April 14, Easter 3, For the Love of Pete (and Paul)

 

 

Acts 9::1-20, Psalm 30, Revelation 5:11-14, John 21:1-19

Saul was born a Jew, but he was born a Roman citizen. He was not some Galilean country boy like Peter, James, and Jesus. Saul was born in what is now Turkey, in the city of Tarsus, the citizens of which enjoyed the special status of citizenship of the city of Rome, with all its rights and privileges attaining thereto. Saul had the right of access to Roman power, prestige, and pleasure, but he had committed himself to the opposite, to a rigorous form of Judaism. He had joined the strictest group of Pharisees—who will have been thrilled to have him, this guy who was fluent in Greek and even Latin, who had the freedom of the Empire, and could stand up to other Romans.

Saul was impassioned for the holiness of the Temple in Jerusalem in contrast to Capitol in Rome, for the purity of Jewish law against the laws of Rome, and for holding these tight until the Messiah would come and kick the Romans out and rule in Jerusalem once again. But these followers of Jesus were messing it up. They said the Messiah had come, and that he was ruling in heaven, not in Jerusalem. They infected the Temple with their heresies and prayers. They abused the Torah and did not keep kosher. They threatened the unity and purity of Israel and the sacred status of Jerusalem. Their movement had to be expunged for the survival of the whole.

Saul was that special sort of true believer whom we would call a fundamentalist. He saw himself as a very good guy who was so dedicated to the cause that he was not afraid to hurt people. It’s not that Saul did not love God. If Saul didn’t love God so much, he would not have persecuted him. You know the old saying: the opposite of love is not hatred, it is indifference. Hatred is not the opposite of love but the perversion of love, and it’s from perverted love that Saul is persecuting God. And why is his love perverted? Probably several reasons, including perhaps his motive of rejection, having been immersed in Rome, but what our lesson today suggests that it was his image of the God he loved.

Because he saw God a certain way, he thought he had to love that God a certain way, if even a way that was hurtful to others. Like Westboro Baptist, and let me recommend to you Jeff Chu’s book, because of his remarkable insight that what the Westboro people do is actually for love. We Christians have been doing this a long time in many ways, loving our image of God which causes hurt for other people. So have Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists. You can’t help but love God according to your image of God and how you see what God wants for the world. It’s a spiritual law that we become like what we worship. How you see God is how you see your neighbor and yourself. Saul saw himself as the dedicated one who would stop at nothing to defend the cause of the God he loved.

It’s similar with Simon Peter. Peter fancied himself as Jesus’ right hand man and bodyguard. He was the one who drew the sword to fight for Jesus at his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was one who did not run away, but followed from behind, and got himself into the courtyard of the high priest where Jesus was being tried, the only disciple there. And there, at the charcoal fire where the servants and soldiers were keeping warm, Peter, like some secret agent, denied that he knew him, and again a second time, but they did not believe him, and his cover was blown, and the third time he was vehement, only now to save his skin, and the cock crowed, and he was ashamed. He was the one who denied him because he was the only one who was there. If Peter hadn’t love Jesus so much he would not have denied him. Love can be so wrong. And Jesus has to convert his love. Which is what he does today at the charcoal fire on the beach.

It was the third week after Jesus’ resurrection, before his ascension, while Jesus is still bodily present on the earth, breathing its air and eating its food and accepting its gravity, but unbounded and unpredictable. Two times now they have seen the Lord. They believe he’s risen. But what does that mean? Now what? What’s next? We know the rest of the story, but those guys didn’t. So much for them is still uncertain. What did they imagine might be coming from the power of the resurrection?

Did they imagine that Jesus might be the new King David, trouncing the Roman Eagle and liberating the Promised Land, or a Jewish version of Alexander the Great, leading the armies of God across the world, as the companions of Mohammed would do six centuries later? I think Saul of Tarsus could have imagined that, and many Christians still want a modern version of this kind of thing—the expansion and prosperity and protection of Christian civilization in the world. That would be nice, but that is not the direction that Jesus shows them during these quiet weeks.

What you want depends on your vision of God. Do you picture God like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, muscular, majestic, and powerful, or do you picture God paradoxically like a lamb, a lamb on the throne, a bit more powerful and lordly than a chicken on the throne, but not much. And if the lamb has been already killed, then God does not need our protection, thank you very much. The kingdom of God does not need our defending, and we do not need to strengthen it or build it, it wins by its weakness, thank you very much, so all you have to do is love. Love when they don’t want your love, love when it is inadvisable, and when people think such love impinges on God’s holiness, but God can take care of God’s own holiness, thank you very much.

To be a Christian is to convert your love, to convert your loves according your beliefs. For some of you this conversion is sudden and dramatic, like the turning of an enemy, like Saul. For some of you, like Peter, who have been with Jesus all along, your conversion is gradual, more intimate, and probably more painful, because it makes its way slowly through your guilt and shame and disappointment. Peter was a man of feelings, so he had to smell it, the charcoal smoke and the memory of his denial and and his shame and his fear and how his fear perverted his love. Paul is a man of intellect, and so he is blinded, to go inside himself and review himself in terms of this new piece of information he’s received. There are different ways God uses to convert our love. But all of them involve some suffering. Not the suffering of punishment, but the pain of our own selves and the feeling of our shame and the guilt. And you must come to love yourself, your shameful self, your guilty self, so that you can love other people too and suffer them.

What is your image of the power of the resurrection? What is your image of God? Early in the morning, a man walks out onto the beach, and he sees in the sand the packs and the tracks of his friends, and he looks out over the water and he sees them in their boats, and he sits down for a bit and watches. Then he gets up and gathers wood, thinking about each one of those guys in turn, how well he knows them and what their personal stories are, and then he builds a fire, and while it’s burning down to coals he goes down to the water, and he catches some fish (and we are not told how he does it) but then he comes back up the beach and he cleans them and guts them (don’t you love it, the Lord God cleaning fish), and he arranges them on the coals, and then he calls out to the disciples, and as he gets them finally fishing right, he kneels back down to turn the fish on the coals. He so loves the world. He so loves his friends, even that poor Simon Peter. "We’re going to have to have our talk." Saul of Tarsus will learn to love a God who acts like this. You can love a God like this.

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

April 7, Easter 2, "Blessed Are We Who Have Not Seen"

 

 



Note: the movie is Tarkovsky's Mirror, the actor is Margarita Berekhova, and the scholar I quote is Debra Rienstra, from her blogpost for The 12. Thank you, Debra.

Acts 5:27-32, Psalm 150, Revelation 1:4-8, John 20:91-31

 Last week I spoke in terms of the Story, the Doctrine, and the Vision. This week the Vision is Belief. You believe to be true what you cannot see. The Doctrines for this week are three. The first is the resurrection of the Lord Jesus from the dead—the doctrine we already got last week. The second is new today, which is the divinity of the Lord Jesus, that he actually is God, and the third is how we can believe in him.

So, in the Story, first, the disciples witnessed the Lord Jesus back from the dead, and they saw his scars, the sign that he was in his body, his same body, but his body transformed by a power beyond the ordinary boundaries of the world, the sign of which was the locked doors. Second, Thomas recognized him as God, as more than a resurrected man. Thomas was the first person ever to call Jesus "My Lord and my God," the titles of the God of Israel. Third, the story displays the complexity of belief, including skepticism, and reading the signs, and going beyond the signs, and making a leap, and converting your mind, and coming to terms with your own self.

Jesus does not judge Thomas as a doubter. He honors his request, and he invites him to verify the signs of the marks in his hands. In the original Greek, he doesn’t even use the word "doubt". He says, "Don’t keep unbelieving but believing." Thomas stands for all of us. We all have to keep converting our unbelief to belief, and doing that on the basis of not so many facts, and on facts which can always be contested, as I said last week.

What do you need in order to believe? What level of evidence, how certain the signs? We vary in our satisfaction-levels for belief. I find it easier to believe in the resurrection than my wife does, and certainly more than my son does. For Thomas the testimony of the disciples that they had seen the Lord was not enough—he wanted stronger signs. You might feel like Thomas did, that the testimony of the Bible that people had seen the Lord is not enough. Can we believe it simply on testimony of an ancient book? One scholar has written that "the stories in the gospel function as the signs for us. The stories are a mediation through which we can see a Jesus we have never seen, as Jesus himself is a mediation through which we can see a God we have never seen."

