Renewing the Chandelier

Old First has this magnificent chandelier. We lowered it a couple weeks ago (a complicated process requiring steel cables, a geared windlass, and a number of ropes) in order to clean it and change the bulbs. Then we built scaffolding around it in order to reach its higher parts. Working in these pictures are Michael, Daniel, Rachel, William, and Christina. Photos are by William and Michael.

February 20, Proper 2, Gleaning, Love, and Deacons

Note: This sermon speaks of two men, who because of my wife, became very important in my life. They were flawed, but yet better men than me. I loved them and they loved me, for which I will be always grateful.

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18, Psalm 119:33-40, 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23, Matthew 5:38-48

My father-in-law Phillip Takken died five years and five days ago in Hudsonville, Michigan. I loved him and he loved me, though he blamed me for his daughter liking to live in Brooklyn. His life’s work was a baby clothes factory in Grand Rapids. He wasn’t the owner, but he was the vice president in charge of production, and over thirty years he brought that factory from twenty operators to four hundred. He didn’t like labor unions, so he gave his employees better conditions and benefits than a union could bargain for. He gave jobs to Viet Nam refugees, and they worked hard for him. He got licenses from the Smurfs and Disney and the NFL and they churned out the sleepers and pajamas by the truckload. One day the owners informed him that they had sold the factory to a conglomerate. A few weeks later he was told the factory was being closed down. They had been bought to get their licenses and then be taken out of production. My father-in-law had to lay off every one of the four hundred workers he had hired over the years and close down the production he had given his life to. The owners walked away with buckets of money. My father-in-law prized loyalty, and he said, “Well, it’s all about the bottom line.”

But in the kingdom of heaven that’s not the bottom line. It’s a top line, it’s a superficial line, it’s a line in the breeze, it’s the conventional wisdom. It’s not the wisdom of God nor the law of God. The real bottom line is the love of neighbor as yourself. I don’t mean love as feeling or affection but actions and practices, even when they cost you or reduce your profits.

Jesus is not talking about charity or generosity. Those things are great, but they are voluntary. He’s talking about something obligatory. It’s obligatory not as a burden but as an attitude in tune with the very deep structures of creation as God designed it. The other mammals have the bottom lines of their appetites or their rank within the herd or their survival. But to choose against your natural appetites and your self-interest in order to love your neighbor is what makes you a human being as God designed you. That’s not charity, that’s actually in keeping with the hard realities of the world, although we keep fooling ourselves against it with our pretended wisdom of the world.

My father-in-law’s father-in-law, that is, my wife’s maternal grandfather, Gerrit Boldt, was a very successful farmer. He grew carrots on forty acres of muck in Grant, Michigan. Muck is black dirt, very fine and fragile; it’s what remains when you drain a swamp. Grandpa Boldt told us once that he was losing a foot of soil a year to erosion from the wind. He told us the main reason was that they had cut down all the trees along the edges of the fields. They had done this to make it easier to turn around their tractors and get a few more rows of crops. But when they cut down the trees they lost the birds who ate the bugs, and they had to start using lots of insecticide, which burned the soil and made it powdery and dry, and as there were no more trees to break the wind, the soil just blew away.

When Leviticus talks about not reaping to the edges of the field, it’s representing the deeper laws of existence, which we think we can ignore, but only for so long. When Leviticus talks about loving your neighbor as yourself and Jesus adds to even love your enemy, they’re telling us the deep laws of existence that we keep ignoring at our peril. The kingdom of heaven is not come on earth to lift us away from real existence, but to bring us back to reality, to get us back into harmony with the deepest structures of creation, the only source of true and lasting prosperity, the great shalom under the great and arching firmament of the sovereignty of God.

People fear that this kind of life will reduce them or disempower them. But if you work out what Jesus says about turning the other cheek, you see that it’s the opposite of that. He most certainly says to not strike back if someone strikes you first. But notice he does not say to roll over. He does not say submit. He says to offer up the other cheek. “Did you call me Roy?” To offer up the other cheek communicates something like, “I don’t believe you hit me,” which the striker might read as “I dare you to hit me again,” and he might think, “Only this time harder.” It takes the power of great self-discipline to act this way. It takes greater courage to turn the other cheek than to strike back, it takes more courage to be non-violent than violent in your resistance to abuse, and you will be tempted to listen to those voices that tell you its less realistic. But Jesus is following Leviticus to call you to the deeper structures of reality, and the long term vision, that “the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,” because it is the will of God.

You need to learn this, because you will have enemies. Especially if you live by love. Do you get that? People seem to think that Christians should have no enemies. But it’s the following of Jesus that will make you enemies. The world resists the holiness of God. But if Jesus loved his enemies who are we who wear his name to do otherwise? Do you want a miracle? Love your enemies. Do you want to work a miracle? It’s easy. Love your enemies. I believe in miracles.

Of course what he calls you to also depends on your having neighbors like yourself who in turn look out for you, who join in your cause, and join you and support you in your obedience. His ethic is not an ethic for heroic individuals, but an ethic for a community of love. It’s an ethic of holiness, because of the holiness of God, and this is the holiness which God requires of us. God says that a village in the Kingdom of Heaven is holy when we consider the fortunes of our neighbors to be essential to the fortunes of ourselves. And who is your neighbor? Well, since this Kingdom claims the whole territory of the world, that means even our enemies are our neighbors. Even your enemy belongs to God, and is therefore holy to you. It doesn’t matter how you feel about them, but what you owe them. You know that’s true, to the deepest structures of the world.

And so we have deacons in the church. They lead us in our intercessory prayers, not only for our own community, not only for the poor and the needy, but also for our enemies. And after they lead us in the offering of our prayers, they lead us in the offering of our money. They collect our money and they count it, and while they may spend most of our money on our own community, they have to make sure that the gleanings and corners of our money go the poor and the aliens, because “God is the Lord.” How large will they make the edges of our fields? How many grapes will they purposely let fall to the ground? You can support them. You can support the deacons by going the second mile with them, and by not refusing them when they beg you for your money.

Jesus got it from Leviticus, that we love our neighbors as ourselves. Yes, it means we have to love ourselves. There is great self-love implied in the command to stand up to the evils and injustice done against you, there is self-respect required in the expectation of self-discipline and self-control. But to love your neighbor as yourself also requires you to treat your neighbor with the same indulgence that you always give yourself. You know how you understand yourself in the best possible light even when you do wrong? Indulge your neighbor as you do yourself. It doesn’t mean to take your enemy’s violence lying down, but it does mean to understand your enemy as you desire to be understood.

This all means that we don’t believe that evil is built into the universe. It means we believe that evil is temporary, and passing, and should never be invested in or given more credit than it deserves. It means to believe that the victory of God is inevitable. It means we believe that we are called to holiness, not a holiness that we can earn or have to earn, indeed, we are holy even in humble repentance, because our holiness is a gift that absorb by having a holy God among us. And God promises to be among us, because God loves us.

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

February 13, Proper 1, Elders Choosing Life: On the Ordination of New Elders at Old First

Deuteronomy 30:14-20, Psalm 119:1-8, 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, Matthew 5:21-37

"Choose life.” Deuteronomy 30:19. Keep choosing life. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, choice after choice, judgment after judgment. By many small choices and judgments. But how do you know what to choose?

The paradigm case is Adam and Eve. God had given them a daily choice for life and not for death. Their choice was between two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They could know the difference between good and evil by trusting in God’s commandment to eat from the first and not from the second.

Not that the fruit of the second was evil or poison; it was good and lovely, and I’m sure other creatures ate it with no problem, but for Adam, God had commanded against it. And so every day Adam had to walk past that tree and choose against his natural appetites and choose for God’s commandment. He had to exercise his judgment and his trust in God, even against his natural appetite, which no other creatures have to do, and to choose against it day after day is what made him and kept him a human being. He had to keep choosing life according to the words of God.

That story is at the beginning of the Torah, the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, and at the far other end, like the other foot of a rainbow, is our lesson from Deuteronomy 30, from the very last speech that Moses gave the Children of Israel, just before they entered the Promised Land. It was for these people (and their parents) that the story of Adam and Eve was first recorded, because they will need it on this occasion. The Promised Land is their own Garden of Eden, and the Laws of Moses are an expanded version of the commandment of the trees. Every day they have to keep on choosing life by choosing to trust God and obey. And their doom will be the same as Adam’s if they make the same kind of choices.

