September 1, Proper 17, Contradictions 1: Fear God, Fear Nothing

Proverbs 25:6-7, Psalm 112, Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16, Luke 14:1, 7-14

This past July 21st I was in Newfoundland, Canada, in the fishing village of Lark Harbour, and I tried to go to church. Across the road from the gas bar is St. James Anglican. It has no sign of the service time, so on the Saturday, when I saw some people standing out back, I asked them the time of the service and they looked at me strangely and said 11 AM. Okay, so I got there at 10-of, and I was impressed. There must have been fifty cars parked around the church, and even young people entering in Sunday clothes. Wow, the locals are pious! Inside the usher handed me a bulletin and asked if I was family. What? No, I said, and went into the sanctuary.

The organ was playing and the acolytes were busy at the altar, and all the front pews were full and all the back pews were full and the middle pews were empty. That’s strange. I went back out to the usher and asked where I should sit. He said, Are you family? Then he said, This is a funeral.

I stood there stupidly for a moment, and then I asked if there would be communion. No. I think that’s tonight at 6. Oh, I’ll be on the ferry to Nova Scotia. Well, I did try to go to church.

If I sat in the middle, all by myself, everyone would have been watching me. If I sat up front they’d be watching me: Who is he and how did he know Billy Cavendish? If I sat in the back, the usher would not come and tell me to sit up front, nor would he tell any of the Cavendishes to go sit in the back, or there’d be trouble in Lark Harbour.

Seating has its protocols, and Jesus tells a parable on it, and like most of his parables, this one has several layers, and you have to keep working your way down into the layers, you have to unlock it like a combination lock, turning it back and forth. The outer layer is the good advice on how you can be deferential to your own advantage. Did we need the Messiah to tell us that? It’s already in the book of the Proverbs. You could get it from Emily Post. But thank you, Jesus, for confirming that we may look to our advantages. And you can leave the parable right there and be satisfied.

You could turn the parable the other way and go a layer down. Does it really matter where you sit? Do you care whether people think you’re either high or low? You can be free of that. Be free. Be free to sit alone. Wherever. The status that you need is what’s in your own mind, your advantage is your own to give yourself. There is wisdom in that.

But then Jesus adds those words about inviting the poor and the lame and guests who can’t invite you back, which turns it back the other way and goes another layer down. It’s not about yourself, do not sit alone, do not be free of other people, gather them around yourself but to your potential disadvantage. You give advantages away. When you are standing on line for tickets, you let other people in ahead of you. Practice a freedom of radical generosity and selflessness. God does.

That’s inspiring, but how much chaos will result from that. We need order, we need structure, we need patterns in our lives. We are animals, not angels. The customs of society have wisdom in them. If you let people cut in line ahead of you, what about the people behind you. At weddings and funerals it makes realistic sense for friends and family to have their special places. We cannot leave the parable at this point.

We have to go one more layer down. We turn it the other way again. The final combination is what Jesus says at the center of our lesson: “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Is that true? Is that really true about the world? Often, but not always. We can think of plenty of humble people who are made to stay that way and worse. But Jesus does not say this as a truth about the world, he is giving the riddle of what God does within the world. God humbles the exalted and God exalts the humble, all the time, round and round, up and down.

Jesus was taught this by his mother. She sang of it in her song, the Magnificat, thirteen chapters earlier in this same gospel, and he echoes the language of his Mum. It’s about what God does. God freely acts this way in the world, with no regard for our advantages or our status or our sense of our deserving what we get. That’s the center of this parable, the freedom of God, the freedom of God from where you sit, God’s freedom from our conventions and patterns and good behaviors and predictions, which, of course, we know is right but still it is a fearful thing.

The Pharisees feared Jesus because he was so free like that. That’s why they were watching him closely. And we would have to say that the kind of fear they had of him was a negative thing. So why is it that the Bible tells us to fear God as a positive thing? Isn’t the fear of God a contradiction? Isn’t it a contradiction for us to repeat what repeated in Psalm 112, “Happy are who fear the Lord”? How can that be good?

I get that question frequently and it can’t be answered easily or quickly. You have live with it, you have to give this contradiction time and space within your life. You to let it open up a space in you, maybe a new space inside yourself for that special kind fear which is a good and loving fear.

They say that lion tamers have to love their lions but never lose their fear of them. You can’t domesticate a lion, it’s finally always wild. And powerful and dangerous. God is wild, and powerful and dangerous, and is absolutely free in front of us. In such a relationship fear is natural, and it’s why we should fear God. We cannot manage God, we can’t control or predict God, except only upon the promises which God has freely made to us. You can hold God to those promises, but you can’t even predict how and when those promises will be kept. Even when God is faithful God is free. And dangerous.

To fear God is to enter that space inside yourself where you feel the implications of the dangerous freedom of this God, this God who loves you for your good, but who has no regard for your status or your advantage or even your self-respect. What God has any regard for, as far as you’re concerned, is God’s own promises to you which are conditioned only upon God’s self. Which leaves you uneasy, to say the least.

But from this we get two benefits, but to get to them you have to make a couple jumps. The first jump is the benefit that if you fear God, you need not fear anything else. Fearing God, fear nothing else. You repeat to yourself what our epistle says, “The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid, what can anyone do to me?” It’s not your courage, it’s your hanging on God’s promise, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” God reminds you of that promise time and again in scripture.

Once God confirmed it to me silently, by suddenly becoming present to me, locally but not physically, next to me in our back room on President Street, when I most needed it, when I was more than humbled, when I was humiliated. “I will never leave you or forsake you.” Upon that promise I am still learning not to fear, not to fear other people or situations or possibilities of loss or disadvantages and even not to fear myself. Fear God, fear nothing.

The second jump is the benefit that your freedom from fear is your freedom to love. You see that today in both the epistle and the gospel. You can love despite the restrictions of the conventions and the familiar order in the world.

So let me tell you a story which is true. Her name was Brenda-Lynn. She was a member of my second congregation, in Ontario. Brenda-Lynn was a nurse practitioner. She worked in a group home for the mentally-handicapped, some of them severely so, including cerebral palsy. That was her job. Brenda-Lynn got married to a guy named Evert, whom we all loved, and I did the wedding. They represented two big Dutch families, and it was a big reception.

Have you ever been to a Dutch-Canadian wedding reception? There’s nothing like a Dutch-Canadian wedding reception. And I think more than half our church was there. And you know whom the bride had seated up at the head table with her and the groom: the residents of her group home; they were the special honored guests of Brenda-Lynn. I watched them off and on, how they were watching her. They loved her, they were proud of her, because Brenda-Lynn was a beautiful bride. And she was beautiful in her freedom from the conventions of receptions, and we could see in her what God's own love for us is like.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

July 7, Proper 9, A Geography of Prayer 6, The River

Isaiah 66:10-14, Psalm 66:1-8, Galatians 6:1-16, Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Dearly beloved, this is the sixth sermon in my series entitled “A Geography of Prayer.” This week’s feature of geography is the River, from Isaiah 66. For the most part, until my final paragraph, I shall be using the image otherwise than Isaiah did. I am lifting the image out of Isaiah and applying it to our Psalm today, Psalm 66, with its verse after verse of praise to God.

I’m calling the prayer of praise a River (allow me an epic simile): like the mountain stream which is its source, to the length of the river as it bends through the landscape, as it defines the valleys it flows through, and cuts its way through canyons, as it gathers its tributaries and develops its current and increases its power as it goes, and then widens in its lower length and meanders through its plain until it forms its delta in the sea, like the Mississippi, or, like the Hudson, it widens into a great long channel and an inland sea and then into its greater bay. The river is life-giving to every thing along it and destructive to whatever stands against it, peaceful in its reaches and raging when resisted, forceful in fluidity, inexorable, inexhaustible, ancient, primeval, eternal, the prayer of praise to God.

What is praise? What do we mean by Praise? It’s when we call God “Holy, Majestic, Great, Wise, Beautiful,” and other attributes. Praise is close to Thanksgiving and of course they overlap, but we can distinguish Thanksgiving as what we offer God for what God has done for us, and Praise is what we offer God simply for who God is, irrespective of what God does for us. Of course, we believe that we can only know who God is by what God has done for us. So Thanksgiving comes quicker to us than praise does. But I think the ultimate is Praise, for it is the least self-interested form of prayer and the least regarding of ourselves. I don’t mean we lose ourselves. We still maintain our minds and skills and our abilities, we fully use our arts and crafts, the fullest efforts of our speech and song and dance. The point is that the pay back is irrelevant, and you could call it, as one writer has, a “royal waste of time.” That’s the point.

There is legitimate self-interest and self-regard in prayer. That’s usually where we start in prayer, with our petitions for ourselves. Let me remind you that for Christians there are six kinds of prayer, in three pairs:  Petition and Intercession, then Confession and Lamentation, and then Thanksgiving and Praise. From Petition to Praise you move from the most self-interested to the least.