"So Thomas is not a counterexample for right belief, then, but a metaphor in his own way. He signals in his passionate insistence how we are to respond to these stories. See the nailmarks in these stories; put your finger in these words." And blessed are we who believe these stories, even when our belief is seasoned with the skepticism that comes from never having seen it for ourselves. We have to live by our vision of what we cannot see, and our vision is our belief. That it is this way has benefits: in what kind of a creature you become when you live by vision beyond mere sight, when you live by faith beyond your knowledge, and when you live for love beyond yourself.

Thomas leaps to a new belief about Jesus and thus a new belief about God. But when he looks at Jesus there’s also a change within himself and his vision of himself and what he can believe about himself.

In your own life, you came to know yourself by watching the faces of other people: the face of your mother (you couldn’t take your eyes off her), the face of your father, and then others you could recognize, and in learning them you were discovering yourself, measuring yourself, developing your awareness of yourself. In Tarkovsky’s great movie Mirror, the unseen narrator spends his life watching the face of his mother and his wife. She is played by a single actress, Margarita Berekhova. She is luminous, you can’t take your eyes off her, and she is the mirror in whom the narrator is always looking for himself.

In the wonderful new book which we will celebrate this afternoon, Jeff Chu tells the story of his pilgrimage in search of God, and his method is to tell the stories of how other people deal with God, but of course it is also a pilgrimage of his own self-discovery, for the people he meets with are more or less mirrors for himself—some distorted, some bright and clear, so that in looking for God by means of them he has to develop his vision for himself. What can he believe? What can he believe about God, and what can he believe about himself?

I have said before that belief is a combination of knowledge, imagination, and desire. The anchor of belief is knowledge of some fact, some event, some truth, some news, some sign. For Thomas the fact was a dead man now alive again, and the sign was the nail-prints. He could know that, but he also had to imagine that the impossible could be true, and stemming from that, to imagine even more: that the God of Israel was in this man with his hands held out, and to imagine that the God of Israel would come to this.

Having imagined it he desired it, and the sign of his desire is when he says, "My Lord and my God." Self-referential words, for self-discovery. How suddenly that desire rose within him, after the last whole week when he was standing firm on his demands. And now, not only is he able to believe what he did not think he could believe, he can even to desire it. He gives himself to his desire, and he will start to imagine his own life in ways he did not know before.

Here is the take-home for today. To believe in Jesus as the Son of God is how you can come to believe in yourself. To desire the Lord Jesus permits you to desire yourself. To imagine him directs you to imagine yourself. To know him is how to know yourself. This is a feature of the Christian faith which it offers you when you practice it. To come to know God is how to come to know yourself.

Now there are many ways beside the Christian faith to get knowledge of yourself. You can learn about yourself from reading literature, and doing therapy, and from how other people respond to you, both in confirmation and critique. I’m talking about yourself at your root, your deepest self, your naked soul, how you love yourself and desire yourself and imagine yourself and even believe in yourself as the beloved of the Lord.

I am not saying only Christians can know themselves, nor am I saying that Christians necessarily do. I was reading on the internet the comments on the reviews of Jeff Chu’s book, and many of them written by Christians are mean and hurtful. You can tell how these people must see Jesus, and what they desire from his Lordship, and you wonder at their self-knowledge. But Jesus does not force on us what he offers us, even though his offer is an obligation. The obligation is real and the offer is well-meant: to keep on digging your fingers into these stories of Jesus every week, from which to imagine yourself and desire the self that he envisions for you. He is the living God, the God of the universe, who bears the signs of nail-prints for the love of you.

When I sing out to you, "Alleluia, Christ is risen," I’m offering you the knowledge and I’m appealing to your imagination. And when you sing back, "The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia," you imagine it as well, and you signal your desire by the word "indeed." These words are the sign of the Holy Spirit within you, bearing witness to your soul that what Jesus offers you is true, and that you can give yourself permission to believe it, and that love wins. Love always makes the leap, the leap across the skepticism of your doubt, because the love is God’s own love in you.

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

March 31, Easter 2013, The Story, the Doctrine, and the Vision (second edition)

Isaiah 65:17-25, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, 1 Corinthians 15:19-26, Luke 24:1-12

(N.B., this sermon quotes from Lesslie Newbigin’s modern classic, Foolishness to the Greeks, pp. 62-64. For Jim Bratt.)

Welcome to Easter, welcome to the celebration of the resurrection of Our Lord. Members and friends, visitors and seekers, 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 it for the world on God’s behalf.


We celebrate three things today: the story, the doctrine, and the vision—the story as in the gospel lesson by St. Luke, the doctrine as in the epistle lesson by St. Paul, and the vision as in the first lesson, by Isaiah, when it says, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.” The vision is projected by the doctrine, and the doctrine interprets the story.


When I say “story”, I don’t mean the kind that opens by saying, “Once a upon a time” (Barth), but a news story, with a date line, the kind of story that a journalist files with a periodical. Journalism comes closest to what the gospels do: blending facts and narratives and observations and interpretation, in the general interest. The gospel writers did not think of themselves as writing for spirituality and religion—they wrote for the general interest, and as much about politics as about spirituality. If St. Luke were writing today, I think he’d want to get published in The Atlantic Monthly. St. Mark would try for Mother Jones, and St. John for Vanity Fair. The apostles did not think in terms of starting another religion. They had a story to publish for the public interest.


When I say “doctrine”, I mean the summation of the story, as in the Nicene Creed, which we will soon recite, that “on the third day he rose again, in accordance with the scriptures.” There is a broader summation and a short analysis in our epistle, 1 Corinthians 15. The epistle is journalistic too, but in the manner of an op-ed piece. The doctrine interprets the implications of the story. And again, the implications are not merely spiritual but general. The doctrine is not just for personal religion, or for the church, but for the whole public. The doctrine is offered as public truth for public life.


When I say “vision”, I mean what the doctrine permits us to look for in the world, in both the future and the present. According to the Nicene Creed, the doctrine permits us to “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” That gives us a public vision for the world and the whole life of the world, from plants and animals to economics and politics—a view of the world, a world-view projected by the resurrection. It also gives you personal visions for yourself and your loved ones, a vision of your death, but also for a life beyond your death, and a vision of your body—your body so familiar and so mysterious—that your own poor body, your bones and your nerves and your feelings and emotions and all the memories you carry within you, can be so totally healed and reconstituted by God as to be physically fit to inhabit the world to come.


The vision requires the story to be true. And there are reasons to be skeptical. Skepticism is not an enemy of belief. Skepticism arises from belief. It’s because you believe some things that you are skeptical of others. And the ordinary public of Jesus’ day was just as skeptical about his bodily resurrection as anyone is today, because they believed, with good reason, that dead bodies do not come back to life. It was totally implausible, according to the plausibility structures of the worldview of their day, no less than by the plausibility structures of the worldview of our day.


The disciples were not watching at the tomb because they had given Jesus up for dead—dead as a door-nail, done for. When the women discovered the tomb was empty they were perplexed. They did not believe what they were told by the two men there in dazzling clothes. And when Peter noticed the linen clothing lying there (evidence that no Jew had carried his body out—not a naked dead body, certainly not on a holy day, so that maybe Jesus came out under his own steam), Peter still could not envision it until the living Lord confronted him, and even then it took him a couple weeks really to get it.


It’s remarkable that the Lord Jesus never tried to prove his resurrection to the public, and he never showed himself to his opponents—not to Pontius Pilate nor the chief priests and the scribes. God seems to have designed the facts of the story not to be the kind of facts which count for public proof within the plausibility structures of whatever the prevailing worldview is. St. Paul called the resurrection “foolishness to the Greeks,” and there is no way that the truth of the resurrection can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the modern mind. God intends that we who believe the story and celebrate the doctrine must always give our “testimony in a trial where it is contested. The verdict as to what stands and what falls will only be given at the end. To desire some kind of rationally conclusive ‘proof’ of” the resurrection is to mistake the privilege of witness which God has given us. God invites us rather to offer and live out the ethics of an alternate worldview which arises from the doctrine. And our view of the world is part of our vision.


It is the vision of the life of the world to come, a world which is inhabited by persons who are resurrected from the dead. We get the first glimpse of the vision from the story, from those two men in dazzling clothes. St. Luke specifically calls them men, not angels, and they are wearing the same clothes as Jesus did at his transfiguration. These men two men are in the future, living in the world to come, but the women could see them because the resurrection of Jesus had broken through the boundary of death. The resurrection of Jesus is the gateway to another universe, a greater universe than ours, embracing ours, penetrating ours, expanding into ours, converting ours, a universe generated by the small bang of the resurrection, the new heavens and new earth.


