Easter 6, Acts 7:22-31, Psalm 66:8-20, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21
What does it mean to love God? We know what love is, and we can tell the difference between the different kinds of love, like loving fried potatoes, or loving your mother, or loving your neighbor. We love best what’s close to us. How do we love a God so far away? How do we love a God who is so unknown? The saints and mystics call God the great unknown, the glorious mystery.
How do you love a mystery? If someone asked you directly if you love God, you might hesitate before you say you do. You might not have the same degree of confidence as saying that you love fried potatoes, or your spouse. You might say you want to love God, but you’re not sure you’re good at it.
How much is loving God like loving my father? Can I project the love of the unknown from what I do know? Can I project the love of God from loving my mother? Can I project the love of Jesus from how I loved my kindergarten teacher?
We know that projection is part of every love we have. To love someone, you connect to some extent with something of yourself in that someone. Or something of your mother, or father, more or less, or positive or negative; you project some part of that prior love onto this new love.
This is how we learn to love. Your first love is the love of your mother, and then your father and your siblings, and then you develop your loves by projecting some of each onto the next. But your projections can be hurtful and inappropriate if you can’t get beyond them to love a new person in herself, as she defines herself in her own right. There can be narcissism in love when we project too much of ourselves and our needs onto the persons we are trying to love in their own right.
To the Apostle Paul, the Areopagus represented this kind of projection. All the gods and goddesses were human projections. "What is god like?" Like my mother, like a human father, like the ideal warrior, like myself if I were strong and smart and beautiful.
That kind of god is one that I could know and understand, that kind of goddess I could love and serve. The commandments which that god asks of me are the commandments I would make if I were a god.
St. Paul does not preach at them with condemnation. That would be like condemnation of young people who grope their way through bad romances as a result of having grown up in bad family relationships. They are caught in vicious circles. They’re looking for love in all the wrong places, but they’re right to look for love.
Condemnation doesn’t help them if the right way is unknown to them. And you can’t tell them or explain it unless you model what they do not know. You have to a model of a different kind of love, a way of loving as yet unknown to them, of which they might even be afraid.
You offer them a love that is a gift, a gift from the outside, a gift that can’t be canceled by their inability to receive it rightly; it keeps on loving until they can receive this kind of love, and let it carry them and teach them, and having received it they can begin to practice it.
This is what we call the healing of relationships, it is a very important aspect of the power of resurrection already active in the world. It is one practical application of the forgiveness of sins, and to receive it is an aspect of repentance, to repent is to acknowledge that you need this giving love you don’t deserve and cannot earn and cannot cancel.
St. Paul offers them a gracious invitation: "Let me tell you of a god you did not know and could not know, because this God is not a product of our projections." This God is self-defining. You couldn’t come up with this God if you wanted to, not even the greatest philosopher among you. From your projections you only recognize you need this unknown God, from your projections you know there’s something more which you can’t produce, a solution you can’t deduce. The only way to know this God by accepting and learning what this God tells you about God’s self. And to learn this God, the littlest child may be your greatest philosopher.
How do you learn love? I mean at the very beginning? You learn it by receiving it, as a baby, and your mother holds you in her arms, and she loves you. Your love is first a passive love, her love is the active love. When you hold on to her, it’s because she’s holding you first. She’s the center of your universe.
Month by month, your love for your mother develops from passivity to more and more activity. You watch her, you try to copy her, you read yourself within her eyes, you learn to see yourself as she sees you, and you find out who you are. It’s the opposite of projection. She defines herself, and her self-definition is the key to your own self-definition. You become what she expects of you.
As you start to gaze around the room, and learn the look of things, you keep looking back at her. As you start to crawl around the house, you keep coming back to where she is so that you can find yourself. That’s how it is with you and God. That’s how you come to know God, that’s how you come to love God, and how to know yourself. As loving your mother makes you into a human being, so loving Jesus makes you able to keep his commandments.
"If you love me, you will keep my commandments." That’s a circular statement. The loving of Jesus is the keeping of his commandments, and the keeping of his commandments is loving him. It’s both a challenge and a comfort. It is circular, but it’s not a vicious circle.
You know what vicious circles are. Insomnia causes depression which causes insomnia. Fear causes ignorance which causes fear. Racism causes fear which causes racism. Vicious circles are hard to stop because if you fix just one side of the cycle, the other side will bring it back again.
You need a gracious circle going right next to the vicious one, moving faster and more powerful, touching and clutching it at every point, with friction and purchase, to retard it and reverse it, to convert it. That’s the power of the resurrection. That’s the function of Jesus’ commandments in our lives, the curving motions of a gracious circle.
I meet many people who say that God is the same as the spiritual energy of the universe. They tell me that they don’t think of God as personal or volitional. Maybe they are turned off by all the projections of a personal God that they have seen in human history, especially church history. So they want to keep God unknown.
When we say that our mission is to be a community of Jesus, we mean that our mission is to share the truth which the world cannot know or see on its own, from its projections of what God is like, or how to know God, or what God’s commandments probably must be. We bear witness to a gracious opposite. Not only that, our mission is to model it. We want to be known for that.
We want this congregation to be a gracious circle. We want to practice the commandments of Jesus on each other. We want to practice the love of Jesus on each other. We want this circle to grow and expand beyond the boundaries of our congregation, and touch and convert the vicious circles in which so many folks are caught.
We want to be a model. We want to give good evidence that there is a living God at work in us, nursing us and washing us and teaching us how to speak, a God who tells us who we are, a God who desires to be known and loved, and shown it so in Jesus Christ.
"Help us, O God, to know your love and to give in to it, to respond to it, to accept it and to model it, so that people might see in us that your truest name is Love."
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Sunday, April 13, Signs and Wonders
Dear Readers, this is not the sermon. The sermon for Easter Four doesn't exist in written form, apart from some scribbled notes. So what we have instead is a reflection on the texts for Easter Four by an Old First member, Ms. Pat Caldwell.
Acts 2:14, 26-41, Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord… I believe in the Holy Spirit…”
I say these words often, and I mean them. Yet last Sunday’s Scripture readings and sermon left me with the realization that I have a lot of work to do before I can claim that my beliefs drive my day-to-day life in the way I would like them to. What first stopped me in my tracks was the idea of “signs and wonders.” Do my actions serve as a sign to others, pointing the way to faith? Do they make people wonder what the driving force behind my actions is?
I do more service now than I’ve ever done before, in various capacities within Old First. I don’t discount that commitment, but I’d like to exhibit more wide-spread evidence of my faith, having it more directly color my responses to people and situations. Could I be more patient with others, more understanding and tolerant of their differences, instead of only relating well to those who are most like me? Could I learn to shrug off minor annoyances, and consider the possibility that people who do things I don’t like aren’t actually doing them specifically to annoy me? Do I have to be the main focus of everything in my life?
I’m embarrassed to admit how many days go by where I hardly think about Jesus, or God, at all. I’ll get to the end of the day, and realize that I haven’t uttered or thought a single word of prayer all day. Why is that, I wonder? I know that when I do keep Him more in my thoughts and heart, my day goes better, and I feel more grounded, more centered, more patient, more contented, more serene…
Listening, every week, to the testimony from various members of the congregation about what Jesus means to them, I realize that I really don’t have a clear idea of what He means to me.
Sure, He’s the guy in the picture on my grandmother’s wall – the one with the wavy, light brown hair, whose upturned face seems to glow from within. He’s the subject of many fantastic stories, and He’s had a lot of really beautiful music written about Him. But surely there’s more to Him than that. Figuring this out is part of the work I need to do.
Perhaps the work starts with finding out more about Him. I’m not nearly as familiar with the Bible as I would like to be, so studying the Bible seems like a good place to start. I’ve always been an avid reader, and reading about Him seems to bring Him closer to me. (Well, actually, I’m sure He’s always close to me. What I really mean is that it makes me more aware of His presence.)
I recently started reading St. Augustine’s Confessions, and discovered that it strengthened my awareness of faith, and the role it plays in my life, even as I sat there reading on the subway. (Fancy that – God’s on the C train!) Simply put, I need to set aside time, every day, to devote to nurturing and deepening my faith. Now that I think about it, that's not such an onerous task, after all!
Acts 2:14, 26-41, Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord… I believe in the Holy Spirit…”
I say these words often, and I mean them. Yet last Sunday’s Scripture readings and sermon left me with the realization that I have a lot of work to do before I can claim that my beliefs drive my day-to-day life in the way I would like them to. What first stopped me in my tracks was the idea of “signs and wonders.” Do my actions serve as a sign to others, pointing the way to faith? Do they make people wonder what the driving force behind my actions is?