You can think of it as a continuum, but Jesus remarkably bends the line around into a circle, from Praise back to Petition. He does it in the Lord’s Prayer. The way he teaches us to pray is to  make our first petition all about, not ourselves, but God’s self: “Hallowed be thy Name.” You are asking God to be honored as “the Lord” in the world, and that implies that the desire for God is in your deep self-interest. Then you petition that “Thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done,” which must include the business of your life, and then you petition, “Give us this Day our daily bread,” when your self-interest is obvious and legitimate and as basic as a little child’s. And then you move to legitimate self-regard, when you pray, “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” Implied in this Petition is also Confession, and also Lamentation. And because you make your petitions in the first person plural, using “our” and “us” instead “mine” and “me,” these also are Intercessions. This prayer comprises so much in such small compass, it is a wonder and a sign. It is a very good thing that everybody knows it, out of everything else in the Christian faith.

But there is so much more to prayer, and there are so many prayers the people used to know but now we don’t, especially the prayers of praise. I’m not saying that Christians are not giving praise. I’m saying that in our freedom of invention and our desire to be relevant we have lost the disciplines of prayer and the rich traditions of doxology. Our contemporary praise is strong when it’s immediate, like a thunderstorm upon the grass, and the weather changes and we dry up. I’m speaking of knowing how to sing the Te Deum. Or the Gloria in Excelsis. I’m speaking of knowing the Psalms from memory. These are almost lost to us today, and we are the less for it.

So here’s a take-home: The secret to the prayer of Praise is to not depend on generating praise from within yourself, and with our own ideas, but on stepping into praise, the praise which is around us and has been before us and extends beyond us, which does not depend on us, and which carries us in its current. You step into this stream when you praise God, and you give yourself to it. It offers you a force and motion greater than your own. You say things you did not come up with, but what you heard was said before and what you repeat. You don’t lose yourself — you gain a world. Psalm 66:3, “All the earth bows down before you, sings to you, sings out your name.”

Praise wants company. Even when you praise God privately, in your closet or your room, you know that you are praying along with millions of other people round the world. That’s why I like to pray from a prayer book which is being used by many other Christians at the very same time that I am using it. No matter how far away they are from me I know that I am praying in their company.

So yes, you can praise God in the woods. The other creatures do. You should. But the prayer of praise is richer and fuller when it follows on the other forms of prayer. As it does within our Sunday morning liturgy. After the sermon we pray the prayer of Confession. After that we pray our prayers of Petition and Intercession, and sometimes Lamentation. Then we gather round the Table for the great Prayer of Thanksgiving. We render thanks to God for our creation and our redemption. And then we rise to the climax of the service every week, pure exalted praise of God for who God is, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory.” We sing it together with angels and archangels and with Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants and Jews. God is worthy to be praised.

Maybe you’ve heard the criticism that God must be a narcissist to have set up the world in such a way as to be getting all this praise. Well, who can presume that God’s experience of praise is like our own? Who of us know how our praise engages God? I do think we can say that God deserves our praise, but does not need our praise. We say that God requires our praise in the Aristotelian sense that a knife requires to be sharp, or good food needs to be eaten, or music requires to be heard. I think it entirely appropriate that God requires our praise. And it is appropriate for us, and good for us.

I love that in my life, that I can give such praise, I like what it brings out of me and where it takes me. I for myself would be less of a person if I did not praise God. That’s the conviction of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, when it asks, in other words, “What are people for?” The answer is, “To glorify God and enjoy God forever.” That is what it is to be a truly human being.

I love this river. I like to get into it and then get out of it and camp along it as I live my ordinary life and do my business in the world. If I were not a Christian I would miss it very much. It’s one of the chief reasons I believe in God. I have close friends who do not. They raise the very credible arguments that there is no God, especially not the barbarian god of the Bible stories. I find myself inadequate to answer all those arguments, though other brilliant writers have (Marilynne Robinson comes to mind, for one.) But apart from all the arguments, I know for myself that I want to believe in God, I want what I get from this belief, and not least is the entry into praise.

And it is God I want to praise. Yes, there are others in my life to whom my praise is due: my wife, my children, my seminary students, so many of you within the congregation. But my praise for you all cannot help but be conditional. There is only One whom I praise without condition and without second thought, and who is free from needing anything back from me. The praise of God is pure.

Now I come back to Isaiah’s meaning of the River. It comes from God. Yes, the praise of God begins with God, it flows from God, and out into the world, including us, and back to God. Just like God’s love. I think you could call praise and love the same thing but in different states of matter: praise is liquid (the River) and love is vapor (the Wind, the Breath). God’s love embraces you and so does praise, and so, of course, you praise the one you love, and you love the one you praise. God invites you into this great stream because God loves you.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 30, Proper 8, A Geography of Prayer 5: The Boundaries

1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21, Psalm 16, Galatians 5:1, 13-25, Luke 9:51-62

Dearly beloved, this is the fifth sermon in my series entitled “A Geography of Prayer.” For this sermon in the series, I’m relying a great deal on the reflections and insights of my wife, Melody. My geographical feature this week is the Boundaries, from our Psalm, verse 6, “My boundaries enclose a pleasant land, indeed, I have a goodly heritage.”  Both Jesus and Elijah are crossing the boundaries of that pleasant Promised Land which was the goodly heritage of the Children of Israel.

In the case of Elijah, he gets his message while he’s over the southern border down at Mount Sinai. His message will take him back over the northern border into Syria to anoint the next king of the Aramites. After he anoints Elisha as his successor he will cross the eastern border over the Jordan where he will be taken up, as you remember, in the fiery chariot.

In the case of the Lord Jesus, he crosses the border between Galilee and Samaria on his way down to Jerusalem. Samaria is unfriendly territory for Jews. The Jews and the Samaritans regard each other as heretics, like the Shiites and the Sunnis, and their religious feud goes back for centuries. So it’s with righteous anger that the disciples James and John suggest to Jesus that he call down fire from heaven on the Samaritan villagers who have not welcomed them.

They got that from the stories of Elijah. Two times Elijah called down fire from heaven on the soldiers which the king of the Samaritans had sent to get him. Elijah is on the mind of James and John. They had just seen him for themselves, up on the mount of the Transfiguration, conversing with Jesus — maybe giving him advice? And they are excited now, for they heard the voice from heaven confirm their leader as the Messiah, the Son of God, the rightful king of the Kingdom of God. Should he not judge his enemies, like these no good Samaritans?

The Samaritans had no interest in the Messiah. They believed that the whole thing about the house and lineage of David was an heretical innovation of the Judeans and in contradiction to the Torah of Moses, which certainly said nothing about Jerusalem as the holy capital. So why is Jesus taking this way to Jerusalem, instead of going around along the Jordan? Is he making his claim that this province rightly belongs within the Messiah’s goodly heritage, and that by right his kingdom’s boundaries enclose this pleasant land? So the disciples seem to think.

But Jesus does not push his claim. Nor does he deny it. He calls himself the Son of Man, and then he has these off-putting encounters with individuals along the road. Jesus is a powerful and charismatic figure who approaches people in both predictable and unpredictable ways, and he is also constantly being approached on the road by all sorts and conditions of humankind. Why does he push them off? What he says to them we should not take as reasonable. He is speaking recklessly and in extremes.

It’s like he’s clearing the space in front of him as he goes, pulling on people and pushing them off from side to side. Not out of anger or vengeance, like James and John, but because he has set in motion a lava flow, a river in its flood, a great migration, a world in motion within our world but with a different energy and with different rules. The boundary is not a static border but a dynamic edge in motion, pushing and pulling on the ground it’s passing through.

The momentum is from the entry of God into history, in the person of Jesus. The urgency is not of Jesus’ own making, and you need not take it as a general behavioral model, that you as a disciple need to follow Jesus this recklessly, this hastily. Yes, be awake and be ready to move, but the point here is God’s activity in history, in the person of Jesus Christ. It’s not about our making the kingdom come by our haste. So Jesus tells his disciples to cool it with the Samaritans. “Guys, we don’t have time for that anger stuff now.”

God’s kingdom is coming. God is doing it. We don’t make it come. We don’t bring it. Despite what many Christian leaders say, we don’t advance the Kingdom of God, we don’t build it, and we certainly don’t have to defend it. God can do all that, and God does all that. What you need do is receive it. Pray for it. Desire it. Recognize it. It often contradicts the world, as with freedom and slavery. In Galatians St. Paul writes, “For freedom Christ has set you free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Good. And then he writes, “through love to become slaves to each other.” Not so good. What does that mean? Realistically? At a congregation like Old First? Do you really want to be a love-slave to other people in this congregation? Is that how you receive the Kingdom of God?

Recognize slavery in the so-called “works of the flesh” and recognize freedom in the “fruits of the spirit.” The list of the works of the flesh is long and specific; the list of the fruits of the Spirit is short and sweet, and oddly vague. (Paradise is less interesting than hell.) These sins don’t feel like slavery; they feel more like strategies for dealing with slavery. They feel like ways to forget your suffering for a while. Or to actually do something about your suffering. Some of the strategies don’t sound like fun, like “strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions,” but those strategies are seductive and they feel righteous when you are caught up in them. Most of you avoid fighting, but don’t you feel righteous when you’re in the middle of a fight you had tried to avoid?

