December 15, Advent 3, Children of Light 3: From Innocence to Love

Isaiah 35:1-10, Magnificat, James 5:7-10, Matthew 11:2-11

Why do we get this gospel lesson on December 15? We’re ready for the manger. Why do we get John the Baptist on the day of our Children’s Pageant? We’re on the way to Bethlehem. A better fit with our calendars is the Isaiah lesson, rejoicing at the coming of God. Rejoicing is the proper theme of the Third Sunday of Advent, called Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin verb for “Rejoice.” Gáudete, gáudete, gáudete. Why distract us with John the Baptist?

But the lesson from the Epistle says, Patience. Don’t rush things. James says, Be patient until the coming of the Lord. There is reason to wait. There is reason for the season of penitence, because you can get Jesus wrong. You can welcome Jesus, and delight in his coming, but get him wrong. As John the Baptist did. As you can’t help but do. And that’s okay, it’s to be expected, which is why you should be patient and penitent.

John the Baptist had to be patient but he was not in a penitentiary. Imprisonment in those days was different. It was not the punishment itself, as we do it. It was holding you in custody until your punishment was decided, which could be exile, execution, or exoneration. To delay your decision was in the interest of the sovereign, so that your people might generate, you know, some cash. So you were allowed a good deal of contact with your people. So John was kept up on the news.

John was disappointed with Jesus. You remember from last Sunday what he’d expected from the Messiah. Fire. Wind. A winnowing fork. An ax laid at the roots. Stringent justice. Smashing heads. “So Jesus, no offense, but when are you going ‘to come with vengeance,’ as Isaiah said, ‘with terrible recompense, to come and save us,’ including me? And, no offense, what you’re doing is very good, and keep it up, but maybe should I be expecting someone else?”

Jesus does not defend himself. Nor does he answer directly. “Go back and tell him what you hear and see: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor get good news, and blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” That’s a tough response. From John’s point of view, that response just begs the question. John already knows all that. That’s his point. Doing that stuff is fine, but that’s not the job of the Messiah.

The message that Jesus sends back is a challenge: “Look again, my cousin, look again at the same stuff you have been seeing. The problem is not my evidence, but what you want for the solution. The signs are all there, but you want directions to a different place. Step back from it, John. Your issue with me is your expectations. Which means your issue with me is actually yourself.”

John the Baptist had that peculiar problem of the perfectly pure in heart. It’s the problem with innocence, and why you have to get beyond your innocence. I know that last Sunday I told you that the Advent season calls you into your place of innocence, and in that place to find an inner child, who is God as a child, and I told you to take yourself in there, to restore your wonder and to revive your hope. Today I’m complicating that. I’m telling you to get beyond your innocence.

The problem with innocence is indignation. Like John the Baptist’s. You have always done the right thing, the hard thing, all the way, and at great cost to yourself. You gave your life to the job you were given, you never considered your comfort or convenience, you never complained, even in prison you don’t complain, but now your successor is taking the easy way. Your innocence yields to indignation, and impatience, and sometimes even to intolerance.

Jesus was not disappointed in John! He took no offense at his questioning. Because it had not been given to John to see the something new afoot. No one had yet imagined it but Jesus himself, and no one else would see it until after his death and resurrection, the whole new radical way of being the Messiah. So Jesus doesn’t hold it against his cousin that he has not imagined him.

You can love Jesus and want him to come, and still get him wrong. You do it yourself, you can’t help it — your soul is blind and deaf, you are spiritually disabled. So you need his light and his voice. So every year you need to step back and ask yourself what you expect from him. You need to ask yourself what it is about yourself that makes you expect this. Who do you think you are? Where do you get it from, how God should come into your life? Like John the Baptist, “C’mon, Jesus, don’t you owe me something here? Don’t I have a right to some expectations?”

Innocence says this: "Okay, I’m, say, third in line, and I’ll be happy to get whatever is coming to me as third in line." But the Epistle of James says, "Don’t take your turn, wait, be patient, go to the back of the line!" And now innocence has to learn something new: Love for all the others in line ahead of you.

Innocence has to develop into love. Not childlike love, not natural love nor innocent love, but sacrificial love, generous love, love of neighbor as yourself. John the Baptist, you did what you did because you were certain you were right, and you were. But when the Kingdom comes, you will do what you do for love, and not because you’re right. And only by patience will you learn that.

They are saying that it was his twenty-seven years in prison that allowed Nelson Mandela to develop his moral imagination. So that when he came out, he was not indignant nor intolerant, but able to love his enemies. They are rarely saying that his Christian faith had everything to do with that. He had to wait — he waited on God, with patient endurance, with no control, like a farmer waiting for the rain (James).

And so do you, if you want to develop your moral imagination beyond the privilege of innocence into the sacrifice of sympathy. From the burning purity of the desert into the messy swamp of love (Isaiah). Advent calls you to let God lead you on the road from innocence to love.

Isaiah sings about the healing of your disabilities within the larger transformation of creation. There are crocuses and blossoms that need to come to life in you. And though you value a flower for the beauty it gives you right now, from the flower’s point of view, whatever it is, is for the future, for the seed it will generate; a flower is for the future.

You must be eagerly patient in your life for what God is doing with you still, what God in God’s own time is slowly bringing forth to life in you. And it will go beyond what you expect within yourself. If you could expect it, you would not need God to do it. You must admit your moral disability, and it will offend you — it must at first.

What do you want for Christmas? It’s okay to ask that. We are not so indignant for the sacred mystery that we must be intolerant of the secular festivity. But I will ask you this: What do you want from Christmas? What do you want from God’s coming into the world, and into your own life?

Here is a take-home. For this next year, open yourself to one new way to follow Jesus beyond where you are now, and into an area where you have not yet trusted him. Not a New Year’s resolution but an Advent absolution.

You might try it in an area of society, wherein what Jesus says is just too radical: say, about non-violence, or peace, or wealth and poverty. Open yourself to another patient look at that, keep open to it longer than you have before.

You might try it in an area of your inner life. What do you believe God owes you here? In what have you been disappointed when it comes to God? Pick one thing, and enter that place of drought with God, and water it with God’s Word and Spirit and with the love of, say, two fellow members of the community of Jesus.

You might try it with how you budget your time, or in your dealings with your children.

You might open yourself to a new activity, with a work of joy you have not dared yet: learn the trombone, or cook for the poor.

Just one way. Open to God coming into you there. I can tell you this: no matter what you try, it will also mean a growth in love. Your love will increase. Whether you do it in terms of society or your inner life or your active expression, the sign of it will be more love. Because it’s more of Jesus, and when it’s more of Jesus, it’s more of God.

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

December 8, Advent 2, Children of Light 2: A Little Child

Isaiah 11:1-10, Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19, Romans 15:4-13, Matthew 3:1-12

You get quite a menagerie today. You get a wolf, a leopard, a lion, a bear, and another lion. You get a lamb, a kid, a calf, a veal-calf, a cow, and an ox. You get three kinds of poisonous snakes: the asp and the adder and a whole brood of vipers. You get camel’s hair and three leather belts and sandals. You get locusts, and honey, and wheat, and the chaff of the wheat, and straw. You get a tree stump, a shoot, a branch, and roots, and a root again in Romans. You get an ax on the roots, and trees chopped down and burned. You get fire, twice, and water, and wind. You get sea water, and rain, and showers, and mown fields, and little hills, and mountains. You get stones, and their children, and children of Abraham. You get a little child, and a nursing child, and a weaned child.

I love all the animals, because the season of Advent is for children in the way that Lent is for adults. In Lent you get ready for a death, but in Advent you get ready for a birth. Both Lent and Advent are penitential seasons, but the penance in them differs.  Lent is for self-examination, while Advent is for hope and expectation. In Lent you look for your guilt and in Advent you look for your innocence. In Lent you locate all your guilt inside yourself, and you register your guilt, and process it. In Advent you have find inside yourself your place of innocence. That’s the childlike part — that unstained innocence, that wide-eyed innocence of little children.

You have that space of innocence inside you. An open space, a little room of receptivity, of unreflecting eagerness, of easy hope and easy joy. Can you still find that place in you?

