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

November 25, Proper 29, Grace to You and Peace

Note: I did not preach this sermon. I wrote it, and had it ready, but I ended up preaching something else, ex tempore, which was recorded and eventually will be posted on the Old First Church website. Let me also say that I agree with N T Wright that Ascension Day is a much better Feast of Christ the King than this reactionary holiday invented by Pius XI in 1925. So many sacrifices do we make for both ecumenism and tradition (which, on the whole, I believe are worth it.)

Daniel 7:9-10, Psalm 93, Revelation 1:4b-8, John 18:33-37

 The Epistle lesson which we just read, from the Book of the Revelation, is usually interpreted as referring to the Second Coming of Christ. You know, what we confess in the Apostles Creed, that "He shall come again to judge the living and the dead," and what we sing in the Mystery of the Faith, "Christ shall come again." Yes, you can believe that, but that’s not what the Revelation lesson is not about. It’s about the Ascension of Jesus, which has already happened.

The imagery comes from our Old Testament lesson, Daniel 7, the vision of "one like a son of man" coming up on the clouds into the presence of God, and this man being given dominion and glory and kingship. This prophecy was believed by the apostles to have been fulfilled when Jesus "ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of God, the Father." Forty days after Easter.

The Ascension is reported in Acts 1. It’s reported historically—how the disciples saw it from the ground, on a Thursday of a given week, in real time, within the sequence of history, as it could be reported in a newspaper. The Ascension is reported in a very different way in the prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation—as from the viewpoint of heaven, on no day, in no week, outside of time, outside the sequence of history, as it could be reported in a vision. So we have it reported as a fact and we have it reported as a mystery, which makes sense, because it is both a fact and a mystery. As a fact it happened on a specific day in a specific week in a specific year, and as a mystery it happens in the eternal now, in the eternal present of the presence of God. It was and is and is to be. And if God is eternal, and outside of time (just as the author of a book lives outside the time-sequence within the book), then the past and the present and the future are all one moment in the sight of God.

We are invited to believe this. We are invited to believe that Jesus of Nazareth, a "son of man," i.e., the representative child of humanity, was killed, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and is seated on the right hand of God the Father. We are invited to believe that this one special human being has been placed in the exalted position of the rulership of the world, and that all peoples and nations and languages and cultures serve him, and not as slaves, but as loyal subjects and as citizens advancing his causes and designs. We are invited to believe this as both a fact and a mystery.

It’s easier to take as a mystery than as a fact, considering the other facts around us. By any standard of effective government, Jesus must be a very weak ruler. What he says he wants, he doesn’t get. Many peoples and nations and languages do not serve him, and those peoples and nations who do claim to serve him, serve him poorly. The powers which are under his authority do not honor his authority. His enemies do what they want and his opponents take what they please. By normal standards, he has not consolidated his government. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber said that he liked Jesus very much but he couldn’t accept him as the Messiah because he had failed to accomplish the universal peace and justice the Messiah was supposed to bring.

I suspect this is partly why so many Christians have applied our morning’s prophecies to the Second Coming instead of the Ascension. The prophecies seem unfulfilled, the facts don’t support the mystery, they can’t be about the present, they must be about the future. And that interpretation affects their Christian behavior, especially on the Religious Right. As if the Lord is supposed to be in charge, but is not in charge, so we have to put him back in charge in every way we can. As if the Lord Jesus needs our protection, like a quarterback before his throw, as if his kingdom is like an egg in a carton and needs defending from his enemies who might destroy it. And the best defense is a good offense. This Christian behavior is defensive and aggressive and it’s based on fear.

We are invited not to behave that way. We may rather live our lives in terms of grace and peace, and that’s not just from sloth or laziness. It is from hearing what Jesus says to us, and he says, "Grace and peace." We are to live as gracefully and peacefully as he does. Those are to be the facts of our lives, the facts of our lives which should be bearing witness to the mystery of his sovereignty. This grace and peace should be the facts of our lives which we hold up against the other facts of turmoil and injustice and rebellion and warfare around us.

