June 22, Proper 7: Hagar and Abraham, Choose Between Your Fears

Genesis 21:8-21, Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17, Romans 6:1-11, Matthew 10:24-39

Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 88-90.

Our story from Genesis doesn’t make Abraham look so good. Abraham was in a fix, but the story is on Hagar’s side. In a prior story, God had promised Abraham that he would be the father of nations, and that his descendants would posses the promised land. Such promises depend on your having children, of course, but Abraham had none. So finally his wife Sarah proposed that Abraham sleep with her lovely young slave-girl Hagar, and if Hagar had a son, Sarah could take him as her own, for him to inherit their riches and the promises. This plan Abraham did not protest!

When slavery was legal in America, Black girls were taken all the time by their White masters. According to the ordinary ethics of ancient times, Abraham did nothing wrong. Hagar had no rights. But according to the standards of the Torah this was adultery. More subtly, Abraham insulted God, because he took God’s promises into his own hands. Abraham feared for his future, so he took the ordinary ethic of his day and the standard sexual privilege of powerful men.

Hagar had no rights. Abraham had the power of life-and-death among his household. He had the right to sex with his slave-girl, and Sarah had the right to give her to him, and also to take the slave-girl’s child as her own, even though Hagar would nurse him and do all the work of raising him. Abraham had the right to disinherit the boy whenever he was inconvenient. He also had the right to free his slaves. As he did with Hagar.

But even in freedom Hagar had no rights. Her freedom was no benefit to her. In those days, every woman had to be under the protection of a man, lest any other man might have his way with her. Every town or village would be dangerous for Hagar and her boy, and so she took her chances on the desert. Of all that Abraham did to Hagar, setting her free was the worst.

By the standards of the day he does nothing wrong, but the story depicts it as dishonorable. He does it in the dark, before the dawn, by himself, surreptitiously, and he packs her provisions, which is a servant’s job, and he does it on the cheap, with just some bread and water. He who had hosted a lavish feast to honor little Isaac. He puts the skin of water on her shoulder, touching her body, which once he had loved. She submits to him again. This is how he treats the mother of his son, his firstborn son, for some years his only son: dishonorably and shamefully.

We are troubled by God’s complicity. God tells Abraham to do what Sarah said to do. True enough, God was not complicit in the use and abuse of Hagar in the first place, and it was from Abraham doubting God that this shameful outcome resulted. True, God promises Abraham that Hagar and Ishmael will survive and someday flourish, but imagine him trying to tell her that as he casts her out in the dark. She’d need to have even greater faith than Abraham exhibited.

God rescues her, but it’s not pretty. Why does God allow her to suffer first? And why is it the crying of her boy that God responds to? Does she count for nothing? God watches her suffering from heaven, and only saves her at the last resort. Okay, so God prefers to wait till other hopes are gone. Or do we say that God is always just in time? And that we have to learn the hard way that the right time is not our time? You can’t get around the mysteries of faith.

I do not think that the opposite of faith is doubt. Not most deeply, most existentially. I think the opposite of faith is fear. It’s fear that drives your doubt. You fear that God will not come through. You fear that God will be unfair, or that God will not deliver on God’s promises. You fear that even if God is real, and good, and true, and loving, still God is an ideal, whose promises are ideal, and not to be banked on, so you just have to make do with the darkness of things.

Sarah was operating out of fear for her little boy Isaac, and so to protect him from what she feared she let Hagar and Ishmael suffer. Abraham was also operating out of fear. It specifically says he was distressed. He was afraid of Sarah’s anger, and afraid of dissension in his house, and maybe afraid of his slave-girl and their son, which is why he treated them so shamefully.

Not all fear is bad. Fear has its place. There is such a thing as healthy fear, and the Bible is firm on fearing God. When you plan your future, you have to build in healthy fear of certain things. And you have to choose among your fears. Which do you fear more? Global warming or a weakened economy? Terrorism or state security? Freedom from fear is one of the famous Four Freedoms, but that’s impossible. Freedom means only that you get to choose among your fears.

So often God’s promises run counter to the world’s expectations, so how are you supposed to apply them to the secular world where these promises have no self-evidence nor privilege? It’s natural for you to fear that God will not deliver on God’s promises, and so you yield to the conventional standards of the world.

This fear is addressed by Jesus in our Gospel: Jesus tells his disciples not to be afraid, precisely because following him will bring you new things to be afraid of, and because God’s promises so raise your expectations of the world that you will have more opportunities for doubt than those who do not know God’s promises. Jesus calls you, not to have no fear, but to face your fears and choose between them.

The standard dynamic is that your fear turns back your faith, but I am inviting you to let your faith prioritize your fears and help you choose among your fears: That fearing God you do not fear death. That you fear love, and that you fear love so much that you do not do anything that is not love. That you fear justice, so much that you do not do injustice, even to preserve yourself. That you fear truth and hope, even if your family is against you. That you learn to fear with love and to love what you fear. The great goal of following Jesus is to fear only that which you must love. Fear what you love above fearing anything else.

The Lord Jesus says he came to bring a sword. That sword is not for you to use against someone else, but on yourself, your own worst enemy. St. Paul says it differently in our Epistle. He tells you that you are two of you, simultaneously, the old self always dying, and the new self always rising. As certainly as you are baptized, your old you has been crucified with Christ and your new you has been born again in you. You both live on in you, your you who is enslaved to sin and death and your you who can already breathe the freedom that Jesus had. Your conversion is a daily thing, converting your old you to your new you, and every day you convert yourself again. And when you die, at last you will be only one of you. Your old you will be dead for good, and only your new you will have a future, when you attain your resurrection from the dead.

Slavery and freedom. Which Hagar was better off, the Hagar who was hated by her mistress but who enjoyed the warm security of slavery, or the Hagar who was free, and therefore in danger and at great risk? That’s a tough call. Hagar had figured out how not be afraid of Sarah, but now she has to be afraid of what she does not know and can’t control. Which is more fearful: slavery or freedom? Both of them have much to fear; we see nation after nation backing away from the chance for democracy and choosing the slavery of security.

The freedom of Christ means new things to be afraid of. The light of his love exposes you and you want to hide. His stubborn, quixotic honoring of you makes you feel ashamed. He even loves your old and sinful self, and you should too, but when you want to defend it and explain it he just forgives it and wants it peacefully to die, so that only you live on. You will fear until you die. But perfect love will cast out all your fear. Fear only this, the absolute love of God for you.

Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved. 

June 8, Pentecost: Community of Jesus #6: Wind, Fire, Earth, Water, and Wine

Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104:25-35, 37, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13, John 7:37-39, 20:19-23



All the Jewish pilgrims were gathered in Jerusalem because Pentecost is a major Jewish feast — one of the three great feasts of the Torah, the feast of Shavuoth, the feast of sevens, the feast of weeks, seven weeks, seven times seven, 49 days plus 1 after the Passover.

It is a double feast: it’s the feast of the first-fruits from the gardens and the fields, plus the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, where the congregation of Israel stood as one beneath the mountain where God came down in wind and fire and spoke to them, 50 days after the first Passover.

After the last Passover of Jesus, 49 days plus 1 after his first Easter, the signs and wonders at Mount Sinai are recapitulated in the wind and fire. The God that spoke to Israel at Mount Sinai now speaks to the pilgrim who represent, like delegates, the Jews of all the world. But this is new: from now on God will speak in human voices and in every language, whatever it takes for all of you to get the message. The Holy Spirit loves diversity and multiplicity. In Jesus you get the unique and once-for-all, the only-begotten, and in the Spirit you get ever-unfolding variety and experiment.

It’s the feast of the first-fruits. If Israel is the first-fruits of humanity, and if the first-fruits are now brought in, then it’s time to start working the fuller crops, and for all the other nations and ethnicities and orientations of humanity to be spoken to, and become God’s people too, and receive the Holy Spirit, and bring their gifts to God, the fruits of their own languages and music and traditions and cultures and histories.

This is what the Holy Spirit has been up to ever since that Pentecost. It’s not just your souls that are of interest. It’s not just your souls that belong to the Kingdom of God. It’s also your bodies and your voices and your accents and your dances and your fiddles and your pencils and your poems and your fishing poles.

This outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh is the greatest benefit and application of the Ascension that we marked last week. The Lord Jesus, in his human flesh, is not among us, he is not in the world in the ordinary way, because he is somehow, in some unexplained way, representing us before the face of God. But in his divinity he is with us in a greater way than before: he pours out on us a double portion of his Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a power and energy, for sure, but more than that, the Holy Spirit is another person of the Trinity, the person of the three who is the soul of God, the peculiar self of God, the who-ness of God. And that God comes among us and inside us.

Jesus had told his disciples that it would be better for us if he left us than if he remained with us, because while he was with us in the flesh, God was dwelling among us in only one particular person, taking up one small space, and all eyes were on him. But he has left, and sent his Spirit, and now God is spread out among you all, in all of your locations and your persons, and all eyes are on us.

With Jesus it’s the One, and with the Spirit it’s you the many; the result of Pentecost is that the story of Jesus is succeeded by the story of you. What Jesus has accomplished by his once-for-all death and resurrection is that God is in you, delighting in all your various particulars and personalities, God enjoying and employing all your various aptitudes and gifts. Jesus couldn’t speak English; you can.

From our lessons today we get four images: wind, fire, earth, water, and wine. The first four are the four elements of ancient times. We will take them in that order: air, fire, earth, water, and wine.

The first one, wind, is also breath. The Holy Spirit is the wind of God and the breath of God. The breath of God is the soul of God, God’s inner self, which God breathes into us. Not the animal soul that you’re born with, but the uncreated and transcendent soul, the soul more powerful than death and sin and guilt, the soul who never tires nor fatigues, who never is exhausted or expired, a soul who is pure love and faithfulness even inside your unlovely infidelities, this breath who forgives your sins and inspires you to forgive each other too.

You can’t see the wind, but you can see what’s moved by it, and you can feel it only indirectly, by pressure on your skin. Don’t be dismayed that you don’t feel the Holy Spirit inside you. What you feel in yourself is the pressure and movement of the Spirit against the rougher surfaces of your personality. The Holy Spirit makes you grieve until your grief is done, it rubs against the guilt in you until your guilt is cleaned away, and it erodes your selfishness until your self is made smooth. Slowly you begin to feel yourself softening and flexing and expanding in capacity and love, as the Spirit inflates you and inspires you until it so perfectly fills your inner spaces that you won’t feel it at all.

Not just in you but also in the world. The Holy Spirit is the wind of God that is loose in the world. We name a wind by whence it comes but where it will go we can only guess. God is in the world to inspire the world and quicken it, and God is opening new ways in the world.

The second element is fire, and the fire is the presence of God. The burning bush, the flame upon Mount Sinai, the pillar of fire by night, and the tongues of fire on their heads. The fire is another sign of God’s own self. The Holy Spirit is both God’s energy and God’s own personality. God’s person is dangerous. God burns you in judgment. But the fire of God will also comfort you and warm you up and keep you safe against the cold and dark malicious dangers of the world.

The third element is the earth, and that’s for you and your embodiment. God made you from the dust of the earth and God loves the earth. You see that in Psalm 104: "God’s Spirit renews the face of the earth." Don’t be misled by the notion that to be spiritual is to be unearthly. God rejoices in the earth and all of its creatures. God’s Spirit hardens the rocks, and spices the air, and browns the earth, and salts the sea, and freshens the rivers. God makes you a garden, that you produce the fruits of the new creation in your life. God enjoys the flowers of your personality and God takes pleasure in your work. The Holy Spirit is in you to come out of you for the unfolding of the world. The Holy Spirit is given to the church to come out of the church for the healing of the nations.

And fourth, water; the Holy Spirt is the living water who satisfies your thirst and brings life to your dry dust. The Spirit is the river that rises in you and flows out of you. The image that Jesus offers in the gospel comes from Genesis 2 verse 10. God planted a garden in the East called Eden, and out of the Garden four rives flowed to water all the earth. Just so your own spirit rises out of you into the life you make, into what you do and into your relationships. And the Holy Spirit mixes God’s water with yours to overcome your pollution and keep your river running fresh.

The Holy Spirit is pure water. But of course there is no such thing as pure wine. Every wine is a different mixture, from its particular variety of grape, and its particular soil, and its vintage and its pressing and barreling and bottling and aging. Our Lord turns water into wine. Our Lord turns the water of the Holy Spirit into the particular varietal of your peculiar life. The gospel wonderfully transforms the purity of the Spirit into the manifold diversity of all your lives. The Holy Spirit loves diversity, even while in the One Lord Jesus we find our unity. The Lord Jesus is perfect and unique, and the works of the Spirit are passing and provisional and mixed and broken, but even for that they are no less the realities of God’s salvation in the world. The water of Jesus is the wine of the Spirit.

And that is you, Old First. You are one of God’s realities of salvation in the world, and you must believe in yourself as the work of God. You can believe in yourself, Old First, despite how mixed and broken and provisional ou are, because, as you repeat in the Creed says, you believe in the Holy Spirit, and thus you believe in the Holy Catholic Church.

I take great pleasure in the diversity of this congregation, even in small compass, your variety of ethnicity, race, and orientation, which variety we celebrate today with the recognition of Timothy and Zoë as new members, two new crew-members on this old boat that sails before the wind. We know where the wind came from but where it’s going we can’t see until we get there. Our course has slightly changed again because they are now on board, with their peculiar histories and gifts. But you rejoice in these adjustments because you want to love them, and you want to love them because they are loved so much by Our Lord.


Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 1, Easter 7, Community of Jesus #5: Cloud-Based Believing

 Acts 1:6-14, Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36, 1 Peter 4:12-14, John 17:1-11


We’re going to have a baptism today, but I’m not going to do it, because it’s for my granddaughter and I want to stay out of the way. I didn’t baptize her mother either, or my son. I wanted to just be the father, and now I want to be just one of the grandparents, the four of us. The minister who’s doing it is Rev. Howard Major, who for 28 years was the pastor of our sister congregation in New Paltz, so he’s had lots of practice.

As for this sermon, well, it’s never wise to preach to your daughter, and neither to your son-in-law. So momentarily I will regard them not as family but as the member and adherent of this congregation that they are, who have rightly brought their child to the water. So it’s true that this is a nice day for our tribe, but only coincidentally.

This baptism is not about biology, it’s about mission. The place that Dave and Anni have within the liturgy is as officers of the church, officers with a mission in the life of this little girl. They represent the church within her life. For the next few years they are her surrogate Sunday School teachers, her surrogate elders and deacons, and her pastor by proxy. For her they are the Community of Jesus. The three of them are a small Community of Jesus, in an apartment, with a dog.

And all of you are surrogates as well. You today, who are this congregation, you represent an entity greater than yourselves. You represent the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. That’s the church into which this little girl is being baptized. Yes, her name is written in the register book as a baptized member of Old First church, because it’s in the form and matter of local congregations that the universal church exists, but this particular Community of Jesus is the surrogate for the great Community of Jesus extending around the globe and reaching far into the future and stretching back through time to that first small gathering in Jerusalem on Ascension Day.

So the register of names is a very long one, from the Book of Old First stretching back to the Book of Acts. At this end, Naomi Beatrice Eppley, and at the other end, going backwards: Jesus’ brothers, and his mother Mary, and then Judas Jameson, and Simon, James ben-Alphaeus, Matthew, Bartholomew, Thomas, Philip, Andrew, James at number 3, John at number 2, and Peter number 1. I wonder what your number is, Naomi, in that great list? I wonder how many other names today are being added to that register in other congregations, from the ends of the earth back to Jerusalem? God knows their number. God calls them each by name.

Let’s talk about that Ascension Day. How high up into heaven did Jesus go before the cloud removed him from their sight? Was it a low cloud, like the cloud upon Mount Sinai in the Exodus and the cloud upon Mount Hermon at Our Lord’s transfiguration, or like the cloud in South Africa at Cape Town which covers the long flat top of Table Mountain like a Tablecloth? Was the cloud that low? I believe we are to take it so. The point is not that the Lord Jesus went so far away as that he passed into the unseen reality all around above us.