Experience is the enemy of innocence. The little child will lose her innocence as she gains in her experience. The experience of snake-bite, the experience of poison and of pain, the experience of betrayal by your friends and denial by your intimates. Your hopes dashed, your native joy corrupted. You learn the habits of not trusting, and also not revealing. You learn to judge what you see and decide what you hear, and you have be quick about it and maintain a good defense. You have developed your skills in how to deal with a vicious and malicious world. You learn to take some pleasure in your skills, in the thrust and parry of your sword, in the subtlety of your attack, in the sharpness of your sight, in how deft is your defense, in your shrewdness and your cunning. Yes, you are a decent person, and you keep yourself from extra guilt, but you’ve too much experience ever fully to enjoy again your innocence.

The gift of Advent is that doesn’t have to be this way. The penance of Advent is to recreate within yourself your place of innocence, a pocket of light and air inside you that is free of dust and dirt and sticky webs. Because when you go in there it isn’t free and clear. Your guilt is there. Your shame. The record of your betrayals and denials is all there, and the residue of what’s been done against you and unfairly.

In Lent you are the one who cleans it out. Lent is your own spring cleaning. In Advent you just let him in. Don’t register what’s there, you don’t have to examine what is there, just let him in and he cleans it for himself to make it ready for himself. He makes your place of innocence empty of everything but his gentle, joyful self. You don’t have to clear away your darkness first to let the light shine in. It is the light itself that clears away the darkness in you.

The Advent way to find again that place of innocence inside you is to embrace with your mind the Lord Jesus as a little child. Give yourself to that image, trust that God’s behind it. He will clear away your skillfulness, and the lessons of your experience. He has to clear away your smarts, your shrewdness, and the pleasures you have learned. You let him in as a child pure and innocent, and you become again a child with him. Of course you doubt it, from the poison of the snake, but this child is immune to the poison of the snake, and with his mouth he sucks the poison out of you.

God as a child. Or God within the child. That’s how Christians have taken this prophecy of Isaiah, and taken it beyond how Isaiah had foreseen it. Let me draw you briefly away from your personal place of innocence to do some history (but I will bring you back to it). The prophet Isaiah was predicting the return and revival of the ruined, cut-off dynasty of King David.

You know that King David’s father was named Jesse, and so the family tree of King David is often called the Jesse Tree. The Jesse Tree is called a tree-stump by Isaiah as a metaphor of the dynasty of David’s descendants being cut down by the empires of Assyria and Babylon. The hard thing that the prophets said was that God was behind this cutting down, that the ruthless empires of Assyria and Babylon were the instruments of the Lord God in punishing the House of David for its faithlessness.

But God would still be faithful. God would cause a new shoot to grow up from the stump of the Jesse Tree. We’d guess that Isaiah would anticipate a normal king again, but very good and very powerful, and not afraid to smash some heads. He would be vigorous and even merciless in the working of his justice. Justice, justice, justice. The fruit of his justice would be the peace that we see in the fellowship of the wolf and the lamb, the lion and the calf, and a little child leading them.

In the subsequent history of Israel we don’t find any fulfillment of this prophecy in the way that Isaiah might have anticipated it. There would be no political revival of the dynasty of David. The Jesse Tree scattered many seeds, and there were many descendants of David among the Jews, but none of them ever was king again. Except the son of Mary.

The remarkable thing that Christians claim is that this prophecy was very much fulfilled, but in a surprising way beyond anticipation, and with a doubling of intensity. First, that the little child in the peace part of the prophecy is the very branch of Jesse in the justice part. The child of peace is the captain of justice. And second, that this captain of justice will be God’s own self, that God will just come down and do it God’s own self. Which means, if you complete the circuit, that God is in the little child, and it’s as a little child that God desires to come into your life. The peace that he gives you is how you get your justice and your righteousness. Let him into your imagination and he will do your penance for you. Let him into your place of innocence and he will give you innocence.

What that innocence allows for is wonder, the wide-eyed wonder of a child. You want that. You want to forsake the suspicions you’ve developed in your life. You want to welcome the gifts of the world and the colors of other people and be open to what they do all day. There is so much good reason not to do this, so much good reason to judge the world ahead of time, but for your soul to be joyful you need to be in your place innocence in order to look out wonder. You want to practice the wonder which God intended to be normal for human beings.

One more thing. When you go into your place of innocence with the Lord Jesus, then in there you will also find your hope. Even after all of your experience. Hope is not optimism, hope is what you depend on precisely when your experience is bad. You have to have the hope. Because you’re not a child, because you have experienced the loss and grief and pain. When you have hope, then you know that you are in the place of innocence and wonder. Whenever you struggle to have that hope, then go back to the promises of God in Jesus Christ for your encouragement. Your hope depends upon the Word of God, and your hope is energized by the Spirit of God.

Do you suppose it’s true for you? Does God not love you? Does God not understand you, and also understand the world in all its good and bad even better than you do? Has God not entered the world to bring joy to you and peace? I close with the blessing of St. Paul: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

December 1, Advent 1, Children of Light 1: Walking

Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44

The image of Light is an important image in the Bible. The Bible employs the image of light in a great variety of usages. We will explore those images in the next four weeks. My sermon series is called “Children of Light,” for that is what you are. So let’s explore and enjoy the images of light.

But first, about Advent. Advent is a penitential season, like Lent. Advent was originally a season of fasting and sober self-examination, four weeks of it. There was no feasting until Christmas morning, and then twelve days of what feasting you could afford.

This sober observance of Advent has is now virtually impossible with the secularization and commercialization of Christmas. Unless we emphasized the contradiction: we could say that Advent contradicts the holiday season, and that the repentance of our souls in here contradicts the indulgence of our flesh out there.

But in this case, “contradiction” is not as good as “poignancy”. You can experience the holiday season with positive poignancy. Poignancy like pregnancy. There’s pain in it, there’s risk in it, and sometimes loss, but the relief of it is new life. A birth. The Word becoming flesh. The Incarnation means some affirmation of the flesh. Which is a mercy, because you cannot help but live within your flesh, and live among your flesh and blood. Your children deserve your gifts, your spouse deserves your gifts, your lover waits upon your gift, your boss expects you at the party, and your voice is needed when people are gathering to sing. You can participate.

These things do satisfy, they do, but not completely, these things are not enough, you long for something more. God has planted in you the desire for something more, the something more that all these things are pointing to beyond themselves, if you stop and look and notice it. That beyondness, that incompletion, that longing, is the poignancy you feel. And that feeling can be by turns desiring and despairing. You are longing for something you cannot attain. You can’t achieve your completion on your own. Advent reminds you to desire it as a gift from God, in some partial measure now, but in fullness only after you have died, when you receive your final salvation.

All the world is longing for the completion and summation which is promised with the coming of the Lord; that is, the Second Coming of the Lord; which is the opening theme of Advent, as you have noticed in the collect we prayed: “that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal.” We open the season with his Second Coming in majesty and then we close the season with his First Coming in humility, as an infant.

The season develops backwards: we begin it at the ending and we end it at the beginning. It serves the poignancy. His first coming, though in the flesh, creates within you the desire for something more than flesh, and lest your desire be overcome by the despair of your flesh, his first coming comforts you. You are comforted at the end of the season, and you are challenged at the beginning, now. Today.

We are living in the darkness, the darkness before the dawn. There is some light for us, and that light comes from the morning star, just above the horizon. “How brightly shines the morning star.” Let me explain that the morning star is always a planet, usually Venus. Science has taught us what the Bible writers did not know, that the light that it shines with is a borrowed light. It is light reflected from the sun before the sunrise. The sunrise will be his Second Coming, the great and final dawn, and his First Coming is as the Morning Star, to give us joy and hope and light before the dawn. You cannot look directly at the sun, for its light is burning and blinding, but you can gaze upon the Morning Star, and rejoice in it, and it both satisfies and heightens your desire.

And it gives light enough for you to walk by it. You can walk forward in this light, even before the dawn. Enough is illuminated. Enough is enlightened. In other religions, enlightenment is what you attain inside yourself. In Biblical religion it’s different. You see it in Isaiah. Your enlightenment is around you: it is the light of God upon the world, illuminating it. And Biblical enlightenment is for walking in, not sitting in.

In Isaiah the light is from the Torah, which is the living Word of God, for Israel, and for all the world. In the gospel this living Word of God gets personified in Jesus, who is your Morning Star. He shines the light in which you walk. He illuminates the world before you. The world itself is dark and dangerous, and you have reason to be fearful. There is chaos there, and evils both natural and malicious, and you have your own handicaps and disabilities. But he gives you light enough that you can safely find your way across the landscape of your life that is before you.