We are invited to believe the vision. We are invited to be human beings, and human beings are the creatures who, for better or worse, have evolved to live our lives in terms of visions. So we try to believe the vision of Jesus’ sovereignty. And if our ordinary perception of the world could show us final evidence of Jesus’ sovereignty, then we wouldn’t need the vision. I know that’s circular, and no proof, but I make it as an appeal to your conscience. We live our lives in terms of visions, to some extent at least, because we are spiritual. We agree to find our reference point in what we cannot see, we gather our bearings from what we cannot learn by ordinary means, it has to be revealed to us, and we have to believe it. This doesn’t mean to deny the importance of what we can see, and it’s not that we deny the facts. We live by the interplay of facts and mysteries, and we are invited to let the mysteries tell us the meaning of our facts.

Does his kingdom look ineffective? Don’t employ the usual standards of accomplishment. It wins its victories not by violence but by sacrifice. That’s why Pontius Pilate couldn’t believe it. He knew from his facts that the Roman Empire was built on massively effective violence and that it was maintained by a monopoly on violence, and that no matter what the truth might be of Jesus’ innocence, he would condemn him anyway in order to keep control of the violence, which was the only truth he knew. But Jesus offers a different kind of power. Not the power of domination or defensiveness but the power of reconciliation. He does not ask his followers to be soldiers but to be priests. He regards you as a kingdom of priests. Which means you have no opponents and no enemies. This strategy requires of course a greater strength, a tougher tenacity, a greater force of will, and a deeper kind of leadership. You wouldn’t choose this strategy if you hadn’t been given the very long range view, if you hadn’t been offered the mystery of the universe, too big for understanding, but full of light and of the heat of love and all the colors of God’s joy.

Why does the Christian faith invite us to believe in such an antiquated and even discredited concept as kingship? We believe in democracy. Canadians maintain the status of the status of Queen Elizabeth only because she has no real power. So let us remember that to say that Jesus is a king is but a metaphor. In ways, he’s like a king. He’s not actually a king, he is God, and if he’s truly God, then he certainly doesn’t need to be a king. And it’s only a relative metaphor, in neither one of the Creeds is Jesus called a king. So why do we keep on saying it?

We all understand that the church is a place for cultivating our beliefs. We repeat them and rehearse them and test them and even question them in order to strengthen and refine them. But it’s also a place for cultivating our desires. It’s not a natural desire to love your enemies. It’s not a natural desire to forgive your debtors. These desires have to be learned and reinforced. We learn to desire reconciliation instead of retaliation, we learn to desire sacrifice instead of domination.

We learn to desire a power higher than ourselves, whose power does not derive from us, we learn to desire a higher power whose authority does not arise from us. We cultivate a desire for a higher power which is not just a "What" in the world, but the "Who" of the world. A higher power with intentions and visions and desires and plans and purposes, a higher power with who can love, a higher power who loves mercy and has made it so, a higher power who loves justice and will make it so. We use this antiquated language to say that the central power of the universe is a Who whom we can serve, before whom we should kneel, to whom we can be loyal, and the only power in existence which is worthy of our honor and the only power which is worthy of our love. The mystery of this power is love. Only by the vision could you know this. You are invited to be believe it as a fact that this central power of the universe knows you and loves you. And invites you to live your own life by the vision of this love.

Copyright © 2012, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Sandy and the White House, a report from New York.