How far up is heaven? I have spoken to you of this before. We assume it is way up. But in the Bible, heaven was felt as close. It started just above the ground, and then it was heaven all the way up. Mountains were thought of as poking into heaven, and thus the mountain-top experience—in the realm of light and air, where birds and spirits lived beyond the grip of gravity, the realm of freedom. The point of heaven isn’t altitude but attitude. It’s not far away, it’s all around, but invisible to us, unless it opens up to us somehow.

Right now this room is full of radio waves at different frequencies. Only few of them are visible. There are in here microwaves and short-waves and AM waves and FM waves, and they are carrying a million messages of information and conversation. You can’t sense them unless you have a receiver of some kind. Some of these waves can travel great distances and bounce around the atmosphere. Once I was driving in Canada at sundown and I picked up the broadcast of a Mets game. On short-wave radio you can communicate with anyone around the world. But if you lack the device or the power to run the device you are senseless of this conversation, no matter how real it is.

This is what heaven is like, the heaven which Jesus entered on Ascension Day. It’s the great and living conversation all around above us, the reality beyond the grip of gravity, unbound by time and space, but powerful, and present to the world, and the earthly world is very much within its interest. The radiation in it is the power of Our Ascended Lord, and the information in it is his living Word. And when you also enter that conversation, that is what we call prayer. When we raise up a child in the Christian faith, we teach the child how to tune in to the wavelength of that great conversation already going on. That’s why prayer is just as much about listening as it is speaking.

There’s a story about a man who was exhausted and discouraged. His friend was a person of prayer, and he asked her what her secret was. She said, "I have no secret, I just pray." He said, "I pray too, but I don’t think my prayers even reach the ceiling." She said, "They don’t have to go that far." When we read in our Gospel Lesson of Jesus praying in the Upper Room for his disciples on the night before he died, that he lifted up his eyes to heaven, what he saw with his eyes was the ceiling. And the prayer that he was praying then for his disciples is what he’s praying in heaven for you now.

The Heidelberg Catechism says that you can find comfort in the doctrine of the Ascension because it means that Jesus intercedes for you in the presence of his Father. He knows exactly what it’s like to have a body, to be hungry, to be hated, to be beaten and abused, to be a refugee, to be a little child bundled about. And because Jesus knows, God knows. When Jesus prays in heaven for this little girl it’s not at a distance but here among us, under this ceiling, in our midst.

Now what about that cloud in the story? In the Bible the cloud is the sign of the presence of God which also hides God from your sight. Is God really there or not? What is God up to in there? This past week I just started to do some cloud-based computing. It’s a little scary, not having my files securely on my hard drive. Not even my programs. They’re out of my possession. I really don’t know where those files are, but I can always get at them.

Dearly beloved, you are called to practice cloud-based believing. Your knowledge is not with you but with Jesus in the cloud. The programs you operate are not with you but with Jesus in the cloud. That’s a hard lesson, but it’s for the best.

The disciples had to face this now. The disciples had not foreseen that Jesus would be leaving them. They liked having him back, back from the dead in flesh and blood, standing right there with them, ready to do some politics, but then he left them. Now they have to deal with a cloudy new reality which is not clear to them but into which they must project their belief.

So much is not defined. Like how it works, that he still has a real live Jewish human body with hair and nails and such, and exist somehow the way he does. What space and time can hold him? And who are these two men? Where did they come from? They are not angels, they are men, with bodies too. Did they come here from the future? Is that where Jesus is? My best answer is Yes, and my message to you today is that from the future he is bending our history towards his kingdom of righteousness and peace as we slowly come to him.

You can’t see the future of this little girl. You can’t define what lies ahead for her or what kind of choices she will make. But you can project your belief into the future of her life, her future which the Lord Jesus is bending towards his final righteousness and peace, because he is already there, and at the same time he is also here with her, under this ceiling.

You know, Our Lord is the real guy doing the baptism, and as certainly as Rev. Major pours the water on her head so certainly does the Lord Jesus pour his Spirit into her heart. When Rev. Major repeats her name so certainly does Our Lord repeat it too, and announce it to his Father, and the Father delights to say her name and love her. And when you all witness it, be reminded that God knows your name as well, and delights to say your name, because of how much God loves you.


Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

May 25, Easter 6, Community of Jesus #4: Conscience

Acts 17:22-31, Psalm 66:7-18, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21 


I can say that I’m a competent Biblical scholar, especially on the Gospels. I’m not an academic, but I do spend more time in the technical study of the Gospels than many other pastors do. Of course my conscience troubles me that my sermons are too scholarly and not practical enough, and I worry that my preaching drives away as many people as it draws. Every week I feel I’ve fallen short. So I have to make peace within myself, and honor the core commitment of my job to the serious study and teaching of scripture, and I thank you for supporting me in that and wanting that.

After years of study I have come to the not uncommon conclusion that the Gospel of John was the last of the four gospels to be written, and that it was written by someone who had a copy of the Gospel of Matthew, and maybe also Mark and Luke. It makes sense to me that it really was written by St. John, the best friend of Our Lord, an eyewitness, but more, an intimate who knew the mind and thought of Jesus. It also makes sense that he wrote it late in life, decades after it all happened.

So what you get with St. John’s Gospel is this remarkable simultaneous closeness and distance, Jesus here and Jesus gone, presence and absence, immediacy and abstraction, and also a wonderful simultaneous simplicity and subtlety. The author obviously rewrote and refitted what Jesus said and did, rearranging, repackaging, and distilling, but at the same time he manages to get you closer to Jesus than the other gospels do, closer to Jesus as a man but also closer to Jesus as God, so close that you come to know his voice. In the writing of St. John, you hear the voice of Jesus.

The Lord Jesus himself wrote nothing down. We know his voice only second-hand. But we know first-hand the voice of St. Paul, from the letters that he wrote himself, and his personality comes through. Compared to Jesus, St. Paul is more emotional, more confessional, more self-critical, more modern, more cosmopolitan, and closer to us than Jesus was, in terms of culture and philosophy.

You notice it in our first lesson, with St. Paul in Athens and preaching to the philosophers. He could be speaking to people today, people who go at spirituality like educated consumers, who design their own religions from the many options available, especially the exotic ones, people who like to regard themselves as open and who also do not like to make commitments.

We get the voice of St. Paul second-hand in the book of Acts, in which are recorded five of his speeches. Two of them are sermons, and this one is the second one. It was not a rousing success, if you count the conversions after it, compared to the sermons of St. Peter.

But the voice of St. Paul that we know from his letters is in this sermon: measured, articulate, adept in the classical liberal arts, and ambitious to engage philosophy and poetry. St. Paul was not one of the disciples nor an eyewitness like St. Peter nor an intimate of Jesus like St. John. The only Jesus that he knew personally was the Risen Lord, and seated at the right hand of the Father. St. Paul was the public herald of this new Lord across the empire, while St. John was the close friend who brought you to him. You get a wonderful complexity of voices in the Bible. The New Testament is a Community of Jesus in print.

The voice of St. Peter is different. In modern terms his writing is less articulate. It’s jammed and jumbled; he mixes metaphors and makes weird combinations. He writes in the fluid and pulsing rabbinic style that you can still hear in some synagogues in Brooklyn.

In our lesson today he zips through some obscure Jewish mythology, about the spirits in prison in the time of Noah. In Jewish legend these were the souls of the children of those angels who had made love to human women. So it seems that St. Peter was writing his letter to the little congregations of converted Jews in Asia Minor, who suffered trouble from both sides, Jewish relatives and Roman neighbors, and who had much to be afraid of.

St. Peter is just the one to address their fear. He’s the Cowardly Lion. St. Paul is the Scarecrow, and St. John is the Tin Man, and St. Peter is the Cowardly Lion. St. Paul had the brains, and St. John had the love, and St. Peter had the courage. Or not!

Remember his story. He was an intimate of Jesus, but not as close as St. John was. He was the loud guy, the strong guy, the impulsive guy, who stoutly promised Jesus to defend him to the death, and then, of course, famously didn’t, and in fear denied him, and then hid himself in shame. After Pentecost the Holy Spirit converted his courage, and freed him from the fear of death and suffering.

