October 9, Proper 23, Kingdom Characters #3, Lovely Aspirations

image copyright © Mount Carmel Ministries, all rights reserved.

Exodus 32:1-14, Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23, Philippians 4:1-9, Matthew 22:1-14

This parable is the Monty Python parable, the Marx Brothers parable, the Three Stooges parable. Whatever is comic, whatever is confusing, whatever is vengeful, whatever is violent, whatever is impulsive, whatever is short-sighted, if there is any unfairness, if there is any impatience, that is this parable. Is this really what the Kingdom of Heaven is like?

For today I will say two things: first, the finish of this parable is not within the parable, but in your response to it, and second, the Kingdom of Heaven is offered as free for all and open to everyone and absolutely welcoming, but once you find yourself in it, the Kingdom has its expectations. Of course the poor guy had just been pulled into the party and had no chance to get a clean robe on, but what about you who hear this parable: the kingdom is near, so dress for it. Act the part, if you've been made a part of it.

It’s analogous to Exodus 32. The Children of Israel had not asked God to lead them out into the desert. They had only asked for relief from the misery of their slavery. God gave them more than they asked for, God gave them freedom from the realm of Pharaoh and then all the blessings of the realm of God. But they do not act the part. They use their freedom to indulge their fears and appetites. “Make us gods that we’re familiar with. Make us gods who will serve us and who will not challenge us. Make us gods who have no expectations.”

The Realm of God is welcoming and gracious. You find yourself within it. Maybe you started coming to church, and then you began to see the Realm of God behind you and before you. Or maybe you were baptized into it, and you grew up knowing you were in it; you grew up knowing that “The Lord is near.” However you find yourself within it, you face its challenge and its expectation that you act the part, and that you have a certain kind of character. Which might daunt you, except that its expectation is most natural. Not the kind of “natural” the flesh regards as natural, with our distractions and idolatries, with our typical indulgence of our fears and appetites, but the “natural” of God’s original intention and design, the truly human nature which we can aspire to.

This is the third sermon in a series of sermons on “character”, the kind of character that goes with being a citizen within the Realm and Sovereignty of God. Your character is the rôle that you are writing for yourself in the long-term drama of your life. Your character is not static but dynamic, and you develop your character through your choices that you make through time, each choice affecting your further choices. Your choices have momentum and a trajectory, which affect your posture and your attitude, your uprightness and your soundness as you address your life. Your choices leave a residue—your look and your smell, whether you are savory or unsavory. The combination of that residue and your attitude is the character you show the world.

My method in this series is to ask the Sunday lessons what they might tell us about character. This week is easy. “Finally beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything praiseworthy, think about these things.” A list of virtues to aspire to. Actually not so much a list as a field, because these virtues are not discrete, they overlap, they weave into each other, they blend into the fabric of the robe to wear within the Realm of God.

What’s remarkable about this list is that these words are not narrowly Biblical. St. Paul does not take them from the Torah and the Prophets. That may be because the Christians in Philippi, as indicated by their names, were not Jews but Greeks, and in Hellenistic culture, these virtues were already familiar. And so any new convert could recognize these virtues and immediately aspire to them. But I think there’s something else. These virtues are not peculiar to God’s people. They are the truly human virtues, which many cultures have aspired to. And so to live within the Realm of God is not to live apart in some utopia, it is to live within the restoration of humanity and the reclamation of human culture. The Realm of God is what the world desires even when it does not know its own desiring. You don’t have to be a believer to see the virtue of these virtues.

Whatever is true: αληθη, that is, genuine, honest, sincere, and true;
whatever is honorable: σεμνα, pious, noble, stately, and honorable;
whatever is just: δικαια, right, righteous, trustworthy, and just;
whatever is pure, ἁγνα, chaste, holy, unsullied, and pure;
whatever is pleasing, προσφιλη, lovely, winsome, and pleasing;
whatever is commendable, ευφημα, well-spoken of, reputable, commendable;
if there is any excellence, αρετη, any virtue, any excellence;
if there is anything praiseworthy, επαινος, worthy of admiration and esteem, anything praiseworthy — think about these things.

Get your mind off yourself, and get it on these aspirations. That means, paradoxically, not to focus on making yourself better, or whether you’re improving, like Mayor Koch, always asking, “How’m I doing?” Don’t worry about your own success at these or your performance. It’s not like learning the piano or the violin, where you have to think about your fingering, it’s like singing: you hear the notes, and from within you rise to them, your body is designed quite naturally to sing. And God designed your mind to think about these things and your soul to aspire to them, you were made for these virtues to be natural, you were not made to aspire to your appetites and self-indulgences or to be governed by your fears and your idolatries. Keep your eyes on the virtues and not upon yourself, and you will be joyful; when your attention is not on yourself you will rejoice and again rejoice. Choose for them. Be guided by them in your choices. Set them up as targets and keep aiming at them when you make your choices and decisions. Yes, put them up as slogans on the mirror in your bathroom. Get tee-shirts printed up with the words on them in some nice pattern, maybe shorts would be more telling. Wear these virtues like clothing, if they’re still outside you, and you can live into them.

Now these virtues are not only idealistic, only for the good times. They’re especially for the bad times, the critical times. The Epistle to the Philippian Christians is lovely and pleasing but it’s not House Beautiful magazine. Their situation was more like the Diary of Anne Frank. They were regarded by the Romans as seditious in their loyalty to Jesus as their Lord, their worship of the God of Israel was illegal in the city, so you can imagine the pressure they felt when they crowded in their little homes to break the bread. No wonder Euodia and Syntyche gave each other friction. St. Paul advises them to have a common mind: not sharing their own minds, but the mind of Christ. The mind of Christ who stood firm against the pressure of his opposition, but yet whose gentleness was known to all. The same should be the character of the congregation; that should be their reputation in the city of Philippi. These virtues are for witness and community.

Today we baptize Claire. We commit to a community in which she can learn these virtues by watching us aspire to them, by watching us make our choices and decisions in the direction of our aspirations. We commit to develop our own characters this way, and we want to populate this community of Jesus with a cast of characters in which she can take her place and add her voice and act her part. Today she is our joy and today she is our crown. Her future is what we love and long for, and as much we love her, she is even more beloved of God.

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

October 2, Proper 22, Knowing the Law, Knowing Christ, #2 in the series, Kingdom Characters

Photo copyright © 2010, by Jane Barber, http://www.janebarberdesign.com/, all rights reserved.

Exodus 20:1-20, Psalm 19, Philippians 3:4b-14, Matthew 21:33-46

Last Sunday I began a series of sermons on “character”, the kind of character that goes with being a citizen of the Kingdom of God. Last week I said that your character is the rôle that you are writing for yourself in the long-term drama of your life. I said that your character is not static but dynamic, you develop your character by the choices that you make through time, each choice affecting your further choices. I said your choices have momentum and trajectory, which affect your posture and your attitude. I said your choices have a residue, and the combination of residue and attitude is your character.

My method in this series is to ask each new set of Sunday lessons what they might say about character. This week is easy. The Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are the handy guide to character development for Jews and Christians. That’s why they’re up on the reredos in our sanctuary, because they were read out every week in the old Dutch Reformed liturgy. That’s how I learned them by heart as a child, by hearing my father read them out every Sunday morning.

Only two of the ten are stated in the positive. For special emphasis, because of how distinct they make the culture of the Israelites. The distinction of the Sabbath Day is obvious, and it has many social and economic implications, especially that laborers get a day off every week, which was unheard of and unwelcome, and had specially to be ordered by God.

But what’s distinct about honoring your parents? Well, in Egypt and all the other nations it was the nobility that you had to honor. The ordinary life of most people was regulated by social class and economic class, and you had to show honor to people of privilege: “Your majesty, my lord, your highness, your honor,” no matter how they treated you.

But God’s people are a society of radical equality and a single social class, without nobility, except— you are never the equals of your parents, and they are your nobility whom you must honor. This too has many implications, but not for today.