This article is reprinted by permission from the Christian Courier (www.christiancourier.ca) and it appears in The 12 blog.  Sandy and the White House: A Report from New York City

November 11, Proper 27, Risky Living -- Loose Giving

A Guest Sermon by Rev. Dr. Renée Sue House, for Consecration Sunday at Old First

Risky Living—Loose Giving

I Kings 12:8-16; Ps. 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

A devastating hurricane.  A tense presidential election.  A discombobulating nor’easter. And in the wake of all this, Consecration Sunday. If nothing else, we come to this day newly mindful of the contingency, the fragility, the riskiness of being human. Here today. Gone tomorrow.  Boats splintered on driveways.  Houses lost to fire and water. Subways and hospitals submerged.  Hearts shattered by death.  Physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, it is risky business to be flesh and blood.  Risky to be, risky to have, to hold, to love, to give, to lose.  

It seems always to happen.  In the face of other’s losses, we recognize sharply how blessed we are, how rich in things, and people, and love, and spirit.  Crises can create an open-heartedness and open-handedness in us.  In days like these we don’t have time to count the cost and calculate the risk.

On Thursday night I was here with some of you and could see you responding to the losses of your neighbors with heart, mind, and strength.  Offering your prayers, your church building, your time, energy, money--offering yourselves to make sure that people living in shelters have food to eat, clothes to wear, and hope for tomorrow.  You have responded to the risks of human living with your love. And in this you risk something too in this less protected living.  I think this puts you in a good place to choose how you will consecrate your money to the love of God and neighbor in the year ahead, because  I think it puts you less guardedly into the very mind and heart—into the very life of God.

Last week Rev. Meeter said it is risky to tithe.  It is risky to set aside the first ten percent of our incomes out of love for God and neighbor.  Financial planners would advise that we invest these moneys more realistically.  There is the fiscal cliff and the threat of recession.  There are children to feed and clothe, college and pension funds to build and safeguard.  And, the reality is, it just ain’t cheap to live in Brooklyn. 

Tithes and offerings rub against the grain. It takes faith in God’s own faithfulness and generosity to live generously. Faith in God is the way to respond to the daily risks of just being human, and to the risks of giving when we cannot know what tomorrow holds.  Trust in God’s provision and promises leads to risky living and loose giving!

When we talk about giving, we usually talk about dedicating the first ten percent, the first fruits of our labors. But this morning, the word of God stretches us.  We meet two widows who offer their very last fruits—they give away all they have to live on. 

You’ve got to wonder what God was thinking in chosing the widow of Zarephath to be the one to feed the prophet Elijah.  She lives outside of the people of Israel. She is vulnerable.  Of all the folk who may have offered Elijah hospitality, why her?  It’s like asking a single mom who is now living in the armory to give food for the consecration luncheon today.  The widow of Zarephath responds plainly to Elijah’s demand.  “As the Lord your God liveth, I don’t have anything to give you,” she says.  Apparently, the widow knows about Elijah’s God, but she doesn’t know this God as her own.  She doesn’t know Psalm 146, that “the Lord upholds the widow and the orphan and keeps faith forever.” 

And I wonder too, what might Elijah be thinking when she says, “sorry guy, my cupboard is almost bare.  I am going to make a small cake for my son and I, then we will eat it and die?”  God sent him here, and now she has no food?  I know, we imagine he is a pious, perfect prophet.  Always full of faith and trust in God.  Never questioning.  But in truth, Elijah struggles with God.  He loses hope.  Despairs of his life and sometimes hates his vocation.

As told, this story moves and resolves quickly.  But these two are human beings like us. I believe there is very pregnant pause in which both Elijah and the widow feel nothing but risk.  Nothing but fear.  Their lives are completely contingent on God.  Trusting God to keep God’s promise is the only way to find rest in the risk. So this widow opens her hand to give.  Her first act of consecration.  Her first experience of loose giving.  Her first encounter with this God who provides, creates communities of love, and keeps faith forever!