So here is where we come to prayer. We are used to praying for what we want, but we have to learn to want what we pray for. We pray for what we desire, and we keep praying in order to desire what we pray for. We pray for God’s kingdom to come in order desire that kingdom and what that kingdom brings.

This is why it’s important to pray more than the prayers we make up ourselves. Yes, you need to pray for your own desires, but you need to develop your desires, you pray the prayers that have been written down by other people, the prayers that are still a bit beyond you, the prayers you don’t yet understand. You pray the Psalms beyond your understanding, the prayers of the liturgy, the prayers of the Christian tradition, praying things you never thought to pray for, to develop your desires. You can pray for what you desire, but you can also desire what you pray for. Pray outside yourself, pray beyond your current boundaries.

Pray to want what is freedom in reality. Who wants to be generous? Who wants to be patient? The fruits of the Spirit. Who wants self-control? Nobody likes to be told, “Control yourself.” If someone says of you that you are “controlled,” that means you are no fun, or you can’t access your emotions. It’s an insult, it’s feeling constricted. When Jesus rebukes his disciples on their desire for righteous judgment, he’s inviting them to freedom, to cross the boundary from the normal life of paying-back into the moving stream of love, joy, and peace.

We live on both sides of the boundary. The Kingdom side is fluid and dynamic, and it makes us nervous, while the normal side feels more solid and familiar. But the good news is that the two sides are unequal. On the Kingdom side, the fruit of the Spirit is successful and the works of the flesh are powerless. On the normal side the works of the flesh claim much success. But the fruits of the Spirit are no less powerful here as well, although in different ways, in ways that you can learn to recognize. It is his power that works on both sides of the boundary, and so you work it best by praying for it. And when you’re praying it’s like you’re breathing only on the one side, you’re breathing the fresh wind of that side instead of the stagnant air of this side. The breeze of the Spirit makes this urban jungle still a pleasant land.

Pray for what you desire, and pray so that you may desire what you pray for. Pray for that new job, if you desire it. And pray for faithfulness and gentleness and self-control, to desire to be faithful and gentle and self-controlled. Pray for patience, kindness, and generosity, so that you desire them. You pray for peace, you pray for joy, and you pray for love, to grow in your desire for them. The first fruit of the Spirit is love. You grow your love for others out of the love God has for you. You love God back with the love God has for you. The first way to love God is to pray.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 23, Proper 7, A Geography of Prayer 4: The Slopes

Isaiah 65:1-9, Psalm 22:18-27, Galatians 3:23-29, Luke 8:26-39

Dearly beloved, this is the fourth sermon in my series entitled “A Geography of Prayer.” Last week was The Desert, and this week is The Slopes, as in the steep slopes of the hills around the See of Galilee. That’s our setting today, it’s where the Kingdom of God has landed for a little while in the person of Jesus Christ. And that’s my theme, to pray under the Kingdom of God, to pray for yourself and your needs under the Kingdom of God.

This gospel story is difficult all around. We could wish that Luke had given us some footnotes. It’s difficult to tell when it’s the demons talking or the man, or both, and the verb forms shift from singular to plural. We are not told why Jesus went to that region in the first place, on the far side of the lake. The country of the Gerasenes was across the border, it was pagan territory, and the inhabitants would have had no interest in the Messiah of the Jews and maybe some hostility. We are not told why Jesus so readily gave in to their resistance, when in the story just previous he had commanded the wind and the waves to yield to him. We are not told why, after Jesus saves the guy, he commissions him but does not baptize him.

It’s difficult to know what demons are and why they like to inhabit people and animals, or need to, and Luke does not assist us. I can tell you this: the demons are not the demons of Christian mythology. They do not come from hell. They don’t want to go there, as they tell Jesus. Try to imagine these demons as the displaced spirits of the landscape. Their home is on the landscape, which for the pagan mind is very spiritual. But they are spirits out of whack. They are less like devils and more like diseases, like viruses, or like velociraptors gone berserk. They are not so malicious and malevolent as they are hostile and fearful and destructive. They do not have super-powers, and they are not super-smart. Notice how stupid was their very idea of entering into the swine, in which they get the very destruction they begged Jesus to be spared of. They are destructive and self-destructive.

As for the local population, when they tell Jesus to leave, I doubt the main reason is the cost of the pigs. The reason they ask Jesus to leave is because of how fearfully they see the world, and with good reason. In my first church, in 1982, I pastored an elderly Hungarian woman whom I came to love. She was born in Uj-verbas, a town outside of Belgrade in what now is Serbia. When she was born it was a part of Hungary, and then after World War I it was part of Serbia, and after World War II it was part of Yugoslavia. I forget how many armies came through her town as she grew up, armies in battle, taking their food and abusing her sisters and her, the Austrians, the Russians, the Serbians, and then the Germans, and the Chetniks, and then the Russians again. Her life was not in her control.

We want to control our lives, we want to control our environment, we want to control our economy and political events and protect our national interest in the world. But so much of the world is outside of our control and resistant to us and even hostile. We can establish a bit of order around us, and outside of that is chaos. That is the natural way to see the world, the law of club and fang.

It looks to me like that’s how the Gerasenes saw the world, and you’d have to say the rampage of their pigs confirmed their worldview. So while they couldn’t solve the troubles they lived with they could manage them at least, or keep them at bay, which is what they had done with the demoniac. And then here is this new power who has landed on their shore and who has just added to their uncertainty, so of course they prevail on him to leave. And this foreign power which they are rejecting, a power outside of their control, with new uncertainties, tragically this foreign power they’re afraid of is the Kingdom of God. Which is the case for all of us.

A lot of what we moderns call religion is the attempt of human beings to manage the spiritual powers which we feel are there but are outside of our control. The way the religions do this is by means of rituals and incantations and formulaic prayers. Those are the practices that are being condemned by the prophecy of Isaiah in our first lesson. God was saying, “Yes, pray to me, I want you to pray to me, I’m waiting for you to pray to me, but not like that, not like that, if you pray to me I like that I will not listen and I will judge you.” I believe that the prayer which is rejected by Isaiah is the prayer that we pray in order to manage our world. Sort of like using medicine, or insurance, or your personal financial advisor. We pray to God for help in management, especially when things get tight and the chaos seems to get too close.

But on the other hand, in our gospel lesson, the demons make their request to Jesus and Jesus listens and grants to them what they ask for, self-defeating as it might have been. What’s the difference?

I think it’s because they recognize his authority. When they see Jesus, they recognize the Kingdom of God has come. He has landed. It’s D-Day. It’s General MacArthur striding onto the beach. It’s not the end of the war, and there will still be blood, much suffering and great hostility, but the end has been revealed. Even the stupid unclean spirits can see that there is some new emperor here who has the greater power over them, some Alexander, some Julius Caesar, with his own legions more than theirs.  They don’t know enough to know that he is gracious. They can’t imagine him not torturing them, so they are terrified. But he is gracious even in granting them their request.

“Thy kingdom come.” Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. It’s the beginning of all our prayers. When we pray for salvation, it’s under “thy kingdom come.” When we pray for healing, it’s under “thy kingdom come.” When we pray for that new job, it’s under “thy kingdom come.” When we pray for our daily bread, it’s under “thy kingdom come.” When we pray for that new bicycle, it’s under “thy kingdom come.” And so our prayers need not be formulaic rituals or rain dances or anything else. We make our request, and we explain to God why it fits so nicely under the Kingdom of God. And then we remember who we are and what we really know, and we pray, “Thy will be done.”

Even when we’re living on the edge. We’re always living on the slippery slopes. Prayer is how you keep your balance on the steepness of the slopes. The cliffs, the palisades, the rock-slide, the scree, the precipice, the very steep bank that goes right down into the water.

I’m talking about the prayers we pray within the danger of the world, the liminality of our lives, the chaos that surrounds us and threatens to overwhelm us, especially those of us who are weak or who have made mistakes. But it may be it just happens, even when we’re innocent. I’m not talking about prayers of repentance and confessing of your sin, I mean the prayers we pray to God from just the danger of the world, from how close we really do live to the edge, how close we live to the abyss.

Jesus did not make the world a paradise, a gated community, a pleasure cruise. God did not do that with the resurrection. The resurrection stands in the middle of the world as it is. The Kingdom of God most certainly does bring order to the world, but God has willed it such that it has not yet fully changed the world, and it comes into the world as it is, and it comes only partially and provisionally. And so there’s a gap between the world as we can imagine it should be and the dangerous world as we experience it right now and that gap is what we bridge within our prayers.

"Help us, save us, release us, free us. Not according to my list, not to make this world work for me, but according to your kingdom come." Is this a helpful distinction for you? Can this settle you down like that man, and put you in your right mind, and in some simple clothing?

So look at Psalm 22, in the course of just a few verses it goes from “help me, help me, save me from the beasts, from the dogs,” to “I will praise you in the great congregation.” “You are great O God. You are just plain great and wonderful, quite apart from what you do for me.” You have to do both. You have to let yourself pray both. You have to give voice to your lamentation in order to give voice as well to praise. That’s the way it works when you are praying under the Kingdom of God. It might not seem a natural dynamic, but the experience of believers over the centuries has found it to be true, that the prayer of lamentation is one half the pulse, and the other half is the prayer of praise, and in your heart you generate them both, and you can’t have the one without the other.