I do more service now than I’ve ever done before, in various capacities within Old First. I don’t discount that commitment, but I’d like to exhibit more wide-spread evidence of my faith, having it more directly color my responses to people and situations. Could I be more patient with others, more understanding and tolerant of their differences, instead of only relating well to those who are most like me? Could I learn to shrug off minor annoyances, and consider the possibility that people who do things I don’t like aren’t actually doing them specifically to annoy me? Do I have to be the main focus of everything in my life?
I’m embarrassed to admit how many days go by where I hardly think about Jesus, or God, at all. I’ll get to the end of the day, and realize that I haven’t uttered or thought a single word of prayer all day. Why is that, I wonder? I know that when I do keep Him more in my thoughts and heart, my day goes better, and I feel more grounded, more centered, more patient, more contented, more serene…
Listening, every week, to the testimony from various members of the congregation about what Jesus means to them, I realize that I really don’t have a clear idea of what He means to me.
Sure, He’s the guy in the picture on my grandmother’s wall – the one with the wavy, light brown hair, whose upturned face seems to glow from within. He’s the subject of many fantastic stories, and He’s had a lot of really beautiful music written about Him. But surely there’s more to Him than that. Figuring this out is part of the work I need to do.
Perhaps the work starts with finding out more about Him. I’m not nearly as familiar with the Bible as I would like to be, so studying the Bible seems like a good place to start. I’ve always been an avid reader, and reading about Him seems to bring Him closer to me. (Well, actually, I’m sure He’s always close to me. What I really mean is that it makes me more aware of His presence.)
I recently started reading St. Augustine’s Confessions, and discovered that it strengthened my awareness of faith, and the role it plays in my life, even as I sat there reading on the subway. (Fancy that – God’s on the C train!) Simply put, I need to set aside time, every day, to devote to nurturing and deepening my faith. Now that I think about it, that's not such an onerous task, after all!
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Sermon for April 20: The Way, the Truth, and the Life
Easter 5, Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 1:1-14
Note: No sermon was posted for last week. I had one written, but on Sunday morning it didn't feel right, so I preached a different sermon, mostly extemporaneously, from a few handwritten scribbles. Sorry.
Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." This statement is cited so frequently, and just as frequently misused. This statement is not about who gets saved, or who goes to heaven. It’s not about the exclusivity of Christianity. This statement is about a new development in the experience of God, a new development that Jesus was introducing to humanity, and introducing first to his disciples.
It wasn’t a new God he was showing them, but a new kind of intimacy with this very same God that they had always known, but now they would be so much closer, and they would now begin to experience the God of Israel as God as Father. That’s what this statement of Jesus is about, that in order to experience the One God as Father, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. That if you take Jesus for God, you also get the Father.
This experience of God is distinctive to Christianity and characteristic of Christianity. When Christians pray to God in the way that Jesus taught us to, we say, "Our Father." Do you understand how much of an innovation that was, that Jesus was introducing them to? So when you hear Jesus saying, "I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me," the point you should take is not the exclusivity of Christianity, but the opportunity.
Let’s remember this in these days of interfaith dialogue and interfaith conflict. When we read in Acts 7 that they picked up stones to throw at Stephen, we can make the connection to modern Jerusalem, where Palestinians pick up those same stones to throw at Israeli soldiers and police.
We can think of the great stones in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the last remains of the temple, recovered by Israeli soldiers in the Six-Day War, so precious to the Jews, when we read that prophecy from Isaiah which is quoted in 1 Peter 2, "See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious." The stones in that wall are stones of contention and violence between the Jews and the Muslims, and Christians too.
Muslims do not allow Jews and Christians even to look at the Black Stone of Mecca, the Kaaba, to which they make their pilgrimage. We know the way, but we cannot go there.
The New Testament teaches that the temple of Jesus is the congregation, a temple not made with hands, constructed of the souls of our fellow believers. Our holy city is the New Jerusalem in heaven with God. And yet we Christians acted otherwise with the Crusades, and the sign of the cross became a symbol of holy war instead of reconciliation. We forced the Muslims out, and we excluded Jews from living in Jerusalem. It took the Muslims later on to let the Jews come back.
Our story from Acts 7 reports the beginning of the animosity between Jews and Christians. At first, as we saw last week, the early Christians had the good will of all the people of Jerusalem. How quickly that kind of thing can change. After the stoning of Stephen began the persecution, and the Christians were driven out of Jerusalem. Of course it needs be said that this very short period of Jews persecuting Christians is nothing compared to centuries of Christians persecuting Jews to levels beyond our comprehension.
And so it was a wonderful thing that happened this past Thursday, in Greenwood Cemetery, in the Old First section of Greenwood Cemetery. We laid to rest the remains the beloved uncle and guardian of Mark Wingerson, Bryan Sterling. He was a Jew (a refugee from the Holocaust), and so his internment was conducted by Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim, and he did a wonderful job. When Rabbi Bachman speaks of God I know him as a brother, it’s the same God that we love.
This Tuesday I will be at Columbia University in the company of the chief imam of Turkey (the Muslim equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury). I will be the guest of Dr. Gazi Erdem, the imam who stood right here last September and prayed with us. We were praying to the same God. I know Dr. Erdem as a brother, and it’s the same God that we love.
But what about Jesus saying that no one comes to the Father except through him? I am not fundamentalist, but I am orthodox, and I want to know what Jesus means.
Three years ago, at the Mosque of the Crimean Turks, the imam invited me to join them in the evening prayer. I was with my Muslim son-in-law. He took his place with the other men, kneeling on the line, and I knelt down on the side. As they prayed, I prayed along. And it gave me great comfort and joy to see upon the face and body of my son-in-law the worship of the one true God.
But then it hit me. Not once in their prayers do they address Allah as Father. Of the 99 beautiful names of God, the Father is not one of them. I asked about this, and it was confirmed to me, that Muslims do not experience God as Father. Just about the same is true for Jews. A very few times the metaphor of father is applied to God, but hardly so often as the metaphor of a rock, as in our Psalm. And that will have been true for Jesus’ disciples as well.
So here is Jesus, who keeps talking about God as his Father, and that he is going to be with him, and so his disciples ask him, show us how to get there too, show us the Father. That’s what this gospel passage is about. It’s not about only Christians going to heaven or only Christians getting saved. It’s about how this One God of Abraham is revealed by Jesus to be his Father in a special way, and that this special relationship that Jesus has with God is made available to us as well, that is, when it's in Jesus that we come to God.
Now there will be some Jews, like in Acts 7, who find them’s fightin’ words, and there will be some Muslims who are just as offended. But we also know from our experiences that we can find ways to love this One God together side by side, and leave the sorting out of things to the only who has is competent to judge between us, and that isn’t anyone of us, but God.
Jesus is the way. He is the path of your lifelong pilgrimage. He is the exodus out of your sin and the approach toward your mecca. He is the entrance into the household of your Father.
Jesus is the truth. He is the pledge of your Father’s faithfulness and constancy, he is the guarantee of the love of God which is as straight and true as a fatther’s love should be and as deep and unchanging as a mother’s love should be.
Jesus is the life. Because God is the source of life, and in the circle of God’s holy Trinity is the original energy of life, and through Jesus you may share the life that starts and ends with God.
These words of Jesus are meant to be a welcome in, not a closing out, and so when you enter in to drink and eat and receive from this source of life, you can come back out with overflowing joy and you are ready to receive the generous hospitality of all the others who worship this One God.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Note: No sermon was posted for last week. I had one written, but on Sunday morning it didn't feel right, so I preached a different sermon, mostly extemporaneously, from a few handwritten scribbles. Sorry.
Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." This statement is cited so frequently, and just as frequently misused. This statement is not about who gets saved, or who goes to heaven. It’s not about the exclusivity of Christianity. This statement is about a new development in the experience of God, a new development that Jesus was introducing to humanity, and introducing first to his disciples.
It wasn’t a new God he was showing them, but a new kind of intimacy with this very same God that they had always known, but now they would be so much closer, and they would now begin to experience the God of Israel as God as Father. That’s what this statement of Jesus is about, that in order to experience the One God as Father, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. That if you take Jesus for God, you also get the Father.