Yet even then, some years later, at the Council of Antioch, St. Peter was challenged by St. Paul for betraying his own convictions from fear of the criticism of the conservatives. For the most part, the greater part, he was faithful, for the 99% part, but we know him for his failure as much for his fidelity because every year on every Good Friday his denial is retold again.

Every Good Friday St. Peter has to get his conscience clear by trusting in the gracious promise of the love of Jesus. And he’s writing to little communities of Jesus with cloudy consciences. They love Jesus and they want to keep his commandments, but they are always compromised. Christian wives have to obey their non-Christian husbands and Christian slaves have to obey their pagan owners. They don’t have power over their own lives, and in a civilization which does not value freedom they have much to fear and much to feel guilty about.

He tells them that the way you clear your conscience is to trust the promise of your baptism. "I still belong to you, O God, not by right of my own righteousness but because you put your brand upon my head. I am compromised but I am baptized, so I will climb aboard that ark, as unclean as I am."

My conscience accuses me. I can be the Scarecrow and the Tin-man but far too often the Cowardly Lion. If you were to research the roster of people who have passed through this church in the last ten years, some of them have left because of me. Every time I only think of the names of certain people I can feel my face flush with embarrassment. "Why did I say that to him? Why didn’t I say this to her? Why didn’t I make that call? Just one more visit? Why am I so fearful all the time? Not for life and limb, but afraid of certain people and afraid of what people might think of me?"

You have to clear your conscience. To live the Christian life, with all of your compromises on the inside and the outside, you have to clarify your cloudy conscience. Just one drop is all it takes, just the promise that you are baptized. Just that thought, and hold that thought. It feels like your own thought, and it is, but it’s also the silent voice of your inner Advocate who is not you, your inner Counselor, your Comforter, the Holy Spirit, quietly dwelling in your own thoughts.

The silent voice of Jesus is in the writing of St. John, and it says, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." He doesn’t mean, "If you love me, maybe you’ll keep my commandments," and maybe not. I can tell you from my technical study of this verse that the "Condition" is "More Probable" than that. It means this, "If you love me, you will be keeping my commandments." It’s a promise, it’s a conscience cleanser. It’s not about your performance but your groping and desire, even if only from desperation. It’s not about how good or true your love is, because the love that you love Jesus with is not your own love but the love that God has put inside you, so that it’s not up to you and your cannot compromise it even by your failure and fear and infidelity.

I’ve been saying all this to you as individuals. But as I said last week, the verbs and pronouns in the promises of Jesus here are plural: "you" plural. You have to comfort each other and believe in each other and honor each other in the midst of all your compromising for the love of Christ among you. When you are baptized it’s not just for yourself, for you are baptized into a community. The job of the Community of Jesus is to hold up each other’s consciences.

We’re all in the same boat, but it’s not sinking, it’s an ark, in which we’re being saved. You’re safe with each other. You hold each other up within this very compromising world. You believe in each other. A great part of practicing love within the Community of Jesus is to believe in each other. Not quixotically, not pollyannishly, and with maturity, but still to see that every last person among you is the object of God’s fanatical love. And God has that same fanatical love for you.


Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved. 

May 18, Easter 5, Community of Jesus #3: RSVP

 Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14

"If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it." Why does Jesus make this invitation? It sort of discredits him. C’mon, Jesus, not really. How many things that we’ve prayed for in his name are still not done. His promise contradicts what our experience tells us. He could have qualified it with just a few more words, like, "I will do it–if I think it is a good idea," or I will do it–as may best for you," both of which would make it fully credible. But he didn’t. He says it unqualified and absolute.


Why did the author record him saying this? The author was his best friend John, who wrote this down some decades after the fact. During those years the Apostle John will have had his own experience of unfulfilled requests. He could have suppressed this promise as something not helpful.

That he did not suppress it, you may take as a sign of the author’s trustworthiness. He reported even those things which seem to discredit his hero. Not only things back then which are hard to believe, like the miracles and the resurrection, but also things which would touch your own experience today, like this promise. It’s harder to believe that Jesus is faithfully present and active in your life than it is to believe that those events might have happened. It’s harder to believe that Jesus will keep his promise to do anything you ask in his name than to believe that he rose from the dead.

Jesus gives this promise as an invitation. But we rarely return the RSVP. From fear of disappointment? From only half-believing? Because we’ve learned to take a lot of our promises with a grain of salt? From not expecting much from God?

Pentecostals and Charismatics return the RSVP a lot. They take the invitation at face value, and they keep on asking, and with specifics and details. If Jesus doesn’t do what they ask for, they blame themselves and their lack of faith or holiness. This has the effect of saving Jesus’ reputation. But to end up blaming yourself is not why Jesus offered this invitation. He offered it for comfort and encouragement and precisely to take you out of blaming yourself. He opens by saying, "Let not your hearts be troubled." This invitation is meant to encourage you and comfort you.

Should you filter what you ask for? No. Ask for anything. Even Jesus, praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, asked his Father to spare him the cup of suffering. But then he added these words too: "Nevertheless, not my will but your will."

The Apostle Paul tells us that he kept asking the Lord for the removal of his so-called "thorn in the flesh," but finally he got the message back, "My grace is sufficient for you;" in other words, "Okay, dear Paul, that’s enough."

So do you have to give up asking? No and Yes. I would say only when you get a clear enough message back; but to be able to perceive and accept such messages you have to develop your spiritual maturity.

Do you have to adjust what you ask for? Yes, because the Lord Jesus is adjusting you, in terms of your gradual conversion and transformation, like with Paul, and because the world keeps moving, and your circumstance. In the case of Stephen, in our first lesson, I’m sure that on the day before his martyrdom he had not been asking Jesus for what he was asking now, that the Lord Jesus would receive his spirit, and that the Lord would not hold the sin of his killers against them. You do have to adjust what you ask for.

Should you ask for less? Yes and No. Probably for fewer things, but then more passionately and daringly for those fewer things.

Should you grow in maturity in what you ask for? Yes, of course. You can ask for anything, but you want to start asking for the anything that Our Lord wants for you, for the anything that receives the coming of his kingdom in the world and in your life. That takes discipleship, and learning, and patience, and self-examination.

On Easter Sunday I said that the resurrection leads Christians to speak of things we do not know the meaning of. Of course we do know some of the meaning of what we speak, but much of the meaning we do not know, and yet we are to speak of the things beyond us with conviction. So we hold up this contradiction between the invitation and our experience. Jesus did not fear this contradiction, and the Apostle Paul did not back off from it, and the Apostle John did not suppress it in his gospel but reported it, and I guess he figured you could handle it, and that you need to handle it.

Dearly beloved, I don’t want you to back off from anything that Jesus said, or take it with a grain of salt. My best advice is that we must learn to wait on God. You must learn to wait on God. Turn the other cheek to God: I’m still here, God. I’m holding you to what you promised. Do with me what you will, break me down, batter me, judge me, keep converting and transforming me, but I believe that you love me, and that’s why I’m still here and I’m still asking. I’m waiting on you, God.

This waiting is not passivity. For just before Jesus extends his invitation he says something else remarkable: "You will do greater works than these, because I am going to my Father." Here is promise not only of invitation but also of empowerment. You are empowered to do greater works than he did because of the power he extends to you from God the Father. Jesus had his turn, and now it’s your turn. Jesus is not just promising, he’s predicting; not just that might do them, but that you will do them and that you are doing them. And we look at ourselves, and we say, "We are?" Should we take that with a grain of salt as well?

What can he mean? What does "greater" mean? Larger? More impressive? More effective? I won’t collapse it by defining it. His meaning has to keep moving and expanding. What does it mean? Let’s see what we can make it mean. It’s in our working that we will know what "greater" means.

His promise depends on the connection of working and waiting. I mean the duality of working and waiting. In much of life these two are opposites: on-time and off-time. But in Jesus’ name you have to work while you wait and wait while you work. This means that the results of your works are not within your hands. You are empowered but not for your achievement. You are empowered to surrender your greatest works. Like Stephen. It’s not just when you die that you offer to God your martyrdom, but all through your life you surrender your best works to God; you wait on God.