If you think about that, that fits with love. You can harden yourself to keep the chaos of the world at bay, or you can love it and lament it. You can harden yourself to your fate and to your destiny, or you can praise God, which is what you do for love. If we find that these two come so close together, lamentation and praise, that’s because it’s love that’s pulsing in it. Don’t you want it always to come down to love?

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 16, Proper 6, The Geography of Prayer 3: The Desert

2 Samuel 11:26—12:10, 13-15, Psalm 32, Galatians 2:15-21, Luke 7:36—8:3
Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 45

This is the third sermon in my series entitled “A Geography of Prayer.” My title is from our Psalm, verse four: “My moisture was dried up as in the heat of summer.” When I say desert I mean desiccation and desertion, I mean the drought of desolation and the aridity of alienation. I mean that God is gone from you and you are gone from God, when this mutual desertion is caused by guilt and shame. I mean when the silence between you and God is a guilty silence and not a quiet repose.

The sinful woman does not say a thing. It is Simon who can talk. He’s the one who claims the right of moral discourse. He’s a good man. He works at being good and keeping good, which is why he is a Pharisee. He’s so good he will have Jesus over for dinner, even though he opposes Jesus. He’s so good he lets the poor people in to gather up the leftovers, which is why the doors are open. He’s so clean he never once touches Jesus, because Jesus is notoriously unkosher. So he will not honor Jesus with the customary kiss  or water for his feet and oil for his head. Which could be considered rude, but Simon can justify himself in terms of ritual restrictions. “Look, am I not trying to be a nice guy?” It ends up as a patronizing hospitality, and an insult is implied, if Jesus wants to take it.

But Jesus doesn’t hold it again him. Jesus is more gracious than his host. Jesus has been forgiving Simon all along, without Simon asking for it or understanding that he needed it. There’s a point: God forgives you long before you ask for it, and God forgives you of far more than you ever ask forgiveness for. In God’s economy of grace, forgiveness comes before confession. God has forgiven your sin before you ever confessed it. The reason you confess it is not to get God to forgive it, the reason you confess is to honor the truth of God’s grace and how much you need it.

The woman knows she needs it. She does not hide her status as a sinner. The nature of her sin is strongly suggested, but it’s only suggested and we do not have to know for sure. In fact, whenever it comes to another person, you really can’t know anyway. Simon thinks he knows, but what does he really know about this woman and her predicament and why she might have sold herself, if that in fact is what her sinning is. Not that we need to justify her choice. She does not attempt to justify herself, she offers no explanations or excuses. All she pleads is the expression of her love. And again, we are not told why. We do not need to know. That’s a second point: the true confession of your sins is not an accurate enumeration of your sins. No, it’s far more simple than that: You just say, “I am a sinner. For what I have done I make no excuse, and I do not try to justify myself. I believe you, O God. I am a sinner. Be merciful to me. I want to love you.”

She washes his feet with her tears. How is that possible? Who is physically able to cry out a whole pint of tears? And how long is her hair? How sexual was it when she loosened her hair before them all? Or when she rubbed the cream on his skin. Propriety is threatened here. But it also threatens propriety if the forgiveness of God is so extravagant. If God forgives us so freely how shall we protect morality? How shall we keep things good and right, with good boundaries, and keep things safe for children, and responsible, and respectable? These are right considerations, but they do not capture God, and God’s capacities, and God’s extravagance.

I hear it often said that God will forgive you if you are truly sorry for your sin and if you repent of your sin. Your forgiveness is conditional on your repentance. That was the import of the Old Testament, as you saw in Psalm 32, and it’s still the official teaching of some Christian churches. They teach that a sin is not forgiven unless it is repented of, and it might not be forgiven if you are not sorry enough. That is certainly not the official teaching of the Reformed Church. Our teaching, which we got from Martin Luther, is that your forgiveness does not depend on you or on the depth of your sorrow or even on the value or veracity of your repentance.

Your forgiveness is an absolute and unconditional gift of God which comes from the cross of Christ, once-for-all, for all of time and all of humanity and all of human sin, past, present, and future. There is therefore now no condemnation, there is no more punishment, no more little babies dying because of the sins of their fathers like King David. That’s all completely done with as of that first Good Friday. Your forgiveness does not depend on how truly sorry you are or whether you repent or whether you stop doing the sins you say you’re sorry for. Which is apparently too drastic and radical and lavish and extravagant for many churches to believe, because that means that all of your future sins are already forgiven too, before you have confessed them, before you’ve even done them. That’s right.

Then why do you confess them? Not to get them forgiven but because they are forgiven. You confess to let the load off of your guilt. You heard that in our Psalm today. “God’s hand on me lay heavy night and day, while stubbornly I hid my guilt away.” Guilt is what you deserve when you’re a sinner, it’s what you really do deserve. So knowing this, and in fear of others knowing what you deserve, you hide your sin, and when you hide your sin, your guilt weighs down on you. And that cuts you off. That drains you and it dries you out. You know what it’s like when you’re hiding something, you know what’s it like to feel the weight of guilt, and you know how you get. So you confess your sin in order to release the guilt you feel. You will have to pass through the shame of it, like the woman in the story, but that’s the death you have to die in order to be free.

You confess your sin to tell the truth about yourself. You learn to tell the truth about yourself, even when it’s an inconvenient truth, especially when it’s an inconvenient truth, because it is a liberating truth. That your goodness is a goodness given and not a goodness gained, which frees you from the hardness of trying to keep good like Simon the Pharisee, in order to be free like the Lord Jesus, who let himself enjoy the wet and fragrant contact of the woman’s love. You confess your sins to tell the truth about yourself, which, if you accept the humiliation, gains you liberation.

You confess your sin to tell the truth about God. Your prayer of confession is also a confession of faith. When you confess your sins you’re saying that you believe God, and what God says about our human race, and you believe in the value of what God had to do in Christ for the salvation of the human race. That’s why in our liturgy we first confess our faith and then we confess our sins, because the confession of your sins is also a confession of your faith, you confess your sins to say, Yes, God, I believe it when you say that I have not loved you with my whole heart and I have not loved my neighbor as myself. You confess your sins as a statement of your faith.

Which is why in the Reformed Church we keep our prayers of confession very simple. We don’t generally enumerate our sins. Sometimes there’s value in this, in doing a searching moral inventory, or in therapy, or in spiritual direction. But even then you cannot fully know yourself, and you have to come back to trust in what God says about you, and trust the promise that as far as God is concerned you are fully justified, just receive it and believe it. And be grateful.

You confess your sin as an act of gratitude. How much God has done for you, thank God!

You confess your sins as an act of praise. Let me tell you how great God is, how gracious, how merciful, how lavish and extravagant.

You confess your sin as an act of love. You love the Lord because you have been forgiven much. To recite in your prayer that “you have not loved God with your whole heart nor your neighbor as yourself,” even that recital is act of loving God with your whole heart.

This story is like a parable, and it is mystical. The woman stands for Jesus. The woman is Jesus, who became sin for us, Jesus weeping, Jesus with his dirty hair, smelling of your sweat and your dirt, and his oil on your desiccated skin. The woman is also you, when you confess your sins, and then Jesus is God, whom you are grabbing for, in your broken love and your bad attempts at love, and God accepts your love, and you need not speak, because of how much God loves you.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 9, Proper 5, The Geography of Prayer, #2: The Pits

I Kings 17:17-24, Psalm 30, Galatians 1:11-24, Luke 7:11-17

Dearly beloved, this is the second sermon in my new series entitled “A Geography of Prayer.” Last week was the Planet of Prayer, and today is the Pits of Prayer. My title is from our Psalm, in the tenth verse. In the Bible, the Pit is that deep cavern in the earth where the dead went. In the geography of Israel it was a real place but undiscoverable. The Pit was also a metaphor for them, as it is for us, of the despair of human life, the deep despair.

In both of our stories today, a widow is in the pit of loss and grief from the death of her only son. The widow in the gospel is silent in her grief, while the widow of Zarephath lashes out in anger and resentment, as well as with the guilt we often mix with grief. Neither of the widows ask for help. Neither one has the idea to ask to have her child raised again.

Elijah does it because he is convicted by her accusation. He does it to defend the honor of God against her charge.  But the gospel widow makes no accusation. God’s honor is not at stake. Jesus could have done nothing. He does it for himself as much as for her. It is his idea, not hers. He does not wait for her request. He does not expect it. He does it freely. Or as a Calvinist would say, he does absolutely freely in his sovereign grace.

So if neither widow has requested it, what does this have to with prayer? Last Sunday it was clear. We saw the petition of the centurion and the intercession of the elders. But the widows do not petition and the pall bearers do not intercede. Because it was too late. You can pray for healing while a person is alive, even in extremity, but as soon as that spark of life goes out it is too late. So if you’re a normal person you’re not going to ask for it, even if you believe these Bible stories. Most of my own family believes the Bible stories more or less, but at the funeral of my father, a year ago yesterday, none of us prayed for God to bring my father back to life right there. We prayed for many other things, but not that.