The Children of Israel move into the Promised Land in order to “set forth a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” so to speak, because all men and women are equally in the image of God. This new nation is quite literally the Kingdom of God, the only nation in the world without a human king. Its only king is God, so this new nation is, quite literally, “thy Kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven.”

As they enter the Promised Land, God is giving them responsibility, they’re given responsibility to develop a culture and an economy. They’ll have to make many choices. They’ll have options and possibilities, and many temptations to do it like the other nations do. How will they know what to choose? Short answer: follow the instructions. Do you want God’s blessing? Follow the instructions. Don’t pray for God’s blessing if you’re not following God’s instructions. God doesn’t play games with us, God is straightforward and rather pragmatic. The blessings come from following the instructions, which for Israel, as a political unit, take the form of laws and decrees and ordinances. They describe a way of life. They are the gift of God that calls us to maturity and responsibility. There needs to be at least a little bit of Jewishness in every Christian.

The Laws of Moses left room for judgment calls. How do you apply it here, how do you apply it there, especially as the centuries wore on and the culture developed new situations that were unknown in Moses’ day. The scribes and pharisees dealt with this by ever more detailed applications—where this law counted here for this and but did not count there for that, which Jesus touched on in our gospel lesson. As if you could keep it perfectly by being scrupulous with the precise details. As if you could escape the risk of making judgment calls. Jesus has a very different strategy: he makes it a matter of your heart. Every law always counts every where; not one of them shall ever pass away. But what they count for is your conscience, and your freedom, and your love. Every law always convicts you and every law guides you and every law inspires you. For Jesus the law is the means and not the goal. The goal is life, abundant life, and the goal is love, the love of God.

What Jesus began, the Apostles continued. It was their well-considered decision that the Law of Moses was not binding on the church. What is binding on the church is the Lordship of Jesus. The way that we choose for life is by choosing for him. We cleave to him, we bind ourselves to him, we put our trust in him. We obey him, not as a letter, but as a living Lord. That kind of choosing is harder to define than doing it by the law, but it’s also more personal, and it brings us closer to God. We go so far as to bind ourselves to strong name of the Holy Trinity.

So you, yourself, as an individual believer, are wonderfully empowered and responsible. You are responsible to make judgment calls and daily choices, week after week, year after year. You have the word of God to inspire you and guide you. Not just the law, but also the prophets. And the gospels, and the epistles. Every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And all these words are made so easily available. Not in secret codes, not in priestly mysteries, but in this book, this book that children read. So many of the words in here are sweet and wonderful and as obvious as Mother Goose. So many of the words in here are challenging and daunting and as hard to understand as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But if we are patient and humble we can help each other understand them. A congregation does this when we’re a living community of Jesus.

A congregation is like a village in the kingdom-of-heaven-come-on-earth. In this congregation we live together as a community of Jesus. As I said last week, by our life together we illuminate the kingdom of God for the neighborhoods around us. And how we live together depends upon our constant choices in behavior and how we treat each other. We do this organically all the time in many ways.

But sometimes we have to make judgment calls. Difficult choices. Risky choices. Some of them requiring sensitivity and confidentiality. And that’s why we have elders in our church. A board of elders, in whose spiritual sensitivity we have confidence. We appoint them and anoint them because we trust them and we trust their judgment. We empower them to make choices and judgment calls about our common behavior and our common expectations, with one eye on the Lordship of Jesus and the other eye on our witness to our part of the world.

Next week I’ll preach about our deacons. Our deacons here work very hard and the work they do is very obvious to you. Our elders here work just as hard, but much of what they do is harder to see, and it must be so, for much of what they do is done confidentially. They have to carry burdens in their consciences and their hearts. They deal with the kinds of jealousies and quarreling that we read about in the epistle, the kind of things that develop in a community as naturally as Adam’s appetite. These things are natural and deadly. And the elders have carefully to choose among them in order to choose life for this congregation.

The kingdom of heaven is not something separate way up there. In the Lordship of Jesus the kingdom of heaven is come on earth. Its territory covers everything. It blesses everything and judges everything. This is why our elders have to have daily jobs not in the church but in the world. Our elders make constant subtle choices and judgment calls on how our church can help our human lives receive the Kingdom of God and bear witness to it by our common life. The office of elder is the distinctive office of the Reformed church. Other versions of the church have pastors and deacons, but the office of elder is what makes us Reformed. Our elders have been meeting together for 356 years, as pastors have come and gone, meeting together and choosing life for this community of Jesus. All that we ask of them today is that they keep their watch of three more years, and leave the next 300 up to God. I believe that God will continue to be just as faithful to us as God has always been, because God has chosen life for us, because God loves us.

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

February 6, Epiphany 5: Light and Salt and Beds and Water

Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20

Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world.” Old First, you are the light of Park Slope. You are not the only light, and you are not only for Park Slope, but also for Prospect Heights and Windsor Terrace, etc. You are to illuminate your part of the world. By your good works.

Last week I ended my sermon by saying that in our life together as a congregation we could help little Schuyler Orr learn to see God, and that we can help each other see God. This week I’m going one more step by saying that we can help our community see the Kingdom of God, and what is in it. We can illuminate “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” And today I want to give two very practical examples of how we can do that. Both of them are from Isaiah 58.

First, Isaiah 58:7: “Is it not to bring the homeless poor into your house.” Here is a very clear message for us at Old First, to bring the homeless poor into our house. Look, a few months ago I got a request from a local service agency called CAMBA. (Check the link.) The CAMBA agency asked me if this July and August our church could host a respite shelter for the homeless right here in this room. I think this is something it would be good for us to do, so I passed the request to our deacons, and they are now considering whether the congregation would support it.

The homeless population of New York City is now the highest it’s been since the Great Depression. Our homeless shelters are packed to their capacities. The homeless who sleep in the city’s gigantic public shelters are more likely to stay homeless than those who sleep in the small shelters run by churches and synagogues. These small shelters are being opened up again after the city tried to close them all down. But most of the small shelters shut down for the summer, and there’s a great need for beds during July and August.

A “respite shelter” is a flexible shelter of five to twenty beds that is set up at night and taken down every morning. The agency screens the guests and brings them to the church at 6 pm. The volunteers make an evening meal, and they serve it and eat it with the guests, and then the guests set up their beds and most of the volunteers go home except for a couple folks who stay on all night. At 6 am the guests wake up for coffee and they pack up their shelter into storage and they’re out by 7, with the room completely cleared for other use all day.

We’d need to recruit volunteers. I have no doubt we would find them. I’ve already had expressions of interest from other parishes and civic groups. We have the space, we have the need, and we have Isaiah 58:7: “Is it not to bring the homeless poor into your house?” We can do this. We can respond to God’s call on us. Let the deacons know that you support it. If the deacons approve it, I’ll need six people to serve with me on a steering committee to get the whole thing going.

Second, Isaiah 58:11: “You shall be like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.” I am proposing we install a public drinking-water fountain right outside the front of our church. And let me tell you why: Water is a gift of God for the life of the world; flowing water it is a powerful symbol in the Christian faith; public water is a human right; and a public water fountain can be a wonderful illumination to our community of what’s included in the kingdom of heaven come on earth.

Two years ago I read a book called Bottlemania, by Elizabeth Royte. (Check her link; she lives in Park Slope.) The book describes how public water is being privatized. In our public schools, the water fountains are being removed and replaced by vending machines which sell bottled water and give a cut of the profits back to the administration. In September of 2009 I attended a conference in South Africa and I heard stories of third world governments in the global south which were selling their public water sources to international conglomerates, and the poor no longer have the free use of it, and now they have to buy it, for which they need our foreign aid. At this conference, they said that this is an issue for the churches, because water is a gift of God.

