were prophecies of this. The fire of holiness, the fire of power and judgment and purgation. And what the people will have wanted was an eagle, a properly royal bird, the symbol of power, like the Roman eagle, carried by the legions in their power and their victory. Eagles and lions, the symbols of kings.

The dove is a Biblical symbol of two things. In the story of Noah’s Ark, the dove is the sign of the judgment over, the healing of the world, of restoration and reconciliation and peace. In the law of Moses, the dove was a poor person’s sacrifice. If you could not afford a lamb you could substitute a dove. When the dove came down on Jesus, John the Baptist saw these things.

The baptism of Jesus is reported in all four gospels, but as usual, John reports it in a way that differs from the other three. He reports it after the fact, in terms of what John the Baptist had to say about it afterward. The Gospel of John assumes we know the other three, just as the history plays of Shakespeare assume that you already know the history. And what it reports is a moment in the conversion of John the Baptist, how his expectations of the Messiah were converted, and what he saw in Jesus even converted his interpretations of the prophecies that drove him. Having seen the dove, he began to see the Lion of Judah as the Lamb of God. Who takest away, not the enemies of Israel, as King David would have done, but the sins of the world. That kind of peace.

But lambs are sacrificed, like the Passover lamb. Well, his sacrificial death will be the instrument of liberation and salvation, though not from slavery to Pharaoh and the Egyptians, or from oppression by Herod and the Romans, but from the sins of the world. The sins of oppressors, the sins of enslavers, the sins of assassins, the sins of 22-year-old paranoid losers with guns, the sins of terrorists and politicians, and our own sins, our sins against our loved ones and our friends and even against ourselves. He takes away those sins. That is the policy and program of his kingdom, for he is a king, he is the Messiah. The kingdom of the Messiah brings many benefits in its healing and peace and reconciliation, but the very first article of the constitution of his kingdom is to take away the sins of the world.

It is for another occasion for us to discuss the theological mechanism of the atonement, by which his sacrificial death accomplishes the removal of our sins before the face of God. But it is for us today to commit to take away each other’s sins, because we are citizens of his kingdom and the first article of his constitution is a law for us. He has taken away the sins of the world, then how can we hold our sins against each other? Together we confess our sins here every week, in the prayer of confession, and then together we sing the kyrie, Lord have mercy upon us, and then when we hear the absolution of our sins, and then we pass the peace to each other. It is required of us. It is the coming of the kingdom that we do. Because he is the lamb of God, we are doves to each other. We pass to each other the peace of Christ, a peace that is greater than our own, and yet as citizens we rise to it each week. You let your dove take wing. You rise to your belief that each other’s sins have been taken away by the Lamb of God.

When Simon, the brother of Andrew, came to see Jesus, Jesus told him, You are Peter. That is who you are. When St. Paul addressed the congregation in Corinth, confused and contentious and conflicted as that congregation was, he called them saints, sanctified, full of grace, enriched in every way, not lacking in any spiritual gift. That is who you are, Old First. On the face of it you are a strange and peculiar collection of individuals who have come here for who knows what and who knows why, but do you know who you are? You were called collectively to be God’s servant, and God’s call came to you through whatever who knows what or why that brought you here. You are a community within the kingdom of the Messiah, a beloved community, in the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., you are beloved of God, in order that you might love each other and love the world, even its violence and misery and fear.

It is too light a thing, Old First, that you should speak peace just to each other every week. It is too light a thing that you should do church just for each other and your loved ones and yourselves. God has given you as a light to the nations. To your nation. To your community. It’s because of what happened in Tucson that’s it’s so important what you do here. The peace you practice here, the sacrifices of love that you offer each other in the name of Christ, this is the light to the nations.

The very first words that Jesus says in the Gospel of John are very simple. He says, "What are you looking for?" Two men say, "Where are you staying?" He answers, "Come and see." Where are you abiding? How can I be close to you? How can I feel close to God? Where can I go that I can feel God’s presence in my life? Where can I experience your kingdom coming? What are you looking for? I want my sins to be taken away. I want to be able to let go of the sins of others. I want there to be some relief and resolution to my weeping when I hear the news. I want to have something to celebrate with other people. Yes, yes, you are right to want these things. It is God’s Spirit in you that inspires your wanting them. And in your coming here together each week to find these things you will see these very things come to be. Because the Lord is faithful and has chosen you. I give thanks because of the grace of God that has been given to you.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

On Singleness

My friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Chuck DeGroat, of the City Church of San Francisco, posted this on his blog, The New Exodus. He calls it "The Missional Position: Myths and Musings on Being Single." We were discussing singleness in an Old First small group last night, and how most of us at Old First (certainly not all of us) participate as "singles," even when we're married, while most churches seem to regard "married couples" as the norm.