This vision is so large and loving and inclusive that although the plausibilities of its alternate worldview allow us to be skeptical of all the pretensions and certainties of our common knowledge, at the same time the vision can acknowledge and cherish so much of the fruit and insight and achievements in the arts and sciences of the very culture which regards the resurrection as implausible. The relationship is asymmetrical, but not completely discontinuous. From the one side, this side, the other looks implausible, but from the other side there is a plausibility that embraces both. So if we believe in the resurrection we do not abandon the world and its culture but embrace it, and bless it and serve it and develop it for the sake of the Lord. Using our imaginations, just as God designed to leave the details of the Easter story to our imaginations.


I invite you to imagine your own life in terms of the life of the world to come. You are used to factoring death and sin and evil into your life, it’s hard to imagine real human life without those factors in, it’s hard to envision power without corruption, government without force, prosperity without consumption, aging without weakening, and physical bodies without breakdown. Our visions are only glimpses on this side of the boundary of death, and everything in our present lives is contested. Your own lives are mysterious mixtures of good and evil, which will not be sorted out until your death.


In the meantime, you can still look for the new world in your own life, but you cannot find it in the good things about yourself that you can specify with certainty. You can look for the providence of God the Father in your life, who is converting your every sin and pain and misery into the material of salvation. You can look for the grace of God the Son within your life and for the warmth of his body in the form of his community. You can look for the fruits of God the Holy Spirit in your life, real fruits, though as passing and temporary as fruits always are, as well as the love of the Spirit, whose love is so limitless and inclusive that God loves not only your good, but even your sin, your failures no less than your successes.


Which means that your primary expression of this vision has to be reconciliation, your reconciliation of yourself and of this world in the light of the world to come, and that your application of this doctrine is forgiveness, your forgiveness of yourself and your reality as well as your forgiveness of your neighbor as yourself, and that your insight from the story is the power of God’s love that you see expressed in it, the love of God for the human body, which includes yours, the love of God for humanity, which includes you, the love of God which goes through death to the other side, which will be yours. This vision is a love vision, this doctrine is a love doctrine, and this story is a love story.


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

March 17, Lent 5: Jesus, Mary, and Judas, or, Salvation from Self-Destruction

 

 

Isaiah 43:16-21, Psalm 126, Philippians 3:4b-14, John 12:1-8

Text: Philippians 3:10-11: I want to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and to share his sufferings, being conformed to his death, that I may attain somehow the resurrection of the dead.

Six days after this story Jesus will be dead, and Judas too. Jesus the crucified and Judas the suicide. Judas hanged himself while Jesus was hanging on the cross. But here in the story, six days before, Judas believed that it was Jesus who was suicidal, in the course that he was on, and self-defeating in the cause of independence from the Romans. Judas has lost faith in him, and four days after this he will become a double agent, and betray the guy he had once believed in. Judas is not a monster—he’s more a character from a John le Carré novel. He is smart, and he knows a lot, he thinks he knows too much to follow Jesus, but he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and he fails in his imagination. Just as he cannot imagine what Jesus was really up to, so too at the end, after his betrayal, he cannot imagine the mercy of God to forgive him.

Some churches teach that suicide sends you straight to hell, because you cannot repent of it before you die, and you can’t be forgiven of it if you haven’t repented of it. That is not what we teach in the Reformed church. We teach that we are always being forgiven of sins we haven’t repented of or confessed to, and that our forgiveness does not depend on our confession or repentance or even whether we are truly sorry. We repent and confess and are sorry as our response to the forgiveness already and freely achieved for us by the once-for-all atonement of Jesus the crucified. Nothing you do can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, not even however you might punish yourself in a season of despair. Let’s make that clear.

But what about Judas? In Dante’s Inferno he’s in the deepest pit of hell. You might know from my book that I don’t believe that the Bible teaches that anyone goes to hell, not even Judas Iscariot. His self-destructive death was punishment enough. God does not need to take revenge on him or anyone else for another billion years. God allowed him to destroy himself. And his self-destruction is the point. Judas stands for self-destruction. There is life in Christ, and there is self-destruction. That’s our choice. To desire the life of Christ is salvation from self-destruction.

Judas is not a monster because he stands for all of us. He stands for humanity in our bent for self-destruction. We are the mammals who habitually destroy each other, for no increase in food. We are the mammals who destroy our natural habitat and bet on the destruction of our environment with our atom bombs. We watch our individual self-destruction in the lives of our celebrities. We watch the shriveling and starving of our souls in our materialistic culture, among the poor and oppressed as well as the wealthy and powerful. I know that I have self-destructive instincts in my life, and I believe you all do too. And like Judas, w can even be self-destructive in reaction to salvation: "No, God, not like that. I will not have you save us like that. If I have to give in to that kind of help I’d rather die." Thus the suicide.

Judas is the shadow of Jesus. As Jesus gradually approached his sacrifice, so Judas gradually self-destructed. At first he believed with all this heart. He didn’t fully get what Jesus was up to, but none of the disciples did. When Jesus predicts his death, Judas begins to doubt him, but he covers it, and becomes duplicitous, eventually and inevitably to himself, pretending that taking money from the box is an act of resistance, and he says things which he himself does not believe, and he no longer tells the evil from the good and cannot choose the good, or even, at the bitter end, imagine it.

Spies do this. Politicians do this. Bankers do this. Preachers do this. Nations do this. We all do this, if less dramatically, when left to our own devices and desires. So this is what salvation is: it is salvation from yourself, and from your self-destruction. God does not want you to destroy yourself, God wants you to live, which means God saves you for God’s self. Salvation to live instead of self-destruct, which means the loss of yourself to God.

The opposite of Judas is Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. Lazarus was not one of the twelve disciples but he was a very close friend of Jesus. I imagine that Jesus went to hang out with Lazarus whenever his twelve blockhead disciples were driving him crazy. Jesus had just recently raised Lazarus from the dead, and there he is sitting at the table, next to Jesus. Sitting Roman style, I imagine, stretched out sideways on their couches.

And there is Mary, making them all nervous with what she is doing with her hair. She is certainly crossing the boundaries of propriety. I wonder if Judas says the false thing that he says in order to cover up what he’s really thinking, about Mary and Jesus. But for Mary it isn’t one bit about sex. Because the precious ointment she is using is what remains from what she had just used recently upon the body of her brother Lazarus. When she bought it she had not known that she was buying it for two burials. That’s what Jesus means, that though she didn’t know it, after she anointed Lazarus, she had saved the rest for his own body. And what she also had not known, was that the resurrection of her brother would prove to be the final straw for the powers of Jerusalem, and so they issued a legal warrant for the arrest of Jesus, which would mean his execution. But now she knows it, and maybe she feels like Sophie in Sophie’s Choice, that all her choices have led to grief. I imagine that Judas is thinking, "I could have told you so. I knew it."

She wants him in her hair, the smell of him, the sweat from his legs and the odor of his body mixed in with the smell of the spice. He lets her have him in his hair, this man, this celibate man about to die. He defends her desire, he lets her have this intimacy with him, an intimacy right out in the open. She and Jesus feel together the death on him, the share the death on him, in the form of the ointment in her hair. She is like an artist with her hair, she makes her hair the instrument of her imagination and the fingers of her desire.

Desire versus knowledge. Desperation versus bitterness. Faith requires the balance of desire and knowledge. Faith is empty without knowledge. Faith is foolish without knowledge. Faith has to have some information which is reliable, information that you need to know, but the information of the gospel contradicts a lot of other information that you have. The knowledge which the gospel offers us is the death of many other likelihoods and certainties. Which is a good thing, because knowledge can be self-destructive, knowledge is always self-destructive unless it is directed by the desire for God.

The desire for God is what saves you from self-destruction. There is a formula for this. It’s a formula to save you from the destruction of yourself, individually. And it’s a formula for humanity as a species to save us from the destruction of the world, and it’s a formula which is illustrated by the picture of Mary wanting Jesus in her hair. This is the formula, from Philippians 3:10-11: What you want to know is Christ, and the power of his resurrection, the alternate power in the world, and you want to do that by accepting the suffering which comes to you from the world’s resistance to your loyalty to that power in your life, and your accepting even your own death, which means, accepting your limits and your own silliness, so that even in a dying world you can still be joyful and full of desire, and trusting in God somehow to bring it all home and raise you from the dead and even renew the world beyond what we can see right now. If that is what you keep desiring, that desiring works against self-destruction, that desiring is actually the knowledge. The desiring of God is the knowing of God. That’s finally all you have to know. That God desires you. What little hair you might have left. God loves to feel your wet eyelashes. What God desires is that you know the love of God.