Eight of the ten commandments are in the negative, and that’s because they presume our freedom and initiative. You tell a slave what he must do, because he has no freedom, but your daughter has freedom and initiative, so you instruct her differently: you set limits for her, and tell her where she may not go and what she may not do. These negative commandments are like the fences of your yard. The rabbis described them as a fence, which metaphor Jesus uses in his parable, in the first verse. The fence around the vineyard is the Torah, the Law of God.

One of the most important gifts we give our children is a sense of boundaries. It’s as necessary to tell them what they may not do as what they may do. Many parents seem afraid of this, and maybe they fear the reputation of the negative. We see them give their children too much choice, too much freedom, more than they can handle, and children don’t know where to stop, and they end up with characters combining selfishness with insecurity. Maybe many parents don’t have good boundaries for themselves, and they transfer onto their kids the unchecked combination of their own fears and their own desires driving them. Adults need boundaries too, and God gives you boundaries precisely because God has also given you the gift of freedom.

Boundaries provide resistance to your freedom, and it’s resistance that helps you build your character. As with physical exercise, you only build your muscle strength with resistant exercises, so the boundaries of God’s law give resistance to your freedom for the building of your character. The judgments of God are the opposition to your ego for the cultivation of your character. But according to St. Paul, the law of God is not enough. There has to be a further energy and motivation. For him it is a passion and desire which he identifies in Philippians 3:10-11: “I want to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” That’s my own personal verse, by the way, my core directive, the verse I want the preacher to preach on at my funeral.

What does it mean to “know Christ”, especially in terms of cultivating character? Well, of course, there’s emulation: he’s an example and a model for you in your choices. And there’s devotion: he is your Lord, as you repeat in the Apostles Creed: “And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.” Devotion to a Lord means service and obedience, which also guide your choices.

But St. Paul means more than that, something spiritual and transcendent. “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.” We know him on this side of his resurrection, between his resurrection and his return again, we know him not as a close friend here with us, but as the ascended Lord, into whose person is packed the new creation of the world, the new world that is coming, which he embodies in himself. The new world is ahead of us, it’s already established and waiting for us to get there, when we ourselves will somehow attain the resurrection from the dead.

That new world is not just a dream for the future, it’s a reality already in the future, on the other side of the boundary of death, a reality made by God, with a life and a power invested backwards, sort of, from the future into the presence of Christ. You share in that power which he exercises in the world by your knowing him. By knowing him, especially in worship and in prayer, you open your life to the power of his Spirit which gives the  energy and motivation to the choices which you keep making in your life.

St. Paul also says a negative. “I want to know the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.” Why the negative? Well, remember that I referred last week to an article from the New York Times magazine, and the title of that article is this: “What If The Secret to Success Is Failure?” Just as failing and then getting through your failure is essential for cultivating your character, so sharing the suffering of Christ and then conforming to his death gives you the resistance and the boundary you need. This sharing and conforming provide the inner opposition of which I spoke last week, the repentance and humility, the ordeal that you work through each week freely, the often painful self-awareness which leads to greater empathy and love. It’s a kind of training.

St. Paul ends with an athletic metaphor. So let’s say the commandments are the fences and foul lines and the strike zone and the bases, and let’s say that knowing Christ is the actual playing of the game. It’s only by playing that you develop your skills, the skills of character, and you can improve your skills even when you lose a game. You can risk, you can try, you can gamble and experiment, because it has already been won for us by Christ, the victory is not just a dream, it’s a reality that has power for us now, and you can make free choices with courage. You know, courage does not mean no fear, courage means going through your fear to do the right thing anyway, even if the right thing means sharing his suffering. And the point of being configured to his death is not that you be crucified, but that your natural fear of death and your natural fear of loss do not control your choices, not even the loss of honor or reputation or esteem, all of which he lost on the cross.

  The implication is that the greatest freedom of all comes when you are free from yourself, you are free from your credentials and your gains, free from your achievements and success, free from everything you think you know, free from what you’re trying to prove to other people, free from what you think you know about yourself, and that’s because what you want to know is Christ. It is so liberating to not belong to yourself, and paradoxically empowering. You are free to choose the only thing you are not free of, the only thing really demanded of you, which is to love, to love your neighbor as yourself, and to love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. You make your choices in order to cultivate a character of love, because you want to know God.

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

September 25, Proper 21: When Bad Things Happen to a Good Messiah; # 1 in a series, Kingdom Characters

Exodus 17:1-17, Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16, Philippians 2:1-13, Matthew 21:23-32




Last winter and spring I preached a series of sermons on the Kingdom of God, because the Kingdom of God is the great theme of the Gospel of Matthew. What is the Kingdom, what does it include, what life is like within it, how do we see it, how do we seek it, how do we receive it. Today I’m starting another series, more about us, the citizens of that Kingdom, and what the Kingdom offers us, who seek it, and what it expects of us, who receive it. I will focus this series on the word “character”: Christian character, godly character, Kingdom character.

This focus was given to me by one of you, this past week, when you wrote me in response to my sermon last Sunday. You felt a connection with an article in the Sunday New York Times magazine, describing how two schools in New York City are trying to teach good character. An educator friend of mine sent me a copy of that article the next day. The issue of “character” is in the air. So my plan for the coming Sundays is to ask one question of every set of our scripture lessons: “What do these lessons have to tell us about Christian character?” I don’t know yet what the answers will be. The title for this series is “Kingdom Characters,” in the plural, because we’re not expected to be all the same.

But in our epistle lesson St. Paul challenges us to have the same mind and to be of one mind. Of course he does not mean that we conform our minds to each other, that you conform your mind to my mind or I to yours, but that we all aspire to the mind of Christ—which is a challenge to us all. Character needs challenges. You develop character by working out your challenges, especially suffering, pain, and loss. It was true for Jesus too. He was not an angel, he was a human being, he had to develop his character, especially through the challenge of his loss and suffering, and the shame of the crucifixion.

We can observe the mind of Christ, the mind that we aspire to, when he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, yes, who for the sake of his mission did not defend his honor as the rightful prince of Judea, nor did he hang on to his position as the legitimate Son of David, or grasp the rights of his position as the lawful Messiah of Israel.

To not hold onto your position is something rulers just don’t do. I heard Jimmy Carter tell Charlie Rose that he considered his presidency a failure, simply because he did not get reelected. How much of what Barack Obama does is driven by his natural desire to get reelected; it is what rulers do, they want to hold on to their positions. Not Jesus, though. What he held to was his mission, even at the cost of his position, trusting that the God who had commissioned him would see him through the fear and trembling to work it through. This was so unusual his opponents didn’t know what to make of him and so they were afraid of him. And that too was part of his suffering, that he was feared and opposed by those he came to save.

Look at the gospel lesson. It takes place the day after Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered the city like a prince, and cleansed the temple like he owned it, throwing out the money-changers who no doubt had to give a cut to the temple authorities. Of course the authorities want to know what right Jesus has to do such things, and what are his credentials. His question back to their question is right on point, because the answer to his question is the same as the answer to their question. And they do have an answer, but they will not say it, because they fear the people and they want to protect their position. They can’t be certain that the people will rise against them, but to people in power every potential threat is a real threat, as Dick Cheney has written.

They weren’t bad people, the chief priests and the elders. Jesus was pushing all their buttons. They were in a tough position, between the Romans and an unruly populace, and so to keep things under control they hang on tight to their position, and they back off from the right choice, the risky choice, the courageous choice.

Stanley Hauerwas has written that your choices and the succession of your choices are what determine your character. Your character is not static but dynamic, you work it out by the choices that you make. And the choices you make today both open up and close off the further choices of tomorrow. Your choices have momentum and a trajectory, they position your inclinations and your leanings and your posture and your attitudes as you address your life. Your choices also leave with you a residue, with things like compassion and sympathy and with what that magazine article called “grit”, and with other things like shame and guilt. The composite of these attitudes and aptitudes you can call your character, the role that you have written for yourself in the ongoing drama of your life.