This experience of God is distinctive to Christianity and characteristic of Christianity. When Christians pray to God in the way that Jesus taught us to, we say, "Our Father." Do you understand how much of an innovation that was, that Jesus was introducing them to? So when you hear Jesus saying, "I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me," the point you should take is not the exclusivity of Christianity, but the opportunity.
Let’s remember this in these days of interfaith dialogue and interfaith conflict. When we read in Acts 7 that they picked up stones to throw at Stephen, we can make the connection to modern Jerusalem, where Palestinians pick up those same stones to throw at Israeli soldiers and police.
We can think of the great stones in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the last remains of the temple, recovered by Israeli soldiers in the Six-Day War, so precious to the Jews, when we read that prophecy from Isaiah which is quoted in 1 Peter 2, "See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious." The stones in that wall are stones of contention and violence between the Jews and the Muslims, and Christians too.
Muslims do not allow Jews and Christians even to look at the Black Stone of Mecca, the Kaaba, to which they make their pilgrimage. We know the way, but we cannot go there.
The New Testament teaches that the temple of Jesus is the congregation, a temple not made with hands, constructed of the souls of our fellow believers. Our holy city is the New Jerusalem in heaven with God. And yet we Christians acted otherwise with the Crusades, and the sign of the cross became a symbol of holy war instead of reconciliation. We forced the Muslims out, and we excluded Jews from living in Jerusalem. It took the Muslims later on to let the Jews come back.
Our story from Acts 7 reports the beginning of the animosity between Jews and Christians. At first, as we saw last week, the early Christians had the good will of all the people of Jerusalem. How quickly that kind of thing can change. After the stoning of Stephen began the persecution, and the Christians were driven out of Jerusalem. Of course it needs be said that this very short period of Jews persecuting Christians is nothing compared to centuries of Christians persecuting Jews to levels beyond our comprehension.
And so it was a wonderful thing that happened this past Thursday, in Greenwood Cemetery, in the Old First section of Greenwood Cemetery. We laid to rest the remains the beloved uncle and guardian of Mark Wingerson, Bryan Sterling. He was a Jew (a refugee from the Holocaust), and so his internment was conducted by Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim, and he did a wonderful job. When Rabbi Bachman speaks of God I know him as a brother, it’s the same God that we love.
This Tuesday I will be at Columbia University in the company of the chief imam of Turkey (the Muslim equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury). I will be the guest of Dr. Gazi Erdem, the imam who stood right here last September and prayed with us. We were praying to the same God. I know Dr. Erdem as a brother, and it’s the same God that we love.
But what about Jesus saying that no one comes to the Father except through him? I am not fundamentalist, but I am orthodox, and I want to know what Jesus means.
Three years ago, at the Mosque of the Crimean Turks, the imam invited me to join them in the evening prayer. I was with my Muslim son-in-law. He took his place with the other men, kneeling on the line, and I knelt down on the side. As they prayed, I prayed along. And it gave me great comfort and joy to see upon the face and body of my son-in-law the worship of the one true God.
But then it hit me. Not once in their prayers do they address Allah as Father. Of the 99 beautiful names of God, the Father is not one of them. I asked about this, and it was confirmed to me, that Muslims do not experience God as Father. Just about the same is true for Jews. A very few times the metaphor of father is applied to God, but hardly so often as the metaphor of a rock, as in our Psalm. And that will have been true for Jesus’ disciples as well.
So here is Jesus, who keeps talking about God as his Father, and that he is going to be with him, and so his disciples ask him, show us how to get there too, show us the Father. That’s what this gospel passage is about. It’s not about only Christians going to heaven or only Christians getting saved. It’s about how this One God of Abraham is revealed by Jesus to be his Father in a special way, and that this special relationship that Jesus has with God is made available to us as well, that is, when it's in Jesus that we come to God.
Now there will be some Jews, like in Acts 7, who find them’s fightin’ words, and there will be some Muslims who are just as offended. But we also know from our experiences that we can find ways to love this One God together side by side, and leave the sorting out of things to the only who has is competent to judge between us, and that isn’t anyone of us, but God.
Jesus is the way. He is the path of your lifelong pilgrimage. He is the exodus out of your sin and the approach toward your mecca. He is the entrance into the household of your Father.
Jesus is the truth. He is the pledge of your Father’s faithfulness and constancy, he is the guarantee of the love of God which is as straight and true as a fatther’s love should be and as deep and unchanging as a mother’s love should be.
Jesus is the life. Because God is the source of life, and in the circle of God’s holy Trinity is the original energy of life, and through Jesus you may share the life that starts and ends with God.
These words of Jesus are meant to be a welcome in, not a closing out, and so when you enter in to drink and eat and receive from this source of life, you can come back out with overflowing joy and you are ready to receive the generous hospitality of all the others who worship this One God.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Monday, April 07, 2008
Sermon for April 6, Easter 3
How God Comes to Meet Us
Acts 2:14, 26-41, Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35
Easter is more than a single Sunday, Easter is a whole season of seven Sundays up through Pentecost. On the Sundays after his resurrection our Lord kept showing up to meet with his disciples.
And so the disciples kept gathering on the first day of the week to meet him as he came to them. And when he met with them he broke the bread with them. He was establishing a pattern.
Our story from Luke 24 is a paradigm for the way we meet on the first day of the week. The walk to Emmaus and the meal at the end is a pattern for the way we worship here and now. First we walk and talk, and then we bless and break and eat.
The first half of our service is our walk through the scriptures, and our teaching and our conversation. The second half we gather round the table to break the bread, and there he makes himself known to us and we recognize him. And this is the reason why the great majority of Christians celebrate communion every first day of the week.
This paradigm and pattern is God’s design for recognizing Jesus among us, and also to share his resurrection life. Well, this is a shift for us who were brought up with communion as most about the crucifixion—you wouldn’t want that every week. Communion is not only the memorial of a death, it’s even more the celebration of a life, the resurrection life, and it’s the sharing in that new and powerful life that is healing and joyful and will not end.
The disciples are not joyful as we meet them on the road. They are arguing with each other. They answer with an edge when Jesus asks them what they’re arguing about. They are disappointed and disillusioned, and they can’t believe the latest news from the women. It’s been three days now. They feel like they’d been fools. He couldn’t have been the Messiah after all, because the true Messiah would have been a winner, not a loser. A Messiah by definition would not be crucified.
The whole campaign had been an exercise in futility. Maybe this whole religion is futility. Maybe God has given up on us. Back to the real world, back home.
Futility is the word in 1 Peter 1:18. Futility is the way of the world beneath its apparent success and virtuosity. Futility is not God’s desire for us, and from futility God has ransomed us. And on the road of our frustrations, in the lengthening shadows of our weariness, here God comes to find us, and to give us meaning and direction instead futility.
We may not recognize it’s God, because it’s in a hidden presence that God comes to us, and we usually do not recognize it’s God till after the fact. God’s presence is not in the usual signs of divinity, the sounds of angels or trumpets, but rather in your communion with your companions on your road, and in the mundane breaking of our ordinary bread.
And when God comes, God teaches us. God’s teaching is more than information or advice, God is actually present in God’s word. 1 Peter 1:23 speaks of the living and enduring word of God.
"Living" and "enduring" are resurrection words, these words signify the resurrection life. In God’s word Jesus is alive, in his teaching us he is actually present among us.
Jesus takes his time with us, he does not tell us outright who he is, he walks along with us and he tends to start by asking us what is troubling us. It’s the heart that is "cut" that opens up. The broken heart can be the "burning heart".
His style of teaching is conversational, it comes through fellowship, it’s among companions who together listen to his word. He uses the scriptures to show himself to us, and also to help us find ourselves as well. He shows us why the story of us and God results in those wounds in his hands and his side, and what that says about us, and about God, and why that’s good news.
It always comes to us as news. Like the disciples we’re surprised. We think we know what we need to know. We have our questions we want answered. But he starts from the top, teaching us what we’d not thought to ask about. His teaching challenges us, it doesn’t give in to us. Yet afterward we think, "Of course, why didn’t we see it all along?"
And then he touches us. Last week I said that touching is good, seeing is better, believing is best. We are meant to live by our belief, and then our belief informs what we can see, so that our belief determines how we touch the world. Touching is not bad, it’s good.
And we need to be touched as well. So Jesus does more for us than just teaching us to help us to believe and see. He lets himself be touched by us. He makes himself known to us in the breaking of the bread. We touch his body in our hands, we taste his love upon our lips.