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

February 17, Lent 1: WWGD

I preached the sermon ex tempore. I don't have an actual manuscript. But these are the rough notes:

Lent 01 2013, Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16, Romans 10:8b-13, Luke 4::1-13 Daniel Meeter

Brooklyn, 02/17/13

What is Salvation? Series: #1, WWGD

Romans 10:9-10: what’s salvation?

Many versions of salvation, both sacred and secular. Here is one powerful secular version which is in vogue today: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Another one is: "Fix the economy."

In Paul’s day, the Roman Empire offered salvation, and Caesar was the savior. Yes, literally so. Caesar claimed to be Dominus et Salvator, Kyrios kai Soter, Lord and Savior, even a god and a son of god. So for the Christians who lived in Rome, the question was very much close to home: what kind of salvation could this Jewish Messiah offer that was better than Caesar’s, and what kind of salvation could this obscure Jewish God offer that was better than that of Jupiter or Mars with their temples of victory on the glorious hills of Rome?



(Romans 10: 9: a technical formula to get you into heaven, like a password?)

Salvation is not just eternal life, but already this life, a continuity

Rescued like by a lifeguard, or out of the ruins, set aside like money, preserved for the future.

What do you want from salvation? What do you want from God?

If you were God, what would you do for people, for the world?

If you wore, not a WWJD bracelet, but a WWGD? "What would God do?"

Well, that’s what Jesus had to do. He had to sort it ou. Consider options. Temptations. WWGD.

We assume that he was tempted in his humanity: he was, but also in his divinity.

Can God be tempted? Original Greek, "thou shalt not tempt the Lord your God."

The devil is the Satan of the Book of Job, living above the landscape, an angelic power out of whack, buddies with Jupiter and Wotan and Shiva. He represents to Jesus the kinds of salvation practiced by normal gods and goddesses, the salvations we humans project onto the gods we imagine, and the salvations that you would consider if you were god.

Well, how about if everyone had enough to eat. The eradication of hunger. Not only Third World hunger, but Park Slope hunger, foodie hunger. Judging by the volume of content in the media, our consumption of food is far more important than praying. But of course it’s not just food. It’s health-care in general, welfare in general. We would consider it salvation if Jesus had given himself to that. We all would be more satisfied with God if God would pay better attention to our physical health and well-being.

For us who have enough to eat I think it would be health-care. Mind you, I'm the first to pray for healing, for my niece Ragan for example. She's got the advantage of one of the best children's hospitals in America. But when we were in Grand Rapids last week, and drove up Michigan Avenue past the huge expansion of health care facilities in the last decade, and realized that health care is now the number one industry in Grand Rapids, more than automotive or furniture, I considered the great expense we spend on health care, I think what we would suggest to Jesus is to solve our health-care problems.

The second temptation is power in the world. That Jesus would save us by taking ordinary power in the world and using his power for good. We ask for this all the time. Why did God allow the Nazis to get away with it, and Stalin, and al Qaida, take your pick. We would consider salvation if the Messiah would take some power in the world to take out the bad guys and set things right. This is a great mistake of the Religious Right. But to be fair, the theocratic stance was part of Christendom for most of our history. Our own congregation was established by the hand of government. Could Luke have imagined this? And would he say that the price of this privilege has been that the church has not been serving only God, but also serving the interests of the other regnant powers of society? We will discover that whenever, in the name of Jesus, we take real power in the world, we will be compromised and corrupted.

The third temptation is for God to get us out of trouble. To rescue us, to be a great lifeguard. Well, that is an obvious meaning of salvation. Praying for just this kind of thing is normal and appropriate. The scripture is full of passages that ask for this, including Psalm 91 which we just read and which the devil quotes. And if God would just keep doing this kind of thing we would be largely satisfied. If God would rescue us, that would just about be a proof of God.

All these things are what gods do. In all religions. So what kind of God shall this God be? What kind of salvation can we expect from the Lord Jesus Christ when we call upon his name?

Not these. Of course all of these from time to time are done by God, and you may ask for them in prayer, but, on the other hand, for example, if you live in Park Slope, your not having anything to eat might actually tend toward your salvation. And dare I say it, if you are living the life of pleasure and consumption which is advertised in our magazines, and if your terminal illness is what it takes to save you, God may well not heal you, no matter what you pray.

The salvation he offers is what he demonstrates. The salvation he offers is two things here: freedom and wisdom. Freedom needs wisdom, or it devolves to license and chaos. Jesus claims his freedom here, and he does it by means of his wisdom. That’s the salvation he demonstrates.

The freedom here is freedom amidst temptation. Freedom in the temptations of nature in its neutrality, in the forms of hunger and pain and such, and freedom in the temptations of humanity in its rebellion, in the forms of money, sex, and power. Freedom to say No, in order to say Yes. Not freedom from temptation, no, temptations will never end, and they may increase in your discipleship. The freedom is from the compulsion of temptation. And freedom from your guilt, which is what forces you into complicity with the temptations of the world.

The core of the wisdom is Romans 10:9-10: "Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead."

a motto, a powerfully functioning slogan, like "Don’t tread on me, (the Tea Party) or "Liberty, fraternity, equality" (the French Revolution) or "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" (NRA) or "For king and country" (the Brits in the War) or "Be Prepared" (the Boy Scouts) or some other motto that keeps guiding your behavior through life. It’s an algorithm like in your GPS direction finder, no matter which way you turn it keeps find your route for your destination.

If you believe that and keep telling yourself that— "Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead"— that motto is enough to keep saving you through every situation and get you to your destination.

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

February 24, Lent 2: Herod the Fox and Jesus the Hen

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18, Psalm 27, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35

Herod is a fox and Jesus is a hen, and in Exodus, the Lord God is something like a barbecue grill floating above the ground. Such images. What do these images have to do with our salvation? That’s our theme for Lent: What is salvation? What is the sum total of what you want from God? What should God should do for you? "What would God do?" That was the question of Jesus. He had to represent what God would do, and offer the kind of salvation God would offer us.

What kind of salvation did God offer to Abram? Not heaven or hell. Never once in the Old Testament is salvation ever that you go to heaven instead of hell. For 97% of the Old Testament it’s not even about eternal life. The Israelites rejected that when they exited out of Egypt. Think about it. The Egyptians were fixated on immortality. They built their whole economy around it, as the pyramids still give witness. By contrast the Torah and the Prophets are absolutely silent on immortality, and it’s just not part of salvation which God offers in the Old Testament.

Salvation, for Abram, is a son and a place, a son to call his own and place to call his home. He was a resident alien in the land where he was living. He didn’t even have a green card. Yes, he had great wealth, but as for real estate, he didn’t own, he didn’t even rent, he was a guest. He had no piece of ground to leave to his descendants for their security. But that was immaterial as long as he had no descendants. Not one son. This was his humiliation. No child of his own to inherit his wealth, no grandchildren to miss him after he died or to name their own kids after him.

That was the Israelite version of eternal life. To live on through your descendants, through your seed, just like an oak tree, just like in the nature they observed around them. Your life lives on as your seed keeps cycling on through each generation after you. But Abram was a dry branch, an oak tree without acorns, magnificent maybe, but at an end.

Salvation means not just descendants, but descendants living securely in a land of their own. A permanent piece of private property. God promises the land to Abram’s seed. That’s why we call it the Promised Land. The land of the promise was the promise of salvation.

Of course he questions it, both parts of it. Somebody else owns all it already. And I still don’t have a son. Notice that God does not repudiate his questioning. Faith is allowed to question God. As a Dutch hymn says, Nooit kan ’t geloof te veel verwachten, Faith cannot do too much expecting. Your faith can have high expectations, even impossible expectations, so of course your faith will question God, but then you’ll have to accept God’s answer which usually is not much more than this: "You just have to trust me." O God, that again.

What was God’s answer to Abram? In the dream. If I don’t do this you can cut me up and kill me. In other words, "Cross my heart and hope to die." Now how is Abram ever going to cut up and kill God? Well, just by saying that God is dead to him. By not believing any more. Which God allows. All the time. Some God. Some God who does not stand up for himself or defend his honor. Some chicken of a God. Intolerable to Islam. Also inconvenient for the Christian Right.

What’s salvation for the Christians in Philippi? On first glance you might think it’s going to heaven when you die. Well, yes, the New Testament certainly offers eternal life. But it’s not up in heaven with immortal souls. It’s our souls and bodies in the recreated earth, when the Lord’s Prayer is finally fully answered, when "thy kingdom comes on earth, as it is in heaven." Our eternal life is our personal share in God’s eternal kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

The city of Philippi was a Roman military colony, which means a couple things. It means that Caesar was honored in Philippi quite literally as its Savior and its Lord, in those specific words, but more than that, in Philippi Caesar was even worshiped as a god and a son of a god. It also means that some of the Philippians will have been Roman citizens. Not that they lived in Rome, nor that they wanted to end up there, but that their citizenship was vested there, which had implications for their life in Philippi, for their privileges and their protection. Their citizenship carried the protection of the power of the person of Caesar. St. Paul had invoked this for himself when he was put on trial back in Palestine. The fact of their citizenship in Rome had great benefit for their lives in Philippi. It gave them security, a status, and salvation from bodily humiliation.