In the ancient Greek dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the characters are always in bondage to the choices of their past. This bondage is compounded by the grip of Fortune, with a capital F, and by the selfish ambition of the gods and goddesses. You get the same thing in the Iliad and Odyssey, which is what the Philippians will have been educated in.

  So they must have found it liberating, and maybe a little scary, to learn from the Gospel that neither Fortune nor the gods have any such power, and that the Lord Jesus offers freedom from the bondage of your past. You are always free to choose what’s right, even when it’s difficult. Jesus offers that freedom to the chief priests and elders, they still have the choice to heed the parable and let go of their position and be welcomed into the Kingdom. With the Lord Jesus, every judgment is an invitation and every challenge is a welcome. But for you to receive his freedom he requires of you a transformation instead of just an adjustment in your trajectory, and that transformation risks the loss of your position, and so you regard his challenge as an obstacle.
How you handle obstacles and opposition is the real test of your character. If you aspire to the mind of Christ, you will face opposition from the outside, certainly, but the more critical opposition is from inside yourself, when you oppose yourself by means of repentance, or with that long term character trait of “humility”. That’s a challenge if you want to get ahead. The only way to get to be Caesar, for example, was by selfish ambition. But by humility I don’t mean softness, and by repentance I don’t mean groveling. I mean resting from your momentum, not pushing your trajectory, risking your position. Emptying of everything but yourself. That is the mind of Christ.

Which has its benefits. It means you do not have to defend yourself or prove yourself. Jesus did not defend himself to the priests and elders, he knew who he was. He did not have to assert his authority or fight for his position, because both his authority and his position were grounded in his character. You can have that freedom too by being grounded in your character when your character is a Kingdom character, sharing the mind of Christ.

He emptied himself. He did not grasp at the rights of either his earthly royalty or his heavenly divinity. He emptied himself because that is God’s character anyway, this is the God who bends towards us—who yields to us, who yielded, for example, to the complaining of the Israelites. That is the character of God, and Jesus kept choosing for that kind of character his whole life, even to the loss of everything he had. And so his Father gave it all back to him as a gift, a greater position, and the name above every name, the name of “the Lord”, Adonai. We Christians believe that Jesus is rightly called the Lord God because he had in him the fullness of God’s character. When you aspire to the mind of Christ you are aspiring to the mind of God.

I close with a paraphrase of that final verse in our epistle: “Work out your Kingdom character in fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to desire and to choose for God’s good pleasure.” And God’s good pleasure is nothing other than Love. God’s love is built into God’s character, so that I can even say that God can’t help it, loving you. And that certainty of God’s love is the position in which you stand.


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

September 18, Proper 20: When Good Things Happen to Bad People

(photo by Jane Barber)



Exodus 16:2-15, Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45, Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16

Our gospel lesson is called the Parable of the Vineyard. The Parable of the Vineyard is pictured in the stained glass window on the north wall, in the right-hand panel. You see the figure of a worker standing at a grapevine, and before him is the inscription from Matthew 20:4, “Go ye also into the vineyard.”

I have never seen this subject in a stained-glass window in any other church, and I would love to know why this subject was chosen, and if it was chosen by the Lott family, the old Brooklyn family who gave it. In 2002 the window took on new meaning for us after the accidental death of Alan Q. Hayes, an elder here. The bookmark in his Bible was at this parable, so that’s what I preached on at his funeral. His death was unfair. And the parable is about when our feeling of unfairness affects our belief in God.

A vineyard is harvested as quickly as possible, so that the grapes can be pressed all at once. As the day wears on, and if the crew is running late, you hire more hands. That’s expected, and you can pay the later workers less. But this owner didn’t pay them less—he was generous with them, which the early ones felt as unfairness instead of generosity. But it was fair, objectively, because the owner paid them what he promised them. But we resent the gifts that other people get when we don’t get them too.

In this parable Jesus does a couple things. He pictures how we are with the grace of God when we see it lavished on other people than ourselves. And he illustrates his own ministry, and why so many good people among the Jews found him offensive. It’s not that he was not loving and gracious with them. It’s that he was no less as loving and gracious to bad people as he was to good people. He is generous to everyone, not as they deserve it, but as they need it. Jesus does not give out points for good behavior. That means there is no point to be good, except just to be good. Being good has to be its own reward. And being good will not exempt you from suffering and sorrow.

Twenty years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote that best-selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I was always troubled by the book’s implicit assumption, that it’s okay when bad things happen to bad people. Jesus turns this upside-down. If Jesus wrote a book he’d call it, When Good Things Happen to Bad People. There’s a take-home for today: What is the distinctive message of Jesus among all the religions of the world? Answer: “When Good Things Happen to Bad People.”

The way of Jesus was the way of God in Israel. You see it in the story of the manna from Exodus. He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack. God blessed them as they needed it, not as they deserved it. God provides, God does not reward. You can’t impress God, you can’t win God, you can’t control God, you can only receive from God.

The children of Israel hardly knew this God. They’ll have been much more familiar with the gods and goddesses of Egypt than with this god of their distant ancestors, who had been silent for 400 years, this god, for all they knew, whose kingdom was the desert and whose palace was a mountain, where they have to go to meet him. Well, they were now his guests, in his realm, and as his guests they felt he was obliged to feed them. It was only proper hospitality that God should gave them manna. Moreover, they were purchased by blood from slavery to the pharaoh, by the blood of the Passover lamb, and now they belong to this god, and as his servants they have the right to proper rations. God is obliged to give them their rations as long as they’re on the march.

I think Moses is upset because of the way they asked for it, not asking in faith, but as complaining, insulting God, slandering the liberation God won for them. Ingrates! Well, they’re afraid. They are free, but they don’t know what freedom means, and freedom is scary. They don’t know what to expect from this god, and their years of slavery had trained them in distrust and resistance. Through the whole of the Exodus they are passive-aggressive, defensive, untrusting, unbelieving, always acting in victim mode.

People prefer the misery they know to the freedom they can’t predict. They would not have left Egypt voluntarily, despite their suffering there. The plagues were designed to force them out as much as to make Egypt let them go. The Red Sea was a barrier not only to Pharaoh’s armies but also against their going back. They were resistant to God’s grace and generosity. They are a microcosm of the human race. They are us. We all experience God’s generosity as unfairness.

The manna is a gift designed to train them in receiving grace. We need to be trained in receiving grace, because we are unable to receive it even when we need it and crave it, so God helps and trains us in receptivity. God was teaching Israel the discipline of receptivity by sending the manna six days out of seven, with double on the sixth day, and none on the seventh. It was an exercise in trusting and obeying, a training in receiving.

Why do we resist God’s grace? Maybe we sense how much it challenges us. Either, like the Israelites, we’re trained to be victims, or like the vineyard workers, we have a notion of  our own deserving and we don’t like to be treated out of generosity. Both of these are selfishness, the one developed as a survival strategy and the other the natural compulsion of self-regard. In either case, God trains us to get out of ourselves. God challenges the Israelites to look up, to look out into the desert, and there they see the glory of the Lord. They had to look up into what they were afraid of.

God trains us also in the patterns of receptivity. One of the reasons that Our Lord instructed us to celebrate Holy Communion frequently is because it is a very physical enactment and reminder of our need for receptivity. We have to come up to the table, and hold our hands out to receive, worthy or unworthy. You’re worthy only if you’re willing to be counted among the unworthy. It’s a gift to teach us the reception of God’s gifts. It’s another gracious circle. The gifts of God in particular are designed to teach us how to receive the gifts of God in general. We are willful people, and proud, and fearful, and the world is unkind and unfair, so we are reminded and rehearsed in the disciplines of receptivity.

A take-home here is that progress in the Christian life is not about getting better and better at being good. That way lies the temptation of merit and deserving. Progress in the Christian life is getting more and more receptive to God’s grace. It is learning to say “Thank you, God, thank you for your mercy.” Even while walking through the desert, and risking hunger and thirst. Do you want to be a better Christian? Don’t work on your performance. Work on your receptivity and gratitude.