The benefit of this simultaneous waiting and working is to expand you. It makes room in you. It makes space in you. It opens up your hospitality. Your image for this comes from our second lesson, that you all are living stones built up together into a spiritual house. You know that the stones within the structure of a house are working while they are at rest. From an engineering point of view, the stones in a wall are not just sitting there. The stones are carrying the forces of tension and compression within them. In terms of structural engineering, a building is alive. You are living stones.

You are a community of Jesus and so you support each other in your waiting and your working, and you make a space among you for sanctuary and hospitality. You stand by each other when you work and sit with each other when you wait, you weep with each other, you sing with each other, you encourage each other, especially in seasons of unanswered prayer.

How do you live this out in practice? I’ve got four specific ways. And I need 32 of you to do them.

Twenty of those 32 I need to volunteer for working at the Respite Shelter during the first week of July. Five nights, four per night, 20 of you working for Jesus by waiting on the men. By your waiting and your working you will be building every night again a space of hospitality and sanctuary.

Two of those 32 I need to help me pray for Lacey, one of our members who is homeless and unemployed. I will forward to you his daily text messages to me, when he asks me to pray that he gets a job and a place to live and a girlfriend. For three years he’s been asking Jesus for this. Will 2 of you help me do this work and wait on God for him?

Four of those 32 I need to pray for Rev. Julia Turner. She has committed her life to the gospel and she’s seeking a pulpit of her own. Will four of you pray for her the next few months? I will help you. This kind of prayer takes working and waiting.

And I need six of you to meet with me once a month to pray for our discernment process on the sanctuary. We will have one team doing the work of the process, and I need another team to wait on God.

Don’t do these things alone. The verb-forms within the promises of Jesus are plural, not singular. They’re for the community of Jesus and they make of us community. They engender love and require love. When you balance working-on and waiting-on you engender the love you require. In the name of Jesus you wait upon and work out the unfathomable love of God for you.


Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved. 

May 10, Easter 4, Community of Jesus #2: Sheep and Saints

Acts 2:42-47, Psalm 23, 1 Peter 2:19-25, John 10:1-10 


Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 55: What do you understand by "the communion of saints"? First, that believers one and all, as members of this community, share in Christ and in all his treasures and gifts. Second, that each member consider it a duty to use these gifts readily and cheerfully for the service and enrichment of the other members.
 
On the other side of that wall is a great big sanctuary. We used to worship there, until some plaster from the ceiling fell.

That seems so long ago. There are church members here who have never worshiped in our sanctuary. We have members who have never heard Aleeza play the pipe organ. How long will it take us to get back in there? How much money should we spend on it? Should we just make it safe again, or make it splendid again, or maybe give it up?

We have some big decisions coming. Right now we are designing a process of discernment for the congregation. You’ll learn more about this pretty soon. We want our process to be spiritual and our decisions to be guided by our mission. Part of my job is to remind us of our mission. That’s why I am preaching this sermon series on the opening phrase of our Mission Statement, and I’m asking our scripture lessons every week what they can tell us about the Community of Jesus.

This week two things. Our first lesson describes the first community of Jesus, two months after his resurrection, right after Pentecost. We will come back to this. Our second lesson and our gospel lesson compare the community of Jesus to a flock of sheep. The gospel lesson is in two parts. The first part is a parable — a depiction of an ordinary village sheepfold, with a wall, a gate, and a gatekeeper. Every morning the shepherds all come to fetch their own flock from out of the common herd, calling them each by name, and they follow the voice of the shepherd they know.

The second part of the gospel lesson is an application of the parable. Jesus says, "I am the gate," and he expands on that. He will make two more applications in the verses which come right after our lesson for today, verses which we will read a year from now. So actually the application of the parable is threefold: I am the gate, I am the good shepherd, and I lay down my life for my sheep. In our lesson next Sunday we will hear him say something similar: "I am the way, the truth, and the life." I am the way: I am the gate. I am the truth: I am the good shepherd. I am the life: I lay down my life for my sheep.

But frankly I don’t want to be a sheep. I don’t like to think of myself as a sheep. Neither do you. You do like the shepherd side of the parable, but the sheep side not so much. Everyone loves Psalm 23, The Lord is my shepherd, and you’re fine with Jesus applying that metaphor of divinity to himself, but for your totem animal you would not choose a sheep. Isn’t a sheep a stupid animal? Isn’t the iconic innocence of lambs a function of passivity? Aren’t domesticated sheep helpless without human care? Is that the point? For you to know the truth about yourself you have to see yourself in terms of this unflattering metaphor. The insult is intended and instructive. Accept it.

There is something just as unattractive in our second lesson, in the very first sentence. Frankly I don’t want to endure pain while suffering unjustly. Neither do you. You want to fight back. You want to ease the pain. If you’re sufferin’, you want a Bufferin (Carole King). The lesson suggests passivity and surrender in the face of trouble. Like with sheep. And if he’s such a good shepherd, then why am I suffering?

But actually the lesson is describing something active. The pain and suffering are the by-product of doing the right thing in a tough spot, of voluntarily doing the right thing even when you know you will not get rewarded for the right thing, and even punished for the right thing. This takes moral courage, especially not to fight back, unless your fighting back is only to keep on doing the right thing time and time again. This also takes freedom, a deep inner freedom.

Freedom is not natural. It’s a gift and a treasure for us to shelter and nurture and honor. I was talking to one of our Sunday School teachers about the frustrations of teaching the children of Park Slope who are over-stimulated and over-obligated. The teacher said that her whole attitude changed one day when she realized, from what one kid happened to say, that that kid did not have to come to Sunday School — that that kid was perfectly allowed to stay home if he pleased, but that kid freely chose, on his own, to come to Sunday School. Wow. Precious.

Freedom is not infinite or absolute. Secular freedom has boundaries and it is properly resisted by laws and contracts, the rights of others, physical realities, scarcity, gravity, and taxes. You exercise your freedom against those resistances just as you exercise your muscles against the resistance of your elliptical machine. Christian freedom has its boundaries too, and what properly resists your Christian freedom is the community of Jesus. Freedom and community: dialectical, contradictory, inextricable. You exercise your Christian freedom into the productive and strengthening resistance of the community of Jesus.

You can keep your Christian life a private thing and individual, but then you will not gain the moral strength of it. The Christian life is a communion: a communion with God through the medium of Jesus, and then by extension from that a communion of saints. A flock of sheep, yes, but also saints. You are both of these, at the same time, from God’s point of view. The compliment is intentional and instructive. Accept it. You need to be in this communion because you are a sheep, and you have freedom within it because you are a saint.

This takes us back to our first lesson, from the Book of the Acts, about the very first community of Jesus. "They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." Every church has to do those four things: teaching, fellowship, bread-breaking, and prayer, and do them in several combinations. Today we’re looking at the second thing, fellowship. The Greek word is koinonia, which you can also translate as communion, community, commonality. That first community of Jesus was very communal: they "had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need."

Their primitive communism was a wonder and a sign. It was not meant as a law for us, and the apostles never expected it of their later congregations. How could they, when so many of their converts were slaves who had no property and women with no right to property, and very little freedom; all they could share was themselves, if they could risk getting away for a couple hours once a week at night. That was part of their suffering.

That communism is not a law for us, but it is an enduring sign for us, a sign of both judgment and invitation, to make you wonder, always, about your own life, and your own independence, and how you exercise your freedom as a Christian, and your freedom with your treasure and your gifts. The question is not whether, but how much. How far? Do you give of your gifts and treasure to the community to risk your own financial suffering and pain? I would not. But it might mean you give enough to put at risk your independence and your pleasures.

Of course I’m talking about money, and even time, and your talents, and your skills and expertise, but more important is your personality, your personal vulnerability, the gift of your self, your history, your emotions, your troubles, your triumphs, your suffering, your story. Your story is the most important gift we want from you, and then after that, your questions, if you honor the questions of others and their stories as your own.

Your own personal story is part of the very long story of Old First, but more important, your own personal story is part of the story of Jesus in the world. Do you want us to know your story? Maybe. Are you open to learning the stories of others? "Well, okay, but can we keep it to like a dozen? What does Christian love require of me? I’m not interested in a commune. But I’m open to being challenged and expanded." I believe you are.