Rise up and walk. Wake up, get up out of bed. Change your clothes, take off your nightgown, put on your day clothes, put on the armor of light. There’s an image! From Romans 13, “the armor of light.” Instead of wearing chain mail or heavy metal plates, you are wearing light itself, like a force-field around you, and you are protected by the light upon you, the light of Christ on you that you are absorbing but also reflecting, and as it shines back off of you it clears away the danger that is lurking in the darkness before you. It’s a defense designed for movement and freedom and joy and peace.

Your light is not a burning light, but a softer gleaming light, the light on you of Christ who is the hope and healing for the world, even in its darkness. You have put on Christ, you wear him like a robe of light, and that is healing for your own flesh, which frees you from the compulsions of your flesh, so you now can pay attention to what God is doing and what God gives you.

All this means that you live in the same world as everyone else, but you see the world differently.

It means that your illumination is not some private thing inside you, it’s rather very public, as public as the gospel, freely given, and freely shared with other people like yourself.

It means that you don’t have to solve the mysteries of the world in order to make your way in the world, or even the mysteries of your own life, to live life well.

It means there’s only so much you have to know and only so much you have to understand, and still you’re able to see your way. You don’t know when your Lord is coming back, but you know what it means that he is coming back, with a greater light, but he is coming to you now with the light of his Holy Spirit.

You long for some light in your life. Some solving of a mystery you live with, some illumination to manage your obstacles, or navigate your uncertainties, or just get through the week, or just get through the pain. You need the world illuminated, or just that one small piece of the world which is this week. The light is always there, but it’s also always a surprise.

You have seen it. Maybe only once or twice, but that’s enough. The brief shining moment, the flash in the sky. You can stretch that moment across your life, you can keep on walking in it. That is what religion is: it’s how you stretch that one brief shining moment across the whole course of your life as you go forward.

You don’t have to be passive, you can be active. You can be doing those things you can do now which anticipate the better things you can’t do yet, but you will do when your completion comes.

Keep awake. Pay attention. You have taken off the compulsions of your flesh so that you can pay attention in your flesh. The good news here is that the power of your attention is not in your own self, but in the light that’s given to you. All you have to do is walk. Don’t worry about getting it all correct, don’t worry about your stumbling or your mistakes. Be like a little child, just learning how to walk.

Walking is the image of the Christian life. It’s one of the most basic things that human beings do, and it is God’s metaphor for life. It’s meant to both relieve you and empower you.

And you are walking with your head up. Looking toward the dawning glow on the horizon. Because the day is still to come. You don’t know when it will come, but you know what it means that it will come. It is up to God, and it is from God, and God will do it.

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

November 24, Reign of Christ: Contradictions 12: Executions in Paradise

Jeremiah 23:1-6, Psalm 46, Colossians 1:11-20, Luke 23:33-43

What did Jesus mean by “the paradise”? Why did he use this specific word, for the only time in the gospels? Why didn’t he just say ‘heaven”? Because he didn’t mean “heaven”. When he said “paradise,” the term was more specific than it is today. A paradise was a royal park, a palace garden and menagerie, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, like the Garden of Eden, a private park for an emperor’s enjoyment, where he might take his special guests to walk and talk with him, and where to be invited was a privilege of honor.

Which means (if we respect the metaphor) that Jesus was giving this criminal more than he had asked for. He only dared ask to be remembered in the kingdom, but Jesus brings him into the royal garden. The criminal had asked for some carnations on his grave, but Jesus puts a rose in his tuxedo.

What a strange exchange these two have upon their crosses. What things to be saying when you are dying in defeat. Has their pain made them delirious? “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” What possible kingdom? The Kingdom of Judea? What does the inscription say above his head? “This Guy is the King of the Judeans”? But that is meant for mockery. What it really meant was, “This is what we Romans do to Jewish royalty!” To prevent his kingdom is precisely why he was being killed.

Does this criminal believe that Jesus could die his death and still get his kingdom in the future, that God will bring him back alive for some new liberation beyond the miracles of the Maccabees? If so, then what he’s asking is this: “When that time comes, pardon me; I was with you; don't forget me; don’t let my name be blotted out.”

The answer is unexpected: “Today.” Not in the future, but today. That is, “I am remembering you now, I am already acting as the king. The inscription above me is right. I am the king, today, and when I say, “Amen, today,” this is my royal proclamation. I am doing what kings do in giving you a pardon. But even more I invite you to my royal garden for you to be with me. You are in my kingdom now.”

Jesus has done him better. The criminal believed that Jesus’ kingdom would come after the crucifixion, but Jesus believed that his kingdom was established by the crucifixion; that when the soldiers put him on the cross, they put him on his throne; that in crucifying him, his enemies were giving him his kingdom; and that Pontius Pilate, in mocking him with that inscription, was actually nominating him, which was his official duty anyway. The prophecy of Jeremiah has come true. The Son of David has begun to reign upon the cross, and the pardoning of this criminal is the first act of the new administration.

So Jesus’ kingship doesn’t wait till after his ascension into heaven. He is already executing justice and righteousness. He’s already gathering the lost sheep of Israel, as Jeremiah had prophesied. And the criminal, in the words of Colossians, has been “rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of the beloved Son, in whom he has redemption, the forgiveness of his sins.”

All the other characters are in his kingdom too, all the other watchers and mockers, but they don’t know it. They are bound within the guilt and fear and hostility which are normal in the world. Jesus has asked his Father to pardon them as well. But it’s only this one thief who has welcomed it. Not only by putting his trust in Jesus, but also by acknowledging the truth about his guilt and his predicament. He is the only one in this whole scene who has a good sense of himself, who is open about himself, and therefore open to the Lord.

Unlike Adam hiding in the Garden, unlike Eve hiding in the trees. So yes, this is a paradise, a second Garden of Eden, the beginning of the new creation, and Jesus is the firstborn of the new humanity, and the criminal is with him.

The gospel writer Luke is remarkably silent on Jesus’ suffering and agony. What Luke has given us is another painting, a moment made eternal extending into time and space, let’s say in the style of Breugel or Velazquez. In the foreground are ranged the watchers and the witnesses. On the right, the leaders of the people. They represent religion. They taunt Jesus for his inability to see his reformation through; he is unconvincing and uncompelling and he cannot save a thing. On the left, the soldiers represent the world. They mock him for his folly and his failure and for his being a Jew. Up on that one cross is the criminal who represents our guilt. He is deriding Jesus for the hopelessness of grace. All of these are trapped in bondage to the powers of the world.

Only Jesus and the second criminal are free. Jesus is free from anger and reprisal and from his burden of the past three years. The criminal is freed from his past and freed from his guilt and free to offer honor and respect and hospitality. He has the freedom of the Kingdom of God.

This painting is God’s message to you today. It is your invitation; you are invited to this freedom. He died like a slave so that you might be free from the guilt of your sins and free from bondage to the jealous powers of the world. God wants you to be free. Again: free from your guilt, and free from the compulsions of the world. It is God’s gift to you. Freedom to construct your life. Freedom to develop your character. Freedom to be open to others and free to love. Freedom to be creative and experiment and make mistakes and fall and fail, but without the burden of your guilt. The freedom of the Kingdom of God. But we know that freedom is a problem, too.

Last Sunday I said that the grand strategy of God’s sovereignty was to go through communities of Jesus. Okay. But it’s from the constrictions of communities that we so often feel the need to free ourselves. You had to leave home in order to be free, you had to leave your home town or your family. The contradiction of freedom and community finds a constant reconciliation in a church. Our mission is to practice the constant pardoning of each other’s trespasses against us, and also to practice hospitality to each other’s strengths and weaknesses and warts and goiters and gifts and talents. The hospitality follows on the pardoning, just as Jesus gave both to the criminal.

A second contradiction is between your freedom and the sovereignty of God. If God is in control, if God chooses and predestines, then how can you be free? God has a plan, God has a goal in mind and an end in sight, so what choice do you have? Well, the sovereignty of God is not a pushy one. God does not push God’s plan from the start and forward into time. It’s rather that God is already at the end and gathering us all home. God is gathering all our freely chosen creativities and God is making good out of all of our mistakes and converting our failures and carrying our sufferings and shaping salvation out of it all of it. Let your life flow as you want it, and God gathers the stream of your life into God’s great river. Or as Jeremiah says, God is the shepherd who gathers your wandering on the mountains so wonderfully that you arrive at home.