It’s hard to say thank you when you feel like you’ve been suffering. It was suffering for the vineyard workers who had worked all day, and were hot and thirsty and exhausted, to stand on line for their wages, and watch the other workers get paid the same for much less work. Your suffering is watching others get a break when you don’t, and when, time after time, you get what you have coming to you, but they get more. Your suffering is to accept God’s providence which never provides you with what you deserve. Your suffering is to accept that merit is irrelevant. But so is faith. Your suffering is to accept with open hands your life as you are dealt it. And that’s what faith is too.

Your suffering is a worthy investment. It yields a life of confidence and joy. St. Paul says that it’s a privilege to suffer for Christ. St. Paul suffered double, as a Jew among the Romans and as a Christian among the Jews. He wrote Philippians from jail. The Philippians suffered by an allegiance to Jesus as Lord, which was illegal in a Roman military town, and they could be rounded up at any time. The privilege is not to seek out suffering, but to recognize the fact of it, and rightly to interpret it, and to regard it not as victimization but as a privilege. That’s what love does. You can clean toilets as a victim, or you can clean them out of love.

You suffer by living in-between, between the great huge gift way ahead of you, and the many small gifts behind you, and right before you the unfair, broken world which God has promised to save but hasn’t yet. You stay within it and you bear your part of it. Your suffering is in your receptivity, your awareness of incompletion, that things are not how they’re supposed to be, and you still believe, you believe in the goodness you have seen in your own life and in the gifts you have received, passing as they may have been, or as mixed with pain and grief, or as ordinary to the eyes as bread, but seeing it as bread from heaven with your eyes of faith and hope and love. The love of God trains us to receive the love of God.

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

Sermon for 9/11, Proper 19, What You Did Ten Years Ago

(photos by Hugh Crawford)

See Louise Crawford's Park Slope Patch report on the service.
Exodus 14:19-31, Exodus 15:1b-11, 20-21, Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35

Let me tell you what you did ten years ago, Old First, let me tell you and remind you. Ten years ago, on that Tuesday morning, when the smoke was over Brooklyn and the paper raining down, some of you knew right away that you had to open the doors of the church for sanctuary and shelter. You kept the doors open all week, every day, until the following Sunday afternoon. You did this for everyone, no matter what religion or no religion. And the people came, they sat in here in shock and grief and many came to pray. You hosted them, you gave them music for their souls. You hung up sheets of newsprint, and you put out markers, and people wrote their thoughts and prayers. The people responded with gratitude.

The sheets are up there on the walls and in the narthex. You should read them. They are part of you. Even if you were not here then, if you only came here recently, they are now a part of you, of this community of soul on soul and spirit touching spirit back through three-and-a-half centuries, you today are still the hosts and the stewards of these real prayers of real people in their time of need.

Some of the prayers were written on that first afternoon, for people known to be working on the 73th floor of building 2, for example, or in the Windows On The World. It was not yet known how many had been killed. There are prayers from later in the day, from survivors just come home, prayers of thanksgiving for having gotten out alive, but also prayers for the cops and the firemen, for Squad One, name by name, as the rumors came that they were lost. There are prayers from Wednesday and Thursday, prayers for those still missing, prayers for those who were trapped in the rubble and for those who were toiling on it, prayers of hope and prayers of grief, many statements of love and a couple words of hate, prayers by Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus. Prayers in French and Spanish and Hebrew and Hindi and Japanese. Prayers for the President and prayers for peace, very many prayers for peace, prayers for an end to the cycle of violence and prayers for no more war—which in the next ten years we did not listen to.

Few of the prayers are signed. But we don’t have to know the names of those who wrote them, because they prayed for all of us, not only for you who lived here then, but also for us who lived beyond New York, around the world. These prayers were personal at first, but over the decade they have become more universal, and when we read them now they blend into a great, thick prayer, a single prayer of many different voices.

A couple years ago these sheets were damaged. We had stored them up in the steeple, and then the tornado blew a window in, and it threw these sheets around and some of them got soaking wet, and the ink and colors ran together and the words were blurred. They look like abstract water color paintings, with random broken phrases legible. It seems right somehow, and fitting, that the thoughts and prayers have blended into each other, and have blended into the choruses of heaven.

On that first Friday evening, I came here too, with Melody. We had just driven here from Michigan. We saw the people sitting in the narthex and in the sanctuary, with their candles and their flowers, sitting in small groups or alone, and we saw all these sheets, still new and fresh. We walked down Seventh Avenue, and every other church was closed up tight. But you were open. You had discovered your mission to offer sanctuary to anyone seeking spirituality and hope. That’s why you are being blessed by God, Old First, even in your struggles and your weaknesses.

None of those sheets have prayers of victory, like in our reading this morning from Exodus 15. Maybe the members of Al Qaeda were praying like that, but no one here was praying like that. It might have been different if the pillars of smoke and fire were pillars of salvation, like for the Israelites at the Red Sea, but the fiery pillars here were of destruction and of loss. In Exodus 14:31 it says that the Israelites saw the great work that God had done, and “they feared the Lord and believed in the Lord.” Well, those prayer sheets reveal that many Brooklynites who saw the great evil those terrorists had done were able still to fear the Lord and believe in the Lord. The record is there, and we are the witnesses.

So now what? At least two things. First, you have to keep on doing what you did then, Old First, this mission given you by God, to offer sanctuary to anyone seeking spirituality and hope. You did it this summer too with the respite shelter. You can learn new ways to practice this, with our building, with our small groups, and in your personal relationships.

Second, you have to make another kind of sanctuary in the midst of human sin and violence, and you do this by forgiveness. Forgiveness not just as a single act, but forgiveness as a system, a cycle, which goes the opposite direction of the cycle of vengeance and violence. Violence generates further violence, and you oppose that cycle with the cycle of forgiveness generating more forgiveness. That’s what Jesus means when he says that his Father will not forgive us if we don’t forgive others. It’s not that God is punishing for not forgiving, it’s that God has built the world this way, that forgiveness is a cycle which you have to enter into in order to receive from it.

Forgiveness is not easy, especially the ones who wronged you don’t deserve forgiveness and and they don’t repent. This takes work. When the Lord Jesus says seventy-seven times, he means a single evil that someone does to you can be so hurtful and destructive that every day you have to forgive him all over again. You did forgive him yesterday, but then today you see how much your life is still affected by his sin, and you have to forgive him once again. It’s about remembering and forgiving, not forgiving and forgetting. It’s not even about accepting. And forgiving might include non-violent resistance. Seventy-seven times, remembering and forgiving again.

You need to remember what they did ten years ago, and tell the awful truth of it, for another sixty-seven years, and then forgive them, for, as Jesus said upon the cross, they didn’t know what they were doing. To forgive means to be free of it, to not let your freedom and your future be determined by their sin. You make a space of freedom in the world of human misery and suffering, you make a space of love and justice in the world of human violence, you make a sanctuary of peace.

This is what you did, Old First, and this is what you are called to do, in partnership with all your friends in the community. And you can do it because you love God who first loved you.

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

September 4, Proper 18: The Costly Method of Reconciliation

(photo © jane barber: www.janebarberdesign.com)


Exodus 12:1-14, Psalm 149, Romans 13:8-14, Matthew 18:15-20


The take-home for today is right up front, the gospel lesson, the method of Matthew 18, the three-step process of reconciliation, the discipline of making peace. Learn this pattern, take it home, start to practice it. The point is not that you have to say something every time someone offends you. Good grief, we’re all sinners, we’re all clumsy, we bump each other all the time, and ordinary life is a contact sport. You can’t call every violation. But, when you do have to call a violation, when you do have to say something, this is how you have to do it.