Many of the Christians in Philippi were not Roman citizens. Like Lydia, the founder of the church. But they knew the system. So St. Paul can encourage them when he writes that their citizenship is in heaven instead of Rome, so that not Caesar but Jesus is their Savior and their Lord. It is a jump, it requires a leap of faith. It is for this life already and also for eternal life. Not for up in heaven but for here within the world today, and also for the world to come. "Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven" both for now and in eternity. It means that salvation is for the world but not of the world. It is this-worldly but it’s not by being worldly that you achieve it, you receive it by the gift of God and in God’s time, when the Lord Jesus "transforms the body of our humiliation to conformity with the body of his glory by his power by which he is able to subject all things to himself." You share his subjection in the salvation of your body and your soul.

The down side is that if you do not live by faith, if you just live to satisfy your appetites, like animals, your end is destruction, both body and soul; you will die just like an animal. St. Paul does not mention punishment in hell, for he did not believe in that. St. Paul is quite clear that "the wages of sin is death," not hell. But still he grieves, he is in tears, he would not have anyone reject this hope and opportunity, those who live as enemies of the cross, who do not desire the promises of God and who do not yearn for the salvation of God. And yet God will not force us. God accepts our rejection. All the time. God does not defend himself. A chicken God.

Jesus is a hen and Herod is a fox. Herod does not want the salvation of Jesus, because he has his own agenda. He wants to be the King of the Jews himself, and if Jesus has a better claim to it he needs him out of the way. But Jesus knows that Herod is a fox, and smart enough to realize that he doesn’t have to take him out himself, because the powers of Jerusalem will do it for him. They will kill him and cook him in their pot. None of them in Jerusalem wanted his brand of salvation either. The erectors of the cross are the enemies of the cross.

The first response of humanity towards God is distrust. And there is no real proof of the salvation of God, not within the world. If you live by your smarts you will not trust it. But to be like a chicken is the point of Lent. As much of a chicken as Jesus was. You do not defend yourself and you suffer your dishonor. You do not protest to be called a miserable offender. No self-respect, no self-defense. Like a chicken in a pot and like God on a cross. Can you accept this kind of God? Please do, because then you can accept the kind of salvation that this God brings.

Why did Jesus do it? Like a hen with her chicks, for passionate love. But to live by such love, without defense, makes you a sitting duck. How did Jesus do it? By his faith. He lived by his faith too. He had to keep believing those same two things I said last week. He had to believe that he himself was the Lord, and he had to believe that God would raise him from the dead. Those two things: Jesus is Lord, and God raised him from the dead. That believe is not a password to admit you into heaven when you die, it’s rather your motto, your wisdom, your algorithm which that keeps saving you through your life, day by day, week by week, and through your death, as it did for Jesus, saving you to keep on living within God’s love.

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

February 3, Epiphany 4, "In A Mirror, Dimly: The Ordination of Elders and Deacons"

Jeremiah 1:1-4, Psalm 71:1-6, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30

The name which we give to our church’s board of trustees is “the consistory”. It’s about the equivalent to a vestry or a parish council or a Presbyterian “session”. Today we are going to install four new members into the consistory. But first we have to ordain them. We ordain them and lay our hands on them — we ordain them into sacred ministries.

The elders have the ministry of spiritual care and oversight. The deacons have the ministry of mercy and mission. We ordain them to signify that they hold sacred offices, offices no less sacred than my office as a pastor. They are sacred because they represent the living presence of the Lord Jesus. The elders and deacons represent Our Lord within the church, which is why we make them the trustees. You might think that because you elected them they represent you, which they do only coincidentally. Their real job is to represent the Lord Jesus to you.

As far as I know, it’s only the Reformed Church that does this, and we’ve been doing it since the 1550’s in Europe, and since the 1650’s in Breukelen. Most churches have pastors, many churches have deacons, and some have elders, but the Reformed Church has all three, and we ordain all three. We ordain our elders and deacons because we regard their offices and ministries not merely as useful for the church’s functioning but as essential to the church’s mission and spirituality. And I think it’s because we ordain them that the consistory is such a stable institution. Do you know of any other committee in Brooklyn which has been meeting continuously for 355 years? With minutes?

God has a Word for us today, in what we’re doing today, and to our four ordinands. Well, six words — two by three and three by two. Two words from each of our three lessons, and the first three words for your persons and the second three are for your ministries.

First, from Isaiah. It was God who called you, even though God’s calling was hidden within a pragmatic process of a committee doing a mailing and tallying returns and drafting a list with alternates and sending emails and making phone calls. Do you believe that this is how God calls you? We will ask you if you believe this, just before we ordain you. It’s hard to believe. But isn’t it true that God works this way, by means of many small and subtle miracles, hidden in such ordinary things as bread and wine and water? Your calling and our ordination of you is a sign and a wonder. The sign of our hands upon their heads is a sign of God’s presence and activity for us to wonder at. We wonder if there even is a God, but if there is, then the world should be full of wonders, and and all of us should wonder at our own lives.

Second, also from Isaiah, it was God who called you before you were ready. No one who gets asked to be a deacon or elder is ready for the job. If you thought you were ready, it was your own desire and self-regard that was calling you. If the office is sacred, then by definition you should have a healthy fear of it. And your healthy fear of it will make you a better elder or deacon, just as will facing your unreadiness, and seeking your power outside of yourself, from God.

Third, from First Corinthians. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.” You don’t know where God will take you when God calls you. Your calling has uncertainty built in. You don’t know what bearing your office will do to you. You have to feel your uncertainty and even welcome it, and accept the freedom that comes with it, because your uncertainty is the very medium of your freedom. And you do have a say in how you get to where God calls you to.

You must lead the church to what you can see only dimly. You lead this church to places beyond the horizon of our sight. A hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, our elders and deacons were making choices and decisions that have all worked out to bring us here today, but they could never have imagined what we are today. Only God could see what they were choosing for and what they were investing in. So it must be for you. Within that continuity, within our long and patient evolution, you must keep leading this church to new obedience to the Lordship of Christ, and to new manifestations of God’s presence, and to ever new signs of the City of God and newer wonders of God’s love.

How do you know if you are leading the church correctly? You won’t know for sure, you can’t have that certainty, because you’re “seeing in a mirror dimly,” and because the judgment of God on what you are doing comes with the blessing of God on every move you make. But you can have a good idea by checking for love. Yes, you have to test the spirits and trust the scriptures for guidance and instruction, but mostly you have to keep gauging the love in the congregation. You lead by faith and with hope, but the greatest of these is love.

So, Fourth, also from First Corinthians, the first job of elders and deacons is to love the congregation. We have been given gifts and talents to equip us for our ministries, but if we do not have love, our ministries are nothing. We have been given skills and aptitudes to equip us for our leadership, but without love, our leadership gains nothing. Love is simple in its conception, textured in its expression, and complex in its application. You have to learn the arts and sciences of love, and when fear and pride and honor are in the way, elders and deacons have to pay the price of love and make the sacrifices which love demands, which end up wonderful and fulfilling, but yet are sacrifices.

Fifth, from the Gospel, love can be tough love, challenging love, which your people might not feel as love. I suspect the congregation of Nazareth experienced Jesus as a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal. They might not have called him envious or boastful, but they would have called him arrogant and rude, which made them irritable and resentful. Yes, love may be simple in its conception, but it is textured in expression and complex in application. And it falls to the elders and deacons, and no one else, to do the hardest works of love within the congregation, most easily misunderstood, which cannot be defended or explained. They do it in fear and trembling to represent the Lord Jesus within the church, for the church to better represent the Lord Jesus in the world. Which is why you, the congregation, must honor them.

Sixth, from the Gospel, what enraged the congregation of Nazareth was Jesus saying that God was just as good and loving to their opponents and oppressors as God was to them. God loved their enemies as much as them, so they should be as open as God is. Well, Old First has its own ways of being closed and defensive and irritable and resentful, we must confess it. But it truly is our historic heritage to be an open church. For a hundred years we were the only church in the town of Breukelen and we welcomed everyone.  We were founded by the state church of Holland, for the enjoyment of everyone. Over the centuries there were secessions from our denomination by people who thought it was too easy-going. The conservatives called it a “hotel church”, meaning anyone could walk right in.