Jesus is watching as the people place their offerings in the temple treasury.  A poor widow puts in two small copper coins, worth a penny. She has been coming to the temple her whole life.  Even after her husband died and her financial resources dwindled, she brought her offerings--a sign of her trust in the living God.  She knows that what Jesus has said is true.  The temple scribes play at piety, parade their pride, and devour widow’s houses.  If she were more shrewd, she would protect herself.  If she were less foolish, she would hold onto her last fruits.  But a lifetime of trust in God’s promise and provision leads her to risky living and loose giving.  God upholds the widow and the orphan.  God keeps faith forever.  This widow believes that faith in God’s faithfulness is the only risk worth taking, the only leap worth making.

If Jesus has not been watching, we would not know this story.  When he calls the disciples over and points out what has just happened, Jesus is restrained.  These are the facts.  The rich have put in large sums of money.  The widow has put in her last two coins—all that she has to live on.  Jesus doesn’t criticize the rich folk who put in large sums of money.  He doesn’t accuse them of withholding from God.  But he does do some “new” math by calculating that she has given more than anyone else because she has literally risked her life.  

So we are left to sit with the disciples and ponder what this might mean.  Is Jesus suggesting that every one of us ought to engage in this kind of sacrificial, trust-full giving?  Is he changing the rules, saying indirectly, “You have heard it said that you should give a tenth of what you have to God, but I say, give it all?”  Is Jesus hoping that we with the disciples will be disturbed that there should be in the community a woman so poor while others enjoy great wealth?  Is he praising her faith and generosity, or criticizing the scribes and Pharisees who exploit faithful widows rather than care for them?  Jesus doesn’t tell us what to do here, just creates a pregnant pause in the action and invites us to see, and hear, and respond. 

But there is more to see, and hear and respond to than the widow’s offering.  As Mark’s gospel unfolds, we cannot miss the connection between the widow who gives all that she has, and Jesus who is on his way to the cross. Jesus knows the risks of being flesh and blood.  In birth, in life, and in death, Jesus gives up everything to flood the world with God’s perfect love.  As the writer of Hebrews says: Jesus appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. Once and for all. Risky living and loose, lavish redemptive self-giving. 

And there it is.  The heart of the matter.  Here is it, the deep structure and source of our own desire to give without counting the cost or calculating the risk.  We live, and move, and have our being in the living God whose love knows no ending, who keeps faith forever!  Now unto him who loves us and freed us from our sins with his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion, forever, and ever!

Copyright © 2012, by Renée Sue House, all rights reserved.

November 4, Proper 26, Organized Love, Organized Religion

Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Psalm 119:1-8, Hebrews 9:11-14, Mark 12:28-34

Next week is Consecration Sunday. Which means that this week my job is to preach my annual sermon on tithing. Let me begin prosaically, with five principles of tithing: It’s intentional, it’s challenging, it’s a priority, it’s an investment, and it’s risky.

It’s intentional. Tithing is a discipline. Tithing is not charity, it is not a response to someone else’s need. Tithing is not responding to the needs of your neighbor or the needs of the church. Tithing isn’t even done at church— you do it at home, when you sit down to do your budgeting in general, when you budget your cost of housing and your Verizon plan and how nice a vacation you can take this year. Tithing doesn’t come from feelings but from sober intentionality.

Second, it’s challenging. Tithing is meant to cost you, just like your housing and your groceries. If the money you tithe does not cut into what you might spend on other things, it isn’t tithing yet. The ideal tithe is ten percent. That seems high if you are new to tithing. Okay, tithing is not a law, it’s a freely chosen discipline, so start at three or four percent or whatever challenge you can reach. And then next year, challenge yourself one step higher. The point is the challenge.

Third, it’s a priority. It’s from the top. Whatever percentage you choose, it’s the first portion of your budget, it’s the top percentage of your income. You budget your tithe before your housing or your cable or whatever else is in your budget. It’s the top.  Because your soul is the dearest thing about you. Because your money should serve your soul and not the other way around. Tithing is the tool you use to prioritize the economic by the spiritual.