First you have to go alone, in private. This is to protect your offender, to keep him from public embarrassment. You see, this step expresses love and it requires love. It’s hard. It’s so much easier to complain about him to other people, and to undermine his reputation. But it’s love to go to him in private. Especially when you have cause to be angry at him. This love is not love as a feeling but love as ethical action. It is hard, it is a sacrifice, to consider his interest in spite of his offending you.

The second step is to take a couple witnesses. If the first step was to protect the offender, this step is to protect you. If she hasn’t accepted your sacrifice, now you are vulnerable and open, and you need to protect yourself. Love does not require you to make yourself a victim. It is not a bloody sacrifice you make, but a sacrifice of thanksgiving. You need to honor yourself as much as you have honored her. This is a hard step too, because it’s getting complicated, and you’re bringing other people in, and having to explain it without prejudice. You might decide to let the whole thing drop. Jesus does not require you to go the second step. But if you feel you cannot let it drop, then this is the only second step that you may take.

How do you know whether to drop it or not? Well, will you be tempted to resentment, will it fester, will you get bitter, will you act victimized, which becomes its own offense? Just by bringing in those witnesses you are refusing to be victimized. You do have the right to go the second step, because you opened with an act of love and in good faith, and you deserve to not let the refusal of the offender to be last word. This is not just self-respect, this is about the importance of truth in the world, the ethical importance of the true story, the version of the story which is true. There is more to community than just our feelings and relationships—there also is integrity. Words have power, stories have power, and the truth itself deserves a hearing. You owe it to the world that some fair measure of the truth is stated and confirmed by witnesses.

And if he still doesn’t listen, then you have to consult with the witnesses whether to go the third step. And their vote should count more than your own. They may encourage you to take it to the church. For Roman Catholics, that means the hierarchy, who deal with it. For Mennonites you do the opposite, you bring it to the congregation as a whole. The Reformed Church takes it down the middle, you bring it to the board of elders, the officers in whom the congregation has invested its discretion and authority. The pastor chairs the board of elders, but the pastor has no vote. The elders have to follow some very strict rules for doing this, rules that go back to 1586, stringent disciplines that really protect the offender, and which keep requiring attempts at counsel and reconciliation all along the way. In my thirty years of ministry I’ve watched elders do this several times, and it’s always painful for everyone involved, the elders too.

No elder likes to do it. We wonder what right we have, who do we think are we, we have our own failings too. But Jesus says that even in our weak and stumbling efforts, God in heaven will back us up. He’s saying that headquarters will back us up if a few of us do it in his name, and by implication, according to his standards. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to keep loving.

What does it mean to treat him as a “Gentile and publican”? It can’t mean to shun him and have nothing to do with him. In Jesus’ time that was impossible anyway. It doesn’t mean stop loving him. The author of this gospel was a publican whom Jesus loved. Jesus ate and drank with publicans and sinners. He’s talking here about the special sacred meal of the Passover. Gentiles were not circumcised, and publicans, to do their jobs, had willfully to keep themselves unclean, so they could not share the sacred meal. And that’s the sanction of the elders, the only sanction they have, to ask the offender not to take communion (which no elder wants to do). The suspension is temporary, unless the offender keeps being adamant, and only then the excommunication.

My own grandfather, because of his adultery, was suspended from communion by the elders of the Third Christian Reformed Church in Paterson, New Jersey. It was just months before I was to be baptized there, and that’s why I’m not named for him, it would have really hurt my grandmother. But my parents did not shun him, they kept loving him, and eventually he came to live with us here in Brooklyn, and he and I got very close, and that’s why I speak Dutch. Eventually he repented to my grandmother, and she took him back, and the elders in Paterson reinstated him; they had never excommunicated him. They waited years for him to come around, which eventually he did. And my little brother got named for him.

Go back to the first step, of going to meet with your offender one on one. Who wants to do this kind of thing. Keep your distance and protect yourself. Have good boundaries. Let people do what they do. Everyone is fallen, everyone has weaknesses and makes mistakes. Just get over it. Go to church, worship God, go home, and be responsible for your own life. People have to figure out their own mistakes, and people who won’t, well, they’re not going to listen to you anyway. Oh, I know.

Here’s why we go through with it. First, because we owe it to our offenders, it is our obligation (Romans 13:8). The translation of Matthew 18:15 is misleading. What Jesus actually says is this: “If your brother sins against you.” Not “another church member” but your brother, your sister. You can choose what church to be a member of but you can’t choose who your siblings are. They are given to you without your choice at all. And you have obligations to them no matter how you might feel about them. It’s organic. The church is not just some voluntary associations, it’s mystical and spiritual, it has a reality beyond ourselves, it’s the body of Christ, and how you behave in it as how you behave for Jesus Christ. You owe it to others because they belong to Jesus Christ.

Second, it’s so much needed by the world. The world has so much need of reconciliation. And the church is called to model it. The church does not belong to us. It belongs to Our Lord, and it is his chosen instrument for the healing of the world. If we belong to the church we do not have the right to say “No” to the mission Our Lord has given us. Maybe we should add it to our Old First mission statement. We are witnesses, not that everyone is nice and good, but that ordinary fallen people can work reconciliation. That it can be done and should be done. Of course there will always be some persons who will not reconcile, whom we just have to hand over to the hidden work of God, but we can practice it enough for it to be believed in as a realistic way of living in the world.

Third, we do it for the sake of love. The revolutionary love of Our Lord is always misunderstood and resisted and defended against, and if the best defense is a good offense, then offences will come against the works of love. To live within this kind of love requires you to see it through.

And fourth, you do it to reflect what God has done for you. We go in private to our offender because God sought us out in private. We sacrifice our ease and comfort remembering what great sacrifice Our Lord has done to reconcile ourselves to God, the sacrifice of his own life, which he did for love. “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us. O Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, grant us thy peace.”

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

June 26: Guest Sermon by Kelvin Spooner

Praising God in Times of Distress  

On Psalm 13

Note: Elder Kelvin Spooner is our Seminary Intern this summer. He is also Vice President of the historic Elmendorf Reformed Church of Harlem. Kelvin will be preaching most Sundays this summer.

Giving honor to God who is the head of my life; to Pastor Meeter, the shepherd of this flock in the Body of Christ; to the Consistory and Great Consistory of Old First; to all the members and guests gathered here today: Thank you for the opportunity to worship and fellowship with you this summer.  Standing in front of you in this cathedral-like setting felt a bit overwhelming the first time I walked through the doors, but the words of welcome and encouragement that I have received from you has decreased some of my anxiety and I look forward to working with you this summer.

As you know, I am a seminarian at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary and your pastor, Dr. Meeter, is one of my professors and now he is one of my mentors. I know that I will learn much from his vast experience and knowledge.  Preaching every week this summer is a new experience for me, but by the grace of God, He will give me a Word to share with you that reveal the glorious wonders of our heavenly Father, the grace and mercy of the Son, Jesus Christ; and the movement of the blessed Holy Spirit in our lives.  I pray we will learn and grow in spirit and truth together as we take this journey side by side over the next two months.

Prayer - God of grace and truth, without you I can do nothing as I ought.  Clothe me with your Sprit, that with joy and reverence I may lead the worship of your people and worthily proclaim the gospel of your love to the glory of your name; through Jesus Christ my Lord.  Amen.

This morning I want to speak on the topic: Praising God During Times of Distress based on Psalm 13.  Distress is a human emotion that all of us experience during the course of our lives.  When we are distressed we are at a low place in our lives.  When we are distressed we sense, feel, and experience grief, suffering, pain, anguish, agony, and misery.  We hear and read about, on a daily basis, of how people are distressed. I can only imagine the distress of the families who lost their loved ones in the pharmacy store massacre in Medford L.I.; or the distress of the families of the young man killed recently right here in Brooklyn for bumping in to another person at a party.  Most, if not all, of us have experienced distress over the loss of a loved one.  But distress occurs not only when we experience the pain of death, but in many other situations in our lives.  The tough economic times we are in has caused many people to lose their jobs and left wondering how they will make ends meet (I was one that lost my job because of it, but thank God, I was able to find another one); broken relationships in marriages and in families, and sickness (both physical and mental), are just a few of the areas that can cause much distress. When we look biblically, the story of Job is a heartfelt story of a person in great distress that suffered tremendous personal tragedy. (If you are unfamiliar with the story of Job, I encourage you to read it. It is a fascinating book in the Old Testament). And our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ experienced the greatest distress of all by allowing himself to be nailed to a cross for our sake.