Well, let’s affirm that we are a hotel church, and rejoice in it. You’ll see what I mean if you come here during the week. We’ve got a hotel kitchen over there, we’ve got beds here in the summer, and on any given Sunday our worship includes as many non-members as members. Great. Our church has a porous boundary with the world. But how do we keep it in the world but not of the world? How do we keep it from being only a train-station church?

Our strategy is concentric circles of intentional community with Jesus Christ. And the innermost community of Jesus is the consistory. It’s not just a committee, it’s a small intentional community, modeling community to the next concentric circle of the congregation, and so on outward through the intentionally increasingly fuzzy concentric circles which the world identifies with Old First. And so the consistory is essential to the mission of this church, by its leadership, but also by its modeling a community of churchly love.  Elders and deacons, God calls you to be a community of Jesus Christ within Old First so that Old First may be a community of Jesus Christ in Brooklyn which welcomes persons of every ethnicity, race, and orientation to worship, serve, and love God, and love our neighbors as ourselves.

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

January 27, Epiphany 3, "The Joy of the Lord is Your Power"

 Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10, Psalm 19, 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a, Luke 4:14-21

 

 
We are watching Jesus of Nazareth work out being the Son of God. At the point of Luke chapter 4, the title "Son of God" does not signify the second person of the Holy Trinity, it does not yet entail actual divinity, Jesus has still to work that out; and though it was already true of him, I don’t think he worked it out until his resurrection. At this point in the gospel, to be the Son of God is to be the royal prince of Israel, the true king of the Jews, of the House and lineage of David, the entitled one, the anointed one, the christos, the Christ, the Messiah.

Two Sundays ago we read that this title was confirmed for Jesus at his baptism, when the voice from heaven said, "You are my son, my beloved, with you I am well-pleased." Three Sundays from now we will read what happened directly after that: the Spirit led him into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And every temptation began with the words: "If you are the Son of God." If you are the Son of God, try this, try that, do this. Two of the temptations were based on scripture. Jesus had to sort through some compelling options on how to be the Son of God, he had to consider and reject some powerful possibilities to work out being the Messiah.

Today we read of him going public and developing his campaign. He doesn’t go straight to Jerusalem, straight to Washington, he starts out in Iowa and New Hampshire. In Galilee. He does the synagogues, explaining the book of the law of Moses, the Torah. Like Ezra in our reading from Nehemiah. He read the law and made sense of it so the people could understand it, he was giving them interpretation and inspiration and hope. From our perspective we can see him as God having come among God’s people, God talking to them again. But they would not have seen him as the Messiah, doing that. King David was not a teacher. They saw him as a rabbi and a prophet.

He chooses to announce that he’s the Messiah in his own home town, in the town hall, which is the synagogue. He does it by simply reading from the Isaiah scroll. Let me say in passing that Rabbi Bachman told me they study this chapter of Luke in rabbinical school, because it’s the earliest description of what happened in synagogues, earlier than anything in Jewish books. We may guess, from the account in Nehemiah, that the synagogue’s ruler will have blessed the Lord, that the people raised their hands and said Amen, that they bowed in prayer and worship, and that somebody read from the scroll of the Torah. But we know from Luke that somebody read from a scroll of the Haftorah, that is, one of the prophets, frequently Isaiah, and that somebody did explain the readings and apply them: how shall we keep the laws of Moses in a very different context when the Roman law is above us, and we don’t control the economy we work in, and we don’t even own the land we’re farming. I mean, the synagogue was as much a town hall meeting as it was a spiritual meeting. How are we supposed to live?

It’s dramatic that Jesus finishes reading and then sits down. Everybody looks at him. All his relatives and family friends. "Well, aren’t you going to explain it? Teach us. Show your stuff. Don’t embarrass your brothers here." From where he sits he says, "It’s now. It’s here. It’s me." He has announced—by quoting Isaiah. "The spirit of Adonai has anointed me." Anointed, entitled, the Messiah, the christos, the Christ, the Son of God. He has announced his platform, which is to benefit the poor and free the oppressed. Who the people of Nazareth consider to be themselves, who are hopelessly indebted to the lenders and the landlords and have no capital and cannot rise out of their poverty. He has announced his method. He will accomplish his platform by means of proclamation. "Well, you cannot make it so by simply saying it is so." He will proclaim the good news. "Thanks for the news, but what about the full story? Can you deliver?"

Eventually they will decide he can’t deliver. Over the course of three years, and despite some very positive moments along the way, they will decide he is a loser. He cannot have been the Messiah. He cannot have been the true king of the Jews. "Pontius Pilate, that inscription, please take it down." He was not the king of the Jews, he only said he was. His death on the cross is the denial of all their expectations of how he should have been their Messiah. It’s a great negation.

I wrestle with how the church makes so little real difference in the world. It doesn’t matter, if the church’s only purpose is to get us into heaven when we die. But in the Reformed Church, the gospel is for the salvation of the world and the redemption of all creation. "Thy kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven." We feed the hungry for more than sympathy and Christian love, we do it to bear witness to the Kingdom of God. Our church has a good reputation because of Cooking for Chips and the Sandy Relief Kitchen and our Summer Respite Shelter, but where is the church on the structures of poverty and the institutionalized injustices that result in hunger and homelessness? What about climate change, where is the church on that? Our church has given its blessing to same-sex marriage, but what about real activism in addressing sexual discrimination? Some churches were powerhouses for the civil rights movement, but 11 AM on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of the week. As far as Christian action in the world, the church has to weep like those people wept when they heard what Ezra was reading in the law.

We have to remember and take for ourselves that Our Lord’s death on the cross is the denial of his own people’s expectations of how he should be their Messiah. It was a great big "no" to all their "yesses". They saw him as a failure and yet we believe in him. You came here today to worship this disgrace as the Son of God. What has he done for you? What has he delivered us? The forgiveness of our sins? Reconciliation with God? How does that work? By God saying No to us in order to say Yes to us, by the strange exchange of God loving and accepting us precisely in judging and negating all our expectations of how to be the Messiah for us and how to satisfy our standards for making a real difference in the world. If we claim to have the Christian solutions for these real issues in the world, God says no to us. Which is good. It means that God’s love for us is free from us, so we are free. It means the freedom of our guilty consciences and the freedom of our actions in the world. It also means that the only power the church may exercise in the world is the joy of the Lord. The joy of the Lord is our power.

And so the church, as the church, can be content, without guilt, to busy itself in doing what it did under Ezra—coming together to bless God, to read out the scriptures and interpret them, to consider our failures and accept the forgiveness, to bow down in prayer, and to drink the wine and eat the food and deliver the food to those who don’t have any. So I think we’re on the right track. But that is not to let us off the hook. We are to be the body of Christ, which means a real sharing with each other, our aches and pains and our strengths and our vitalities.

None of us here is an apostle, but if you are a prophet, we must support you in your prophecy. If you are teacher, we support you in your teaching. If you are an activist, we must support you in your activism. If you are a healer, or in medicine, or massage, or therapy, we support you in your healing. If you are a helper, a server, a nanny, a caretaker, a custodian, we will support you. If you are a leader, we will support you when you take your hits. If you have the gift of speech, or of interpretation, as a newscaster or a writer, we will follow you and read you. You are a musician, an artist, a designer, an architect, a carpenter, an engineer, an accountant, a banker, we will encourage to make your difference in the world, in your activity in the world and in all your various associations, in freedom outside the church, with other sorts of believers and non-believers. We need to identify activists and support them and love them, so that their activism may have joy. That joy is the sign that our power is of the Lord. That joy is the sign of the unfailing yes of God and of the unfathomable love of God.

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

January 13, The Baptism of Jesus, "With You I Am Well-Pleased"

 Isaiah 43:1-7, Psalm 29, Acts 8:14-17, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

"You are my son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased." I think it was a very big deal for Jesus to hear these words from heaven, words of recognition and confirmation and approval. I’m sure he needed to hear it. I mean he had developed some beliefs about himself, and had worked out some ideas about his identity, and his calling—who he was, and what he should do with the second half of his life, and his ideas and beliefs about himself were so strange, too strange to have shared with anyone else, strange and daring, and compelling, and challenging, and scary, and now suddenly he gets recognized and confirmed. It was a very big deal for him.

I took some time this week to review the whole Gospel of Luke. I noticed that Luke shows Jesus developing—developing his message, evolving his presentation, exploring his identity, learning as he goes, exploring what it means to be the "Son of God," for the title means several things in the Bible, both literal and metaphorical, and he had to work it out and even advance it.