Jesus did it for her without being asked. Here’s a take home: So much of what God does for you is what you've never asked for. We never thought to request the great part of the good God does for us, nor do we think to credit God for it. I suppose God’s used to that by now, and God is not resentful or bitter. The joke’s on us, and when the angels are having happy hour it’s our stupidity they joke about.

There is another point. Just as the raising of their sons was not the idea of the widows, so too, in a general way, doctrinally, the resurrection was not our idea. It is God’s surprise. If you look at religions globally, it isn't resurrection that humanity was ever asking for. Not that we haven’t always hoped for immortality. People say they want to go to heaven when they die. The global idea of humanity has ever been the immortality of our souls, whether that’s immortality with the angels up in heaven or, in some religions, reincarnation through the transmigration of our souls. But God’s idea is the resurrection and renewal and sanctification of your ordinary bodies. It’s an idea that even the church finds hard to believe, and we keep sliding back to the easier idea of the immortality of the soul.

It’s easy to believe that evil and sin are natural to the ordinary world. It is taught by most religions that Evil is just as natural and necessary as the Good. Even Christians give in to this, and we are taught that this ordinary world is so unsalvageable that we have to leave it behind for heaven in order to enjoy eternal life. But God’s idea is that the world is meant to be good, and the ordinary world is very much worth saving and redeeming. God’s idea is that sin and evil are neither natural nor inevitable to the ordinary world, and that the presence in our lives of sin and evil tells us that there’s something wrong. God’s idea is to make it right, not to abandon it. God intends to make it right, and we shall have a second chance to live in it as right. God’s idea is to raise us again and put us back into the world when God has made it right. And it’s also God’s idea to make things right, right now, even if only provisionally and partially. When we pray we are saying, “Come on God, make things right.”

But what’s so wrong with dying to begin with? Why not just accept our deaths as other creatures do? Why can’t we accept our biology like other animals, that when our time is up we’re done? Cicadas get seventeen years, gerbils get two, elephants get sixty, and we get about seventy. Why does our species presume to be eternal, or even to have a second go round? Why does Christian doctrine set this up? Why does God offer this to us?

It’s not about us. It’s about God. It’s about God’s investment in the world, and what God made us for and wants from us. We are the animals who belong to God and not to ourselves. We are the species that doesn't make sense to ourselves. (How much our tragic history confirms this.) Our species makes sense only in terms of God and the judgments of God. Humanity makes no sense apart from God. Which means that we should not expect the idea of resurrection to be reasonable on its own. The resurrection of human beings is about God, and it’s God’s idea. God will raise us again because this jealous God will not surrender us to sin and evil and death. God will restore us to God’s self. In both stories, the mother — she stands for God. God is the mother, and you are the child, and Jesus is the prophet, and it’s his idea.

The stories are specific. Elijah gave the boy back to his mother. Jesus gave the son back to his mother. God has compassion on these widows in their circumstance and God desires their restoration. God wants a good life for these widows, that they experience their existence in the ordinary world as good. It’s for their mothers that these boys were raised again, in order to care for them in their widowhood. It’s not for yourself that you will be resurrected, but for loving others as yourself as you’re supposed to, and especially for loving God as you should, for once! Your resurrection is because you belong to God and God desires you and is jealous for you, and God will not let death succeed in cutting you out of the enduring communion of God’s love.

Which is why you pray. Yes, you pray because you count on the compassion of Our Lord, but you also pray because you count on what the resurrection tells you, what it tells you of God’s commitment to your life within this ordinary world, which God has made you for and put you in. Now, you get it that to be resurrected you have to die first, you know you have to go down to the Pit, and you know there’s going to be pits and valleys in your life, and you may fall down a pit so deep you can’t see out, and all you have left is a prayer of desperation. But you keep praying as a way of believing in God’s promise of life beyond the pit. You keep praying as a way of trusting in God’s commitment to what life must be like in this world, not because of what we deserve, but because of God, and what God is like.

And what God is like is to be compassionate, and gracious, but also free, and sovereign. And there is no mechanical relationship between our prayers and what God does. Your prayer is not a toggle switch. It’s more like a letter you put in the mail, or an application to college or an application for a job.  And you live with the gap between your prayer and God’s response, and you have trust God in that gap. The gap is not in God, who is constant and eternal, the gap is in us and in our knowledge and our limits and our mortality.

So now my family is praying for my little niece Ragan. She has leukemia. You could say that leukemia is just natural to the world, and you’d be right, and all of us have to die. But God has strange ideas, and in your prayers you claim those strange ideas. And you cannot see beyond the gap so you have to trust in the goodness of the sovereignty of God. And, on my word, you can believe that all the energy that empowers the sovereignty is love. God’s love. Not just compassion, but love, and desire for you and delight in you. God’s been loving you before you even thought to ask for it. You can pray because God loves you.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 2, Proper 4: A Geography of Prayer, Number 1: The Planet

I Kings 8:22-23, 41-43, Psalm 96:1-9, Galatians 1:1-12, Luke 7:1-10

Dearly beloved, we have entered that period in the church’s calendar that we call Ordinary Time. Ordinary time is most of the year. It is all those Sundays outside the seasons of Easter and Christmas. In those two seasons we celebrate the events in the life of Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world. In Ordinary Time we look at our own ordinary lives, in the ordinary world, but as this world is the Kingdom of God.

In Ordinary Time, by ecumenical agreement, each Sunday gets its proper prayers and lessons. Today is Sunday Proper 4. Why we are not starting with Proper 1 has to do with the changing date of Easter, as I could show you in some charts and tables, but not in a sermon.

My next seven sermons are going to be a series on prayer. My method is to look at the proper lessons every week with this question in mind: what can these lessons can tell us about prayer. And if we believe that scripture is God’s Word, that means we’re asking God to tell us about prayer. So my sermons are going to be reports. I will report to you what I have heard the scriptures say, and what God is telling us.

Well then, scripture lessons for Proper 4, what can you tell us about prayer? We start with our first lesson, from First Kings. First, the obvious: people pray. We talk to God, and we use words when we do it. We assume that God listens to what we say and can understand us in any language. We assume that God has a mind of some exalted sort, and that God has a will, so that God can choose to act or not on what we tell God.

Second, people can pray together, with one person leading. King Solomon prayed out loud, and the assembly of Israel listened to him, and by their listening they were praying too. Some of us believe that the prayers of a designated person have more value than a common person’s prayers, but Protestants aren’t supposed to believe that.

Third, we pray in certain places which are designed for prayer. Some of us believe that the designated place adds value to the prayer. Christians aren’t supposed to believe that, unless its value is for ourselves; designated places can encourage and inspire us to pray, and it’s more than convenient for the congregation to have a designated place for our common prayers. So then, although all of us pray elsewhere as individuals and as families, we assemble here to pray, we let ourselves be led in prayer and we pray with our leaders by listening, and we assume that God listens and understands and at least considers doing what we ask.

Fourth, foreigners pray. Prayer is global. Almost all religions pray. I would say that prayer is the most religious thing that people do. Our religions incorporate such ordinary activities as singing and eating and teaching and serving and committing and making communities, but it’s only in religion that we pray. Prayer how we cross the boundary between our ordinary lives and whatever is transcendent. Human beings are the animals who pray. We are the animals with such strong imaginations, and we can imagine transcendence, and we try to enter into that transcendence which we’ve imagined, crossing into it by our thoughts and by our speech, and we imagine that someone transcendent is listening, even if that someone is not talking back, at least not directly, not in any way you’d call a conversation. God does not pray back to us! Prayer is a strange form of communication, being so one-sided. How do I know that anyone is listening, or that anyone is even there? But billions of people all around the planet keep on doing it.

Fifth, we can invite the people of the world to pray with us and we can pray with them, without regard for their belonging to the church or not. God listens to them too. That’s the assumption of the first lesson and the implication of the gospel lesson. Jesus heard the request of the pagan centurion. Our church is loyal to the Lordship of Jesus, and in his name we pray to God, and we witness to the way of Jesus and the truth of Jesus and the life of Jesus, but God is not constricted to our loyalty and God is greater than our witnessing. God is faithful to the church but not confined to the church. God’s goal is not the salvation of the church but of the world.

Sixth, when we pray in church we can pray for our own needs but we must also pray for all the world and for all sorts and conditions of human kind. That’s also in both the first lesson and the gospel lesson. This is what it means for us to be called a kingdom of priests, as we repeat it in the Ascription of Glory every week. A priest is someone who prays on behalf of other people. So if all believers are priests, one of our missions is not only to pray for other people but to help them pray. People don’t know how to pray. People are afraid to pray. People have given up on prayer. We help them pray.

Whether the people are saved or not or Christian or not is up to God, that’s not up to us, our mission is to help everybody pray, and I have discovered in my fellowship with Muslims and Jews and people of other faiths, that if I am truly open and humble and respectful, I can always pray my prayer in Jesus’ name and most of them are fine with that.