Why did you start coming here? Not to maintain an old historic church, and not to fix up a sanctuary. You came here to get closer to God, you came here for yourself and your own interests. But the more you are here, the more you are here for the other people who are here. It’s not all pain and suffering. It’s the slow development of love. You practice your love and you rehearse your love, both giving and receiving it. You make mistakes. You practice it again. You always start by believing that God’s first gift to you is God’s own love for you.


Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

Rabbi Andy Bachman: An Ethical Missionary

 

(Reprinted from The Twelve: Reformed, Done Daily )

The charismatic rabbi of the most dynamic synagogue in Brooklyn announced his resignation a few weeks ago, and this made the papers in both New York City and Israel. People were “shocked” and “stunned.” I was only momentarily surprised, and that was at the timing. I had figured it was coming. I know this rabbi very well, and I know him to be a missionary, and missionaries move on.

My friend Andy Bachman has been the senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE), the largest Reform synagogue in Brooklyn, since 2006. Under his leadership, the synagogue has doubled in size to 1000 families. Andy has welcomed many young Jews back to the faith. The CBE synagogue has gained a national reputation for revitalized worship, innovative education, expansive cultural programming, progressive Zionism, and social witness. After Hurricane Sandy the synagogue began feeding thousands of the storm’s victims, and then “CBE Feeds” morphed into an ongoing ministry for the poor of New York. On Sundays, a Christian church meets in the main sanctuary. Hundreds of people pass through the doors of Beth Elohim every day, and only a majority of them are Jews. It’s the cathedral of Park Slope. Rabbi Andy Bachman has led all this.

So, yes, it was big news when at the end of March, Andy announced that he would not be renewing his contract next year. (In the Reform movement, rabbis have to give a year’s notice.) He’s not retiring---he’s only fifty years old. He hasn’t taken another position---he doesn’t know yet what he’ll be doing, although it will be public service to the wider community. People were asking how someone so successful and who gained such prestige for himself and his congregation could just put it all behind him---for what?

To me it makes all the sense in the world. Andy is a missionary. He’s an ethical missionary. I don’t mean that he’s a missionary of the Christian type, with the motivation to convert people. He’s a missionary of the Jewish type: he is a witness for the Jewish contribution for the healing of the world.

It was Andy’s missionary passion and vision which inspired in the synagogue’s dramatic growth. CBE had always been remarkably hospitable; I had already experienced that from the former rabbi, who was also a good friend and confidant. But under Andy that hospitality began to pour out of the synagogue into the streets and everybody’s lives.

Jews have good reason to be careful and probably they’ve earned to right even to be defensive, but this synagogue is acting defenseless and taking risks in welcome and witness. It got both more spiritual and more political. It is expressing a new and vintage Judaism, affirming worship and devoted to the Torah as God’s gift to the world. These Jews are Jewish for the sake of the world, and not just for protecting Judaism.  Andy has been leading them in that.

This would be true even apart from all the collaboration between Andy and me and between our two congregations. We are known and recognized for this in Brooklyn. We’ve been in the news together, we’ve been on stage together, we’ve led in prayer together, our congregations have worshipped in each other’s houses, we make music together, and we house the homeless together. We talk. We kvetch. We joke. (One Good Friday morning he called me up to wish me a “good Good Friday,” and then he said, “I just want you to know it was all a mistake!”) I know about Andy’s prayers. About the same time every morning we pray in our apartments, with only Prospect Park between us. So I was not shocked or stunned. It was coming. You can fill a cup with only so much wine, and then it has to go somewhere. Andy has felt the call. He doesn’t know in what new direction or endeavor he’ll be going in, but what I know is that he’ll be going as an ethical missionary.

People love Andy for his bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, and his funerals. In Christian terms, he’s a caring pastor and an inspiring preacher. He’s a great rabbi, but being a rabbi is not his first love. What he really loves is being a Jew. Yep. Being a Jew. No small thing. That’s the great burden and the greater privilege, to be one more Jew who stands between the world and Adonai. Andy will be resigning his rabbinate in order to be a Jew. For the world, for Adonai.

April 27, Easter 2: A Community of Jesus #1

 Acts 2:14a, 22-32, Psalm 16, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:91-31


Please look with me at our Heidelberg Catechism Question and Answer 55: What do you understand by "the communion of saints"? First, that believers one and all, as members of this community [of the church], share in Christ and in all his treasures and gifts. Second, that each member consider it a duty to use these gifts readily and cheerfully for the service and enrichment of the other members.

Last Sunday was a wonderful worship service, and it was made so by many unseen gifts. For example, Aleeza Meir had to arrange and rewrite all the hymns and all the other music for our soloists and our little orchestra. Not one moment could she just plunk down some ready score in front of the musicians; all of it had to be re-scored, and some of it new-composed. I wonder how many folks last week realized how much a gift they were being given.

A second example was the behind-the-scenes activity of our consistory. A few months ago one deacon offered to manage the details of the service and the seating and the ushering and the other elders and deacons and the breakfast and the other volunteers, to let the rest of us enjoy it all, including myself. I want to thank them now on your behalf.

After the service, as Melody and I were on our way out, and headed for our car to go to our cottage for a couple days, one of you handed me an unexpected gift: some excellent cookies, some excellent chocolate, and a very excellent bottle of Riesling.

As we drove away I thought about how this person was thinking about us in the days before Easter, and imagining what we would like or need or delight in. That’s one of the great thing about giving gifts — the joy and pleasure of the planning and imagining beforehand.

This kind of thoughtfulness is hard for me. I am not a good gift-giver. I come from a family of poor gift-givers. My father was wonderful, but he never gave me an ordinary present in my life. My mother does give presents but still, it’s a Meeter family defect and my children can testify that I have it too.

Not Melody; she’s a gift-giver. Whenever she shops, or is on a trip, she’s thinking about other people and what she might get for them. I’m thinking about how to get myself out of there as fast as possible. Some of you in the congregation bring me presents when you come back from traveling, and I am always both grateful and a little guilty, because I never remember to do the same.

What about the Lord Jesus? When he had risen from the dead, wouldn’t he be thinking about his friends and about what gifts to give them? Wouldn’t it give him joy and pleasure to imagine what his friends would need and profit from?

Let’s not assume that after his resurrection the Lord Jesus wasn’t thinking and being creative and original. Don’t assume he was just following some script: "Better check my schedule. Oh, it’s six pm. I’m supposed to go forgive the disciples now." No, he was up to things and things were up to him. All authority in heaven and earth had been given him. He had to sort out what to do next and say next. He had no precedent, no one had ever been in his shoes before.

Of course he was in concert with his Father and the Spirit, but he did not lose his human ego, his "I". He was no less desiring than before to love his neighbors as himself. He will love to think about his friends, and to imagine them, and what gifts he will give to them to lift them up.

He decides to show up among them with three gifts: his peace, his breath, and his authority.

Peace first, and he gives it twice. They were doubly afraid. They feared the Judeans wanting to round them up and arrest them too. And they feared one Jew in particular — him! whom they had abandoned and denied, and shouldn’t he be angry? But he says Peace, which means he reconciles them, he forgives them.

Second, his breath, his Spirit, a share in the Spirit, the extension of the inner life of God and the power of the living God.

They will need this living power for the third gift, which is a share in his authority, the authority to forgive the sins of others on behalf of God, just as he had just forgiven them. No doubt that implied in this authority is the responsibility as well: I’m giving you the power and authority to do it so that you do it.

To for-give is to give. You notice that the one word is built upon the other. You give somebody something when you forgive somebody something. It’s true in other languages as well, in Dutch and German, and in French: pardonner est donner. It’s the first gift of the resurrection, this combination of forgiveness, peace, and power — it’s the first gift to the church. We get many gifts from the Lord Jesus as the benefits of his resurrection, but Our Lord decided to give us as his first gift that peace we get from forgiveness, and the power for us to give that gift as well.

What do you believe? You say that you "believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sin, the resurrection of the body." Church-communion-forgiveness-resurrection. Through these four words there runs a dynamic current, from church to communion to forgiveness to resurrection. The church is a community which gives the gift of forgiveness which is the first fruit of the resurrection.