Last spring Elizabeth Royte called me up and said, “How about a public water fountain outside Old First?” Both for the real public need of it and for the message it would represent. I said I liked it but I needed time. Last summer I went to Grand Rapids for the General Council of the World Communion of Reformed Churches (check their link), and they had a workshop on water justice and the church. I thought of Elizabeth’s idea, but it seemed like such a small thing, compared to the realities of India and Africa. But then I mentioned it to the leader of the workshop, who is a theologian from Switzerland, the home of Nestle, which owns Poland Spring. He’s a leader in what’s called the Ecumenical Water Network. (Check their link.) He told me he thought it was a very good idea and we should do it, and they wanted to be part of it: they want us to share with them the process of our doing it and any problems we might face. He said it might seem like such small thing, but it’s a very important thing to do.

We’ll involve the community. We’ll need the support of the Park Slope Civic Council, of which I am a member, and its Committee on Livable Streets. We’ll need the support of our city councilmembers, Brad Lander and Steve Levin; both of them are good friends of Old First. We’ll need to celebrate this thing, and to publicize why we are doing it, and we’ll need creative ways to use the fountain liturgically. We want it to express our faith. So, I’ll need six volunteers to work on this with me. I think I might have two already.

Beds and water. These two things are being asked of us. And Isaiah 58 is telling us to go ahead. You will ask what real difference do these things make? Well, what difference does a light make in the house? It doesn’t move the furniture, it doesn’t clean the dust, it doesn’t fix the walls. So how needs light, right? What real difference does salt make in the soup? What difference does salt make in the omelet? How small a thing is salt, how little it does, but you put it right there on the kitchen table, because it opens up the taste of everything you eat. It is the same with light, it opens up the sight of everything. We need to be salt and light, and we can do it with beds and water.

Look, Old First, you can’t change the world. You can’t even change this neighborhood. But Jesus doesn’t ask you to. He reserves that for himself, and he does it in his own way, by the power of his word and his spirit, which you must be patient with. He is the one who is perfectly in control of his kingdom, he is the one who makes his kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. That’s why you pray to him about it, because it’s in his power to do it and not in yours. You can’t build the kingdom of God, and you are not expected to. But you can certainly receive it, and share it, and be witnesses to it, and point to it, and let people know what’s in it, and by your words and your good works you show the world around you what it means and what it stands for. When you host a respite shelter, you illuminate the kingdom of heaven. When you host a public water fountain, you open up the kingdom for anyone who wants to drink of it.

A skeptic might say that things like this are meaningless, but there are two more reasons that we do them. First, as our epistle suggests, not for the approval of the wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age, but as Jesus says, for the glory of God. If these things are God’s ideas, then we do them for the glory of God. And the second reason is to enjoy them. To enjoy them. To enjoy the light as God’s light, to enjoy the salt, to enjoy the water, and even to enjoy the beds. That’s how you know it’s the kingdom of heaven, by how much joy you get from living in it.


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

January 23, Epiphany 3: On the Shore and In the Hills

Isaiah 9:1-4, Psalm 27:1, 4-9, 1 Corinthians 1:10-18, Matthew 4:12-23

Jesus moved out of his home town of Nazareth, up in the hills, and rented a house down at the lakeshore, in Capernaum. Imagine Jesus in his house: in the mornings doing carpentry, making furniture for the merchants, or going out to frame houses for Gentile settlers. He makes his mid-day meal, takes a nap, and then he goes out for his walk. He loves to be out among the people. He likes to walk along the lakeshore. One afternoon he comes back from his walk with four other men. They sit down in his front room, he makes them all coffee, and they talk. More coffee, more talk. Late that night, they go back home. I wonder, how many days a week do they come back? How much do they keep fishing, in order to feed their families?

On Fridays they go with him up into the hills. Every week another synagogue, arriving at sundown, repeating the prayers with the people, socializing overnight, going to service on Saturday morning, preaching and teaching, getting invited for coffee, healing the people, then still more coffee, and then walking back downhill, and home to Capernaum.

The campaign platform was the same as John the Baptist’s. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near," but the emphasis was more on the second part. For John, you had to go down to the water and repent, to get clean and ready for the kingdom soon to come. With Jesus the kingdom has come, ready or not, and he was taking it up to the people, in their ordinary lives, and just to accept that kingdom is the same thing as repentance.

In their villages, not in Jerusalem. In Galilee, not in Judea. In the Bronx, not in Manhattan. In the north, in the region that Moses had assigned to the tribes of Zebulon and Naphtali, a region that had always been a battlefield, one army after another marching through, pillaging their crops and ravaging their women. A region of Jews in poverty, and of Gentile settlers controlling the means of production. The Jews were in depression, and they felt like exiles in their own land.

The Jewish revolutionaries, the Zealots, had their headquarters in Galilee because it was more open and less controlled than Judea. Jesus had more freedom here to develop his campaign. Had he stayed in Judea, and announced in Jerusalem that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, he would have would been arrested with John the Baptist. But Galilee was also a better venue for Jesus’ new version of the kingdom of heaven. He didn’t bring it as a kingdom of independence, but a kingdom of interaction. It’s not for ridding our life of enemies, but for loving our enemies close at hand. It’s not for isolation but engagement. It’s not for getting rid of troubles, but for dealing with our troubles. The kingdom of heaven is for the mixed-up reality of our lives.

And to join him in his campaign he didn’t call priests or scribes or soldiers, but ordinary working guys. This was not the first time that he called them. Last week we read of the first time he called them, in the Gospel of John. They were down in Judea, standing beside the Jordan River, disciples of John the Baptist. And then when John pointed out Jesus to them, they went to him, and began to follow him. Then there was a gap. John the Baptist got arrested and his campaign was dispersed. The disciples went back to Galilee to fish. And now a second time they’re called, but instead of their looking for him, he comes to find them, right in the midst of their ordinary lives. And now they have to balance their fishing with the immediacy of discipleship.

Following Jesus is not magic. It’s usually gradual, in fits and starts, with gaps and hesitations, and with doubts and disappointments. It happened in stages that Peter and Andrew became disciples. That’s how we experience it. Following Jesus is rarely a sudden simple thing or one nice gradual evolution. You get an experience where you really take notice of God, which feels like a call. And then there is a gap, and you wonder if it was real, and if anything has really changed. Then you have another experience that takes you further, and you feel called again. Now God is asking more of you, a greater measure of devotion, God is calling on you to do something which may cost you, and you have to put down what you’re doing, and make new room in your life to keep on going where Jesus is calling. And when you think you’ve got it down, there’s more.

Jesus calls them on the lakeshore—not in the desert nor in Jerusalem. My favorite place on the planet is a rocky lakeshore up in Canada. In the summer I love to get up at dawn and just sit there for a couple hours. The lakeshore is a boundary, a limit, yet it’s not a wall, it’s an open boundary, the lake is open wide before me, and I can enter into it. And the lake is always right there all the time I’m doing whatever I’m doing on shore.

That’s what discipleship feels like to me, that’s what repentance feels like, not like putting yourself through fire or through torture, not punishing yourself, but like living along the lake, living along the boundary between two worlds, two realms of existence. The one realm is the one we’re born into and we’re used to it, where we can make our own way, thank you very much, where we don’t have to follow anybody. You make your bed, you cook your meals, you do the dishes. The other realm of existence is right there, always with you, as close as heaven is to earth, but it’s wide open, and I’m drawn to it but I’m unsure in it. When I look at this world I"m used to from within the air of heaven, the very same world becomes a different world, a strange world, in which all of my certainties are made uncertain, where all my confidence must be humility, where I need a leader and a guide, someone I can trust. And he says, "Follow me."

That’s very open-ended. I’d like to know first where he’s going. Why not just tell me where we’re going, give me the directions, and I’ll go straight there on my own? And why not just tell me what I have to repent of? I don’t mind repenting, just tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll say I’m sorry, and I won’t do that again. But Jesus doesn’t stand up in the synagogues of Galilee to say, "This is wrong, these thirty-seven things are wrong." If Jesus did that we could keep a list and check it off. He doesn’t tell us precisely what we have to repent of, he just says, "Repent," and then he says, "Follow me." He leaves it very open-ended.

Discipleship, repentance, the coming of the kingdom. These are all aspects of a single package. The kingdom is what Jesus brings, and to receive it is repentance, and to explore it is discipleship. The kingdom is what Jesus brings, and to receive it is repentance, and to explore it is discipleship. So then what is required of us?