Seventh, from the gospel lesson: The Lord Jesus has authority, as prophet, priest, and king. He has authority to be a prophet, a healing prophet, like Elisha in the Old Testament, who healed the pagan officer Naaman, which story is the background to what Jesus does. Jesus has authority to be a king, which the centurion recognizes by calling him Lord and by saying that he’s unworthy to have Jesus come into his house. And as Solomon was a king who acted as a priest, so Jesus has authority to be our priest. He has authority to intercede with God on our behalf. More than that, he is himself the living temple to whom the people go to offer their prayer. And so we believe that the Lord Jesus has authority to hear our prayers to God and act on them. That’s why we pray to God in the name of Jesus Christ, because of the authority he bears for our sake.

Eighth, in this story we see two kinds of prayers. Petition and intercession. A petition is the request you make for yourself or for someone very close to you. That’s what the centurion did. And what the elders did was intercession, a request you make for someone other than yourself. Of course these overlap, and we should balance them.

Anne Lamott has written that the most basic prayer is “Help me!” That we can pray for our ordinary needs was confirmed by Our Lord in the prayer that he taught us, for what could be more basic help than praying for our daily bread? But we also pray, “Thy will be done, thy kingdom come.” Which means that in all our petitions and our intercessions we trust in God’s authority to answer our needs according to God’s own will and as our requests conform to the coming of the Kingdom. We will not see the final answer to our prayers until God’s kingdom has fully come on earth as it is in heaven. That is the gap we have to live with when it comes to prayer, the gap between our own knowledge and God’s providence.

Ninth, did you notice in the story that Jesus and the centurion never meet up with each other or even see each other, and also that the slave is healed by Jesus at a distance and in silence. Is not this the normal experience of prayer: the distance, the silence, this unseeing, the lack of physical contact and physical certainty? The distance of God, the silence of God, and if we have any real sensation or feeling of God’s presence we cannot prove it, it can be explained away by anyone who does not believe it, and if we point to a seeming answer to our prayer from God, that too can be explained away. We cannot disprove the disproof, we cannot escape the gap, which is why it takes such faith. It does take faith to pray. I think it takes more faith than doing good deeds for the poor.

In this sermon series, I expect to be coming back to this problem of the gap, and the distance, and the silence. I hope to have more to report to you. But today I leave you with this: The silence of God is not the anger of God. When we are angry we do the “silent treatment,” but God doesn’t. The anger of God is always spoken and always very clear. The silence of God is like your silence when you sit down with a hurting friend and you are wise enough to  keep your mouth shut and let them do the talking. The silence is God suffering us and also suffering with us, God waiting on us, God giving us great space to live our lives, with good and bad, with joy and sorrow.

And this you will have to accept as my testimony, I cannot prove it. I have learned, through my own prayers, which I’ve been practicing every morning now for twenty years, that while you’re praying, you will begin to experience the silence of God as the love of God. Honest. I certainly am not the only one to have discovered it. That’s why I pray every day, because it’s in my prayers that I experience the love of God. I recommend the same to you.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 26, Trinity Sunday, "Why We Love the Holy Trinity"

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, Psalm 8, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15

Today is Trinity Sunday. Unlike most Sundays in our calendar, we are not marking any specific Biblical event, but it makes sense to celebrate the Trinity on the Sunday after Pentecost. On Pentecost God exposed God’s self in the Holy Spirit --- God came among us in the third person of God. Fifty days before that, on Easter, God exposed God’s self the Lord Jesus --- God was among us in the second person of God. The Easter season celebrates the mighty acts of God for our salvation as these actions of two persons, so now that the Season is over, we can put God back together!

Notice that God did not expose God’s self as the Father, as the first person of the Trinity. God the Father has chosen to be exposed in the person of the Son and the person of the Spirit. Recently we heard one of the disciples tell Jesus, "Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied." Jesus answered, "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." Which means that when you have Jesus you have all of God, not just a part of God. Likewise, when you have the Holy Spirit, you have not just a third of God but the whole of God, in the person of the Spirit. That’s the special Unity of the Trinity, a unity that is unique. God is One but God is free, so God is not confined to the mathematical restrictions of oneness.

　
So not three gods. Whenever you have one person of the Trinity, you have all three, but in that person. So when you receive the Holy Spirit, what dwells within you is not just a third of God but all of God—the Father, Son, and Spirit, in the person of the Spirit.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is challenging and even difficult. It is believable, and many people have believed it with integrity, but most of humanity has not. On the one side, it seems narrow and bigoted to claim there is only One Lord God, the God of Abraham, and on the other side it seems illogical to claim that this One God is in three persons. The doctrine has sometimes been reduced to make it easier, but it’s better to increase our capacity for what is difficult.

The Early Church had to do that from the start. After that first Easter and Pentecost, the Church, in the power of the Spirit, explored the truth of Jesus and expanded that truth into the breadth of human culture and philosophy. The Church experimented with language and logic on how best to witness to the mystery of One God in three persons and not three gods. These linguistic and logical experiments were controversial, but they were consolidated into a common formula in A.D. 325 by a church council which met at the little city of Nicea, and the Nicene Creed contains the formula (revised at Constantinople in A.D. 381).

　

Ever since then, the Nicene Creed is the standard of whether you are orthodox of not. You need to know this. For example, Old First is orthodox. We may be considered liberal or progressive or unconventional, but strictly speaking we are orthodox. The standard is the Nicene Creed. I say this not to boast of it, or even to suggest that orthodoxy has some value in itself. But it’s a symbol of keeping our focus not on the family or on current issues or ourselves or our behaviors, but on the wonderful inviting mystery of the character of God. That’s why.

The Nicene Creed is not in the Bible. It is a summation of the Bible. The word "Trinity" is not in the Bible. It is a distillation of the Bible. The raw material of the doctrine of the Trinity comes from Our Lord himself, from what he said to his disciples, which his best friend John wrote down for us. Jesus spoke of God the Father as a person, and as a person other than himself. He spoke of God the Holy Spirit as another person, and as a person other than the Father and himself. He spoke of three persons: himself, his Father, and the Spirit. And yet the God he spoke of was the the One Lord God of Israel. Not once did Jesus ever challenge the basic Jewish creed that God is One. So it’s the Lord Jesus who got us started on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
　

I called the doctrine a distillation. What I mean is that the Lord Jesus is the vine who gave us the wine, and the church has taken the wine and distilled it like a spirit. There is some play within these words—the wine and the spirit. The spirit rises from the wine. The wine is the one and only Son of God in his incarnation, God unique in one man, once for all. But the Spirit of God goes out, expands, explores, experiments. The Holy Spirit loves pluriformity, multiplicity, manifold expressions and explorations, many lands and many peoples and many languages, new thought forms, new creations, new ideas, new discoveries of what God is doing in the One Lord Jesus Christ.

With the Trinity there is both an in and out. God calls you into God, in the second person, in the Son of God, who calls you to come to him, who calls you to enter into God, into the life of God, the gracious and loving life of God, which can you enter like a child right at home. And in the third person, in the Holy Spirit, God comes out to you where you are, God enters into your life, your own life, which is unique to you.

God grants you the right to your own life. God does not absorb you. As Melody said to other night: "No one else can know exactly what goes on inside my head. You can’t see into my head, you can’t read my mind. No one can. My ife is unique. No one else has ever lived my life before. No one else has ever had my combination of thoughts and experiences. Only me, I am unique, this is my life." I told her she gave me my sermon.
　

That’s what God wants, for you to have your own life. A free life, even a free-standing life, but not a self-standing life, that you may be a self who is not selfish. It’s more than just sharing and more than mutual interest, it’s mutual investment, it’s committing to each other, it’s bearing each other and serving each other and suffering for each other. God commits to that with us.

We go in and God comes out. We enter into the suffering and death of Jesus, for the sake of our salvation and redemption and reconciliation, in order to be able to have the fellowship with God that we are made for, but from which we are cut off by the guilt of our sin. That gives us entry into the circle of love which keeps moving between the persons of the Trinity. And that circle of love which is the greatest energy of all then generates a great love rising out of it, like a geyser, like a flame arising from the surface of the sun, and pouring into us, the energy of God’s love which is God’s self, which is God’s soul, God’s Spirit, in the person of whom the whole God enters you. God’s love has been poured into your hearts by the Holy Spirit.

God enters into your own suffering. You know that the Spirit inspires your goodness and obedience, but the Spirit dwells within your troubles and afflictions. The Spirit is inside your fruits and your graces and your good works, but God is also in your groaning and your misery, experiencing your life in you. God loves every part of you from inside you.
　

Which is why St. Paul can say that we boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us. I have known it to go the other way, that affliction leads to bitterness and bitterness to bad character and from that to despair. The difference is God’s love, which has to sustain through your affliction all the way to hope. And that love is God’s self, in the Spirit, who lives quietly within you.

We love the Trinity because it the Trinity generates the love of God. Greatest love is not self-love but love of the other who will always be other than yourself. The persons of the Holy Trinity love each other in their eternal otherness. And this love God shares with you. That is the secret of your life, and why you exist, so that God can love you, and love you with the love God has within God’s self.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 19, Pentecost 2014: Why We Love Our Advocate

The great Charles Laughton in "Witness for the Prosecution"


Genesis 11:1-9, Psalm 104, Romans 8:14-17, Acts 2:1-21, John 14:8-17, 25-27

Pentecost is a holiday for both Christians and Jews. We Christians call it “Pentecost” from the Greek word for “fifty”, because it’s fifty days after Easter, and it marks the end and the fulfillment of the Easter Season. We Christians got the holiday from the Jews, of course, who call it Shavuoth, which means “sevens”, because it comes seven-times-seven days after Passover, a week of weeks.