It is during these times of distress that we may wonder: How do we pray when our hearts are broken?  When the events of our lives have turned us upside down and God has done nothing to prevent it?  How can we pray when we are angry with God?  When the One in whom we’ve put our trust no longer seems trustworthy?  These questions have been raised for centuries and to find some answers we can look to the Psalms.  I have heard it said, Dr. Meeter, I think I might have heard it from you, that the Psalms is the hymn book of the Bible.  The Psalms are the voice of the people collected over several centuries, of ancient Israel.  It is the poetry of the Hebrew people and it vividly expresses individual and collective thoughts, emotions, and feelings in their living, in their worship, and in their relationship with God.  And their voices may certainly apply to our thoughts, emotions and feelings in our living, in our worship, and in our relationship with God today. 

In this hymn book of the Bible there are many different kinds of songs, there are songs of praise, there are songs of thanksgiving, there are wisdom psalms, liturgical psalms, and royal psalms.  But the type of psalm we will examine today is the song or prayer of lament, which Psalm 13 belongs to.  A lament is a complaint, an objection, and a protest of what God is, or is not doing in our lives.  During times of distress we question or get angry with God.  I remember a couple of years ago, a dear friend of mine passed away.  He was a person I knew since high school and we are/were about the same age.  He was a devout and mature Christian who was an inspiration to me.  He thought he had the flu but was diagnosed with cancer in February of that year.  By December of the same year he was gone.  Why did God take away this devoted husband this ambassador for Christ?  It did not make sense to me and for a while I became angry with God for taking my brother in Christ away.

The psalmist in Psalm 13 was experiencing his own anguish and this psalm reveals three themes to us of how we can praise God during our times of distress.  The first theme contained in (vs. 1, 2) reveals to us and allows us to know that during times of distress we can show our disillusionment and disappointment to God (We can let God know how hurt, upset, angry we may be).  The psalmist asks God four times, “How long?” How long will you forget me?  How long will you hide  your face from me?  How long must I bear this pain?  How long will my enemy be exalted over me?  Each successive complaint becomes more harsh and intense.  The psalmist is crying out to God from the depths of his soul.  No holds, barred; no holding back.  No hiding how he truly feel.  In our times of distress we must open our hearts and be completely honest with God with what is on our hearts and what we are feeling.

The psalmist in (vs. 3, 4) calls on God to answer him.  It is not a passive petition but an active one.  We do not know the problem or situation that the psalmist is facing but he is not asking God to resolve the problem, he is expecting God to fix the situation. When we are open and completely honest with God we may petition Him for a response. Psalms 5 says it best, “Give ear to my words O Lord, consider my sighing.  Listen to my cry for help my King and my God, for to you I pray. In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.”  In our times of distress, we can make our requests known to God, lay them before His throne of grace and wait in expectation, in anticipation, knowing He will respond.

In (vs. 5, 6), the psalmist suddenly shifts from anguish to praise.  His attitude changes from complaining to God to complimenting God; he moves from the language of protesting to the language of praise.  The text does not reveal if the psalmist’s particular problem is solved, but the text does reveal a number of aspects about the psalmist’s relationship with God.  First, the psalmist trusts God.  Trust is all about being dependable, trust is about being reliable, trust is about having confidence in, and the psalmist is confident in God. He knows that he can depend on God. Second, the psalmist knows that God’s love is steadfast. Steadfast love is God’s unchanging love, steadfast love is God’s unconditional love, steadfast love is God’s unending love, and steadfast love is God’s everlasting love.  Third, God has saved the psalmist and God has rescued him, which is a cause for celebration. The thing about distress is that it happens not once, not twice, but several times over the course of our lives. Fourth, the psalmist knows that God has been good to him in the past and God will always be good to him. Fifth, the psalmist understands who he is and who he belongs to. He addresses God personally by calling him “my God”. They have a relationship. They have history. They talk to one another. And we have that same opportunity. I love the way our Heidelburg Catechism, in its first question, What is your only comfort, in life and in death, frames for us to whom we belong: That I belong-body and soul, in life and in death-not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation.  Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

In our times of distress, we can praise God because He desires for us to be totally open and honest with Him; we can lay our requests before Him and wait in expectation; because of His steadfast, unchanging and unconditional love for us, we can be confident that He will respond, rescue, remain at our side no matter what pain, suffering or anguish we may be experiencing; and we can go to God because we belong to Him, in body and in soul, in life and in death.

To Him who loves us and freed us from our sins by His blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. (Rev. 1:5-6). 

June 19: Trinity Sunday: Commissioned by the Trinity

Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20

Our gospel lesson is the last five verses at the end of Matthew, the final words of Jesus to his disciples. We call these final words the Great Commission. The commission includes our using a new name for God. Now, you know that God has several names. In Genesis 1, God is Elohim, the plural form of El, or Al, or Allah. In Genesis 17, with Abraham, God used the name El-Shaddai, or God Almighty. In Exodus 3, God commissioned Moses to use a new name, Yahweh, or Adonai, the Lord, the Eternal. In Matthew Jesus commissions us with a new name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three names together, always together, the name in which we are baptized, the name which defines how we relate to God.

Three discrete names means three discrete persons, one of them being Christ himself. He is God, but a different person than his Father, as is the Holy Spirit. Three names, three persons, and yet one God. The unity of the one God has a texture which Jesus opens up to us by means of this new name. Not that he explains it, but he commissions it. We accept the commission, though it is challenging. It’s not for convenience that we confess the Holy Trinity, but from obedience.

The doctrine of the Trinity has tested the church throughout the centuries. It’s been the cause of conflicts and an excuse for wars. Our original conflict with Islam was because it was Unitarian, not because it was violent—Christendom was just as violent. Our supposed rationale for persecuting Jews was the crime of Unitarianism. To be a Unitarian of any sort was punishable by death. Such defensiveness of a doctrine suggests a fragile doctrine.

The presenting problem of the Trinity is the status of the person of Jesus: how can Jesus be God, and not his Father, and we still say that God is One? It is a stretch. It took the Apostles years to work it out. Well, it took years for Columbus to work out that he landed in a new world, not the Orient. It took rethinking everything. The resurrection forced the disciples to rethink everything they knew of God. I suspect that even Jesus, before his resurrection, did not fully comprehend his status and identity.

The status of Jesus is the problem for Jews and Muslims and Unitarians, but the problem for many Christians is the status of the Holy Spirit. Last month some of us were discussing the difficulties of the Christian faith, what we found problematic, and two of you said that you didn’t get the Holy Spirit thing. God the Father, yes, God the Son, yes, but why speak of the Holy Spirit as a separate person? The Spirit is an energy, a force, a power, a wind, a breath, a fire, a dove.

Well, I am commissioned to teach it to you as best I can, though no one fully can. The Trinity is unique, incomparable, incomprehensible, as it must be if it is God. If I said I had it fully figured out and I could neatly explain it, that would tell you not to believe me. We only have analogies and images, which all break down.

Let me use the image of a tree. God the Father is the trunk of the tree. God the Son is the branches and the leaves. And God the Holy Spirit is the seeds. If you look at a tree you see the trunk and the branches and leaves, but not the seeds. A seed falls to the ground, and it is hidden in the earth. But the seed is the concentrated essence of the tree. More so than the trunk or the branches or the leaves. The seed at one point is a tree in full. No matter how tiny, the seed has the soul of the tree in it, all the concentrated tree-ness of a tree, which will open up with all the textures of a growing tree. You could say that a tree is one seed’s strategy for making other seeds. Which would be wrong. A tree in its reality is the dynamic movement from the compact unity of a seed into the textured richness of the tree and back again into the seed.