Amen, Today, says Jesus from the cross. It’s not just a man talking, it is God talking, for as Colossians says, “in him all the fullness of God is pleased to dwell, and through him God is pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether in heaven and on earth, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” So here is reconciliation of all our contradictions. It is the fullness of this holy and eternal love which is exposed upon the cross. The reconciliation of God’s righteousness and God’s mercy. The reconciliation of our judgment and our peace. The reconciliation of God’s power and your freedom, the reconciliation of God’s sovereignty and your freedom, all of this is gathered into that great hospitality of God’s love. God is doing the gathering. It is for you to let God gather you and for you to love God back.

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

November 17 revised, Proper 28; Contradiction 11: The Worst of Times and the Best of Times

Malachi 4:1-2a,
Psalm 98,
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13,
Luke 21:5-19

Live recording of the sermon

The Lord Jesus says this during the last week of his life, a few days after Palm Sunday. He’s teaching in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple is busy with pilgrims arriving to celebrate the Passover.

The Temple is a grand complex of buildings and courtyards; it’s a combination cathedral, White House, and Capitol Building. The Temple has been under construction for fifty years, since 19 BC, in a long-term project of expansion and lavish aggrandizement, with the general backing of the Roman government, and it’s being paid for by taxes and donations. It won’t be finished for another thirty years, in AD 64, and then only six years after that, in AD 70, the whole thing will be burned and demolished by the Roman army of Titus Caesar.

The Lord Jesus was predicting it. He was not speaking here about the end of the world, despite how many Christians keep on reading it this way. He was speaking to his own context. He was predicting the impending catastrophe of Israel. The demolition of the temple. The destruction of Jerusalem. The expulsion of the Jewish population from their own capital city. The exile once again. All of this at the hands of the Romans.

The Lord Jesus could see it coming. He wasn’t the only one. The Jewish leaders feared this too — they who had to manage the Roman occupiers from the underside and keep the lid on their own turbulent people and their aspirations for independence. Over six decades, Jesus was just one of some fifteen patriotic agitators claiming to be “messiah”. Most of them were open to using violence (just as we did in 1776). In the name of God their followers ambushed Roman soldiers and terrorized Samaritans and murdered each other, and finally the Romans had enough, destroying the Temple just forty years after Our Lord’s prediction.

I leave it to your own judgment whether Jesus predicted this out of clear-headed political insight or from some miraculous vision, or both. Biblical prophecy is always both literal and metaphorical, always both political and spiritual, local and global, historical and eternal. In that sense it was the end of the world. Jesus was speaking of a catastrophic adjustment in the religion of the Bible.

He was non-violent, but he was a revolutionary, and he caused a global change: from a religion that was centered geographically and focused politically and defined by ethnicity to a world-embracing and supra-political movement claiming universality, addressing every nation and the life on earth of every human being. It was a whole new way of serving the God of the Bible, and a whole new way of living in this world.

What I do not leave to your own judgment is whether this trouble for Jerusalem was the result of God’s manipulation of historical events or the predictable result of human politics — that is, the cause and effect of what happens when subject peoples act in certain ways against their brutal overlords. It was the latter.

The only manipulation of historical events was God’s incarnation in the Son of Mary and Joseph, and his teaching, and his crucifixion and his bodily resurrection. That was enough for God to do.

That one great singularity has been quite enough for God to insert into the ordinary course of human events in order to catalyze the long-term judgment of the world. So that the nations judge themselves. The principalities and powers expose themselves. The living Word of the Lord Jesus is the once-for-all and perfectly sufficient catalyst by which the truth keeps coming out about the world, and about the pretensions of our empires and our self-destructions and our devices and desires, and about our simple daily hopes and fears.

In this judgment of the world we are given a critical part to play, and that is by means of a very strange strategy: little communities of Jesus scattered through the empire. Little congregations, fragile, powerless, like in Thessalonika. What a contradictory strategy for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, by which to exercise his Lordship and dominion over all the earth. I mean the Thessalonian Board of Deacons needs instruction on whom they can give free food to and whom not, and the Thessalonian Board of Elders needs advice on what do with those freeloaders and busybodies that every church attracts, and is this the strategy of God for overcoming the world?

Yes, our little communities of Jesus are the squadrons and battalions in the army of the Lord of Hosts. But our only weapon is our witness, our only strategy is our testimony to the Word of God. We’re like United Nations peacekeepers, we’re like the Canadian army, we have to have the same instinct for world domination as Canadians do. Hah!

This strategy of witness is not based on the testimony of individuals, despite the emphasis of evangelicalism, but on the testimony of congregations, even little congregations; and that not by their public statements or pronouncements, but by their life together — how their mutual behavior with each other gives form and shape and character to the Words of God which they rehearse. We are the witnesses. That’s all. We are not the judges, nor the juries, nor prosecutors nor public defenders, we are just the witnesses. That’s enough. And because it’s from our life together more than from what we say, that’s a lot. 

I know for myself that often I just want to go to church and worship God and then go home. No coffee hour, thank you, no gossip, no nervous conversations, no membership, no committee work, all the stuff that comes with congregations, pledging, tithing, obligations, weeknight meetings, it’s like one more co-op to go with the food co-op and the building I live in.

That’s why I always go to church when I’m on vacation, because that’s when I can just walk in and worship God and walk right out again. I don’t have to do all this other stuff. Do you wish for that when you come here? You’re allowed to. We give you room for that, as long as you need it. We will not judge you, because we are not your judges.

But you know you can’t love God if you don’t love your neighbor, and being forgiven of your trespasses means you forgive those who trespass against you, especially church members, and the worship of God requires ethics, so you practice your ethics on your fellow worshipers. And thus a group of worshipers who practice their ethics on their fellow worshipers is what you would call a community of Jesus.

That’s why we do this, Old First, this community of Jesus within the community of Brooklyn: contradictory but not antagonistic, contradictory but not fearful, contradictory but not angry, not defensive, not different, not even distinctive, but fully engaged in the same life of the world with everybody else, in the same schools and the same soccer leagues and the same restaurants — but then also by our life together as a fragile congregation bearing witness to the foolishness of the Cross and the impossibility of the Sovereignty of God.

It is the best of times and the worst of the times. We live with the great contradiction of the absolute sovereignty of God on the one hand, and on the other, the freedom and success of pride and prejudice and vengeance and violence and hatred and destruction in the world. The obvious temptation is for us to live defensively in anger and in fear, as if our Christian duty in our culture is to defend a better past, or preserve a Christian nation or Christian civilization, or protect our Christian values. Many Christians feel the need to do that in America, but that is like fighting to defend the temple in Jerusalem. As Jesus says, “Do not go after them.”

Of course America is under judgment, but not by us. We are not the judges nor the jury, for every nation must now judge itself against the standards of the gospel, exposing to itself its violence, exposing to itself its greed, exposing to itself its disregarding of the poor. Of the contradictory patterns of healing and generosity and love we are witnesses. Even in our weakness, especially in our weakness, for then it is Jesus who is exposed in us and in our common life.

The whole point of this sermon is to encourage you, congregation of Old First, so that you “not be weary in doing what is right.” You are tempted by our weakness and by your experience of suffering which contradict the promises of God. And even the promises can be contradictory. Jesus says, “Some of you they will put to death, but not a hair of your head will perish.” So, you’ll die but with a full head of hair? Of course, prophetic language is never not both literal and metaphorical. How about this: “Old First, you will be betrayed by your colleagues and even hated because of the name of Jesus, but not a rib from your sanctuary ceiling will ever fall.”

But of course it’s how we deal with the falling of our ceiling that is our chance to witness. We bear witness by the priorities that we set for our community in such a trying situation, where we put our energy and love. Because as our preacher (Rev. Dr. Steve Pierce) said to us last week, Old First, you are not your building. You are not your pastor, you are not your history, you are not your program. You are your community of Jesus within the community of Brooklyn welcoming persons of every race, ethnicity, and orientation to worship, serve, and love God and to love your neighbors as yourselves. You just do this, and you let God take care of judging the world and saving it. It is God who loves it, after all, and more than you do!

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

November 3, Proper 26: Contradictions 10: Zacchaeus

Isaiah 1:10-18, Psalm 32:1-8, 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12, Luke 19:1-10

One of our elders was in the Midwest at one of our Christian colleges, and a professor there who is an acquaintance of mine introduced herself to him. He told me that she said that she wanted to meet him because Daniel was always boasting about Old First. She meant it well, but when I heard this I thought to myself, “Oh dear, I do go on, I must be such a bore.” So I was comforted by the epistle for this week, 2nd Thessalonians 1:4, where St. Paul writes: “Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God.”