Never before had God felt like this. What a very strange way for God to show up. Not what any philosopher would predict, or any rabbi either, that God would show up in the breaking of the bread. How unimpressive, how not divine. How like a broken body, like the wounds in his hands and side that led Thomas to a deeper vision of divinity.
This story tells us that communion is a remembrance of his broken body but even more a celebration of his resurrection life, first, because bread is the staff of life, and he said, "I am the bread of life," and second, be cause he is not only the bread but also the bread-giver, the bread-blesser, the bread-breaker, he’s the host of the meal.
We are offered to believe that every Sunday he is present among us by his Holy Spirit, living in our community, as together we break the bread, and we are to recognize him as among us all. So while out there on the long road of our ordinary experience he chooses to keep his presence hidden, in the breaking of the bread he welcomes us to recognize his presence.
Why this way? Well, first, as this morning’s collect says, that with the eyes of faith opened, we may behold him in all his redeeming work.
Second, to show you the model of the resurrection life, which is not a life of enlightened independence, but of community and companionship, sharing side by side, building each other up and enjoying the presence of each of other and also enjoying and sharing the good gifts of the world.
And third, to show you what you cannot see but must believe, that the living Jesus not only teaches you but feeds you, and nourishes you, from his own body.
I suspect that if not for his Incarnation, the Second Person of the Trinity would not have come to this. For he learned it from his mother. There are ancient paintings of the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Jesus at her breast, and she speaks to him softly as he drinks from her body. What Jesus learned from his mother he also does for your soul, and as faithfully as his mother did for him. Because he loves you he shares his very life with you.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
What Spirituality Means to Me
What follows is a short testimony by Pat Caldwell, a member of our congregation. I asked her to consider doing some writing, and this is the first thing she's submitted. I think you will see more to come.
I was recently challenged to think about what spirituality means to me. This is not something I’ve spent much time contemplating – I’ve pretty much taken it for granted.
Once I started thinking about it, though, I realized that its meaning for me has gone through many variations over the years; in the past year or so, I have finally begun to develop a sense of spirituality that seems right to me.
At its core is a strong connection to God. The space within me that has cried out for this connection is fed by being in church, and participating in the reassuring, comforting rituals there. I know I can depend on their being there to form a foundation for me. It is also fed by hearing other people talk about God, by learning more about Him, and about Jesus’ life and ministry.
As I become more aware of God’s presence all around me, that empty space is fed more and more by everything around me. Walking in the park becomes a spiritual experience when I am conscious that it is filled with God’s creations.
Connecting with other people is spiritual for me, when I remember that they too are children of God, and when I can try to love them as I know God loves me. Music, art, literature, mathematics, science – if God is everywhere, then surely He is in these things. For me, to fully experience His world is to experience spirituality.
I was recently challenged to think about what spirituality means to me. This is not something I’ve spent much time contemplating – I’ve pretty much taken it for granted.
Once I started thinking about it, though, I realized that its meaning for me has gone through many variations over the years; in the past year or so, I have finally begun to develop a sense of spirituality that seems right to me.
At its core is a strong connection to God. The space within me that has cried out for this connection is fed by being in church, and participating in the reassuring, comforting rituals there. I know I can depend on their being there to form a foundation for me. It is also fed by hearing other people talk about God, by learning more about Him, and about Jesus’ life and ministry.
As I become more aware of God’s presence all around me, that empty space is fed more and more by everything around me. Walking in the park becomes a spiritual experience when I am conscious that it is filled with God’s creations.
Connecting with other people is spiritual for me, when I remember that they too are children of God, and when I can try to love them as I know God loves me. Music, art, literature, mathematics, science – if God is everywhere, then surely He is in these things. For me, to fully experience His world is to experience spirituality.
Sermon for March 30, Easter 2
Acts 2:14, 22-32, Psalm 16, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:91-31
Thomas Takes a Leap
We read that the doors were locked. They must have been afraid. Afraid of the authorities, who might round them up as well.
And I think afraid of Jesus too, because if the first report of the resurrection was true, they had no idea of what was going on, and in their guilt and shame of having deserted him they would have been afraid of him.
We read that Jesus passed through the doors. Don’t assume that he was insubstantial like a ghost. I think the opposite, that his resurrected body is of an even more substantial nature than anything else, that compared to him, the doors were soft as clouds, that his new creation makes the old one ghostly and vapid by comparison.
Our mental categories do not suffice to comprehend his resurrected body, but this we surmise: he is physical, and yet unlimited by his physicality; unbounded, so that he now enjoys a perfect unity of intention and action, of desire and result. Jesus is able to pass through the doors of their resistance, because he wants to. He is able.
We read that twice he said to them, "Peace be with you." One time for their outer fear of the authorities, and a second time for their inner fear from guilt and shame. He breathes on them to heal them inside and also to inspire them to face the uncertainties outside.
We read that on Easter evening Thomas was not there, and that during the week he did not believe what the others reported. We read that the next Sunday evening, Easter 2, the Thomas who was behind jumps out ahead by calling Jesus "my Lord and my God."
This is a wonder. No one had expected this, least of all Thomas. He was only looking for his rabbi returned, his leader brought back like Lazarus, and suddenly he finds himself leaping into something new, and jumping to a conclusion that no one had been looking for.
This is the first time anyone has come this far, recognizing Jesus as "Lord and God." He’s using the technical terms for God from the Torah. Thomas has just joined the ranks of Moses and Isaiah and Ezekiel, that he looks on God. Thomas is the first to land on the defining doctrine of Christianity, that this man Jesus, who suffered, died, and rose again, is also God.
This was Thomas – not a member of the inner circle, like Peter, James, and John. He was the skeptic of the twelve, the guy who always said, "yeah right." During the week he had said, "Maybe, guys, but seeing is believing." So then, what did this skeptic see in Jesus suddenly to make the leap to call him Lord and God?
If you saw God, how would you know it was God? By what signs would you recognize God? A burning bush, a pillar of fire, the cloud of glory on Mount Sinai, the burning wheels and four living creatures of Ezekiel, signs deserving of divinity. But Thomas looks on the signs deserving of degradation.
The open wounds in Jesus’ hands and side. They are obviously the proof that this is that same body that was killed, they are the proof that this is that same guy, but how are they the indicators of divinity? Signs of torture and abuse. Badges of suffering, of pain, of loss and grief. Emblems of sacrifice.
Well, I guess what Thomas intuits are that the wounds of love are the new signs of God’s glory. Can this be a wounded God? If this is God, what kind of God is this? For Thomas it’s not just a new vision of his rabbi, for Thomas it’s also a whole new vision of what God is like. And that will take some working out. The whole New Testament has to work that out. The little communities of Jesus’ followers have to work that out.
And look how kindly and patient this God is with us. Look how Jesus deals with Thomas. Jesus offers him the proofs he demanded. Jesus invites him, but he also challenges him. The invitations of Jesus are always challenges. He calls him to jump past his conditions. "Come on Thomas, don’t be unbelieving but believing." This is as much about you as it is about me.
So which is true, that seeing is believing, or that believing is seeing? That if you start from the open and vulnerable attitude of belief, you can see much more than you expect? Thomas sees more deeply into God than anyone had before, including Moses and Ezekiel. Here is a first class example of imagination achieving reality. Any scientist will tell you that is how it has to be.
This story is the climax of the gospel of John, and it specifically mentions us, who have not seen Jesus but who yet believe. This story ends by blessing us. We have to go one step further than Thomas did, we have to make an even further leap. We have to believe without seeing at all. We only get to see the text upon the page, and the only voice of Jesus that we hear is when he’s quoted by others in the church. Are you able to make the leap?
It is a weekly leap, a daily leap. It’s hardly automatic. But the goal of it is that once you land in this new spot, and you look around, everything else looks different too. You see the whole world from a new angle. This is the Christian version of enlightenment. It requires the energy of love.
Touching is good, seeing is better, believing is best.* Because we are animals we need to touch. Because we are primates, and up there with the chimpanzees and the parrots and dolphins and killer whales and whatever is the latest brilliant animal, we need to see. Because we are spiritual animals we need to believe.
It is in believing that we see the new creation that is begun in Jesus Christ, it is in believing that we can see other people in terms of forgiveness and peace, and we can touch the world with our hands to make new signs of reconciliation, the handicraft of healing and comforting and encouragement. It is in believing that we can bear the wounds in our hands and our bodies that we will get from working for reconciliation and for peace.
Touching is good, seeing is better, believing is best. What you touch you can see in terms of what you have heard about Jesus, and what you see you can imagine in terms of what you believe. By your belief you are transcendent, and you are blessed.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
*This line is from N T Wright.