On the one hand, everything is on the table, The boundary runs through all things. There are not some parts of life which are in the kingdom of God and other parts which are exempt. Every action, every possession, every relationship, every issue, every interest, every dollar, everything about you, everything you think or hope or say, it all belongs to the kingdom of God. The call is fully comprehensive. You must be ready to put anything down right now, from your plans to your possessions. In nothing are you self-sufficient, in nothing are you fully competent, in everything you need instruction, in everything you need healing, in everything you need forgiveness, and for everything you need repentance. Repentance as an attitude, not a self-evaluation or a listing of rights and wrongs you’ve done, but repentance as an attitude of full reception.

On the other hand, there is no stress to this. It is total but it is light. There is no pressure to this. Look how easy Jesus takes it. Look he patiently he campaigns, how much time he takes, how much room he gives. How just a little is a sign and seal of a whole new world. There is no pressure because the kingdom has already come, we don’t have to earn it or build it but receive it. You explore it by enjoying it. This is a kingdom where the law is love and the power is joy.

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

Eagle's Wings: From a John Donne sermon

This was just sent to me be a parishioner, and I love it:

Eagle's Wings. ". . . So are those words which are spoken of God himself, appliable to his Ministers, that first, The Eagle stirreth up her nest, The Preacher stirres and moves, and agitates the holy affections of the Congregation, that they slumber not in a senselesnesse of that which is said.

"The Eagle stirreth up her nest, and then as it is added there, She fluttereth over her young; The Preacher makes a holy noise in the conscience of the Congregation, and when hee hath awakened them, by stirring the nest, hee casts some claps of thunder, some intimidations, in denouncing the judgments of God, and he flings open the gates of Heaven, that they may heare, and look up, and see a man sent by God, with power to infuse his feare upon them;

"So she fluttereth over her young; but then, as it followes there, She spreadeth abroad her wings; she over shadowes them, she enwraps them, she armes them with her wings, so as that no other terror, no other fluttering but that which comes from her, can come upon them;


". . . And so the Minister hath the wings of an Eagle, that every soule in the Congregation may see as much as hee sees, that is, a particular interest in all the mercies of God, and the merits of Christ."

January 16: Epiphany 2, The Lamb and the Dove (for Christina Taylor Green)

Isaiah 49:1-7, Psalm 40:1-11, 1 Corinthians 1:1-9, John 1:29-42

We had our consistory meeting on Monday night. The consistory is the governing body of the church, the elders and deacons and myself. I’m always a little nervous before these meetings, because I am accountable to them, and I felt unusually vulnerable because we were discussing my salary, and also because I needed to retract some information I had given them the month before. But it was a very good meeting, and at the end we all felt very positive. We had many things to celebrate, because last year was a banner year for Old First. We want to share these things with you at our congregational meeting next week after church.

On Tuesday morning, as is my habit, I got up at 6 am to keep working on this sermon, studying the lections, trying to listen for a word from God for me to communicate to you today. At 8 am I took a break for breakfast, and turned on NPR, and I heard the latest report on the shootings in Tucson, and suddenly I found myself weeping, weeping for the congresswoman, and the judge, and the other victims, and for Christina, the little nine-year-old girl, weeping for our nation, and grieving our violence and our indulgence of our violence. I am usually inured to this, I try to be professional, but maybe I was still vulnerable from the night before.

"O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. O Lamb of God who takest the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace." Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, misere nobis. For many centuries the church has been singing this and praying this, especially when we face our violence and fear and misery, and the damage we do to each other and to the world.

"Behold the Lamb of God." John the Baptist was the first to say it. He was the first to identify the Messiah as the Lamb of God. Where did he get that from? That’s not what they wanted from the Messiah. They wanted a lion, a victor, a leader, not a lamb. Lambs get sacrificed, lambs get eaten, lambs are victims, lambs are like little nine-year-old girls.

I think I know where he got it from. He testifies that he saw the dove come on Jesus. He reports that he saw the Holy Spirit come down on the Messiah like a dove. That’s not what he expected. He was expecting the Holy Spirit to come down on him like fire. There were prophecies of this. The fire of holiness, the fire of power and judgment and purgation. And what the people will have wanted was an eagle, a properly royal bird, the symbol of power, like the Roman eagle, carried by the legions in their power and their victory. Eagles and lions, the symbols of kings.

The dove is a Biblical symbol of two things. In the story of Noah’s Ark, the dove is the sign of the judgment over, the healing of the world, of restoration and reconciliation and peace. In the law of Moses, the dove was a poor person’s sacrifice. If you could not afford a lamb you could substitute a dove. When the dove came down on Jesus, John the Baptist saw these things.

The baptism of Jesus is reported in all four gospels, but as usual, John reports it in a way that differs from the other three. He reports it after the fact, in terms of what John the Baptist had to say about it afterward. The Gospel of John assumes we know the other three, just as the history plays of Shakespeare assume that you already know the history. And what it reports is a moment in the conversion of John the Baptist, how his expectations of the Messiah were converted, and what he saw in Jesus even converted his interpretations of the prophecies that drove him. Having seen the dove, he began to see the Lion of Judah as the Lamb of God. Who takest away, not the enemies of Israel, as King David would have done, but the sins of the world. That kind of peace.

But lambs are sacrificed, like the Passover lamb. Well, his sacrificial death will be the instrument of liberation and salvation, though not from slavery to Pharaoh and the Egyptians, or from oppression by Herod and the Romans, but from the sins of the world. The sins of oppressors, the sins of enslavers, the sins of assassins, the sins of 22-year-old paranoid losers with guns, the sins of terrorists and politicians, and our own sins, our sins against our loved ones and our friends and even against ourselves. He takes away those sins. That is the policy and program of his kingdom, for he is a king, he is the Messiah. The kingdom of the Messiah brings many benefits in its healing and peace and reconciliation, but the very first article of the constitution of his kingdom is to take away the sins of the world.

It is for another occasion for us to discuss the theological mechanism of the atonement, by which his sacrificial death accomplishes the removal of our sins before the face of God. But it is for us today to commit to take away each other’s sins, because we are citizens of his kingdom and the first article of his constitution is a law for us. He has taken away the sins of the world, then how can we hold our sins against each other? Together we confess our sins here every week, in the prayer of confession, and then together we sing the kyrie, Lord have mercy upon us, and then when we hear the absolution of our sins, and then we pass the peace to each other. It is required of us. It is the coming of the kingdom that we do. Because he is the lamb of God, we are doves to each other. We pass to each other the peace of Christ, a peace that is greater than our own, and yet as citizens we rise to it each week. You let your dove take wing. You rise to your belief that each other’s sins have been taken away by the Lamb of God.

When Simon, the brother of Andrew, came to see Jesus, Jesus told him, You are Peter. That is who you are. When St. Paul addressed the congregation in Corinth, confused and contentious and conflicted as that congregation was, he called them saints, sanctified, full of grace, enriched in every way, not lacking in any spiritual gift. That is who you are, Old First. On the face of it you are a strange and peculiar collection of individuals who have come here for who knows what and who knows why, but do you know who you are? You were called collectively to be God’s servant, and God’s call came to you through whatever who knows what or why that brought you here. You are a community within the kingdom of the Messiah, a beloved community, in the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., you are beloved of God, in order that you might love each other and love the world, even its violence and misery and fear.

It is too light a thing, Old First, that you should speak peace just to each other every week. It is too light a thing that you should do church just for each other and your loved ones and yourselves. God has given you as a light to the nations. To your nation. To your community. It’s because of what happened in Tucson that’s it’s so important what you do here. The peace you practice here, the sacrifices of love that you offer each other in the name of Christ, this is the light to the nations.

The very first words that Jesus says in the Gospel of John are very simple. He says, "What are you looking for?" Two men say, "Where are you staying?" He answers, "Come and see." Where are you abiding? How can I be close to you? How can I feel close to God? Where can I go that I can feel God’s presence in my life? Where can I experience your kingdom coming? What are you looking for? I want my sins to be taken away. I want to be able to let go of the sins of others. I want there to be some relief and resolution to my weeping when I hear the news. I want to have something to celebrate with other people. Yes, yes, you are right to want these things. It is God’s Spirit in you that inspires your wanting them. And in your coming here together each week to find these things you will see these very things come to be. Because the Lord is faithful and has chosen you. I give thanks because of the grace of God that has been given to you.