I do boast of you. I know there is significant self-interest in my doing so, it makes me look good, so please forgive me, but I celebrate the possibility of a real and vital Christian congregation. You exhibit what St. Paul writes: “Your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing.” Yet, while it’s true that Old First is facing some daunting challenges, we cannot really say that our church has to endure persecutions and afflictions, not compared to what churches endure in Syria and Egypt and Indonesia. Still, as individuals many of you are enduring great afflictions and even some persecutions, and yet you remain steadfast and faithful. And yes, we could always do better, and yes, we must always be praying that God will make us worthy of his call, but you can believe that God will continue to fulfill by his power every good resolve that you make, and every work of faith that you attempt, that the name of Jesus may be glorified in you, Old First. Oh yes, I boast of you.

You as a congregation are evidence that the Christian faith is not just an ideal, and it’s more solid than a mystery up in the air. It’s a real live thing for real life in the real world, and you give it shape and space within the structures and systems of the world.

True enough, our churchly structures and systems are always compromised, and always at least a bit complicit in the corrupted systems of the world, and we always fall short of the glory of God. As I said last week, the gospel both calls you to religion and also tells you that your religion never measures up. That ongoing contradiction we heard again this morning in Isaiah’s condemnation of the very sacramental practices which the Law of God ordained.

Of course the problem was that the sacramental practices were not accompanied by the more costly practices of seeking justice and rescuing the oppressed and caring for the poor. But then immediately the prophet offers cleansing and absolution if they confess the truth about themselves. That confession and absolution is what I’m going to call today a “feedback-loop”.

We can say that even though our practice of the Christian faith is never pure and that it never reaches its own ideal, it has built within it a number of effective feedback-loops for repentance and reconciliation and revival, which make the whole thing very doable in real time. It is doable and you are doing it. Yes, there are contradictions built into the Christian faith, as we have seen for ten weeks now, but those contradictions are not discrediting—they are rather honest to God and to our experience, and they are not deadening but generative and creative, and we can work them out in real terms in real life. It’s doable.

Which brings me to our gospel lesson, the story of Zacchaeus. I will offer an interpretation that contradicts the common one, including all my previous sermons on this passage. Until today I have always followed Calvin and other interpreters in assuming that Zacchaeus was converted here, that his encounter with the Lord had turned him from being a bad guy tax-collector to a penitential tax-collector. This common interpretation is what you would expect from our English translation (NRSV) of verse 8: “Look, half of my possessions I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anything to anyone I will give it back fourfold.” Notice the verbs in the future tense, “I will give to the poor, I will give it back fourfold.”

But this past week I noticed that the Greek verbs are in the present tense. The Greek original reads thus: “Look, half of my income I give to the poor, and from whomever I have wrongfully exacted anything, I give it back fourfold.” He’s already doing it. Do you believe that such is possible of a government official? I don’t think the crowd does. I don’t think the Pharisee would from the parable last week.

But he’s rich! Jesus just accepting him would contradict what Jesus said in Luke chapter 6, “Woe to you who are rich now,” and what Jesus said in chapter 18, that “it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” But at the same time, how about if the rich man has built in a feedback loop, by giving the half of his income to the poor? Remember from last month the parable of the Crooked Steward, when Jesus said, “Make friends for yourselves with unrighteous mammon, so that when it runs out, you will be welcomed into the eternal habitations.” Isn’t that what Zacchaeus is doing?

Okay, he’s not perfect, indeed, he is complicit in a corrupting system, but who of you are not? (This is the true meaning of the doctrine of Total Depravity---we're all corrupted.) Look, the Romans would demand those taxes be collected anyway, so why not do it in such a way to benefit the poor? And if it also makes him rich, is there anything good that anyone of you does without some small measure of self-interest? Like when I boast of you?

You will ask why he wrongfully exacted anything from anyone to begin with. Well, that will have been inevitable, the way the system worked. As I said last week, the Roman system of taxation required some level of legalized extortion. But Zacchaeus, to his credit, had a feedback-loop, and the fourfold repayment was generous compensation for the trouble the system had caused. And so in complicated and complicit circumstances, Zacchaeus manages to find a way to demonstrate the economic values of the kingdom of God. I think this must have encouraged Jesus the week before he died.

So then why are the people grumbling? Are they’re jealous that he’s rich? Or that, even for all the good he does, he’s still complicit with the Romans, and he’s unkosher from handling unclean money? It’s really Jesus they are grumbling at, because he contradicts their expectations of whom the Lord accepts. They grumble at the sovereignty and freedom of the grace of God.

But the free and sovereign grace of God is very great comfort when you face the truth that everything that you do in your Christian life has some fault or flaw within it and always some complicity. Nothing you do is pure. Even every good thing that you do has some small measure in it of self-interest. And so you have to repent and be reconciled, and build into your life some realistic feedback-loops, some actions of selflessness and sacrifice. Not because God needs your sacrifice, but because you do. Not just to keep you humble, but to keep you tuned in to the grace of God. You have to build some contradictions into your own life in order to keep yourself on the homing signal of God’s free and sovereign love.

Tithing is one such thing. Because to be a Christian in the real world, in real time, with real things, must include your money. Tithing is a feedback-loop. It’s how you contradict the constant whispering of your evident self-interest, and how you set real limits on yourself. It’s a combination spiritual and economic exercise you need to do to keep in tune.

What we mean by tithing is that you give back to God the top percentage of your income. The Biblical goal is the top ten percent, but you can start with one percent if it is new to you, as long as it’s the top one percent of your budget, before you budget for anything else. And then every year you try to raise yourself by one percent again, till you reach ten. And yes, there is self-interest in your tithing, because of the services the church gives back to you. You get community, you get the Word of God in real terms, you get the means of repenting of your sins and reconciling yourself to God. You get music and education Look, you get back from what you give.

It goes without saying that teaching you to tithe is in the obvious self-interest of the church. Like, “you should tithe, and give it to us.” Which is why we build in many feedback-loops in the systems of Old First. But at the same time, it’s a realistic part of your participation in the Kingdom of God, because it’s in the form of congregations, like the Thessalonians, like the Park Slopians, like the Israelites, like the Brooklynites, it’s in the form of churches that the Christian faith takes real form in the real world. Old First is a "salvation-reality."

A church is not an end in itself, it must always look beyond itself and find its meaning in the larger scope and larger purposes of the Kingdom of God, and yet the Lord has made the church the necessary witness and first-fruit of the Kingdom of God. Your congregation makes the Christian faith something more solid than a mystery up in the air. Your congregation makes the Christian faith a real live thing for real life in the real world, and you give it shape and space within the structures and patterns of the world.

This shape and space deserve your participation. Every Sunday the Lord Jesus says to you, “You come down, because I’m going to your house today. And you are happy to welcome him. Today salvation has come into this house.”

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

October 27, Proper 25: Contradictions 9: The Gospel Contradicts Religion

Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22, Psalm 84:1-6, 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18, Luke 18:9-14

The Pharisee and the tax collector. The patriot and the collaborator. The Pharisee wants the Kingdom of God, literally and politically, and the tax collector works for the Empire of the Romans.

The Pharisee keeps himself clean and pure to be qualified for the Kingdom of God when it comes. The tax collector’s employment makes him unclean, handling unclean Roman coins, stamped with that idolatrous image of Caesar, which makes him a traitor to his own nation, and which makes of him a constant thief, in the eyes the people, as he earns his living by his surcharge on the tax, a sort of legalized extortion.

The older translations of the Bible styled the tax collector a “Publican,” so this is called the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, and despite our dislike of the Pharisees, this Publican would not have been your friend.

We miss the force of this parable if we read as if their prayers were Protestant private prayers. So let me give you its original context. There was only one temple in Israel, the one in Jerusalem. There were many synagogues, in all the towns. You could pray in synagogues, every week, on the Sabbath, as still is done, of course. But in the temple the prayers were offered every day, and not led by rabbis but by Levites and priests. Plus, the prayers in the temple were centered on the daily sacrifices, sacrifices of animals, of lambs — one at dawn and one at the ninth hour, say 3:00 pm, the sacrifices which made atonement for the sins of Israel. Once their sins were covered by the blood of the lamb,  they were permitted to make their prayers to God. The Levites ignited the incense, and as the smoke of the incense rose, the prayers rose up, from the Levites around the altar of the sacrifice, making supplication for the whole of Israel, from the people in attendance, making their own supplications and intercessions.