Thomas Takes a Leap
We read that the doors were locked. They must have been afraid. Afraid of the authorities, who might round them up as well.
And I think afraid of Jesus too, because if the first report of the resurrection was true, they had no idea of what was going on, and in their guilt and shame of having deserted him they would have been afraid of him.
We read that Jesus passed through the doors. Don’t assume that he was insubstantial like a ghost. I think the opposite, that his resurrected body is of an even more substantial nature than anything else, that compared to him, the doors were soft as clouds, that his new creation makes the old one ghostly and vapid by comparison.
Our mental categories do not suffice to comprehend his resurrected body, but this we surmise: he is physical, and yet unlimited by his physicality; unbounded, so that he now enjoys a perfect unity of intention and action, of desire and result. Jesus is able to pass through the doors of their resistance, because he wants to. He is able.
We read that twice he said to them, "Peace be with you." One time for their outer fear of the authorities, and a second time for their inner fear from guilt and shame. He breathes on them to heal them inside and also to inspire them to face the uncertainties outside.
We read that on Easter evening Thomas was not there, and that during the week he did not believe what the others reported. We read that the next Sunday evening, Easter 2, the Thomas who was behind jumps out ahead by calling Jesus "my Lord and my God."
This is a wonder. No one had expected this, least of all Thomas. He was only looking for his rabbi returned, his leader brought back like Lazarus, and suddenly he finds himself leaping into something new, and jumping to a conclusion that no one had been looking for.
This is the first time anyone has come this far, recognizing Jesus as "Lord and God." He’s using the technical terms for God from the Torah. Thomas has just joined the ranks of Moses and Isaiah and Ezekiel, that he looks on God. Thomas is the first to land on the defining doctrine of Christianity, that this man Jesus, who suffered, died, and rose again, is also God.
This was Thomas – not a member of the inner circle, like Peter, James, and John. He was the skeptic of the twelve, the guy who always said, "yeah right." During the week he had said, "Maybe, guys, but seeing is believing." So then, what did this skeptic see in Jesus suddenly to make the leap to call him Lord and God?
If you saw God, how would you know it was God? By what signs would you recognize God? A burning bush, a pillar of fire, the cloud of glory on Mount Sinai, the burning wheels and four living creatures of Ezekiel, signs deserving of divinity. But Thomas looks on the signs deserving of degradation.
The open wounds in Jesus’ hands and side. They are obviously the proof that this is that same body that was killed, they are the proof that this is that same guy, but how are they the indicators of divinity? Signs of torture and abuse. Badges of suffering, of pain, of loss and grief. Emblems of sacrifice.
Well, I guess what Thomas intuits are that the wounds of love are the new signs of God’s glory. Can this be a wounded God? If this is God, what kind of God is this? For Thomas it’s not just a new vision of his rabbi, for Thomas it’s also a whole new vision of what God is like. And that will take some working out. The whole New Testament has to work that out. The little communities of Jesus’ followers have to work that out.
And look how kindly and patient this God is with us. Look how Jesus deals with Thomas. Jesus offers him the proofs he demanded. Jesus invites him, but he also challenges him. The invitations of Jesus are always challenges. He calls him to jump past his conditions. "Come on Thomas, don’t be unbelieving but believing." This is as much about you as it is about me.
So which is true, that seeing is believing, or that believing is seeing? That if you start from the open and vulnerable attitude of belief, you can see much more than you expect? Thomas sees more deeply into God than anyone had before, including Moses and Ezekiel. Here is a first class example of imagination achieving reality. Any scientist will tell you that is how it has to be.
This story is the climax of the gospel of John, and it specifically mentions us, who have not seen Jesus but who yet believe. This story ends by blessing us. We have to go one step further than Thomas did, we have to make an even further leap. We have to believe without seeing at all. We only get to see the text upon the page, and the only voice of Jesus that we hear is when he’s quoted by others in the church. Are you able to make the leap?
It is a weekly leap, a daily leap. It’s hardly automatic. But the goal of it is that once you land in this new spot, and you look around, everything else looks different too. You see the whole world from a new angle. This is the Christian version of enlightenment. It requires the energy of love.
Touching is good, seeing is better, believing is best.* Because we are animals we need to touch. Because we are primates, and up there with the chimpanzees and the parrots and dolphins and killer whales and whatever is the latest brilliant animal, we need to see. Because we are spiritual animals we need to believe.
It is in believing that we see the new creation that is begun in Jesus Christ, it is in believing that we can see other people in terms of forgiveness and peace, and we can touch the world with our hands to make new signs of reconciliation, the handicraft of healing and comforting and encouragement. It is in believing that we can bear the wounds in our hands and our bodies that we will get from working for reconciliation and for peace.
Touching is good, seeing is better, believing is best. What you touch you can see in terms of what you have heard about Jesus, and what you see you can imagine in terms of what you believe. By your belief you are transcendent, and you are blessed.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
*This line is from N T Wright.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Easter 2008: Resurrection Fact, Metaphor, and Mystery
Acts 10:34-43, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, Colossians 3:1-4, John 20:1-18
Colossians 3:3, For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
Welcome to Easter. I’m glad that you are here. Church members, visitors, walk-ins, whether you are Christian or not or something else, with your questions and doubts and beliefs, whatever, we are glad that you are here.
Easter is for everyone, Easter is not church property, we don’t own this story, it’s been given to humanity. It’s a great gift, it’s a story beyond our full comprehension. Old First is an open church. Our people have different responses to this story, different understandings, but we agree that this is the story that deserves our celebration and our contemplation.
This morning I want to contemplate the resurrection as fact. and as metaphor, and as mystery.
I believe the resurrection is a fact. I mean that I believe it really happened in real time. If you find that you doubt it, I don’t blame you, and I suspect it’s the hardest thing of all to believe. It’s not the kind of fact that you can prove, and I don’t intend to try. I want only to propose what kind of fact it is, what kind of fact the writers of scripture regarded it to be.
It is not a scientific fact. It cannot be verified according to the scientific method of controlled repetition. Of course not, by definition, because the resurrection was a singularity. It’s sort of like the Big Bang, which strictly speaking is not scientifically verifiable. It can only be inferred.
The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Arno Penzias who first detected what we call "cosmic microwave background radiation," the constant extra hum of the universe, which he proposed to be the leftover noise of the Big Bang. We cannot prove the Big Bang, but inferring it helps us make sense of many other phenomena. Christians regard the resurrection of Jesus to be like that.
The resurrection is not an historical fact, not in the way that the crucifixion is. The crucifixion was not a singularity and it fits with ordinary Roman practices. It has literary witnesses which are relatively objective and even unsympathetic, the sort of witnesses that we require for the standards of history.
With the resurrection, the gospel writers report only what the apostles said they saw, and it only helps a little to note that at first the apostles were not sympathetic witnesses. They didn’t expect the resurrection, they hadn’t wanted it, and at first they did not believe it. They had to come around to it. But then afterwards they didn’t try to prove it objectively, because they couldn’t.
Consider the resurrection as something like a newspaper kind of fact. That fits with how the apostles presented it, they always called it "news," like the daily news, or when you tell someone you have good news.
Consider that news is most newsworthy when it’s least expected and most exceptional and singular.
Consider that news is the kind of story that we want to know because it makes a difference in what we do from then on and how we see the world.
Consider it the kind of fact that depends on the credibility of the reporter. You believe it not because you see the evidence but because you trust the judgment of the network that you listen to.
My second church was among Dutch immigrants in rural Ontario, and one summer evening a group of us were standing on the shore of Lake Erie and gazing at the full moon. I remarked, "Just think, human beings have walked on it." An elderly woman named Cornelia Vander Knyff said she didn’t think they really had. Now I respected her, and she had been in the middle of Nazi gunfire in World War II. So I said, "Well, we watched it on TV!" And she looked at me with some pity, and asked me if I really believed in what I saw on TV.
How much can you trust the writers of the gospel? If we judge them as reporters by their subsequent behavior, by what they did with what they said, by their judgments on other matters, I think we may find them very credible. And so we have reporters who are credible telling a story quite incredible. And that’s the best we can do with the resurrection as a fact.
That the resurrection is a metaphor there is no question. It has become fashionable to call it a metaphor as a dodge around its being true, especially among many popular scholars. With the way they use "metaphor" I don’t know how they got through English Composition 101. A metaphor is when you apply something concrete to something other either abstract or unfamiliar.