For Jews it marks two things: First, it’s the feast of the first-fruits, when in the new growing season you bring offerings in of the earliest fruits and vegetables. Asparagus. Fiddle-heads. The first-fruits of the Christian Church. Second, it’s the commemoration of the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, when God came down in fire and smoke. When God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage; thou shalt have no other gods before me.” God did that fifty days after the first Passover.

Fire and smoke. “For he is like a refiner’s fire.” “And who may abide the day of his coming?” That was the prophecy of God’s coming, as repeated by John the Baptist who said, “I baptize you with water but one is coming after me who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Because when God comes down, God is so holy and righteous that God will burn you pure or burn you up. That was the prophetic expectation, so when it happened like this, little flames upon their heads, harmless little flames, it was a very new thing that God was doing, and I think for many a disappointment.

This day was full of surprises. God was doing new and unexpected things. Although every new thing that God did on Pentecost had its intimations already in the Old Testament. The Holy Spirit took a new form in the world, in these little tongues of fire on their heads, and giving this multiplicity of languages. I want to stress the interplay of both newness and continuity. The old salvation in new forms. The faithfulness of God in new applications.

Which is why we do not say, as some churches do, that Pentecost is the birthday of the church. You hear that said in other traditions, but not in the Reformed tradition. Notice what we read in the catechism, that the church goes back to the beginning the world. The church began Adam and Eve, and then Noah and his family, and I would say the animals, which God gathered, protected, and preserved within the ark, and then it began to take new forms: successively the clan of Abraham, the twelve tribes of Jacob, the nation of Israel, the kingdom of David, and then the remnant of Judea, until it took new form again on Pentecost. Up to then, four thousand years of Biblical chronology, and one people of God through out, with different forms and different people, coming from different places with different backgrounds and different accents and different stories, whom the Son of God is gathering, protecting and preserving.

That’s the first thing that is typical of the Holy Spirit. That is, the old salvation in new forms. The faithfulness of God in new applications. The one truth in many languages. I will say more about this next week, on the Feast Day of the Holy Trinity, when I will preach a further sermon on the Holy Spirit, and what the Spirit shows about the character of God.

But today I want to stay with what the Spirit does within the world. And so the second thing that is typical of the Holy Spirit is multiformity and creative multiplicity. Psalm 104, “O Lord, how manifold are your works, in wisdom you have made them all.” That Psalm celebrates the great diversity of creatures in the world, creeping things innumerable, the fish in the sea, the birds in the branches lifting up their voices.

That’s why we have that reading about the Tower of Babel. Whether it’s from pride or fear or arrogance or love of power, we prefer the safety of centrality and predictability and uniformity. But that is not what God wants for us. It is a judgement that God makes them speak in different languages, but it also is a gift, so that they might go back out and fill the earth, and be creative in experience and experiment. That’s the doing of the Holy Spirit.
It’s also true in the church. You need not take it as a thorough negative that we have different denominations of the Christian church. When it comes to the different churches condemning each other and not being in communion with each other judging other, then it’s negative. But the variety of churches is a positive work of the Holy Spirit as the people of God have scattered by God like seed into the world and scattered by the Spirit into human history. Did you expect the church among the Filipinos to sound like the church among the Greeks or to look like the church among the Dutch? I wonder how many forms of the church we still may see? O Lord, how manifold are your works, in wisdom you have made them all.

And third thing of the Spirit was totally new, what Jesus told them in the Gospel, that the Holy Spirit is among us an Advocate. Advocate, from the Latin ad-vocare, translating the Greek word  παρακλητος,, which is sometimes anglicized as “The Paraclete,” a specific title for the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete. It means Counselor, the Holy Spirit is your Counselor who gives you advice and wisdom and good counsel, who whispers the relevant words of Jesus in your ear. It also means Counselor in the legal sense, the Holy Spirit is your attorney, your lawyer, who takes your case, who helps you make your case. You are the one who has to be the witness, you are the one who has to speak, but you have a Counselor who keeps you prepared to make your case.

Since Easter I have been saying that human history is like a great, long, public trial of the truth, the truth about the world, the truth about God. Within this trial we are witnesses, and when we give our testimony, our testimony is contested. And the verdict as to what stands and what falls will only be given at the end. We do not have the luxury of some kind of rationally conclusive “proof” of our position. The Lord Jesus is always on trial on the world, and so it is no different with our Christian faith. (Romans 8:17) But we are not left alone in this, we are given a Counselor, an Advocate, who helps with our testimony, and also counsels us to give our testimony in gentleness and humility and love.

And also for the trial that is always going on in your own mind, in the inner courtroom of your head. I mean the constant trial of your consciousness and the voices in your conscience and the trial of your own experience as you try to find the truth about yourself. “What is true about me in my life? Should I think this, should I think that?” You want to believe, you have your doubts. Can you believe in your own belief? Can you trust your trying be true? Don’t be discouraged that you doubt. Don’t judge yourself that issues keep rising within you to question your belief. Don’t think you have to hide behind the walls of your inner tower to keep protecting your belief. It is the Spirit who sends you out to life and to experience, and the Spirit is your counselor who helps you interpret all the unfamiliar sounds and the multiplicity of voices. Even in your own inner courtroom you can be at peace. Among the clamor of voices that keep echoing in your head is the voice of your Counselor who reminds you what Jesus said, “Let not your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

The Spirit is your life-long Advocate. The Spirit creates diversity. And the Spirit is always faithful. Those three things all speak of love. Capital S, capital L. You know, it always comes down to the Love of God, the love of God for the world and all the creatures of the world, and it always comes down to the love of God for you.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 12, Easter 7, Why We Love the Jailer

 

Acts 16:16-34, Psalm 97, Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-26, John 17:20-26

The earthquake shaking the prison and the doors opening and the chains falling off the prisoners is an image of the resurrection, it’s a recapitulation of the resurrection of Jesus in the life of Paul and Silas. And in the life of the jailer the resurrection comes a different way, as he gets saved from the power of death by his believing in the Lord Jesus.

This is the second of my two sermons on the resurrection coming to the city of Philippi. As I said last week, Philippi was a colonia, a Roman military town. Its magistrates were military officers, its population was soldiers and their hangers-on from all over the Empire. The spirit of Rome was concentrated here, with its pride and prejudice and arrogant aggression. Caesar was worshiped here as a god, as was Mars, the god of war. Jews were not welcome, if they practiced their religion. Law and order were heavy-handed and violence was just below the surface. There was commerce and prosperity and also corruption and exploitation.

You see the exploitation with the slave girl. She had a real gift, but her owners exploited her. I gotta say that I wish St. Paul had done a little more for her; you know, after he had ended her profitability he might have dealt with her remaining slavery somehow, like having Lydia buy her or something. But there it is; the story was not dreamed up to illustrate a point or make St. Paul look good. The story is offered as historical, and not white-washed, and sometimes even St. Paul needs to be forgiven. If we dare to judge him!

You see the corruption in the unfairness of the magistrates, kowtowing to the slave owners, and you see the violence all through the story. Especially in the violence the jailer is going to do to himself. He knows this city punishes without much thought or any concern for fairness. When something goes wrong, then someone has to pay, and the penalty may be so brutal that suicide is preferable. The fear of death has power in this city, and the people are in bondage to it.

Not that life outside the Empire was better. Not that the barbarians were any less violent or less afraid of violence. There was much about Rome which the apostles valued. They paid their taxes and they prayed for the Emperor. It’s not that Rome was specially bad, but that Rome is typical, it is the Biblical type by which we measure our own societies and nations and ideologies. How are we imperial? How much violence is built into our way of life? How much does our prosperity depend on exploitation? Such questions are always relevant for every nation all the time. Yet after his conversion the jailer is not expected to stop being a jailer, and Lydia does not end her business selling purple to the upper class. The resurrection can keep you in your business, and keep you going within the moral complexity of your employments and activities.

Paul and Silas act like they are free, even in the bondage of their chains. Not free of death, but free of the fear of death. Not because they’re stoical, as you can see later when St. Paul feels very free to make use of his Roman citizenship to get some vindication and respect, but free of the fear of death because of what they believe about the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Free to live within the corruption and not be angry or bitter, free to move within the moral complexity with self-respect yourself. That’s the kind of freedom the gospel offers you. It’s the special kind of freedom you get when you become a servant of the Most High God. And today that’s what salvation means. Not only rescue, but freedom — freedom from and freedom for.

Salvation. What is the salvation you desire? Eternal life? Escape from hell? Some sort of release? Some sort of relief? For those of you who are depressed, it usually means finding some meaning for your life. For those of you with anxiety, it usually means relieving your fear of pain and death. That’s what the jailer felt. He was terrified of the punishment that he would get from the prisoners having all escaped. But notice how the power of the resurrection was working to save the jailer before he knew it. St. Paul called out, "Don’t hurt yourself, we’re all still here." That first message saved his life. But his mind was still in bondage, and his fear is evident when he falls before the apostles and voices the classic question of the ages, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" Even here, it’s the salvation of his neck he’s worried about.