Now think with me about our church’s Mission Statement. I repeat the first part of it every week at the welcome, and beginning today I’m using the first phrase for a sermon series, "A Community of Jesus." What will our weekly scriptures tell us about Old First being "a community of Jesus"?

First, of Jesus, that admirable teacher who lived so long ago, and was executed for what he said and did, whom we, like Thomas, recognize as Our Lord and Our God. You admire him and learn from him but you also worship him and believe in him and you get your life from God through him.

Second, this community is a communion. We are more than a free association of individuals with a common interest; we share a communion with Jesus. We’re in this together because of Jesus, and Jesus defines and determines how we’re in it together. Jesus is an historical person we remember together, but also a living personality with influence and power and determination, and by giving us his Holy Spirit he is constantly making our community of communion of saints.

Third, you share the gifts and treasures that he gives you. And the first gift he has given you is the power of peace from reconciliation. In your own life, no matter what troubles you from your errors and your failures and your history, every week you are clean again. In your relationships with others in the church, and in your relationships with others in the world.

How do we share this gift of forgiveness with the world around us? Could we set up a booth on Seventh Avenue and offer confession and absolution to anybody walking by? Well, actually we do express this gift of peace and reconciliation in the third and fourth missions that we list in our Mission Statement: the gift of sanctuary to anyone seeking spirituality and hope, and the gift of hospitality to community groups and the arts. More subtly we express it even in our fifth mission, to care for the gifts we have been given in our Reformed Church heritage, including our historic sanctuary.

As to that fifth mission we’re looking at some major decisions in the next few months. How much should we repair and renovate that sanctuary, and how much should we spend on it, and with what partners? The consistory is shaping a season and process of discernment for that decision, and no matter what we decide, for that process to be edifying for the congregation, we’ll have to keep expressing among each other this gift and treasure of active peace and reconciliation.

Church, communion, forgiveness, resurrection. I can restate it as Old First, community of Jesus, peacemaking, renovation. The process behind the process. We will do our business together to express the gifts we share with each other from the treasure of Our Lord’s resurrection, and the greatest of these is love. If you track the Lord Jesus in the New Testament, he is present, then absent, then present, then absent, and yet he’s always at the center, and what’s always present is his love. Look for his love, and look for how to express it.

Our congregation is just one more congregation, and our building is just another building, and yet both of them are gifts which have been given to you in love, with lots of thought behind them, and imagination. Receive them as gifts of love to you, and receive each other as gifts of love to you, and as living treasures of the love of God for you.


Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

Easter 2014: "I Know that You Are Looking for Jesus Who Was Crucified"

Acts 10:34-43, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, Colossians 3:1-4, Matthew 28:1-10

Welcome to Easter, welcome to the celebration of the resurrection of Our Lord. Members and friends, visitors and seekers, whatever your religion, whatever your belief or unbelief, it’s good that you are here. Easter is a public day, Easter is not church property — it is but our privilege to host the celebration of it for the world.

What brought you here today? Are you like the women in the story? Are you looking for the Jesus who was crucified? You came here to get close to God, you came here for the worship and the celebration, you came here for the music and the prayers, you came for the metaphors and mysteries. Or you came here out of curiosity, or from your desire for faith and hope and love that go beyond the hardness of the world.

The resurrection is a window to the Great Beyond, so that when we speak of Jesus rising from the dead we have to speak of things we do not know the meaning of. Yet some of its meanings are discernible.

It means the vindication of Jesus as the Messiah, in spite of his public failure the Friday before.

It means the affirmation of the long experience of Israel, and the lasting importance of that people for all the rest of us.

It means the victory of goodness over evil in the universe, but from the inside out.

It means that grace is stronger than sin and forgiveness is stronger than guilt.

It means that justice beats injustice, not by force of arms but by the force of love.

It means that life is stronger than death — the life that comes from God.

It means that the promises of God hold true, even at great cost — especially at great cost.

It means that our species Homo sapiens has a strange and blessed future which remains a mystery hidden with Christ in God, and of which we can only catch some glimpses and some intimations. His risen body is the window, the doorway, the gateway, the wardrobe, the wormhole, the conduit into the future of God already impinging on us now.

And yet there is something so primitive and old-fashioned about it, that it centers on the revival of a physical body, which physical body will have an endless life. As if the physical body is so important. Aren’t spiritual things the most important things? Isn’t truth eternal anyway?

But isn’t it so that your physical body is the intersection of all that’s important in your world? Your emotions, your affections, what you love, whom you love, where you sleep, where you dream, where you work, what you do, how you feel, your fears, your griefs, your pain, your exultation? Your body is both spiritual and physical, where what is eternal encounters what is seasonal, where heavenly realities hit the dirt, where good and evil, and holiness and depravity, are jostling each other side by side. Your body is the stage on which the universal drama gets played out. Your body is the seat of your strengths and weaknesses and the vehicle of your enjoyment and your suffering.

So if God loves you, then God loves your body too, and God’s great salvation will include your body. The resurrection of Jesus is an affirmation of the flesh-and-blood existence of humanity. That is a continuity. But as the angel says, he is not here. That is a discontinuity. Easter gives us both.

This is a problem. The resurrection is the hardest doctrine to believe.
Humanism tries to solve it by denying its reality and his divinity. Gnosticism tries to solve it by denying his flesh-and-blood humanity. For both of them it ends up all within your mind.

All four gospels claim that Our Lord arose in flesh-and-blood. You can read in this the promise of some continuity between your bodily existence and your eternal life. But there is discontinuity in how hard it is to pin him down. He comes and goes, he appears and disappears, you can touch him and then you can’t. He presents himself to his disciples but most of the time he’s in absentia. "Jesus, come back, where are you going? Can’t you just stay put, and not go off again?" The great discontinuity is that the angel’s proof of the resurrection to the women is that his body is not there!

So he is real but also beyond us. His risen body is the intersection of time and eternity. He is where we will go but can’t go yet. We have to die first. We have to disconnect. His resurrection life is real in us, but only partially, and mixed with the corruption that remains in us. We live at the intersection of time and eternity as well.

This means something for yourself. It means that your eternal life is not the mere extension of your current life right now, and it’s certainly not the simple immortality of your soul. It’s rather the transformation of your life, the transformation of your body and your soul. It will be you, not by the extension of you, but by an extrapolation from him within the form of your own particulars.

And because of this discontinuity, you cannot see yet what you will be. As our epistle says, your life is hidden with Christ in God, hidden even from yourself. Hidden for safe-keeping. Preserved, protected, guaranteed, and incorruptible even by your failures or your sins or doubts or unbelief. Which is a great relief. You can let go of yourself. You can die to yourself. Do not be afraid.

This also means something for Christian social justice in the world: the continuity of his body tells us that we can share the ethos of humanists and progressives for the greater humanization of the world, and for the progress of liberty, fraternity, and equality. But the discontinuity, as well as the fact that this most perfectly humanitarian person who had ever lived was innocently crucified, is the judgment upon the secular faith in the positive power of humanity to achieve the progress we desire. We can receive it only by our transformation, upon repentance and in our dying to ourselves, in union with the Jesus who was crucified.

But do not be afraid. By raising this particular crucified person from the dead, the Lord of history has raised a banner in time and space against tyranny, injustice, discrimination, disease, poverty, suffering, oppression, greed, and war. That is where God stands, and to that social transformation we bear witness, even in our fear and trembling. So of course the women left the empty tomb in fear and in great joy.

Somebody who’s here today needs to be encouraged. Somebody who’s here today needs to be inspired. Somebody needs to see this vision once again. Somebody needs to be relieved.

Somebody here is trying to be good and noble on your own, and no matter whether that makes you hard and critical or soft and mushy, you need to hear the message that you must look for Jesus who was crucified, and die to yourself and even to your noble aspirations, and do not achieve but receive, and for your goodness you aspire to a life of gratitude and humble generosity.

Somebody here is afraid, afraid of the future of the world and for the children being born today. You need to hear the message that yes, the world is truly self-destructive and is judged by God, but also the promise that God so loves the world, and God has future plans for it, and for its good, and for its healing and its peace.

Somebody here is angry, angry at the failure of love in your life, and you are tested and tempted by the power of hatred and hardness and self-preservation, and you need to hear the message to get you through this temptation, even if sweating drops of blood, and believe that love is costly but love wins.