He will have begun that in his earlier life, those silent years before he came out. Thirty years, by our best guess, into which our only glimpse is when he we was twelve and he came to the temple and loved it, and he surprised the rabbis there by his precocious knowledge of scripture. Then eighteen years of anonymity. He had a lot of sorting out to do. His mother told him what the angel had said to her, and about the stable and the manger and the shepherds, and his father told him about his dreams, and the magi, and why they had lived in Egypt for a while, and the terrible knowledge that those innocent children of Bethlehem were slaughtered because of him.

He took some years to think about these things. He had to read and study and pray. He had to meditate upon the Torah and the prophecies. This Messiah thing. What has God promised to Israel? What does God want for the world? What can I do about it? Who do I think I am? What am I nuts? Why me? Why now? His precocious interest in scripture was self-interest. What is the purpose of my life? Who am I really? What is God to me?

What did he know and when did he know it? Did he think of himself in terms of our orthodox doctrine as the Second Person of the Trinity? I don’t think so, not yet before his death and resurrection. We can believe that he was, but that he didn’t know he was, because our orthodox doctrine teaches us that in his Incarnation he emptied himself of the rights and benefits of his divinity. So that having accepted the limits of the human condition, including the organic boundaries of the human brain upon his memory and knowledge, he would not have known this about himself. He did not have some special mental telepathy to communicate with God. Like everybody else, he had to study the scriptures and pray, even to sort out being the Messiah.

Was he active in the life of Nazareth? Was he an activist? Did he organize the carpenters into a labor union to stand up for their rights against the Romans? Or did he watch and wait? Was he friendly, cheerful, likable, dependable, but also a little reserved? Did he party? Did he already hang out with tax collectors and prostitutes? Is this why his brothers doubted him? How about that he did not take a wife? Was he good looking? A perfect face, a great body, a hunk, an Adonis? Orthodox doctrine says that his perfection was not in being like some Greek god in human form, nor even in never getting a parking ticket or a library fine, but his perfection was in his obedience to God. Which was not automatic; he had to sort it through and work it out.

That obedience, as any Jew will tell you, means lots of time just studying Torah. That study is itself obedience. And also learning by heart the prayers and the prophecies, like in Isaiah, about God’s plans for Israel, not yet fulfilled, the coming back of God, the return of the spirit of God.

These scriptures lived in him, and he figured he could be the Messiah to make it happen, but it took lots of study and reflection to resolve not to take the obvious course of military leadership that everyone was hoping for. He had to let himself wonder, and imagine how he might work it out, he had to imagine the likely opposition and get used to that idea, and even imagine how it might end very badly. He had to figure this out himself, nobody else could do it for him. He had to believe it was the Spirit of God who was whispering these things to him, and not some demon. Some nights he could not sleep, and he wished he did not have to think these things, that it was not so, that he could have a wife like everybody else, and kids like his brothers had.

He had this cousin John who was quite strange, and open about his strangeness, who started preaching and baptizing down by the River Jordan. Okay, it must be true. And if it’s true, it’s time. So of course he gets baptized. He needs to be part of this. He needs to belong to the people whom John had prepared for the coming back of God. He feels he must be last in line, and then he takes his turn, and then, I think, he gets surprised. Wonderfully surprised. By the dove and the voice. Not what he had expected. Not what baptism ever was about. For God to come down on it.

The dove. Like the dove of Noah’s Ark? The dove which had flown back and forth over the face of the flood, just as, at creation, the Spirit of God had hovered over the face of the Deep? Did Jesus wonder at this dove, and then imagine its meaning from out of his deep knowledge of scripture? Did he intuit that God had just started coming back to Israel, and coming back on him?

The voice, how great for him to hear that voice and be confirmed in all his years of study and imagination. To be recognized. To be approved. A great relief, I think, and a consolation, after all those years. And then the challenge. And the joy. Okay, let’s go. Let’s roll. He could hardly wait.

How much of what holds for Jesus holds for us? Well, you are a child of God, but none of you is a Son of God in the special ways that Jesus is. Yet one of the main points of the Christian faith is that you can claim an intimacy with the God of the universe like that of a favorite child with her daddy.

You may consider yourself the beloved of God. Not just loved, as God loves the world and everything in it, but the beloved, God’s sweetheart, you are the object of God’s affection, which is why you have a soul, for you to receive the affections of God into your life. So the purpose of your Christian life, your learning and your prayer, is to explore in your life your belovedness to God. Which does not depend on your earning it. It’s not your goal, it’s your beginning, it’s a gift to you at your beginning, and to be a Christian is to sort it out and grow into it, develop it, advance it—your belovedness to God.

And with you God is well-pleased. Before you have done anything. You do not have to justify yourself to God. Of course you can’t, but you think you must because it’s something you do all the time in your daily life. You’ve got to look good. You’ve got to look better. You’ve got to keep the approvals working. You’ve got to cover your bases and cover your you-know-what, or you may lose your place. I think there’s more guilt spread around by our New York City culture than by any religion ever made. The Park Slope way of life requires so much justification. If we fallen creatures expect this of each other, how much more must a righteous God?

But "with you I am well-pleased." Here is the entrance of God into your life. Not, "you’re fine, you’re good, you’re great." It’s not about you, it’s about God, and about God’s attitude toward you, the unshakeable affection which God has for you, which is the core of your identity, and the beginning of your life of service in the world. When you serve God in the world, for justice and for peace and for mercy and healing, you will be resisted and opposed, but not by God. Your attempts at the right thing will be half-way, and you could always do better, but this you cannot shake, "with you I am well-pleased." Unconditionally? God’s love for you is unconditional, God’s love is absolutely free, God identifies what love is just by being God. God is love.

Who are you? What is the purpose of your life? What is your own personal contribution to the healing of the world, and how can you find happiness in your life? You cannot help but ask these questions all your life, just because you are a spiritual creature. You are on a constant quest to explore this in your life. Your answers will develop through your life.

But your starting point is this, unshakeably: "Who are you?" There’s lots I don’t know about myself, but I am God’s beloved, and with me God is well-pleased. So let’s go. Let’s roll.

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

January 6, Epiphany, On the Twelfth Day of Christmas

Isaiah 60:1-6,  Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14, Ephesians 3:1-12, Matthew 2:1-12

The twelfth day of Christmas is today, January 6. Epiphany completes the Christmas story, with the arrival of the Magi, who did not ever go to the stable with the shepherds, but some time later came to the house where the Holy Family was living. In our crèches of the Nativity we place the Magi and their camel behind the shepherds, but it is not Biblically accurate. Our traditions like to mix in all these things, and often the tradition is not Biblically accurate. The magi are not kings. They work for kings. The tradition calls them kings from the overlay of passages like Isaiah 60 and Psalm 72. The tradition can be misleading, and it can distract us from the real point of the story of the Magi, which we don’t include within our crèches, and that’s the contrast between the Magi on the one hand and King Herod on the other, which will result in Herod’s terrible slaughter of innocent children and the flight into Egypt and the second homelessness of Christ.

The Protestant principle is to scrap the traditions of the church because the traditions clog up the message of the scriptures, and they often do. But the Protestant Reformers did not anticipate that the traditions which are part of the marketing of our consumer economy have more power than the church traditions ever did to manipulate our desires and manage our imagination, and we have jumped from the frying pan into the fire, from the traditions of the church to the traditions of the market. So it is worth the risk for us to practice the traditions of the church, as long as we keep them measured by the scriptures and we honor the freedom of the Word of God.

We are committed to this balance at Old First. As much as we can we honor and employ the great traditions of the church. We do not reinvent the wheel. Some of our own local practices go back 350 years. But yet, when we believe the gospel calls us to, we take our freedom from our traditions.

It’s against the Christian tradition to have women pastors. But the gospel calls to this freedom. It’s against the Dutch Reformed tradition to have communion every week, but we listen to the invitation of our Lord Jesus. It’s against the human tradition to be fully inclusive of gay and lesbian persons without any conditions at all, but the gospel compels us, and this obedience to the gospel means freedom from the tradition.

In this regard I might have said that we are like the Magi and the gospel is the star, and we all have to leave the places of our safety and comfort and such, and follow that star across the moors and mountains of our lives without our having to think about the path that it might lead us on. But I cannot say that in good conscience, because the magi did not follow that star. Maybe in the tradition, but not in the Biblical text. Certainly not at first. For the star to have led them they will have had to see it in the West. But they told King Herod that they had seen it, literally, “in the East.” Had they followed it East they would have ended up in Pakistan, not Palestine.