Fourth, it’s an investment. It’s not a response to current need, it’s your investment in the long term work of God in the world. It’s also an investment in yourself, in your spiritual power over the money you have, instead of your money having power over you. You know that in our culture money means power, and money has more power over every one of us than any one of us admits to. Money demands of us that we take care of it and protect it and secure it. Tithing is how you claim some freedom from the power of money. Tithing is how you accept the power of money but reject what it demands of you. Tithing is an investment in your own empowerment.

Fifth, it’s risky. Every investment has some risk in it. You will ask yourself if you can really do this. Your certified financial planner would advise you to invest that top percentage of your money more realistically. To tithe is a risk and it requires faith. You can tithe as a way of managing your risk by means of the faithfulness of God, by believing that God is providential.

Those are the principles of tithing. The motives of tithing are two. Gratitude and love. You heard about gratitude form Jeff Chu last week and from Lance Gangemi the week before. The week before that you heard about love from Kelly Greene. I want to take up love again, because of the scripture lessons we heard today.

So Jesus, tell us, which commandment is the first of all? There are 613 commandments in the Torah, 613 mitzvoth, which mitzvah is the first? If Jesus had been a Christian, he’d have gone to the first of the ten commandments from Exodus, “thou shalt have no other God before me.”  But Jesus was a Jew, so he went to Deuteronomy, to the first mitzvah he repeated every morning in his prayers, after he repeated the Shema. And then, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Translate “might” as “strength” or as “power”. And if money is power, could you say that “You shall love the Lord your God with all your money?” Well, that’s at least the motivation. Tithing is from love.

Then Jesus adds another commandment, another mitzvah, from Leviticus, “You must love your neighbor as yourself.” Very close to the first one, but subtly different. You must love God totally, but you must love your neighbor equally. The command to love God is unlimited but the command to love your neighbor is measured with proportion. You need to love God with limitless extravagance, but you need to love your neighbor in balance with loving yourself. You love God with everything, and that’s why tithing is the top part of your spending, thereby giving the proper meaning to everything else you spend. You love your neighbor in equal proportion to yourself, and that’s why tithing is the percentage that you determine according to the measure of the cost of your life and your family’s life. You measure the cost of love, in real, practical terms.

You don’t have to do this if you want to be spiritual but not religious. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to participate in organized religion. You can just go off by yourself to the beach and see God in the sunrise. You won’t have to think about anyone else. You won’t have to share with them or forgive them or be forgiven by them. You can have your spirituality without any risk or challenge or investment. You won’t have to do the work of love as part of spirituality.

Love is not love unless there is an object to your love, someone or something that you love. If tithing is an act of love, you give your tithe to a whole community of people whom you love, not so much depending on how you like them, for these are the people you try to practice your love upon, and in real terms. Your tithe makes possible the object of your tithe. It’s circular. It’s a circle of love. When you tithe to this community you help to build a community in which to practice love — indeed, a community which requires love in order just to operate. You contribute to a fellowship of intentionality in which to organize your sacrifices. You contribute to a culture which recites these commandments to your children and talks about them when you are at home.

A community of Jesus means that the love of God is at its center and we express that love towards each other in concrete terms. That’s hard work. That means care and visitation, the habits of reconciliation, and the work of peace. It means organization and institution and paying insurance and hiring staff and buying Sunday School curriculum. You may invest your tithes in this community as a way of loving your neighbors in real time, expressing the love of God with all your strength, because you want to love God with all your soul.

You tithe because you’re thankful for that love. As was said by Lance and Jeff. The love you get from the other people here. Not always such great love, and never perfect love, but real and practical attempts at love. Most of all you’re thankful for the love you get from God. You have heard that God is love, and you believe that God is love, and occasionally you see that Love within the world, and not just in the sunrise on the beach, but in the lives of other people, and now and then you recognize that Love of God in your own life. And you remind yourself that this is the greatest motivation for any risk and any investment and intention, this is indeed the priority of your life, to give thanks for the love of God.

Copyright © 2012, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.