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

On Singleness

My friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Chuck DeGroat, of the City Church of San Francisco, posted this on his blog, The New Exodus. He calls it "The Missional Position: Myths and Musings on Being Single." We were discussing singleness in an Old First small group last night, and how most of us at Old First (certainly not all of us) participate as "singles," even when we're married, while most churches seem to regard "married couples" as the norm.

Thoughts On Mitigated Hell

I'm finishing up my manuscript,

"Why Be A Christian (If No One Goes to Hell)". I am claiming the Biblical case that we take St. Paul literally, that "the wages of sin is death," not hell. I am claiming that no one goes to hell, certainly not in the way that people think of it today.

This summer I discussed this with a pastor friend of mine. He disagreed with me. He said that he agrees with C. S. Lewis, as he pictures in The Great Divorce (a book I certainly love), that some people will spend eternity in a total separation from God, even if it's a total separation of their own design and prejudices.

I imagine that the damp and chilly hell of C. S. Lewis is not as horrible as the torturing hell of Dante, so maybe it's more attractive to Christians. Well, maybe it's not as cruel in terms of pain, but I think it's no less cruel in terms of God.

As I understand it, the only way fully to be separated from God is to not exist at all. To imagine hell as a somehow less cruel eternal separation from God does not hold up. Psalm 139 says, "Though I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there." Now I know that's a poetic statement, and not to be forced, either theologically or philosophically, but it confirms something about God, and the impossibility of any existing thing being "separated" from God.

C. S. Lewis' hell is a passive aggressive hell, more hypocritical, I think, for being cooler. You spend eternity in God's cold anger, God's distant anger, and it's not eternal separation from God (because that is not possible with this God), it's eternal suspension in the chill of a jealous God. The hot hell is actually more honest (if wrong), because at least it's an honest anger.

But to not exist---that and only that is eternal separation from God.

Yes, yes, I most certainly believe in eternal life. I believe in the "resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." I don't believe in the immortality of the soul. Neither did the Apostles.

So I take the Apostle Paul literally: "The wages of sin is death." That's it. You're dead. Dead dead. It's over. No hell. No eternal punishment.

November 17, Proper 27, Stepping Up in Prayer

Haggai 1:15b-2:9, Psalm 145:1-5, 17-21, 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17, Luke 20:27-38

Next Sunday is Consecration Sunday. Our guest preacher next week will be our new missionary in Oman, in the Persian Gulf. I think you will enjoy him very much. And on this Sunday beforehand, it’s always my job to preach a sermon about tithing. So let’s dig into it.

Tithing in the strict sense is taking the first ten percent of your income and giving that back to God, before you spend a penny on anything else. In the broader sense the size of the percentage is less important, as long as it’s off the top and not the bottom. Tithing is both mathematical and spiritual, both economical and ethical. It is a financial expression of a spiritual reality.

Tithing in the broadest sense is the Christian discipline of money. It’s the Christian practice that helps you deal with all of your money in general. Tithing is good for you in general, it gives you an attitude toward all your money which benefits you in the totality of your economic life. Yes, tithing helps you give the proper value to your money in general, tithing helps to free you from the power of money by helping to give you power over your money. Tithing is one way to sanctify the whole of your economic life. You set aside the top percent to sanctify the rest of it. The many benefits of tithing, however, are not immediate, while the cost of tithing is immediate, so the practice of tithing has to be an exercise of faith.

It means testing God. Sort of like in the gospel lesson, where the Sadducees tested Jesus. He did not spurn the test, he accepted their testing him, and he passed the test beyond their expectation. You can test God. And God will test you back. Tithing is a mutual testing of God and you.

The goal of tithing is the top ten percent. This amount comes from the Torah, from the Law of Moses. But if you are new to tithing, better to start with two percent or three percent, as long as it’s the top two or three percent. You might find even that to be a challenge. It’s meant to be a challenge. If it’s easy, it isn’t tithing yet. It’s a discipline. It means you have to push yourself to do it. It means you’re touching the limit of what you can afford, it means you’re at the boundary of risk, and if you’re not risking, it isn’t tithing yet. But to do so does empower you, financially and spiritually.

Tithing is about your need to give. Not the need of the church to receive. God doesn’t need the money. How much do you need your money? How much of a hold does your money have on you? How free are you of the money that you have? How free are you with your money? Can you be both free and responsible? Usually, you exercise your freedom with your money by spending it on your pleasures. Eating out, seeing a show, buying an extravagance. That’s fine, go ahead. But even greater is the freedom and empowerment that comes from giving it away, and giving it to the service of God? It is paradoxical. The service of God is freedom and empowerment.

So where are you right now? From one percent to ten percent? The challenge is the same, to take a step, one step up, one step more challenging, one step more risky Now if you are suddenly unemployed, or you’ve lost your empowerment, maybe you need to go two steps down, and even that is still risky. But what about the rest of us? Are you tithing at two percent? Well, this year try to make it three. Are you tithing at five percent? Step up one to six. Are you already tithing at ten percent? Then come to me and offer an hour a week to pray for every member of the church, or offer to me administer the Sunday School. Wherever you are, one step up. It is the staircase of risk and challenge and commitment, and the climb is freedom and service and empowerment.

If you’re going to do it, do it in prayer. Prayer is the bridge between faith and action. You cannot go directly from faith to action or from action to faith. In either case you will be disappointed. Your Christians actions themselves will never be as wonderful as you had hoped. Your Christian actions will never accomplish your ideals. Your Christian actions, in themselves, will always disappoint. Christian action is never enough, and it will never satisfy. In the time of the prophet Haggai, after the remnant had returned from exile to Jerusalem, they rebuilt the temple, but how sorry and shoddy it looked compared to the glory of the prior one. How disappointed they were, and they were tempted to give up their labors. So Haggai calls them to faith, faith in the future of the promise, faith that what humble actions they were doing now would have a future benefit, a benefit beyond what they could see, their actions had value only by their faith.

You have to connect the two by prayer. You do your Christian actions in an attitude of prayer. That means the benefits of your actions are not up to you. You leave the benefits of your actions up to God. You don’t have to see the fruit of what you do, you might not see any benefit from what you’ve done, but you do it as a prayer. You say to God, "Here God, I give it to you what I have done, I trust you with the fruit of it, I trust you with the difference it might make in the world, I give my work to you, I’m just thankful I could do it." If you pray this, you are free. Your prayer is your connection between your actions and your faith.

Now yes, there is a clear and immediate benefit to your tithing. You get to have this church. You get to have our Sunday School. You get to have our children’s choirs. You get to have our organ music and our hymn-singing. You get to have my preaching and my pastoring and my support of you. You get to be part of a congregation that is committed to our community, you get to offer hospitality to community groups and to the arts, you get to offer sanctuary to anyone seeking spirituality and hope, you get to keep vibrant one of the oldest churches in America, you get to praise God every week, you get to pray for each other every week, you get to take communion every week, you get many immediate benefits from your tithing, and it’s the duty of this church’s leadership to make this congregation always worthy of your tithes.

But even if this church were not here, you still should tithe. As a Christian action, as an act of faith, and as an act of prayer. As a Christian action, putting your money where your soul is. As an act of faith, investing in whatever use that God may make of it. Investing in the proclamation of the gospel in this neighborhood, investing in the teaching the traditions to the next generation, investing in holding fast to goodness and joy no matter how much shaking the world is going through, investing in the promise of the resurrection, when we shall be changed and our social relationships will no longer be having power over each other, but we will be completely free, your tithing is an act of faith in all of that.

It has to be an act of prayer. Because of the risk you know it means for you. Because of the commitment you know it will cost you. It takes prayer to tithe. Use your praying to convey your tithe. "O God, I am praying with my money now. I am offering my money as a gift to you, I am praying with my money now." And use your tithing ignite your prayer. "I’m going to need your help with this, O God. I’m going to need you to hold me up, and make me able to do this. I’m going to trust you God, be good to me and bless me." My testimony to you is that God does.