What they did was to interpret it. That was their business, after all, for the magi were the royal astrologers of Babylon. Their job was to calculate the meaning of the stars by their risings and their transits and their relationships to other constellations. That is what they did with this new star, by the arts and skills of their astronomy and astrology, which back then were the same.

There’s the rub. The God of Israel, who had forbidden Israel to use astrology, was willing to use astrology for revelation. Well, it’s hardly the only case in the Bible where God may do some things which we may not. In the Old Testament, God is free to act outside the covenant as long as God’s free actions do not compromise the covenant. And here God appeals to the heathen practice of astrology in order to communicate with the Magi.

But not fully. Their calculations got them as far as Jerusalem, where their research would naturally lead them. It took the scriptures to get them to Bethlehem. And then they saw the star again, and for the first time it was before them, leading them to the house where the child was. Which tells us that the star must have been angel all along, who took the form of a star in order to appeal to them in a way that they could recognize. Which means that it is useless for modern researchers to try to identify that star with some comet or supernova or such. There will be no record of that star in historical astronomy. It was an angel, as came to Mary and to the shepherds and to Joseph in his dreams.

There is a lesson here for us. You pray to God leading and direction in your life, for help with what to do with your life and what direction to take and decisions to make. You should do this. But God will not provide you with some star for you to just keep following over the moors and mountains of your life. God’s direction for you may rise in a place quite opposite to where you need to go, and you need to interpret it, which requires you to use your mind and your heart and your brain, and never with full inner certainty.

There is great value to goal-setting and long-range planning. I do it for myself and our elders and deacons do it for the church. But in all of our goal-setting for 2012 did we ever plan that we would set up a relief kitchen to produce almost 100,000 meals by December 31? The last four months have been remarkable for Old First and we believe that God has been leading us but it’s not like we had some star out there in front of us. The gospel of Our Lord Jesus has risen once for all above Jerusalem, and we have seen it, and we do our best to interpret it by all the arts and sciences we know, and then we start walking forward as best as we can figure out.

You need to make plans for your life. You need to be responsible, and that for those who love you and depend on you. You direct your life as best you can. But then a storm slams into you, or you get sick, or your child gets sick, or your landlord sells the building, or your spouse tells you its over and you get thrown back, or you say something stupid and you pay for it, and suddenly you need new plans. “O God, please help, O give me some direction.” But the gift of freedom means some uncertainty. Even when things are good, God gives you no yonder star to follow.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with you. You can believe in the rising of the gospel, and then patiently apply yourself with all the ordinary arts and skills that God has given you to calmly address the next steps of your life, because while you are responsible there is also so much out of your control. Don’t sit and wait for a personal message which you can simply follow. You have to engage the message that has been given to us all, with patient openness and in humble consultation and in prayer, and patiently trust that gospel to help you address each new uncertainty.

Don’t worry about not getting it right. You will make mistakes along the way, you will get things wrong and do wrong things. There is a wonderful and liberating Calvinist doctrine with the unfortunate name of Total Depravity. What it means is that even the best steps that you take will have some wrong in them and even the worst things that you do will have some good in them, so that absolutely everything you do is under grace, which liberates you to use your freedom and take risks and make your mistakes. You are under grace, and you cannot prevent the hurricanes and  wall street crashes and other dangers will come into your life, so do not try.

Use your freedom. You will make mistakes but you will not end wrong as long as your goal is the Magi’s goal: to worship this Lord Jesus Christ, and to offer to him your most precious gift, the first part of your life and what you stand for, and whatever you do, the first part of the work of your hands and the first part of the work of your mind. With that goal, no matter how you go, you cannot end wrong, but, like the Magi, you will end in joy, the joy of worshiping Our Lord.

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

Christmas Eve 2012, Blessings Flow Far as the Curse is Found

Note: There were 28 memorial candles on our Communion Table, behind the Advent Wreath.

(Here follows the Homily at the beginning of our Service of Lessons and Carols.)

Good evening, and welcome, I’m glad you are here tonight. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, Christian or Jewish or something else or nothing, whatever, we welcome you to celebrate with us the Incarnation of Our Lord.

He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found. (You know the line, from Joy to the World.) The blessing and the curse. The blessing overflows the curse. The light shines in the darkness. The goodness overcomes the evil. The goodness does not compare in measure to the evil. You cannot measure the light by the darkness that it shines into. You cannot reckon the blessing by the power of the curse. They are all unequal, they are not equivalents.

Evil has no being in itself, it’s only the corruption of the good. Darkness is not something in itself, it’s only the absence of light, and one small beam can break its power. The grip of evil can be loosened by very small actions of the good. One little blessing can break the compulsion of a curse.

We need to hear this news again, because we feel accursed right now, especially in these last eleven days since that slaughter of the innocents. We feel the evil in our world, the murder and the malice and the misery. The darkness weighs on us. We find ourselves weeping and grieving. All the resolve and positivity that we generated since November by our service to the victims of Sandy is overshadowed by the horror and the grief of Sandy Hook. The shadow of death is on our land. We are walking in its darkness.

In just a few minutes you will hear a voice read out, “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” You will hear that within the story we repeat tonight, that story we need to hear again each year. It’s the story of the light in the darkness and the blessing over the curse. The light does not replace the darkness, it shines within it, indeed the darkness is its very medium, but it’s enough to show you how to go. The blessing does not displace the curse, but it is real enough that you can choose it. The blessing will not compel you. It is your choice.

We know of people who surrender to the darkness and the curse—out of fear, perhaps, or pride, or anger, or anger and fear together, as they reckon the compulsion of the curse and the thickness of the dark. But tonight we will dispel that darkness with just a little bit of light.

Jews and Christians claim that evil is not built into the world, that evil is unnatural in God’s world and that evil is in the world only as the result of human sin. So we begin the story with Adam and Eve because we believe that it is our disobedience which lets loose the evil in the world, which curses us, and which we are powerless to overcome. The story moves quickly to the blessing, in the voice of the angel, to Abraham, in the Akida, which we will hear in Hebrew once again.

The story propels the blessing with promises from Isaiah, of the child who shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, and of the blessing so close upon the curse, and yet immune to it, as the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den.

The story raises our hopes, and the music rises in us with the hope. The darkness deepens but the light gets more intense, and focused on the savior, who himself is light and is the source of the light: God-with-us. And then, upon the hillside, the angel counts us worthy, as crooked and grimy and guilty as we may be, to go and greet the savior of the world. A great God in a little space. A holy God in humble flesh, a body in which this God could be killed and cursed and die. That’s the part beyond the story for tonight, which the angels don’t yet see, but God does, and what God knows is that though this single life is very small, it cannot be extinguished. It is too good for that, too blessed. Such a little thing, this baby, and such vast power for hope and healing is concentrated in him. All the good hopes of God’s own self.

This little story is so important in these days. So I thank all these persons who have come to read it to you tonight. And I thank all the musicians who have come to help us feel the wonder and the joy that’s in this story for tonight, the soloists and players up there like some angels in the air. And I thank all of you for coming to share in the hearing of this story once again. You were right to come here tonight. And may God bless you one and all.

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Meeter, All Rights Reserved.

December 2: Advent 1: Adonai Tsidkeinu

This is Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who my grandfather loved, even though he was a passionate socialist.

My sermon for Advent 1 was preached ex tempore. You can listen to it here: Adonai Tsidkeinu.

November 25: Proper 29: Desiring the Kingdom

This is Robert Royster. He's a pan-handler who belongs to the community of Old First. He longs for the Kingdom of God.

I had previously posted a sermon for November 25, but I ended up not preaching it. I preached something else (an expansion of the last point of the aforementioned posted sermon). I preached that ex tempore. You can listen to it or even download it by going to this link: Grace to You and Peace.

I  must give credit here to my sister-in-law, Rev. Dr. Renée Sue House, who reminded me of an important theme from a book by James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom.

November 18, Proper 28: "Hold Fast": A 358th Anniversary Sermon,

This is one artist's rendering of our first church building from the 1680's. All we know for sure is that it was "a small and ugly little church standing in the middle of the road." It stood in the middle of Fulton Street, in front of what now is Macy's. The congregation was established in October, 1654, by order of Governor Pieter Stuyvesant, but we don't know exactly when the first service was held.

This sermon is not written. I preached it ex tempore, but it is on the Lectionary texts for the week: Daiel 12:1-3, Psalm 16, Hebrews10:11-25, Mark 13:1-8. And, I'm grateful to say, it was recorded. You can listen to it, or download it, by going to this website:
Let Us Hold Fast