The second message offers him a salvation greater than he asked for, and gave him more than he expected. He has no guarantee that there might not still be retribution, but his mind is free. And look what happens to him. The prisoners are still within his care, but he who was a jailer now becomes a host. And he washes clean the wounds from their flogging which had been left to fester. He is recapitulating Jesus who washed the feet of his disciples, and he anticipates the baptism which his whole family now receives.

The jailer is empowered here, he is the master who becomes a servant to his guests. He brings them from the dungeon to his house, and he serves them food, again like Jesus in the Upper Room. Here is healing and communion, here is the proper hospitality that the city of Philippi really should have given them. The city is dark outside, but from the windows of this little house there shines a light the darkness can neither overcome or comprehend.

What is it about this new life which the city is afraid of? Why do they find it so disturbing? Aren’t the slave owners right, that this gospel upsets the social order of the city? Isn’t it because the peace and healing if offers is a condition of the Lordship of Jesus, because the salvation it offers is the sovereignty of God? The sovereignty of God calls into question every other sovereignty and every other system which we work out in order to protect our interests and to keep our fears at bay? We are more afraid of the sovereignty of God than of the other hurts and dangers of the world. And often we’ll accept only when we have no other choice, like the jailer, from desperation. Well, some of us are like Lydia, last week, accepting it with calmness and freedom. Most of us are in between. It’s a long continuum, and there’s lots of room for all of us.

You have your own motivations. The desperation of the jailer, the confidence of Lydia, the faith of your fathers like Paul, the faith of your mother, like Silas, maybe you came here attracted by what you saw, maybe you came here driven by your need, maybe you were looking for community, maybe you were looking for nothing but God. Whatever you came here for, you get more back than what had expected—it is related, yes, but different, with implications and extensions that give you pause and second thought. You find that it both comforts you and challenges you, that in giving you what you wanted it transforms you into desiring what you did not want before. This community has more than you bargained for, but God keeps calling you, and you keep taking yet another step further into the sovereignty of God which is salvation.

　
I’m telling you that God is calling you. God keeps saying, "Come. The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come’" And let all of you today who hear this tell each other, "Come." You have freely chosen to come here, but I’m telling you that God was calling you before you knew it. What God is calling you toward is your own resurrection. What God is calling you toward is your own share in the life of God. This is what you were made for, though you are afraid of it. The life is fearful and powerful because it does not belong to you. It belongs to God, who has its sovereignty, but you may desire it when you believe that is it love. The love that calls you is the love which comes out from inside God. And your fear of it is exactly what tells you how true it is. This is the love you may believe in. It is the love of God for you.

Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 5, Easter 6, Why We Love Lydia

Acts 16:9-15, Psalm 67, Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5, John 14:23-29

This is the first of two sermons on the resurrection coming to the city of Philippi. Today, the resurrection comes to Lydia, and next week, the resurrection comes to the jailer. So this week let me introduce you to the city of Philippi. The city was the site of a history-changing battle just a century before, when Caesar Augustus defeated the army of the Roman Senate and Brutus and Cassius, and the family of Caesar secured the personal control of all the vast power of the Roman Empire. Caesar Augustus made the town a colonia, a military town, full of officers and infantry and all their hangers on, and its inhabitants came from all over the Empire. The spirit of Rome was concentrated here, in its pride and prejudice and arrogant aggression. The city worshiped Caesar as a god along with Mars, the Roman god of war. As we will see next week, law and order were heavy-handed and violence was just beneath the surface. There was corruption and exploitation, but also commerce and prosperity.

 

The woman Lydia shares in this prosperity. She’s an importer of purple cloth, the expensive fabric reserved for the upper class as a sign of rank. She has access to cash and capital, she seems to own a house and property, she’s got enterprise and initiative, and she is not identified by any husband’s name. She is an independent character, and she does not buy the established religion of the empire, even though she depends on its defenders to be her customers.


Caesar was honored in Philippi specifically as "Lord and God," so, in this city, no synagogue was tolerated. Any Jews had to say their public prayers outside the city gates, and apparently only women dared to risk it. But why is Lydia with them? Why should this prosperous Gentile be praying to this strange god of the Jews who in the last hundred years had proven incapable of defending his chosen people against the gods of Rome? Well, the reason for her belief in this God is something the Bible never bothers to explain. But who can ever adequately explain the reasons for anyone’s belief? I have told you that your belief is a mystery even to yourself.


One Sabbath, at the riverside, a stranger shows up. He has a message. She hears the stranger out, and she believes him. Once again, the Bible doesn’t explain why—why her, why not the other women praying there? But she signs up, she gets baptized, and her household too. Just like that. But it’s not that simple, really. Think of the implications for her. When she says that "Jesus is Lord," she means that Caesar isn’t. She is putting her household under the sovereignty of a foreign power, within a city of the gods of Rome. What does she hear in the message, that she should choose to be identified with the followers of a dead man, executed by the very soldiers and officials who would be her customers? What in her self-interest was anything Paul could offer her? We don’t find her miserable and enthralled in sin. She seems to be on top of things.


She must have believed the message that Jesus really had risen from the dead, and that behind this Jesus was the one God of the universe, and that his kingdom of justice and righteousness was spreading in the world, and that she could join up with it. She believed the message and trusted the messenger. I mean she must have known how to size up her customers and when to trust her suppliers. She was used to taking calculated risks, she lived by investing her current capital in long-term gains, and she trusted this stranger and she believed what he told her. Self-interest? Faith is that which looks beyond self-interest, isn’t it. Faith is what brings you out of yourself.


And then she challenges Paul to have faith in her. She says, "If you can judge me to be loyal to this lord, then why not stay at my house." Go Lydia. So direct. So open. This is the kind of lady you’d like to build a church around. And so after this, to find the church in Philippi, you go to her house. That’s where the disciples gather. Not just to listen to St. Paul’s teaching and to enjoy his fellowship, but also to sit at Lydia’s table and break the bread and pray. The Spirit of Jesus is among them. God has moved into her house. She is the host of the church. Her open hospitality will define that church for years to come, as you can read in the Epistle to the Philippians. Her church was always one of St. Paul’s favorite churches.


So, St. Paul. He had come to Macedonia because of his dream, and I’m guessing the whole first week in Philippi he’s looking for the guy in his dream. "Is it him? Is it him?" He never finds the guy. It’s this woman that God has brought him here to meet. You wonder why it wasn’t Lydia in his dream, that would be the normal thing in mystic literature. The Bible offers no explanation. Explaining is just not very big in the Bible. The ways of God are always reported as both sovereign and mysterious, obvious and inscrutable. Which is not to stop you from taking initiative, never to hinder your free will, but the opposite. St. Paul planned for "a" and God did "b", but St. Paul would not have been there for "b" if he hadn’t tried for "a". Which means you can be active and take initiative and exercise your free will, which God will make use of for God’s own sovereign purposes; and if things end up quite other than what you intended, you can be grateful in retrospect. The take-home is that you are free to choose and let God use. You can exercise your free will in the service of God’s superior and gracious sovereignty. Take initiative, God’s purpose welcomes your free initiative, and you must welcome God’s surprise with your initiative.


Now, Lydia. I love Lydia, the businesswoman who is the president of the first Christian church in what is now Europe. You can delight in her, she is an image of the power of the resurrection in your life. This is what it looks like and what it leads to, that little church within her house. How strange that the mighty God of the universe should work this way, compared to the gods of Rome. That this God should contest the other gods, the triumphant gods, the victorious gods, the gods of pride and prejudice, by means of a small group meeting in a businesswoman’s house. How strange, but then how typical, if the power of resurrection always takes its form in grace and love. It never takes form in anything that is not absolutely love.


How lovely, that what Jesus promised to his disciples in John 14 came true so quickly with this Gentile businesswoman and her staff and her Jewish friends, that as Jesus said, "My father will love them, and we will come to them, and we will make our home with them." The Holy Trinity had moved in to Philippi, and was at home in Lydia’s house, in her community of Jesus.


The city had temples for its gods and for Julius Caesar, where you could go to contact them. But if you wanted to make contact with the One God who made the universe, you would go to Lydia’s house, the temple of God in Philippi. To her house would come people from every nation who happened to be in Philippi: Jews, Italians, Gauls, Germans, Dalmatians, veterans, their wives, their slaves, their suppliers, their sales people. Her house is a pledge and foretaste of the city of God in Revelation. A bit of the city of God in the middle of a city of Caesar. And the food on her table was for healing. The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.


Lydia’s house is a vision for Old First. Why do you keep coming here? What are you looking for? We do offer something real, real contact with God. Not the totality, not the finality, but the pledge, the foretaste, the first-fruit, the witness, never enough to satisfy but just enough to quicken your desire. There are real signs of love here, signs of the love that you may invest in your own world this week. And no matter what your profits and your losses in love this week, those signs will be here again next week, and although they are small and passing, they are real, because they express the love for you of the God who has called you here.

 
Copyright © 2013, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.