Copyright © 2010, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

October 30, Proper 26, Prayer Up A Tree

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4, Psalm 119:137-144, 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12, Luke 19:1-10

This is the last of my sermons on prayer. I’ve been asking the scripture lessons what they might have to tell us about prayer. In our lessons this morning I count five different kinds of prayer. Two from Habakkuk, two from 2 Thessalonians, and one from the Gospel of Luke.

The first one from Habakkuk is the cry for help. "O Lord, how long shall I cry for help." It is a most basic kind of prayer—it is known to all religions. I talked about this a few weeks ago.

The second one from Habakkuk is "keeping watch." Prayer can be like keeping watch. Like just patiently paying attention to God. It takes patience and it takes faith. We want help now, we feel our situation now, but God’s time is not our time. There’s a gap between God’s eternal perspective and our immediate perspective which we can only bridge by keeping watch, by waiting on God. We get this kind of prayer from Judaism, where it is particularly strong. In other religions you can get the gods to help you by certain rituals and spiritual techniques. But not the God of Abraham. You can’t get God to do anything. Israel learned that. You have to trust God’s promises and God’s faithfulness. And that means watching and waiting.

The Lubavitchers seem not to get this. They are the Jews who ask you on the street if you are Jewish. They believe that if they can get enough Jews to perform certain Jewish actions all at the same time, they can get the Messiah to come. It’s a formula thing. It’s a sliding back into a pagan view of God. Many Christians also share this pagan view of God, that if you just pray the right things in the right ways, you can get the help from God you’re asking for. And, if you aren’t getting what you ask for, you aren’t praying right. That is a pagan view of prayer.

Prayer means watching God. You start in your certainty of your need and leap the gap onto the certainty of God, and to make that leap you have to keep your eyes on God. That’s the sense of prayer you get in the Psalm today. The Psalm gives words to your review of God, to your vision of God: "Oh yes, God, I recognize you, I behold your character and your temperament, I will keep waiting on you in this long gap between my experience and your fulfillment." You can’t keep waiting without praying. Prayer is the only way to keep waiting without losing heart.

The third kind of prayer is in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, and it’s the prayer of thanksgiving. I talked about thanksgiving a couple weeks ago. You need to pray thanksgiving, always. You have to practice it, and even learn it as a discipline for the times when you don’t feel it. One reason we practice holy communion every week is because it is the great thanksgiving of the community.

And it’s not just being thankful for creation, for food and drink and lovely sunset and the colors of the fall, but also being thankful for other people. You can pray for other people even when they don’t need help. You pray for them by giving thanks for them. Why don’t you try that this week. Take home the bulletin, and every name on the prayer list, and anywhere else in the bulletin, thank God for them—even if you don’t know them, even if you don’t like them. You can even pray for dead people in this way. Especially on All Saints Day. Mention them name by name to God, giving thanks for them.

The fourth kind of prayer is intercession, praying for other people in their need. We do it frequently. It’s part of what e mean by "the communion of saints" in the Apostles Creed. It’s how we watch out for each other across the boundaries of time and space. You can intercede for people far away as easily as close by. And I believe you can intercede for people in the past and in the future. Because God’s time is not our time. You always have to remember that when you pray. And learning to pray is learning to not be confined or confounded by the length of time.

The fifth kind of prayer is what Zacchaeus does in the Gospel of Luke, the prayer that is vow or a pledge of a commitment. It’s when you say, "This is what I want to do, O God." There are times you need to do this. Don’t do it too often, or else you’ll get discouraged by your failures. Don’t make any more vows than you have to, because you’re going to fall short. It’s best to not vow too much, it’s best to rest in the work that God is doing in you, but there are times when you do need to make your commitments and your vows to God.

The conversation between Zacchaeus and Jesus reminds us that prayer is a conversation between yourself and God. It is a two-way thing. In order for you to keep talking to God, you need to have the talking of God to you, which you get by listening to scripture. You cannot keep this life of prayer alive unless you feed it with the words of scripture. Scripture needs prayer, and prayer needs scripture. It’s the only way that both of them can be the conversation that you want.

Let me end this series with an image of prayer as a tree. The roots of the tree are your simple prayers for mercy, as I said last week. "Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy." The trunk of the tree is your prayer for yourself, your prayers for help. Where it breaks out of the ground is your prayer of confession, confessing your sins, and asking for the help of forgiveness. The rising of the trunk is your petitions for the other kinds of help you are in need of every day. The branches of the tree are you intercessions for other people. They carry you out from yourself, out into the larger world. The leaves of the tree are your prayers of thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is not optional, it does the photosynthesis of prayer. Your thanksgivings catch the light of God and breathe the Spirit of God, and they give life back to all your prayer. The blossoms on the tree are your prayers of praise—the glory of the tree, its color and its beauty, the praise of God.

It’s from this tree that you can see Jesus. It’s from this tree that you can come down to meet him. That’s the interpretation of Zacchaeus that one of our elders gave to me this week. When you are in the tree of prayer, then God calls to you in the name of Jesus. God says, I want to be with you. I want you to be with me. And you can come to him. You might be afraid to, you might feel guilty, it may take some courage on your part, so as you slide down the trunk of petition you can pray for faith and hope. But when you stand on your ground before him you can be rooted in your prayers for mercy, and you can believe that God not only accepts you but wants to sit and eat with you.

And like Zacchaeus you can offer yourself back to God. You can call it accepting Jesus as your Lord, you can think of it as your commitment to help the poor or to recompense to people what you might owe to them, you can think of it simply as committing again and again to love your neighbor as yourself and love God most of all, there are different ways to describe whatever it is you want to say when you get down from that tree.

It is a very pushy invitation Jesus makes. He doesn’t invite you to his house, he invites himself to your house. Accept his backwards invitation. That is the most important commitment you can make. Nothing you can do, but accepting what he does. That is what we do here every week. That is why you came here, and just by being here today you are doing it. You have him in your life. All you are doing is coming down from your sycamore and standing with all the other sinners and enjoying the presence of God in your life. All of us, every week.

Copyright © 2010, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Sermon for October 24, Proper 5: Prayer is Acting Justified by Faith

Joel 2:23-32, Psalm 65, 2 Timothy 4:6-18, Luke 18:9-14

Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 60


60 Q. How are you right with God?
A. Only by true faith in Jesus Christ. Even though my conscience accuses me of having grievously sinned against all God’s commandments and of never having kept any of them,
and even though I am still inclined toward all evil, nevertheless, without my deserving it at all, out of sheer grace, God grants and credits to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ, as if I had never sinned nor been a sinner, as if I had been as perfectly obedient as Christ was obedient for me. All I need to do is to accept this gift of God with a believing heart.




Next Sunday is Reformation Sunday, the Sunday just before All Saints. But we are treating today as Reformation Sunday because our gospel lesson this week is a perfect Reformation gospel.

The Reformation began in 1517 in Wittenberg, Germany, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church, which was the billboard of the town. He was simply announcing a public debate. Martin Luther never intended to divide the church; he only wanted to reform it according to the gospel. He never wanted to leave the Roman Catholic church, he was kicked out of it by the Roman authorities. His sympathizers protested his treatment and they were kicked out too. These "protestants" kept on having church. They called their churches evangelisch ("evangelical"), after the Latin word for "gospel." It was all for the sake of the gospel.

The Protestant movement was messy and disorganized. It was eventually given system and structure by John Calvin. Calvin carried the Reformation further than Luther, and only half of Luther’s followers would go that far. In the Netherlands they did. In the Netherlands, the whole Catholic church was reformed, top to bottom, and it was called the "Reformed Dutch church." Our own congregation was founded as "the Reformed Dutch Church of the Town of Brooklyn". "Old First" is just our nickname. Our official name contains a history. A "reformed" church belongs to the historic Holy Catholic Church, reformed according to the Word of God.

The catalyst of the Reformation was the doctrine of justification by grace through faith. And justification by grace through faith is loud and clear in our gospel lesson for today. The publican went home justified. Not because of anything good he did or said to deserve it, but because of the grace of God, the sheer grace of God, which the publican hung on to, which he desperately hung on to, and this hanging on to grace is what we mean by faith.