Somebody here is grieving, grieving at the loss of someone you loved, or for the loss of what you had hoped for, or at the imminence of your own death, and you need to hear the message that death is a boundary which has another side, and that while you are not fully shown the geography of that other side, you can know that there is reconciliation, and satisfaction, and joy and peace.

Somebody here is in pain, or you are sick in body or in soul, and you need to hear the message that God loves your body more than you do, even in its connection to infection and pollution and its susceptibility to aging and decline, and God will take it from you, and give it back to you in some new version, as yet unseen, without spot or wrinkle, and fit for bearing light.

Somebody here today is guilty and feels ashamed, and you need to hear the message that your value and your goodness is securely held by God and not by you, and is preserved by God against your failure and your foolishness and faltering.

Somebody needs permission to believe this mystery. Somebody needs encouragement to believe that the green and yellow metaphors of Easter are backed up in reality, though that reality be hidden from the present in the past and in the future. That reality is opened in the promises and prophecies, and reasoned out in the epistles and enacted in the gospels and emoted in our music.

The love and joy you feel today is passing and partial, but there is reality behind it, more real than all the other incidents and accidents you call reality. Whatever you are looking for today, I invite you to believe the enduring and cosmic reality of the love of God for you.

Copyright © 2014, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

March 9, Lent 1: Knowing Better, # 4 in a Series on Sin

 Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-78, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11

In this sermon series I am asking every set of lessons to tell us something about sin. Right off these lessons tell us is that sin is as simple as thinking you know better. You are given the instructions and directions, but you do it your own way because you know better. Or, you hear your friends talking and you interrupt and give them the real skinny because you know better.

Eve and Adam were suddenly not content with the knowledge they had. They wanted to know as God does, that is, knowing things independently, knowing things for themselves, apart from any one else’s instructions. That unconditioned knowledge was too much for them, for now they knew too much and yet still not enough. Their knowledge was accurate, and incomplete, and wrong.

In the case of the temptation of the Lord Jesus, you could say that the devil knew too much, yet not enough. I think the devil really believed what he was saying. Don’t think of the devil as some hideous, malicious Ringwraith or Lord Voldemort. He’s more like Saruman (in the book, not the movie) or Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. He knows an awful lot, more than anybody else, but he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. He thinks he knows better than Jesus does, that pious fool. He’s negotiating with Jesus from what he knows about the world, from lots of experience, the sad truth about the world, and the only realistic way to make any difference for any attainable good.

The story of Our Lord’s temptation is rich and endlessly paradigmatic and I could preach a dozen sermons on it and not repeat myself. Please come back three years from now, when I hope to preach on it from the pulpit in the sanctuary. Three years after that, God willing, and I’ll be sixty-six and I’ll preach on it again. Three years after that you’re going to have to help me up to the pulpit. It’s because this story is so rich that I like people to help me hear it. So we read this story the other night at one of our small groups, and then I asked them to reflect on this: "What question would you ask of this story?" One of you said, "Why did Satan want to tempt him?" I didn’t try to answer.

At home I posed the question to Melody. "Why did Satan want to tempt him? What was his motivation?" Melody said, "Putin." You know, Vladimir Putin. She said, "It’s about power." Who’s got the power, and who in power is threatened by power, and uses power to defend his power?

The power to turn stones to bread. That is, the power to make good at no cost. That power would really help the bankrupt government of Ukraine right now, if it could convert its debits into credits, or print some money and then make it valuable, or convert its fertile soil into natural gas.

The second temptation is the power to call on God to rescue us. "He will command his angels concerning you." The power to get God to intervene. That God considers you important enough to break the rules of nature just to keep you safe. How important do we consider Ukraine? Enough to intervene? "We will command our soldiers concerning you." Even at great cost? How important to us was Hungary in 1956, or Czechoslovakia in 1968? Would you enlist? Would you risk your life? How much power do you have in your life to call on others to help you when you need it?

Melody said that the third temptation is about territory. Right. Having power means having some territory to control. So when Satan shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, that’s like if Putin is telling the Ukrainians they belong to him, they don’t belong to the West. "Let’s just see if they come through and rescue you. They’re all talk. Obama is a pious fool. Face the facts. Just submit to me as the boss and then we can work this out and everything will be fine."

Well, you do need to have some territory. You need a place to call your own, but more you need to have some space within the world that’s under your control so you can exercise your initiative and your creativity and your freedom, or your life is no better than a tiger’s in the zoo. You notice how much I speak of freedom in my sermons. To exercise your freedom you need some power.
Power, might, macht, puissance, force, energy, voltage, wattage, horsepower, GDP, force of arms, strength, çë in Hebrew, äõíáìéò in Greek. Power has positive meanings in the Bible. And in terms of psychology and sociology, your empowerment is critical to your health and happiness, both personally and collectively. And yet you know the cliché that power corrupts.

Money is power. We’d like to fix our sanctuary ceiling, but we don’t have the power to do it because we don’t have the money to do it. The other night at that same small group, I asked one of the members to suggest what we might pray about. She suggested that we pray for the people we see around us every day who do not have we have. On the sidewalks, on the subways. We did. What they don’t have is the power to get for themselves what most of us take for granted. They don’t have the money, or the access or the means, or the emotional reserves, or even the know-how.

Knowledge is power. Is that what was really behind the sin of Eve and Adam? That’s how C. S. Lewis interprets it in his novel Perelandra, that to know as God knows would make you so much more powerful. Knowledge is good, you need to increase your knowledge. But your knowledge has its limits. You have to reach the point when you admit that you can’t know better than God does.

Sin has power. Your sin sets off a chain reaction and it gains a power of its own. You cause it but you can’t control it. Sin spreads, and you can’t pull it back. It’s a contagion, it’s a pollution, it gains a momentum and it overpowers us. That’s the teaching of St. Paul in our epistle. The whole human race is infected. No one starts out clean. We call this the doctrine of "original sin." Some churches teach it as if it’s in our DNA. Not the Reformed church. Our metaphor would be that you’re born clean, but the maternity ward is contaminated and the birthing clinic is not sterile, and every single one of us is compromised at the start.

But the Lord Jesus Christ has even greater power, and his power has its own force and momentum outside of us and our control. St. Paul sets these two against each other, the humanity of Adam and the humanity of Christ. Under Adam, sin has the power, and under Christ, righteousness has the power. Under Adam, even though we live, our lives are under the shadow of death. Under Christ, even though we die, our deaths are under the light of life. Under Adam, even the good you do is corrupted. Under Christ, even the sin you do is reconciled. This scheme has two benefits for you.

The first benefit is knowledge. When you’re within sin, you think you know sin. When you’re under death, you think you know death. And you think you know the reality of life, as the serpent thought and as Satan thought, but you don’t. It’s only when you’re under life that you really know what death is. And it’s only when you’re within the humanity of righteousness and reconciliation that you truly know what sin is. Part of the problem of sin is that sinners are confused about sin.

I see this all the time with people. Sin confuses people about their sin. Take the case of Putin. I don’t know about his personality, but I imagine that everything he’s doing makes real sense to him. It all fits with how he sees the world and what he thinks he has to do. Everything that Satan says to Jesus is true on its own, but it all falls short of the glory of God. Not one thing the serpent said to Eve was untrue, but it wasn’t the whole truth. But the truth of your sin you can know correctly from the other side, from the perspective of God’s grace, from the vista of God’s redeeming love. You can know it as God knows it. How humble you deserve to be. And in Christ how righteous you are.

The second benefit is power. The power of righteousness within this new humanity has even more power than sin. It is not an objective power, or a mindless persistent power like pollution or infection, a power blind and dumb and stupid, for all of its momentum. No, it is a personal power, the personal power of the Lord Jesus who is risen from the dead, it is the power of his resurrection and the power of the Holy Spirit. He keeps pumping this power into his humanity.

So your choice is no longer between sin and not to sin, it’s your choice between sin and the Lord Jesus. You rest in him, and in his power, and in his love. You don’t have to know better. What you have to know is him, and you can recognize him as the channel of God’s love for you.

Copyright © 2014, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.