Also praying is this Pharisee. He’s not interceding or supplicating, he is lifting up his hands in thanksgiving. He’s off to the side so that he won’t get touched by anyone who might contaminate his purity. He is strict and more than strict, fasting more often than the Torah mandated, and tithing more completely than the Torah required. So we would love this guy to be a member of Old First, even if we’re irritated by his self-righteousness in thanking God that he’s such a righteous guy.

Also praying is that Publican, far off in the back, and quite unwelcome. He’s a bad man. Maybe he’s the guy who was giving all the trouble to that poor widow from the parable last week! He knows he’s bad. So he’s praying with his head down, and he’s beating his breast, like we did last month in the synagogue on the night of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. He prays, not just “God be merciful to me, a sinner,” but more literally and specifically, “God, let the Atonement be for me, the sinner.” He’s guilty, and he knows he has no right to talk to God apart from the bloody sacrifice which is offered to cover his sins.

And that’s why he’s the one who’s justified. That’s why he is rectified and qualified to enter the Kingdom of God. That’s the contradiction, that the righteous guy is reckoned as unqualified, and the unrighteous guy is reckoned as qualified. This is the gospel’s contradiction to religion, this is the paradox preached by Martin Luther, this is the antithesis instituted by John Calvin, this is the quite contrary doctrine of the Reformation, and because it is contrary we need reminding of it every week, we need to hear it every Sunday as the morning news.

It’s not that God prefers the Publican to the Pharisee. God would just as soon justify the good guy as the bad guy. But the Pharisee has not offered up himself. The Publican did. It was his bad self that he offered, but it was his true self. My wife put it this way: the Publican knows his life is a dirty business. The Pharisee doesn’t know that being human is a dirty business. The Pharisee doesn’t admit, not even to himself, that he’s just as needy of God’s grace as the Publican. It’s that tragedy of unawareness that I spoke about three weeks ago.

The Publican is aware of himself. And all the Publican has to offer to God is his own sinful self. The only gift he has to give to God is his need of God, and his need of God giving freely and indiscriminately back to him, without regard for his deserving it. The Lord Jesus does not say that the Publican went home to make amends, or try to be better to show how sorry he truly was. We’d like him to do that, we’d like him to stop extorting money from the people, but that would miss the point of the parable, that the grace of God is not conditioned by our proving it in our behavior.

Both of them are in us all the time. Don’t say, “Oh, I’m like the one and not the other.” You are always both. You have both in you. You have the contradiction running in you all the time. You compare yourself to others, and you justify yourself. You also know your guilt and you bow your head in shame. The gospel both judges you and comforts you. It resurrects you to new life but first it lays you dead. The gospel calls you to religion and it tells you your religion cannot measure up. The contradiction between religion and the gospel is one you recapitulate each week.

So what do you do? Take a clue from the epistle, from what St. Paul wrote to Timothy. He sounds a little like the Pharisee, almost like he’s boasting. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race,” I’m not a loser, I’m a winner, “I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day.” Well, St. Paul, aren’t you special.

Of course, considering the fact that he’s got prison chains on him while he writes this, he’s sort of got the right to speak like this. And he does not exalt himself by degrading other people. He does admit that other people did him wrong, that they did not support him, that they deserted him, but he asks that it not be counted against them. He wants grace for them too. He forgives them. He has to keep on forgiving them in his own mind, no doubt, because in his prison cell he’s reminded of their desertion every day again. His reason to forgive them is not in them, and not in himself, but in God, and the love and the grace of God, which is what he wants to be true to. 

So yes, take this clue from the epistle. Thank God for where you are, and what God has done for you, and then also love your enemies, and pray God’s grace and favor on those persons who have done you wrong. Be thankful to God, and reckon yourself among the Publicans who know their need of God. What God loves to see in you is your desire for God.

Today we will baptize Ronald, who has acted upon the desire of his life for God. We heard his testimony here last Spring, and he told us that from his childhood he believed in God, but that when in his youth he requested baptism, he was refused. He was not welcome in the Temple, so to speak, he was not welcome at the sacrifice or in the prayers. But like St. Paul, he kept his faith. That’s the remarkable gift of grace that Our Lord Jesus was working in him through the years, that Ronald did not reject his faith because of his rejection by the church. As St. Paul wrote, “no one came to my defense, but all deserted me.” But then, “May it not be counted against them,” which he has demonstrated today by seeking out the church again. He fought the good fight, he is finishing the race, he is keeping the faith, and the water and oil we will put upon his head will be his crown of righteousness.

His baptism is a gift of God for him but also for the rest of you. You are to see in the sacrament today a story of requited love. Not unrequited love, but requited love. It is the love of God that touches the contradictions in our lives to comfort them. This is the love of God which converts the tragedy of your unawareness to the comedy of your acknowledgment and the feast of your recognition. Look up, you belong here. Look up, there is love coming here. Look up, receive the little gift, behind the little gift is the boundless and inexhaustible love of God for you.

Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

October 20, Proper 24: Contradictions 8: The Unjust Judge

Genesis 32:22-31, Psalm 121, 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5, Luke 18:1-8

We have two contradictions today. The first one is forthright: that God is compared to a judge who is unjust. Jesus compares that spiritual being who is most righteous to a human official who is not. Such a comparison is offensive in Islam, but the parables of Jesus force us to get used to Our Lord doing this, using contrary characters. Not just to make his point, but to shake us up, to open us up.

Of course we often do find God to be unjust, both philosophically and personally. Philosophically, if God is responsible for the world as we know it, and if God is all-powerful and omnipotent, then the fact of so much unrelenting injustice in the world must finally be God’s fault, and it therefore follows that God must be unjust. 

Speaking personally, how much of my own experience as a Christian, as a pastor, has felt unfair, and even if I do confess the faults of my own, and my own responsibility for most of my losses and my suffering, still there is a surplus of unfairness in the lives of those I care about. And God just lets it go unanswered. I can testify that there were many years of my life when I felt God was being unfair to me.

Wisdom would say, Buck up and bear it. Get over it, get on with it. When I was a kid I used to get lots of trouble from my older brother. I would go to my dad, and he would say, “Fight your own battles.” Which meant, implicitly, don’t be like the widow in the parable.

None of you wants to be like her either. We’d call her shrewish. Not shrewd, but shrewish. A nag. A cry-baby. Who wants to keep crying to God day and night? Who wants to be so tiresome? Get real. Accept the realities of life. If you expect justice all the time you’re asking for constant frustration and you’re no fun to be with.

In America our justice is relatively good. In much of the world a bribe is just assumed. When Jesus told his parable, the obvious solution was for the widow to pay the judge the money he was waiting for. Which, in other terms, is the basis of so much religion. You want something from God, so you offer something in exchange. “Dear God, give me this, and I promise I’ll be a better person, or I’ll do this or that, whatever.”

But in the parable the widow offers nothing to the judge beside her pure demand. So when you pray to God for something, it doesn’t help if you offer something back. That would be a bribe. You should just ask for it and ask for it and ask for it, for no reason other than that you think it’s right for you to receive it. But even that gets tiresome. Who wants to keep on praying like that?

Now let me ask you this. Why do you come here on Sundays? Do you come here because you’re looking for justice? Likely not. In other times and places that is what congregations were praying for. Like in Montgomery, Alabama, in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Or like in Syria right now, in the Syrian Orthodox Church, that most ancient of Christian churches, whose members are in danger of their lives from either side. For thirteen centuries these people have been crying to God for justice day and night.

Do we ask enough of God? Do we demand enough of God? Do we expect enough of God? Do we keep our expectations minimal, limited, and well-controlled? If we don’t ask much, we won’t be disappointed. We are modern people after all, we are not superstitious, nor fundamentalist, we don’t go round saying “God did this for us” and “God did that for us.” We know what life requires and what life offers and we deal with it. So we do not ask enough of God, we let God off the hook. We want to be respectable, we don’t want to come off like that widow.

So you need this balance: You should allow yourself to make every request of God that seems right to you. You should not filter your requests to God. If it seems right, ask it. But, at the same time, commit yourself to long-term learning of what it is that God desires to offer you. For example, if you want to be wealthy, ask for it. Be true to yourself and be honest in your relationship with God. If you want justice, ask for it. And if you are doing the long-term learning of what God desires to offer and expect, then you learn that God is a lot more interested in giving you justice than wealth. Your goal is that by long-term spiritual training your deepest requests begin to conform to what God offers and expects. Your honest and candid prayers are balanced by humble and costly learning.