What did Jesus mean by the publican being "justified"? Let’s say two different people are applying for green cards. The one person says, I am a good businessman, I already have a bank account with half a million dollars, I speak English very well, and you can imagine I’ll make a good American. The other one says, I can’t speak English, I have no bank account, and some of my friends are terrorists. I cannot demonstrate I’d make a good American. Have mercy on me. And Jesus says that the second one gets the green card.

Who will be a citizen of the Kingdom of God? The main message of Jesus was the coming of the Kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven. This kingdom has standards. If you are judged to fit those standards, you are "justified." To be justified is to be given approval by the judge, to be judged as deserving to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God. And what kind of person is deserving? The answer is the paradox of grace. The deserving do not deserve it, for no one deserves it, it’s not about deserving it, it’s all about the grace of God. As if the only requirement for a green card were your absolute need of it. As if above the door of every US immigration office were the words from the Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me." Jesus stands and lifts his lamp beside the golden door of the Kingdom of God.

I am preaching a series on prayer. I’m asking every gospel lesson what it might tell us about prayer. This parable has two prayers in it. The first is the thankful prayer of the righteous man. He was righteous. His being a Pharisee doesn’t make him a bad guy, he was a good guy, and that is the point. His own goodness was the source of his prayer, his own success with righteousness.

The Publican was a bad guy. He was a collaborator and a traitor and an extortioner. He had no righteousness to speak of. All he could pray was "God be merciful to me, a sinner." What he needed was what Martin Luther called "alien" righteousness—"alien" meaning from another place, an outside righteousness, a righteousness not his own, but freely given to him by the sheer grace of God without his deserving it at all. Which God does freely give. The righteousness of Christ, which God grants and credits to you as if you had never sinned nor been a sinner. You can believe it. Take it on faith. God offers it unconditionally, without regard for anything in us at all.

Have you noticed how often the prayers of the gospel are prayers for mercy? The prayer for mercy is the fundamental prayer; your prayer for mercy is the root of all your other prayers, even your prayers of thanksgiving. You always have to start with mercy. To pray for mercy is the purest practice of your faith. Because to keep on praying for mercy, again and again and again, means that you have no grounds to ask upon except for the unconditional promise of God.

Jesus does not tell us that the publican went home and changed his life. We hope he does, he needs to, but even if he doesn’t, he can still keep coming back for mercy. If he doesn’t, the elders may have to exclude from membership for the sake of the rest of the congregation, but he can still keep coming back to God another million times, and keep on being justified. It doesn’t depend on him, it never depends on us, it depends on God, and God does not give up. Ever, ever.

I notice how often I preach about mercy and grace. I have preacher friends whose sermons are more practical, like on how to live the successful Christian life. I do try to preach more of that, but then the gospel keeps dragging me back to this fundamental of grace. So maybe it’s the message that God has called me to repeat. Maybe. I also have to admit that my personal instincts are more catholic than Protestant; not Roman Catholic, but catholic like for tradition and ritual and liturgy. But what keeps me Protestant is this message of free grace that comes to us every week again as news, impossible good news, that we are justified by grace alone through faith.

It doesn’t depend on your living it right, it doesn’t depend on your getting it right or praying it right or believing it right, it doesn’t matter if you’re Protestant or Catholic or even a baptized Christian.

Begin your prayers each day with "Lord have mercy."
That’s my practical message for you today.
Begin your prayers each day with "Lord have mercy," and then maybe "Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy."

God never gets tired of hearing that. Every time God hears it, it’s always like the first time.

Make it the preface to all your other prayers. Because when you do, you’re beginning to pray purely out of faith alone, and from nothing that you have yourself. You are planting yourself down on the deepest bedrock of religion, on God’s own self and nothing else. God invites you there. Again and again, endlessly, unconditionally, God promises to always take you. And when you’re there, you really don’t have to say anything else but "O God, here I am again." And God says,"Yes, you are."

Copyright © 2010, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Sermon for October 10, Proper 23, Prayer is Praising God In This World

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, Psalm 66:1-12, 2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19

Note: My intepretation turns on the correct translation of "foreigner" as "allogenes" meaning "other born" (used only here in the whole NT), meaning for Luke something like "born again," and also of the last phrase, "your faith has saved you," not "your faith has made you well." All ten were made well, but not all were saved, and what "saved" means is at issue here.

The disease of leprosy was incurable and a long, slow death. It was contagious, so it made you untouchable. You were cast out of your village and dead to your family; you were dead to the people of God and you could not worship; you were subhuman. And notice that while healthy Jews and Samaritans did not associate, but these ten lepers were together in their misery, for what did it matter now? They live outside the boundaries, they are dead to the world.

Jesus commanded them back to life, a resurrection of their bodies. They were not healed standing there, they had to go as he had said, they had to obey his command, and in their obedience they are made clean. They scattered, no doubt, each one to his own village priest for the ritual certification of being clean again. All ten of them were made well through their faith.

So what is it about this one? The other nine were doing what Jesus had told them, they kept on going to their priests. They figured the Messiah had done his job for them, he had restored them to Israel, they could go back to their normal lives now, they could "build their houses and live in them, they could plant their gardens and eat the produce, they could take their wives again and have their sons and daughters once again." (Jeremiah) They were back, they had returned to normalcy.

The nine were not so wrong, but the one was so right. What made him turn around was more than simple gratitude. He was praising God as he came back. And he came right up close to Jesus instead of keeping his distance as before. He has not yet been certified, but he acts as if he’s already been restored. What does this mean? Jesus was not authorized to certify him clean, but he recognized that Jesus was certainly authorized to make him clean. He read God into it.

So the difference seems to be while he is still on his way to the priest, he realizes that the real thing is not in front of him, but back there behind him. "Back there with that man Jesus is where God came into my life, God was there in Jesus, so I will go back there where Jesus is to thank both him and God." Now I am not saying that at this point the Samaritan believed in the Divinity of Christ, but he seems to have known by faith that God had come to him in Jesus.

And the other nine seem to have missed the remarkable surprise. They went right back to

religion as usual. They did accept the miracle, they did believe what Jesus said, but they missed the full meaning of what had been done to them. Who can blame them for being so eager to get back to their normal lives. But they miss a close encounter with God.

All ten had faith. All ten believed the first command of Jesus and acted on it. But faith has to become more than just believing that God's word is true. Faith is also vision and insight. Faith sees more than observation can. Faith can hear the word of God in the voice of a human being. Faith can see the hand of God in ordinary things. And this one out of ten had a faith that could see that though there was a village priest in front of him, there was a greater priest behind him.

I can imagine the other nine not turning around for fear that if they did so they might not be fully healed. The tenth one actually disobeyed what Jesus said. Doubtless he did go on to the priest eventually, but he interrupted his obedience. For praise and thanksgiving. As if praise and thanksgiving are the whole point of obedience. As if he’s already been restored to his full humanity before his return to his normal life in the village. As if returning to his normal life is not even really the point, but returning in praise and thanksgiving is the point.

So what does it mean to be a human being? To build houses and plant gardens and take our spouses and have children. What people do. The normal things. Or is that not enough? Is that only sub-human too. Not the miserable sub-humanity of the living death of leprosy, but the cheerful sub-humanity of houses and gardens and families and that’s all. Those things are all good, and what God wants for us, but to be a fully human being is to know when to turn from all of that and return to God in praise and thanksgiving.

That’s a fully human being. To be saved is to be made a fully human being. When your faith has saved you, that does mean healing and cleansing, it does mean restoration to the world, but it also means orientation to God. It’s only by your turning to God in praise and thanksgiving that you get the fulness of the world.

In this series of sermons on prayer, I am asking what each of the lessons might tell us about prayer. Well, in this passage there are three kinds of prayer. It opens with all ten of them praying for mercy, just as we do every week. "Jesus, Master, have mercy upon us." (We could sing it.) It is the prayer we pray from out of our misery, from our uncleanness, from our alienation from each other, from the world, and from God.

And it closes with a prayer of praise to God and then a prayer of thanksgiving to Jesus. What praises might he have shouted? "Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing great wonders? O praise the Lord." What might he have said to Jesus? "Thank you Jesus, thank you for cleansing me, thank you for restoring me to life. Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord."