If you say metaphorically that "your love is like the ocean," then your love is the abstract and the ocean is the concrete, and so the ocean is a metaphor for love. If we say the resurrection is a metaphor then we must also say for what.
Our reading from the Epistle to the Colossians says for what. The resurrection of Jesus is a metaphor for the new life of the rest of us. The new life is bound to be unfamiliar and abstract, but St. Paul regards the resurrection of Jesus as concrete. And so he writes, "If you have been raised with Jesus, seek the things which are above." He makes the resurrection of Jesus the generating metaphor for the whole new life of the world. I can recommend this metaphor to all of you today, even if you find it difficult to believe the resurrection as concretely as the apostles did.
The resurrection’s power as a metaphor confirmed the followers of Jesus in their belief that it was concrete. It empowered ordinary people to do extraordinary things. They were very ordinary people except for one thing which distinguished them—that the fear of death had no power over them.
Not like the heroes of the sagas and the epics, because they were not heroes, they wore no helmets and they carried no swords; they were only private soldiers in the ranks, they were slaves, they were mothers and seamstresses. But they were a new kind of human being, because they considered themselves to have already died, and risen again, the sting of death was behind them.
They could be beaten, but they could not be broken. When they were bound in chains they acted as if they were free. When they were condemned they acted as if they were justified. They didn’t keep score, because they had already won. They refused to regard their enemies as enemies. They began to experience a whole new way of living as human beings in the world, they began to live a whole new kind of life.
When you speak of love, do you say that your love is like a precious jewel or like an ocean? The metaphor makes a difference. The resurrection is the generating metaphor that opens up so much. It means your body is meant to be the spouse of your soul for eternity, and that your body has a spiritual potential beyond that which you now experience. It means the physical world itself is good, it means God cares about our daily lives, and it must mean that God takes suffering seriously. It means that the gospel addresses poverty and ecology and slavery and femininity and sexuality. The implications of this generating metaphor require the whole New Testament to work out, indeed, it’s taken two thousand years of history, and there is more to come.
But when I watch the driver of the B69 bus lower the ramp for a person in a wheel chair, and when the driver patiently and cheerfully does all he has to do to strap that wheelchair in, and when we other passengers remind ourselves how good it is for him to take our time to do this, I’m telling you that this is the long term effect of the resurrection as God’s great metaphor for our lives on this planet. And we may consider such effects as something like "cosmic microwave background radiation," from which we can infer a singularity, which if it’s true can help us make sense of many other phenomena.
And the resurrection is a mystery. Not a narrow and finite mystery, but a mystery inexhaustible and infinite, like the mysteries of astrophysics and the universe.
It’s a mystery because it opens new uncertainties even while it makes sense of many phenomena, and these uncertainties require us to live by faith, not sight.
It’s a mystery because it is an act of God that is so full of the nature and character of God that it requires the mind of God fully to understand it. And yet this is a mystery which is for us and for our benefit, a mystery like the mysteries of music and of love.
It helps us with the mysteries of grief and joy, with the mysteries of our own lives, and the difficulty of these two natures that are both inside us, the old nature that is dying away and the new nature that is coming to life. We live in the framework of a daily mystery, that our old and dying nature is not the summary of us, but the earth in which the Holy Spirit plants a new nature, which we can detect in ourselves, which we have seen in Jesus Christ, which has a power beyond the force of death, a power that only comes from God.
We can be relieved to learn from St. Paul that our lives are hidden with Christ in God, and that means even hidden safe from our own selves and from the predations of our self-awareness and our guilt. Our lives extend beyond the boundaries of our present references and comprehension. The greater part of our own lives do not belong to us, but to God, and even in this present darkness we are in God’s light and sight and care and love.
This mystery compels the metaphors and comprehends the facts. This mystery we must always hear again as news, and rise again to greet as true. This great mystery we can prove only with the conduct of our daily lives in the world, this great and wonderful mystery we can only solve in the prayer and praise of worship. You were right to come here today, whoever you are, whatever you call yourself, whatever you think about these things, you were right to come here today for glory, and to celebrate this great story of God in Jesus Christ.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Colossians 3:3, For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
Welcome to Easter. I’m glad that you are here. Church members, visitors, walk-ins, whether you are Christian or not or something else, with your questions and doubts and beliefs, whatever, we are glad that you are here.
Easter is for everyone, Easter is not church property, we don’t own this story, it’s been given to humanity. It’s a great gift, it’s a story beyond our full comprehension. Old First is an open church. Our people have different responses to this story, different understandings, but we agree that this is the story that deserves our celebration and our contemplation.
This morning I want to contemplate the resurrection as fact. and as metaphor, and as mystery.
I believe the resurrection is a fact. I mean that I believe it really happened in real time. If you find that you doubt it, I don’t blame you, and I suspect it’s the hardest thing of all to believe. It’s not the kind of fact that you can prove, and I don’t intend to try. I want only to propose what kind of fact it is, what kind of fact the writers of scripture regarded it to be.
It is not a scientific fact. It cannot be verified according to the scientific method of controlled repetition. Of course not, by definition, because the resurrection was a singularity. It’s sort of like the Big Bang, which strictly speaking is not scientifically verifiable. It can only be inferred.
The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Arno Penzias who first detected what we call "cosmic microwave background radiation," the constant extra hum of the universe, which he proposed to be the leftover noise of the Big Bang. We cannot prove the Big Bang, but inferring it helps us make sense of many other phenomena. Christians regard the resurrection of Jesus to be like that.
The resurrection is not an historical fact, not in the way that the crucifixion is. The crucifixion was not a singularity and it fits with ordinary Roman practices. It has literary witnesses which are relatively objective and even unsympathetic, the sort of witnesses that we require for the standards of history.
With the resurrection, the gospel writers report only what the apostles said they saw, and it only helps a little to note that at first the apostles were not sympathetic witnesses. They didn’t expect the resurrection, they hadn’t wanted it, and at first they did not believe it. They had to come around to it. But then afterwards they didn’t try to prove it objectively, because they couldn’t.
Consider the resurrection as something like a newspaper kind of fact. That fits with how the apostles presented it, they always called it "news," like the daily news, or when you tell someone you have good news.
Consider that news is most newsworthy when it’s least expected and most exceptional and singular.
Consider that news is the kind of story that we want to know because it makes a difference in what we do from then on and how we see the world.
Consider it the kind of fact that depends on the credibility of the reporter. You believe it not because you see the evidence but because you trust the judgment of the network that you listen to.
My second church was among Dutch immigrants in rural Ontario, and one summer evening a group of us were standing on the shore of Lake Erie and gazing at the full moon. I remarked, "Just think, human beings have walked on it." An elderly woman named Cornelia Vander Knyff said she didn’t think they really had. Now I respected her, and she had been in the middle of Nazi gunfire in World War II. So I said, "Well, we watched it on TV!" And she looked at me with some pity, and asked me if I really believed in what I saw on TV.
How much can you trust the writers of the gospel? If we judge them as reporters by their subsequent behavior, by what they did with what they said, by their judgments on other matters, I think we may find them very credible. And so we have reporters who are credible telling a story quite incredible. And that’s the best we can do with the resurrection as a fact.
That the resurrection is a metaphor there is no question. It has become fashionable to call it a metaphor as a dodge around its being true, especially among many popular scholars. With the way they use "metaphor" I don’t know how they got through English Composition 101. A metaphor is when you apply something concrete to something other either abstract or unfamiliar.
If you say metaphorically that "your love is like the ocean," then your love is the abstract and the ocean is the concrete, and so the ocean is a metaphor for love. If we say the resurrection is a metaphor then we must also say for what.
Our reading from the Epistle to the Colossians says for what. The resurrection of Jesus is a metaphor for the new life of the rest of us. The new life is bound to be unfamiliar and abstract, but St. Paul regards the resurrection of Jesus as concrete. And so he writes, "If you have been raised with Jesus, seek the things which are above." He makes the resurrection of Jesus the generating metaphor for the whole new life of the world. I can recommend this metaphor to all of you today, even if you find it difficult to believe the resurrection as concretely as the apostles did.
The resurrection’s power as a metaphor confirmed the followers of Jesus in their belief that it was concrete. It empowered ordinary people to do extraordinary things. They were very ordinary people except for one thing which distinguished them—that the fear of death had no power over them.
Not like the heroes of the sagas and the epics, because they were not heroes, they wore no helmets and they carried no swords; they were only private soldiers in the ranks, they were slaves, they were mothers and seamstresses. But they were a new kind of human being, because they considered themselves to have already died, and risen again, the sting of death was behind them.