Which brings us to the epistle, Second Timothy. It is recalling us to scripture, to the trustworthiness of scripture, the necessity of scripture, and the discipline of scripture, for our proficiency and our equipment in the world. The epistle reminds us that there is sound doctrine and bad doctrine, and the bad doctrine is often more attractive and appealing than the sound doctrine. And a great deal of bad doctrine purports to tell you want God offers and what God expects, and what you should pray for and what you might as well forget about. You need to learn what’s right in this and what is wrong, and the way to learn it is through the mature and patient study of the public documents of scripture. Pray for what you want, and study to learn what God wants.

The gospel lesson tells you to pray exactly what’s on your mind, and do not filter it. But we’re not talking about a couple of prayers, or what you are asking for this week, we’re talking about long-term prayer, we’re talking about months and months of prayer, years and years, we’re talking about prayers that wear God out, like the Civil Rights Movement, and like the churches in Syria, who have been praying for justice for 1300 years. If that’s what you’re willing to do, and stay at it, then go ahead, tell God exactly what’s on your mind.

So then, is it possible that the prayers you offer have an influence on God? That’s certainly what Jesus seems to say. Your prayers do have an influence on God. Not based on how long you pray or how often you pray — it’s a parable, it’s comic, you can get past that overly literal conclusion — but based on the character of the teller of the parable, the nature of the God who became incarnate, the God who allowed his person to be taught by a mother and trained by a father and surprised by a leper and moved by Mary and Martha. In Jesus we see that God is taken by your prayer. Not by how often you pray it or how long, but by who you are and what you ask. You have an influence on God.

And that’s the second contradiction. How can that be so if God knows everything already and has chosen already and predestined already and elected already? This contradiction is one that Our Lord himself will not resolve. Not logically, and certainly not philosophically, to the frustration of theologians over the centuries who have wrestled with the problem of God’s sovereignty and our freedom, God’s predestination and our free will, God’s omnipotence and our responsibility.

What I like about Reformed Church doctrine is that we don’t let the obvious reality of our freedom and our free will and the evident necessity of our responsibility diminish the less obvious promise of God’s predestination and the less evident truth of God’s omnipotence and sovereignty. These two truths have a difficult marriage, but “What the Lord hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

The resolution has to be in prayer. The wrestling you do with God in prayer. The back and forth you have with God in prayer. The resolution of the contradiction is not in the logic on the page but in the wrestling of your heart. Like Jacob in our first lesson. You have to grapple the contradiction in the dark night of your soul and in your darkest passages of grief and loss. God will surely bless you, but it will surely cost you, and you’ll be limping in the morning, but don’t let go of God.

God wants you in partnership. You have to consider your influence on God. But even more, you have to accept God’s influence on you. Keep at it; your long-term praying works back on you to shape you and transform you, so that your mind begins to merge with God’s mind, and also that you yourself become part of God’s answer. The answer to your prayer begins to flow back through you into the world. You will discover that what you get from this is hope. Hope. Real living hope. You will feel that the God who is gripping you in your struggle is the God who is embracing you in love.


Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

October 13, Proper 23, Contradictions 7: Dirty Water, Faithful Denial

2 Kings 5:1-3; 7-15c, Psalm 111, 2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19

We have four contradictions today. The first one is in the gospel lesson, when the Lord Jesus speaks contrarily. First, he tells the ten lepers to go to a priest to get certified as healed, which they do. On the way, they realize they are healed, but they keep following the Lord’s instructions, except that one of them turns around and comes back to him. The Lord gives him credit for this, which is fine — but the problem is that he questions the other nine for doing what he had told them to do.

Unless his questions are not rhetorical but real. That is, the Samaritan leper had surprised him. There was a surplus in the Samaritan’s response, a surplus which surprised Our Lord, and then, having seen it, Jesus says, “Hey, I wonder why this one is the only one who did this?” We can allow the Lord Jesus to have his surprise and wonder too.

The second contradiction is the standing one we saw again last week, the contradiction between God’s promises and our experience. If it was his faith that made him well, then why am I still sick? I have faith, I've prayed, and I’m still sick. The answer of conventional religion is that there must be a  problem with my faith, that it isn't great enough. But Jesus contradicted that last week: he said your faith should be the size of a mustard seed, so the greatness or smallness of your faith is immaterial.

I have to tell you that our English translation of what Jesus said doesn't help. He doesn't say, “Your faith has made you well.” He actually says, “Your faith has saved you,” which is more than a little different. Think about the story: all ten of them were made well, all ten of them were healed, and not by their faith, but by the free and invisible action of Jesus as they walked away from him. It’s only the tenth one who was both healed and saved. And getting saved — what it means to get “saved,” in the Gospel of Luke, is to accept and enjoy the Lordship of Jesus, to get saved is to enter the Realm of God, right then and there, to get saved is to receive the Kingdom of God. Which is what only the tenth one did when he turned around and returned to Jesus.

So from Luke’s point of view, you are saved. You here. You came here today to say, Lord, have mercy on us, and then also to offer up your thanks to God, so you are within the Kingdom of God right now. You are saved, you are safe, even in whatever you are suffering. You are within God’s sovereignty, and God will keep you safe.

In the case of our first lesson, the prophet Elisha did more than make General Naaman well, he also saved him — he made him receive the Kingdom of God. That’s why Elisha told him to bathe himself in the dirty waters of the Jordan. To Naaman it sounded contradictory — our third today — and at first he wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t either. Go wash in the Gowanus, and you’ll be healed.

The story is intentionally comic. It’s a joke on the king of Israel, who thinks it’s a set up. It’s a joke on Naaman, when he shows up at Elisha’s door with his horses and chariots and all his retinue, and the prophet doesn’t even get up from his crossword puzzle, but sends out his servant with the message. Then, at the edge of the river Naaman has to endure the shame of getting undressed and exposing his nakedness, not to mention his awful skin, before the eyes of his lessers.

It’s comic that he has to go seven times into the water. Once, still leprous. Twice, still leprous. Three times, everyone is looking to see if there is any change. Four times, Naaman is humiliated by the show, but he can’t stop now. Five times, any hope? Six times, what if this doesn’t work, what a fool he’s been, but he goes in the seventh time, and then, the laughter of relief, and maybe tears as well.

The reason for this whole show, and why Elisha did not just heal him while he stood outside his door, is that Naaman had to get baptized. The water was symbolic. Just as the Israelites had to cross the Jordan to enter the Promised Land, so did this foreigner, this enemy of Israel. He had to brave the boundary waters, seven times to test his faith, like marching seven times around the walls of Jericho. He had to enter the Kingdom of God and receive the Kingdom of God. He’s been saved. So he doesn’t go straight home. Like the Samaritan he returns to the man of God to confess his faith.

Naaman confessed his faith, and the Samaritan offered thanksgiving. To practice gratitude is to practice your faith. That’s a take home for today. If you want to live by your faith, then practice thanksgiving. Thanksgiving to God is the best way to express your faith and the best way to rehearse your faith and the best way to maintain your faith. To practice gratitude is to practice your faith. For does it not take faith to do it — to be grateful to God even when you are suffering, even when you keep on waiting to be made well. That you still return to God, that you still worship God, that you still give thanks to God, that you still keep wanting to live within the Kingdom of God—that’s what faith does and what it takes faith to do.

It is challenging. You need encouragement. Your faith runs thin. You have your doubts, and you know you have your weaknesses. The Bible is full of positive characters who stumbled in their faith, or failed in faith, or even lost their faith. From our Second Lesson it looks like Reverend Timothy was facing that and he needed encouragement. His church was small and struggling. His mentor was in jail, and the whole Christian movement looked very weak indeed.

St. Paul reminds him of one of their early Christian hymns. It's a poem with four lines. The first two lines are fine: “If we’ve died with him we’ll also live with him, if we endure with him we’ll also reign with him.” So far so good. Not just for the future. Living right now, reigning somehow right now. Often it doesn’t feel like it, but see your life that way, like Malala Yousafzai, for example.

The third line is the hard part: “If we deny him he’ll also deny us.” Uh oh. Does that mean eternally? Does that mean that even though God says Yes to you, your No to God can overturn that Yes? That contradicts the Reformed Church doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints, that doctrine of comfort and consolation, that if God has called you to salvation, nothing weak or sinful that you do or say can overturn God’s call on you, so that God, who began a good work in you, will see it through to completion, no matter how you stumble or fail from the sin which still lives on in you.