There are many reasons that we pray, there are many things to pray for. The reason to pray that I put to you today is that we pray in order to be fully realized human beings. It’s not enough just to have houses and gather food and make love and have children to be fully realized human beings. Animals do all that too. But to be a fully realized human being is to be an animal who prays. Who consciously praises God with memory and understanding. Who consciously praises in the middle of both mercy and thanksgiving.

It isn’t enough just to praise God just for the normal things of life, but to see your life in terms of needing mercy and needing to return your thanks, that’s where you have to go in praise to God, and that’s what makes you a fully realized human being. Why do you come to church, why do you worship? To be a fully realized human being, you come to church to pray together with other human beings, you come to church to do together these three things, mercy, thanksgiving, and praise.

Praise is at the center, and mercy and thanksgiving are the frames. Mercy and thanksgiving are about yourself, mercy for your need, and thanksgiving for what you have received, and then praise is not about yourself, but all about God, and how you forget yourself. And the great thing is that this is how you become a fully human being. By losing yourself in praise.

But how can you praise God when the world is so full of sickness and suffering and cruelty and sin? And when you daily find yourself unclean? This is the sober truth of normalcy. But Jesus saves you from normalcy by making you a foreigner to normalcy. By saving you for God, Jesus saves you from the world but also for the world and so Jesus saves the world for you. It has to begin with receiving his mercy. And in his mercy you can enter the world and return from the world in thanksgiving. It is by praying every day for mercy, and by every day returning thanks that you are able to praise God, and that you are able to be a fully realized human being.

It might sound a little foreign, it doesn’t sound normal, but it’s a message of the gospel today. By your faith in Jesus you are saved to be a fully human being, which means to praise God in this real world. So then beloved, pray these things every day. Pray for mercy. Return your thanks. And then you can start to speak of the wonder and greatness of God.

Copyright © 2010, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Sermon for October 3, Proper 22, Prayer is Projecting Anger

Lamentations 1:1-6, Psalm 137, 2 Timothy 1:1-14, Luke 17:5-10

The little parable of the mustard seed is meant to be funny. To command a mulberry tree to do something so unbeneficial, and to make that work of faith. Why not command the mulberry tree to bear more berries, or even why not command the Roman soldiers to "Get pulled out and get lost at sea?" But why something so useless as a work of faith?

And it’s also meant to be funny that Jesus calls for a faith that is smaller when the disciples ask for faith that is greater. They say, "Increase our faith!" He says, "Get it small!" It doesn’t matter how great your faith is. What matters is what your faith is in.

It’s tempting to use the weakness of our faith as an excuse. It’s too hard for me, it’s too hard to believe all this. But is that really the problem? It really comes down to facing the right thing, just the right thing, and just doing it.

Thirty years ago an elder from Massachusetts invited me to come up to his church as a guest preacher. I said, "Well, it’s hard, I’d have to find a substitute preacher for my own church, and I’d have to leave Melody alone with Nick, and I’ve got my doctorate to work on," and then he said, "You want to do it or not?"

There’s a preacher whose blog I follow and on his profile he writes that he "struggles to follow Jesus." Well, I know what he means, and I’ve said that too, but it feels a little self-indulgent, like "Look at me, I’m trying to follow Jesus but it’s so hard." Well, is it the right thing or not? If I’m following Jesus, that’s no big credit for me, it’s what we’re supposed to do.

We think, "O God, please make some allowances for the weakness of my faith." And then I say to myself, "Who do I think I am, that doing the right thing requires so much faith on my part? Of course the right thing is the hard thing. What did I expect? Do am I going to do it or not?"

We have to face our obligations, our obligations as human beings. This is hard for us modern Americans, who see our lives so much in terms of freedom and personal self-fulfillment. Well, yes, the gospel certainly offers us freedom and self-fulfillment, but that comes with obligations.

We need to learn our obligations. It’s one of the most important parts of learning morality. We teach our children their obligations, that they must do them not for applause or reward or even recognition, but simply because they’re the right things to do. For example, I do not think we should applaud our children’s choir after they sing in worship. Not according to Jesus’ parable here. For our children to serve God in worship with their music is their obligation as human beings, and we should distract them from God by our applause. We should just shout "Amen."

This matter of facing our obligations is in the reading from the Lamentations. The writer laments the suffering of Judah at the hands of the Babylonians. So much loss and misery. But the writer knows that their suffering is the result of their own transgressions. For centuries they had not kept up their obligations as God’s chosen people, and finally God said, "Enough, enough indulgence of your self-indulgence, we’re done here." God was hard on them but not unfair.

They figured they deserved their punishment. They believed that God was right to be angry. And they were angry too. You can feel the anger in the passage, in their weeping bitterly. They were angry at their enemies but mostly at themselves. Their anger was mixed with grief. And that is what leads to depression, according to psychologists. It’s a problem many people have. And that’s why in Psalm 137 the singers refused to sing. Anger mixed with grief.

You have to pray it out. You have to pray your anger out. You have to pray out your grief. That’s easier, it’s more acceptable, to pray your grief. But to pray out your anger is harder, maybe because you yourself are partly responsible for what it is you’re angry about. You blew your obligations. So you are angry at yourself. But you look at other people who have blown their obligations and they don’t seem to be suffering as much as you are. So the unfairness comes in the comparison. And that’s the anger and the grief. You have to pray it out. Like in the ending of the Psalm, one of the most difficult passages in the Bible, with its words of hatred and revenge. The Christian church has found those words embarrassing. Can you admit to those very same feelings deep inside you? Can you dare to pray those feelings out to God? You need to.

How much is your anger justified? Of course you think it’s very justified, and maybe at one level it is, like if you were the servant coming in from the field all tired and then you still had to make dinner for your master. You have reasons for your anger and they are real. But then how long will you stand on your reasons and keep yourself angry? Soon your anger starts to empower you. Soon your anger starts to be a pleasure. Soon your anger makes you feel more righteous. Eventually you won’t need to live by faith any more. You have your certainty. You know what’s wrong, and what’s been done wrong to you, and you stand by it.

You have to give your anger up. I mean literally, giving it up. Up to God, giving it in prayer. You cannot give it unless you acknowledge it. Feel your frustration and your grief, your jealousy and your disillusionment, it all feels so damn unfair, you lousy God, what a lousy life I have, what a lousy world you made. "Here God, I give you my anger. You take it, I don’t want it." That’s what faith does. It finds the right target. The right point. A point no bigger than a mustard seed, but the right point, right at God. You plant your prayer in God, and you let God have it, you give it up to God, and you let go of it. Because you don’t want to stay in it, you don’t want that kind of power and that kind of pleasure, because it corrupts you, and besides, who do you think you are to have the privilege of dwelling in your anger?

Commit your anger to God. So you can return to your obligations of serving God and serving other people and living joyfully in the world. It is your obligation to live joyfully in the world, not because you’re so special but because it’s the right thing to do.

When I was a child my parents had family devotions at the dinner table every night, and we read the Bible and we prayed and we had to sing. They considered it our obligation. One of the songs the taught us was from our epistle. "But I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I’ve committed unto him against that day." I learned the melody and the alto and the tenor and finally the bass, but I had no idea what it meant. I doubt my parents understood it in terms of committing to God our anger, that Jesus is able to keep the anger we’ve committed to him against that day.

I think what St. Paul meant is that your own life is too much for me ultimately to understand or even control, so you commit your life to God for God to hold on to it.

Your own future is beyond your ability to manage, so you commit your future to God, for God to hold onto till that final day.

Your part of the world, that little part of the world that’s within your control, you do your best with it, but you admit you haven’t done what you should have done with it, you haven’t lived up to it, but you give it all up to God for God to keep it until God makes good of it.

Your obligations, in which you’ve fallen short, your service to others, so half-hearted and self-serving, you commit it all to God, as a sort of surrender, and there is a little grief in that, which grief is the feeling of the crucifixion, but that’s how you let go of your sovereign self-fulfillment. Not because your faith is so great, but simply because who God is, and it’s the right thing. What freedom that gives you. Most of all, the freedom from yourself.

Copyright © 2010, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.