The Holy Spirit is the soul of God and the concentration of God. The Holy Spirit is more purely and essentially God than are the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit is not an add-on, but the deepest self of God, the deeper personality behind the majestic personality of the Father and the comely personality of the Son. The Holy Spirit is the most essential God because that is what God is, pure spirit, the purest spirit that there is, the great spirit, the original spirit, without limit, without boundary, unconstrained and uncontainable, without sex or gender, neither male nor female. If God is anything, God is spirit, purely and wholly spirit, God is the holiest of spirits.

It’s a common mistake to think of the Father as the essential God, that the Father is the one God we believe in with Jews and Muslims, and then we add Jesus, so that we have God and Jesus. That mistake is rightly criticized by Jews and Muslims. The God of Abraham and Moses is not the first person–God the Father–to which we Christians add a second. No, the God of Abraham and Moses is the undivided Spirit who is holy, holy, holy.

We didn’t see the Father in God until Jesus spoke to God that way, and we didn’t see the Son in God until the resurrection. We began to see their distinctive personalities, the Fatherly personality of one and the child-like of the other, which we can relate to, because of the way God made us. But both their personalities express the hidden personality of the Holy Spirit, which is going to be harder for us to relate to, because it is purely spiritual. The personality of the Holy Spirit has to be hard for us because it’s not like a parent and not like a child, it has no human analogy, it has a personhood which is purely God and a personality absolutely unique, which must of course remain a mystery to us. It is the point that we might not see the need of it, because this third person is absolutely God without clear reference to our human experience. And it’s the character of this personality to be hidden. Not absent, but hidden, as hidden as a seed, as hidden in you as the life that fills your body, which no scientist can isolate.

We are told enough about the Spirit’s personality to know that the Holy Spirit does love fellowship. Look, just as the seed loves to open up into the fulness of the richness of the tree, so the soul of God loves to open up into the fellowship of three persons. And this same soul of God wants fellowship with us. The Holy Spirit comes to us. It enters us and is hidden in our lives. For love. The Spirit is so loving that it keeps saying “you, you, you,” not “me, me, me.” And it keeps pointing away from itself to the persons of the Father and the Son. But it is a person who does that, who enters you, with preferences and initiative, it is the Lord, the Lord in your life and the giver of your life.

The take home today is your commission. Let me set it up. You have two commissions: the one from Jesus in Matthew and the one from God in Genesis 1:28. God commissioned the male and female to fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over every living thing. But we executed our commission sinfully, filling the earth with violence and subduing it with greed and with the dominion of our misery. Thus all of God’s investment in salvation from Abraham to Moses to Israel to Jesus and his death and resurrection, for his teaching and his authority, for the salvation of the world and all the nations of the world, by means of us who are commissioned by our baptism in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are Christians in order to be proper human beings, not the other way around. Salvation is not against creation, but for the restoration of creation, only the new creation will be richer and deeper and more lovely from the sadness that it knows.

You need to have power in the world. According to Psalm 8:6, that’s what it means to be a human being. But your personal power must always be under the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Your power must always serve the glory of the Father, not yourself and nothing else. In the name of the Son, your power is humble and repentant, seeking reconciliation. In the name of the Holy Spirit, your power is always exercised in fellowship and love, never on your own, and never for yourself. That kind of power is the hidden power of the soul of God in you, a power which must always feel like Love.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 5, Ascension Sunday: Purpose and Power, Comfort and Joy

Acts 1:1-11,
Psalm 47,
Ephesians 1:15-23,
Luke 24:44-53

Thursday was Ascension Day. Ascension Day used to be a major holiday, and it’s still a public holiday in those countries in Europe which keep the connection of church and state. It’s kept a holiday so that people have off from work to go to church. Well, in America we don’t have the mind for such things anymore, and we think we don’t have the time for such observances, so we mark it on the Sunday following, which is today. But we still mark it because the Ascension of Jesus is an important doctrine and one of the major facts and mysteries in the Apostles Creed.

It strikes me that as you work your way down the Apostles Creed the things in it get gradually harder to believe. I mean it’s not that hard to believe that God created the heavens and the earth. Most people on the planet believe that, in one form or another. It’s not that hard to believe that Jesus was born of a Virgin; modern biology has begun to mimic that all the time in laboratories, and some species of creatures have always generated life that way. It’s not hard to believe that Jesus suffered and was crucified and buried. That’s actually attested in the documents of history.

But then you get to the resurrection, and that’s harder to believe, at least if you take it as it was first proclaimed, that he was resurrected in his body, not just in his soul. And then the Ascension is even harder to believe. Not if you just believe that Jesus went to heaven in his soul, because that kind of idea is assumed by most of the religions on the planet, and even by many of the philosophies. But to believe that he ascended into heaven in his body; that’s more difficult, and it’s much harder to imagine. It’s beyond our reckoning, both in its character and its meaning. And its meaning is complex.

But the Bible treats it as important. St. Luke is the most careful historian in the Bible, and he reports it twice, in our first reading from the Book of Acts and in our Gospel reading. And then the meaning of it is set out several times, especially by St. Paul, and especially in the Epistle to the Ephesians, in which the Ascension is a controlling theme. And neither St. Luke or St. Paul had seen it with their own two eyes. The other apostles all had seen it, but not those two, for they were not yet believers when it happened. So they are the ones who best communicate it to the rest of us, throughout the centuries, who would never see it either.

It happened between Easter and Pentecost. We think of those as Christian holidays, but for the disciples they were still the Jewish holidays of Passover and Shavuoth. It was forty days after Passover and ten till Shavuoth. You can see the Ascension as the completion of Easter and the prerequisite of Pentecost. The Ascension is about both body and soul, and flesh and spirit. It’s the vindication of Jesus in the flesh and his inauguration as the giver of the Holy Spirit. The Ascension is about both history and eternity. It’s about history in his coronation as the Messiah of Israel and about eternity as his exaltation as the Son of God. It’s both a completion and a commencement. It’s the completion of his special work on earth, for which the Lord became a human being and incarnated in human flesh, and one of us, and it’s the commencement of his special work in heaven, at the right hand of his Father, the work for which he maintains his incarnation, the work for which he is still a human being, still one of us.

For us. And how for us? Four things today. Purpose and power, and comfort and joy. Let me start with purpose and power. The Ascension is for our purpose as Christians, and for the power we have to do our purpose.

Our purpose as Christians is to be witnesses. Witnesses to his Lordship and witnesses of what life is like within the Kingdom of God. Witnesses of what life can be whenever we honor him as Lord. For a few of us with special callings, that witness is witnessing in the narrow sense of proclamation or evangelism. That has its place, but it is not for everyone. It is for those who are given special gifts for that, as it is explained in a chapter four of this epistle. Don’t feel guilty if you don’t feel called to go out and do that kind of witnessing. There is a much more challenging kind of witnessing which is for most of us, and that’s the witnessing that you do in terms of daily human life. What you buy, and why you buy it. What you spend, and why you spend it. How you eat, and why you eat that way. Who gets invited to your table, and why. Whom you serve, and why you serve that way. Whom you love and how you love and why you love that way. How you sing and dance. What you rejoice about it, what you take pleasure in. What you suffer, and how you suffer, how you deal with those who make you suffer and how you deal with the pain from it. How you deal with loss and how you deal with abundance, how you deal with death and how you deal with birth, how you are a human being, what it means to be a human being in the world of which Jesus is the Lord. That kind of witnessing is challenging, and needy people notice it.

That’s your purpose, and to fulfill you purpose you are given power. That power comes from the Holy Spirit, which I will say more about next week, on the feast of Pentecost. But the gift of Pentecost depends on the Ascension, for Jesus went to heaven make room for us, and to send the Holy Spirit to empower us who take his place. This power is not given you just for anything. And if you crave it you will not get it. It is the power to be a witness, which includes the power to face your losses and your death, as well as your successes and abundance, which are more difficult.