Could we make sense of this third line by saying that there’s a denial that comes from strength, when you just plain say No to God, and God will let you have your way, and there’s also a denial that comes from weakness, or fear, or shame, or guilt, and God will not let your No be the last word? Think about St. Peter and his denial of Jesus three times before the cock crowed on Good Friday, and yet Jesus did not deny him back. Do I dare say that what Jesus denies is your denial?

And is the fourth line not contrary to the third? "If we are faithless, he remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself.” Even when you break faith, he will not break faith. Well, there’s the promise, and that’s the promise you have to hold on to. Not that I can make these four lines add up nice and neat, but no matter what the third line says it’s not the last line.

Your faithless denial never gets to be the last word. The last word is always God’s. And God’s last word is always Yes. To you. I know you doubt God, you look away from God, you strike out at God, you rage at God, you even say No to God, but God gets the last word, and God’s last word to you is always Yes. Because God’s love is as eternal and unfathomable and unending as God’s own self.

It’s hard to believe. And so you have to rehearse the thanksgiving. Which is why our liturgy is set up the way it is, it’s designed to help you rehearse each week the process of believing. We go from the promise in the sermon, to the “Okay, I believe it” of the Creed, which then leads you to the “Lord have mercy,” which then leads you to the intercessory prayers for all the suffering — for all the people who still need in one way or another to experience that Yes — which then leads you to the Great Thanksgiving.

We do that Great Thanksgiving every week in order for you to keep your faith alive, because how you practice having faith in God is to rehearse your Thanksgiving to God. And what God gives back to you is more than just faithfulness — what God gives back to you is love. For God cannot deny God’s self, and God is love.

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

October 6, Proper 22, Contradictions 6: Free Grace and Obligation

Habakkuk 1::1-4; 2:1-4, Psalm 37:1-10, 2 Timothy 1:1-14, Heidelberg Catechism Q1, Luke 17:5-10

Note: We mark today our 359th Anniversary.

We have three contradictions today. The first is the contradiction of obligation and free grace. Your obligation is the message of our gospel lesson. Your faith is an obligation that you have. You think of your faith as something you freely chose, your choice to add meaning and fulfillment to your life, but the gospel says that it was your duty anyway, your faith is obligatory, you owe it to God, you are accountable for it. What you have freely chosen is only not to be delinquent, not to have defaulted on your obligations, and what credit is that to you? You are only doing what you’re supposed to do.

For most of history, people lived their lives in terms of obligations. You behaved yourself according to the expectations of a whole thick web of obligations. But the evolution of modernity in Western civilization has changed all that. We put a premium on freedom. We believe in self-fulfillment. Your truest obligation is to yourself. The ideal of our education is our self-discovery. So everybody gets rewarded, everybody gets applauded, everybody gets a prize just for showing up. Every Park Slope toddler who manages to get his foot somewhere near that soccer ball gets a great cheer from his parents looking on. We've changed the meaning of “praiseworthy” from the object to the subject. We teach our children to perform expecting praise. I get that. I’m a performer, and I love approval and applause. But the gospel says this to me: “Okay, you preached a good sermon; you were supposed to, what do you want, a medal? You want recognition? Go visit some prisoners in jail.”

My uncle in the Netherlands was recognized as a “Righteous Gentile” by the Government of Israel for the Jews he protected during World War II. He did not care to be recognized. He did not think of himself as a hero. He felt he had no choice but to do what he did. He knew that doing the right thing might mean his own suffering, and of course he always tried to minimize the suffering, but he also believed that the potential for suffering did not negate his obligation.

Your religion is your obligation. You are supposed to worship God. It’s what you’re made for. You’re supposed to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and you’re supposed to love your neighbor as yourself. You’re supposed to keep the Ten Commandments. So if you do these things, you should not expect any extra consideration back from God. You should not expect any less suffering or any more success than anybody else. What the gospel is saying.

But what about free grace? What about the passionate love of God for us, the God who comes to find us and pays the cost for us with God’s own blood? Doesn’t God keep promising to bless us?

The contradiction is the open secret of the gospel. Your life is not your own, you owe it to God, and you’ve defaulted. Your life is not your own, and you belong to your faithful savior Jesus Christ, who has fully paid for your default. The resolution of this contradiction is not so much logical as personal, in the person of the Lord Jesus, whose death upon the cross is the guarantee of grace and the incentive of your obligation. “Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.”

The resolution of the contradiction of obligation and free grace is the person of the Lord Jesus. We maintain the contradiction in order to witness to the necessity of his Lordship. Maintaining the contradiction and pointing to the solution in his Lordship is a particular characteristic of Reformed Church doctrine. As in the Heidelberg Catechism.

Let me say a word about the Heidelberg Catechism, because it is part of the Constitution of the Reformed Church, and I am required to teach it from time to time. It was written in 1563, so this year is its 450th anniversary. It remains the most widely used catechism ever, in the most translations, around the world. Only 91 years after it was written, we began to use it here in Brooklyn. Do the math. Our church was established in October of 1654 by order of Governor Pieter Stuyvesant.

This morning we are marking our 359th Anniversary. Next year is 360. We should have a celebration. We should give out hard-hats and hold it in the sanctuary. I guess we’ll need a committee. We have a lot of choices about the how and when, because there is much about our early history which is lost to us. Most of our early records have been lost. We have no reliable picture of our first building. But we do have these precious heirlooms from 1684, these Communion Beakers.

Just think of how many hundreds of our mothers and fathers have drunk from these cups, our grandmothers Lois and our mothers Eunice. How small the beakers are, compared to our building, but how much they carry. If people think of Old First Reformed Church, they think of this great big Gothic building, but these little beakers carry much more sacred power.

Over these many years our congregation has been through thick and thin, and it has been thick and thin, and twice we almost closed. Our faith has been no bigger than a mustard seed. But that’s big enough, and small enough, because the size of our faith is immaterial. That’s the second contradiction: the smaller your faith, the better. The power of the mustard seed unleashes only when it’s planted in the ground. The strength of your faith is not in your faith itself but in what you plant your faith and in whom you put your faith. You can have a very weak faith and still live by your faith. Good news for every one of you. Good news for this congregation.

The third contradiction is the standing one which we have spoken of before, that contradiction between the promises of God and our experience. As the prophet Habakkuk wrote, “How long, O Lord, shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you, ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” We repeat those lovely affirmations in Psalm 37, and we think, “Yeah, right.” We read about Timothy, that young pastor, whose preaching of the power of the Lord Jesus was contradicted by the suffering of his little congregation and by the imprisonment of Paul, its greatest herald and apostle. So that he was tempted to be ashamed of that gospel and ashamed of Paul. And he kept at it only out of obligation. We today are tempted to be shy and hesitant about our message and ashamed of the Reformed Church which has entrusted it to us.

How long, O Lord, how long must we keep this up? 360 years, 390 years, 490 years? As long as the message is still required. As Habakkuk continues, “Write the vision, make it plain on tablets so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time: it speaks of the end, and it does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.” Are you ashamed? “Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous shall live by their faith.”

Your faith is not the solution to that third contradiction, because that contradiction will keep standing as long as human history endures. Your faith is how you get beyond that contradiction to the vision, the vision of God that our human experience desperately needs but cannot imagine on its own. Your faith is where you live in order to survive your experience, in order even in the midst of suffering to survive and thrive. This is the life-giving vision which God has given to our church, and to keep on presenting this vision is the enduring obligation of this gift to us. The gospel lesson tells us that the long survival of Old First is no great credit to us, it’s only what we’re supposed to do. Not so much keep the congregation going, but keep the vision alive, and gather around it. And whenever we are suffering, whenever we come to the end of our own resources, then God’s power works in us to reveal to the world the same free grace which came to find us to save us.

So don’t be ashamed of yourself or your performance or your experience. Your life is beyond your own capacity to manage its future, but “you know whom you believe in, so be persuaded that he is able to keep that which you’ve committed unto him against that day.” Commit your future to God for God to hold on to till that final day. All your obligations, which are many, and you have defaulted on, all the service that you owe, all the love that you have shorted on, commit that all to God for God to make good on till that final day. Not because your faith is so great, but simply because of who God is. Considering your obligations, your only choice is to surrender to the love of God.

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