They could be beaten, but they could not be broken. When they were bound in chains they acted as if they were free. When they were condemned they acted as if they were justified. They didn’t keep score, because they had already won. They refused to regard their enemies as enemies. They began to experience a whole new way of living as human beings in the world, they began to live a whole new kind of life.
When you speak of love, do you say that your love is like a precious jewel or like an ocean? The metaphor makes a difference. The resurrection is the generating metaphor that opens up so much. It means your body is meant to be the spouse of your soul for eternity, and that your body has a spiritual potential beyond that which you now experience. It means the physical world itself is good, it means God cares about our daily lives, and it must mean that God takes suffering seriously. It means that the gospel addresses poverty and ecology and slavery and femininity and sexuality. The implications of this generating metaphor require the whole New Testament to work out, indeed, it’s taken two thousand years of history, and there is more to come.
But when I watch the driver of the B69 bus lower the ramp for a person in a wheel chair, and when the driver patiently and cheerfully does all he has to do to strap that wheelchair in, and when we other passengers remind ourselves how good it is for him to take our time to do this, I’m telling you that this is the long term effect of the resurrection as God’s great metaphor for our lives on this planet. And we may consider such effects as something like "cosmic microwave background radiation," from which we can infer a singularity, which if it’s true can help us make sense of many other phenomena.
And the resurrection is a mystery. Not a narrow and finite mystery, but a mystery inexhaustible and infinite, like the mysteries of astrophysics and the universe.
It’s a mystery because it opens new uncertainties even while it makes sense of many phenomena, and these uncertainties require us to live by faith, not sight.
It’s a mystery because it is an act of God that is so full of the nature and character of God that it requires the mind of God fully to understand it. And yet this is a mystery which is for us and for our benefit, a mystery like the mysteries of music and of love.
It helps us with the mysteries of grief and joy, with the mysteries of our own lives, and the difficulty of these two natures that are both inside us, the old nature that is dying away and the new nature that is coming to life. We live in the framework of a daily mystery, that our old and dying nature is not the summary of us, but the earth in which the Holy Spirit plants a new nature, which we can detect in ourselves, which we have seen in Jesus Christ, which has a power beyond the force of death, a power that only comes from God.
We can be relieved to learn from St. Paul that our lives are hidden with Christ in God, and that means even hidden safe from our own selves and from the predations of our self-awareness and our guilt. Our lives extend beyond the boundaries of our present references and comprehension. The greater part of our own lives do not belong to us, but to God, and even in this present darkness we are in God’s light and sight and care and love.
This mystery compels the metaphors and comprehends the facts. This mystery we must always hear again as news, and rise again to greet as true. This great mystery we can prove only with the conduct of our daily lives in the world, this great and wonderful mystery we can only solve in the prayer and praise of worship. You were right to come here today, whoever you are, whatever you call yourself, whatever you think about these things, you were right to come here today for glory, and to celebrate this great story of God in Jesus Christ.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Good Friday, 2008
John 18:15-40
For the Ecumenical Service at Greenwood Baptist,
with Park Slope Presbyterian.
Ninety-eight score and fifteen years ago our spiritual forefathers played out in Jerusalem an old story, conceived in bondage, and dedicated to the presumption that all men must protect their interests. Today we are met in a sanctuary which is dedicated to that story. We have come to remember that story, and to see what meaning it has for us.
The world will little note nor long remember what we do here, just as, if not for the resurrection three days later, it would not have noted nor remembered what happened that Friday in Jerusalem. It was all too common and unremarkable. That a governor sacrifices justice for political expediency. That the leadership sacrifices the life of the innocent for the sake of national security. That a man denies the one he loves.
Jesus is the only one in bondage here, but he’s the only one who’s free. Do you notice how the others are all compelled by fear? Pontius Pilate by fear for his imperial career should there be trouble in his province. Annas and Caiaphas by fear of Roman reprisals if they cannot keep control. Peter by fear for his own skin. He is in such bondage, he cannot do what he wants to do.
It is Jesus who is free. He is impervious to intimidation and will not be baited by the questions they ask him. Every time he speaks he keeps to his own agenda. He is like the rock against which all the other characters break like waves, and expose themselves.
I tried to figure out how many hours he was in chains. It depends on how long they sat for dinner and how long he prayed in the Garden. Let’s they arrested him at 2 AM. Even with the interrogations, a good part of that night he must have been standing around waiting. That’s as usual with the government.
Waiting. Waiting silently, being watched, being measured by their eyes, being scrutinized in wonder and in fear. Waiting on God, his suddenly silent Father, beginning to turn his face away. Abandoning him to injustice, letting the unfair wrath of sinful humanity begin to have its way with him, these high priests who had their office on God’s authority, this Roman governor whose power had been given from above. God lets him go.
Jesus is keeping vigil here. I’m sure that already here he is meditating on his scripture verses to keep him strong, and singing his favorite Psalms for comfort and encouragement.
It struck me that there are very few stories in the Bible that take place over night. The original Passover, of course, ever after to be commemorated with an all night vigil. Daniel in the Lion’s Den. Both of these stories are recapitulated in our story tonight. But also Jacob wrestling with the angel, or was it God that he was wrestling with? Here Jesus himself is grappling with his Father and his God, who does not speak, who injures him, but who does not show his face.
Jesus himself is radically the face of God. He shows us here what God is like for us. When the suffering of the world and the success of rebellion and the power of evil make us raise our voices to heaven and say, "Where are you God, why don’t you do something, why don’t you act, why don’t you defend the cause of right and righteousness?" then God keeps to God’s own agenda. God has a sovereign plan, and on the way to it, God suffers along with us.
And we may also see something new in his humanity. His humanity is not as unique as you think. He is showing us what can be true for us as well. He is able to be so free, so purposeful, and so righteous because he is already living in the power of the resurrection. He is not yet immortal here, he still must die, but he is living in the power of his resurrection.
As will his followers after him, when they too are put in chains, and flogged, and mocked, and unfairly accused, and condemned to death, and who under pressure speak their own agenda, and sing, and love their enemies and refuse the power of fear and look to the interests of others.
This is what we want tonight. Philippians 3:10-11. We want to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible we may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
For the Ecumenical Service at Greenwood Baptist,
with Park Slope Presbyterian.
Ninety-eight score and fifteen years ago our spiritual forefathers played out in Jerusalem an old story, conceived in bondage, and dedicated to the presumption that all men must protect their interests. Today we are met in a sanctuary which is dedicated to that story. We have come to remember that story, and to see what meaning it has for us.
The world will little note nor long remember what we do here, just as, if not for the resurrection three days later, it would not have noted nor remembered what happened that Friday in Jerusalem. It was all too common and unremarkable. That a governor sacrifices justice for political expediency. That the leadership sacrifices the life of the innocent for the sake of national security. That a man denies the one he loves.
Jesus is the only one in bondage here, but he’s the only one who’s free. Do you notice how the others are all compelled by fear? Pontius Pilate by fear for his imperial career should there be trouble in his province. Annas and Caiaphas by fear of Roman reprisals if they cannot keep control. Peter by fear for his own skin. He is in such bondage, he cannot do what he wants to do.
It is Jesus who is free. He is impervious to intimidation and will not be baited by the questions they ask him. Every time he speaks he keeps to his own agenda. He is like the rock against which all the other characters break like waves, and expose themselves.
I tried to figure out how many hours he was in chains. It depends on how long they sat for dinner and how long he prayed in the Garden. Let’s they arrested him at 2 AM. Even with the interrogations, a good part of that night he must have been standing around waiting. That’s as usual with the government.
Waiting. Waiting silently, being watched, being measured by their eyes, being scrutinized in wonder and in fear. Waiting on God, his suddenly silent Father, beginning to turn his face away. Abandoning him to injustice, letting the unfair wrath of sinful humanity begin to have its way with him, these high priests who had their office on God’s authority, this Roman governor whose power had been given from above. God lets him go.
Jesus is keeping vigil here. I’m sure that already here he is meditating on his scripture verses to keep him strong, and singing his favorite Psalms for comfort and encouragement.
It struck me that there are very few stories in the Bible that take place over night. The original Passover, of course, ever after to be commemorated with an all night vigil. Daniel in the Lion’s Den. Both of these stories are recapitulated in our story tonight. But also Jacob wrestling with the angel, or was it God that he was wrestling with? Here Jesus himself is grappling with his Father and his God, who does not speak, who injures him, but who does not show his face.