His Ascension is for comfort and for joy. For comfort, because the Lord of heaven and earth is a wounded human being, who bears our flesh and feels our frailty, but who is fully able to guide the world to his chosen goal. So despite what’s in the news, despite how fearful the world may get, or your distress with how things are going, your disappointment by your own personal performance, your lack of success in many things, the aging of your body, the fraying of your relationships, and the frustration of your aims, you can take comfort in his Lordship. It’s hard to believe, but you can believe him, and from the step of belief you can take the step of worshiping him, and that you will discover that worshiping him comes back to you in comfort.

And for joy. We read that the disciples departed with great joy, despite all that they did not understand. How joyful are you in your life? One of the chief goals of the Christian life is joy. Why are you a Christian? “To be joyful,” that has to be a great part of your answer. And here’s the deal: if you want to be more joyful, increase the measure of the Lordship of Jesus in your life. The joy in your life is a function of his Lordship in your life. Here’s a take home for today: If you want more joy, then you want more Lordship.

Let me encourage you to choose this joy. I don’t mean just enjoyment, not just entertainment, not the idolatry of fun and pleasure to which we are in bondage in America, but joy. Deep joy in the soul. Self-forgetting joy, like self-forgetting love, a joy that cannot be defended nor fully be explained. This joy hangs on Jesus’ Lordship. It is not spontaneous, and you cannot generate it in yourself. You have to choose for it, and that means choosing against some other precious things to you. If you want it, seek his Lordship. Learn the life within his kingdom. Learn to trust his kind of power and praise his kind of greatness and kneel before his love. It always comes down to love. For myself, I have so much joy in my life because I experience so much love in my life, and because I believe in his Lordship, I can see how all that love in my life has its source in God’s inexpressible and irrepressible love for us.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

Sermon for May 29, Easter 6: The Sign of Love

Acts 17:22-21, Psalm 66:8-20, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21
I had not planned to say anything at all about this Harold Camping “end-of-the-world” thing on Family Radio. I haven’t felt the need to address it since none of our congregation have asked me any questions or expressed any concern about it. The simple response to the whole fiasco is that Our Lord said very clearly that the time of his second coming would not be known to anyone.

But today in our first lesson we have some verses which are depended on by Mr. Camping and others of his ilk. Acts 17:30-31: “While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” Mr. Camping would say that this is what he meant, that the day has been fixed, and that he figured out it was May 21, and if we think the whole thing is a joke, then the joke’s on us. And there is judgment on us too.

I have three friends from college who were members of the church where Harold Camping was an elder forty years ago, the Christian Reformed Church in Alameda, California. That church belongs to a denomination which seceded from the Reformed Church 150 years ago, and in that denomination some of us have relatives. Mr. Camping is not a pastor, but a civil engineer. He reads the Bible mechanically, like it’s engineering specs. He has no emotional intelligence. They say that talking to him is like trying to talk to a computer. He left that church in 1988 because the other members would not agree with him. He belongs to no church now, he says no church is good, that no church has the gospel, and that God has left the church. Just like Mr Camping did. Mr. Camping projects a god who is a lot like himself. (Don't we all?)

It would be funnier if he did not play on the hopes and fears of vulnerable people. One of my cousins figured he’d be raptured, so he went off on a spending spree in Europe, and now he’s got nothing left. He’s got to hope the world will end in October, or else he’s going on welfare, or whatever’s left of welfare.

To be fair to Mr. Camping, the media mistook what he was saying. He never said that May 21 would be the end of the world. He always said that the end of the world will be October 21. He said that May 21 was judgement day, the beginning of the end, with physical signs and manifestations, like earthquakes and suffering and the rapture. Last Tuesday he admitted he was wrong on only that. He says he was mistaken on the signs and manifestations, that they are not physical, but spiritual. There’s a dodge! Ah, the “spiritual” card. He still says that judgement day did happen on May 21, so that if you did not already repent by then, too bad, it’s over, there is no more chance for repentance. You can repent all you want till October 21, but it’s too late baby now, it’s too late. Family Radio is still in business, but they’re just comforting the true believers for another five months of spiritual tribulations. So what will they broadcast on October 22? The Mets in the World Series. That would comfort us true believers in our spiritual tribulations.

Harold Camping is just an extreme version of so much current Christianity, especially on the right. They claim to speak for Jesus, and they quote some of his words, but they distort the gospel as they shout it. They stoke our anger and they stroke our fears. They turn love of country into lust, and freedom into greed, and independence into self-indulgence. If St. Paul were to visit America today he’d say how extremely religious we are, and also how many idols we have. American idols. The projections of what we want for our ourselves. Not just of talent and good looks and greed, but also of military power and economic power and materialism, and of the loss of power, the idols of fear and anger, which we are indulging in America today. But our epistle tells us, “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.”

I wish my cousin had prepared for his being raptured by selling all his possessions and giving the proceeds to the poor. He’d still be disappointed by May 21, but he wouldn’t be ashamed. I wish Harold Camping had told all of his listeners to do the same. He’d still be wrong, but we would all honor him anyway. As our epistle says, “do it with gentleness and fear, so that when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame.”

Yes, we certainly do believe that Our Lord will come again, and we say so in our Creeds. We say that he is seated at the right hand of his Father and so we certainly believe that he is the righteous judge of all the world. But here’s the difference from the distortion. His judgment is not just at the end, he has been doing it all through human history since his resurrection. He does it by his Word and Spirit, as his Word is pronounced among us and as we obey him in the Spirit. He doesn’t do it by sending earthquakes or disasters, but only and always openly, that we may love him and keep his commandments. He doesn’t do it by starting wars and rumors of wars, those are always all our fault. He only and always judges lovingly—that’s how we know it’s him.

His judgement is right now, and active—active in the world, as the words of his gospel take effect within our lives individually and in our cultures corporately. Look at the desire for freedom and democracy in Libya and Yemen, that is the long term fruit of the seed of his gospel and the impact of his judgments. He chooses justice not only for those who believe in him, but for all the offspring of his Father, Christian or Muslim or Jew or Hindu or pagan. He is Lord not only of those who believe in him. He is Lord of all, no matter whether they know him; in him “they live and move and have their being.” His judgment is for life and being. It’s not for the destruction of the world but for the saving of the world.

So now let me give a better translation of our text: While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he summons everyone to turn from their ignorance, because he has fixed a day by which is intending to judge the civilized world in justice, by a man whom he appointed, offering assurance to all by having raised him from the dead.

We have a great mission, bringing the justice and righteousness of Jesus Christ to all of human civilization, the love of him, and the doing of his commandments. I don’t know how long we have, I really don’t care. I don’t know how long we have before he comes again, it wouldn’t matter to me if it were 10,000 years, or at least long enough to let us change our ways enough to cool the globe back down a few degrees and bring back to life the coral reefs. We have a lot of sins to own up to and confess, and a lot of righteousness to learn. I have an idea that Jesus tends to take his time.

The self-giving love of Jesus is the judgment of the world. Whenever you follow him in that love, you judge the world. And this is a judgment that does not condemn the world, but saves it. To have Jesus as your Lord will give you some success, some real success, but it will also be the cause of suffering. With Jesus as your Lord, you can expect to be misunderstood, you can expect to be doubted, you can expect to be abused, if not physically or even mentally, then socially, you may be called foolish or naive, quixotic or unrealistic, disloyal or unpatriotic, whatever.

Look, everybody suffers. Americans have to suffer too, and we ought not increase the suffering of others in order to decrease our own. To accept the suffering of the world with love is what Jesus has commanded us, and if that’s the command that we obey, then we love him too. We love him because he first loved us. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the future of the world, but I can certainly rule out a lot of options and hope for some others when I consider these two things: the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus, and how much God loves us.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.