Jesus himself is radically the face of God. He shows us here what God is like for us. When the suffering of the world and the success of rebellion and the power of evil make us raise our voices to heaven and say, "Where are you God, why don’t you do something, why don’t you act, why don’t you defend the cause of right and righteousness?" then God keeps to God’s own agenda. God has a sovereign plan, and on the way to it, God suffers along with us.
And we may also see something new in his humanity. His humanity is not as unique as you think. He is showing us what can be true for us as well. He is able to be so free, so purposeful, and so righteous because he is already living in the power of the resurrection. He is not yet immortal here, he still must die, but he is living in the power of his resurrection.
As will his followers after him, when they too are put in chains, and flogged, and mocked, and unfairly accused, and condemned to death, and who under pressure speak their own agenda, and sing, and love their enemies and refuse the power of fear and look to the interests of others.
This is what we want tonight. Philippians 3:10-11. We want to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible we may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Homily for Maundy Thursday
Note: Maundy Thursday is named for "The Maundy," which is what medieval English monks called the Footwashing they did on Thursday of Holy Week. The word "maundy" derives from the Latin word mandatum, for "commandment," as they repeated in Latin the text from John's Gospel, "a new commandment (mandatum novum) give I unto you, that ye love one another."
This week’s edition of the New Yorker has a column by Hendrik Herzberg on sex and politics and Eliot Spitzer, which disappointed me. Herzberg repeats the charge that America, compared to Europe, is overly concerned with the private sex lives of our politicians. He describes Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinski as "trivial." He quotes the distinguished Professor Martha Nussbaum, that to accuse Spitzer of betraying the public trust is "laughable."
Well, I agree that Clinton should not have been impeached, but I do wish he had resigned. We would expect the same of any preacher who did that with an intern. And it was right for Spitzer to resign. The underlying issue in both cases, I think, is not the sex, or the sex and the money, in Spitzer’s case. Sex and money are both expressions of the real issue, which is power.
We gave those people power. We put them in power when we elect them. We entrust them with more power than the rest of us, we want them to have power for our common good. We do the same thing with our generals and admirals, with our police chiefs and our building inspectors, we give them power over us. Power is not evil in itself, it’s only partly true that power corrupts, to leave it that power corrupts is to excuse the human heart, it is the human heart in its sinfulness that makes power corrupt. Jesus had power, he had lots of power, and he is not corrupt.
Classical literature tell us that power is drawn to hubris and to arrogance. In Latin terms, the terms of virtue, we can point to Spitzer’s arrogance. In Greek terms, the terms of drama, we can point to his hubris. For Spitzer it was a tragedy because it brought him down. For Clinton, the buffoonery of the congress made it not so much a comedy as a farce, and we the people got the worst of it. The whole nation has been besmirched. Can we turn to the literature of the gospels?
If we see virtue and comedy and tragedy more comprehensively in terms of love, the love of God for us and for the world, can we see a kind of power that is both holy and righteous?
Yes, on the cross, which we bring closer to ourselves in the Supper. There is also a secondary way, in the footwashing, which is why we are trying it tonight.
Not only because it’s in the Bible, and it’s a symbol that is rich and physical and not a little discomforting, not only because it’s regularly practiced by monastics and Mennonites and those Amish people who stunned us by how they responded to the death of their daughters in that school, but also because our vision of power needs to be refreshed. Jesus does that by framing power within servanthood and humility.
To wash the feet is servant’s work. Jesus shows us that he will give us power for our servanthood. But this America, we don’t have servants here. This is a democracy, with liberty and equality. This servanthood is not about status, it’s about self-giving. And you cannot voluntarily wash someone else’s feet unless you are quite free.
And to receive the footwashing is even more humbling than to do it. "Don’t look so closely at my feet. My nails, my crooked toes. And to have you touch my feet, that gets a little close." That vulnerability, that potential for humiliation, to go through with it means some freedom from your self-consciousness and fear, and that takes power. Tonight we celebrate the kind of power that Jesus demonstrates within the frame of servanthood and humility. In him we see that this is not powerlessness, but rather the power of selflessness, which overcomes the world.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Despise the Shame
Watching the all the video clips of Eliot Spitzer's public statements, we couldn't help but watch his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer. (Jim Lehrer's Newshour had a piece on her last night.)
First you think, "What was he thinking?"
Then you remember why you're a Calvinist. Total depravity, etc. And why that's good news. And why we pray, "And there is no health in us. But thou O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders." If we can't get down to saying that, we can't live free.
And then, you think about the obvious courage, class, and dignity of Silda Wall Spitzer. She reminded me of that phrase in the old translation of Hebrews 2:12, "despising the shame and enduring the cross." What power and strength that takes.
How classy Jesus must have been. "Looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, and despised the shame."
First you think, "What was he thinking?"
Then you remember why you're a Calvinist. Total depravity, etc. And why that's good news. And why we pray, "And there is no health in us. But thou O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders." If we can't get down to saying that, we can't live free.
And then, you think about the obvious courage, class, and dignity of Silda Wall Spitzer. She reminded me of that phrase in the old translation of Hebrews 2:12, "despising the shame and enduring the cross." What power and strength that takes.
How classy Jesus must have been. "Looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, and despised the shame."
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
"I Want A Sober Mind"
Last Sunday we sang two relatively unfamiliar hymns. We sang The Royal Banners Forward Go and I'll Praise My Maker While I've Breath. The first is a grand Anglican processional hymn based on a late Latin poem. The second is a Watts / Wesley metrical version of Psalm 146.
I had lunch with some regular worshippers and I asked them which of the two they liked better. They both preferred the latter. I was intrigued, because the lyrics of the second are stiffer and more, well, Protestant. At the same they are more direct, more personal, and more intense. The whole hymn is an "I" statement, after all.
I think that's the appeal of lot of the best gospel songs, and of those older hymns of Wesley, Watts, Doddridge, and all. How they speak for the "I" of the singer and of our close experience. Their poetry is often less exalted then some other more lofty hymns, but as Erik Routley used to say, the poetry of hymns should not be overdone, and is often best understated. That doesn't mean the poetry shouldn't be excellent. It's very difficult to make poetry that's both good and understated.
I heard a really good example this the other week when the Dessoff Choirs were singing at Old First. They sang one of my favorite Sacred Harp numbers. The music is great to begin with. With it's fuguing chorus it's slow -fast, like a Hungarian csardas. But the lyrics are what really struck me. Note how forceful and direct they are:
I want a sober mind,
An all sustaining eye,
To see my God above,
And to the heavens fly.
Chorus:
I'd soar away above the sky,
I'd fly, and fly,
To see my God above,
I'd fly to see my God above.
I want a Godly fear,
A quick discerning eye,
That looks to Thee, my God
And sees the tempter fly.
Chorus
I had lunch with some regular worshippers and I asked them which of the two they liked better. They both preferred the latter. I was intrigued, because the lyrics of the second are stiffer and more, well, Protestant. At the same they are more direct, more personal, and more intense. The whole hymn is an "I" statement, after all.
I think that's the appeal of lot of the best gospel songs, and of those older hymns of Wesley, Watts, Doddridge, and all. How they speak for the "I" of the singer and of our close experience. Their poetry is often less exalted then some other more lofty hymns, but as Erik Routley used to say, the poetry of hymns should not be overdone, and is often best understated. That doesn't mean the poetry shouldn't be excellent. It's very difficult to make poetry that's both good and understated.
I heard a really good example this the other week when the Dessoff Choirs were singing at Old First. They sang one of my favorite Sacred Harp numbers. The music is great to begin with. With it's fuguing chorus it's slow -fast, like a Hungarian csardas. But the lyrics are what really struck me. Note how forceful and direct they are:
I want a sober mind,
An all sustaining eye,
To see my God above,
And to the heavens fly.
Chorus:
I'd soar away above the sky,
I'd fly, and fly,
To see my God above,
I'd fly to see my God above.
I want a Godly fear,
A quick discerning eye,
That looks to Thee, my God
And sees the tempter fly.
Chorus
Grackles
The grackles are back in the Park. They're not as popular as robins, of course, nor as tuneful. They're blackbirds, after all, from which we stand off a bit.
I remember, from my childhood, listening to the radio at the breakfast table on weekday mornings, how John Gambling and Peter Roberts used to joke about grackles. John Gambling was the host of Rambling with Gambling on WOR. (My mother never missed.) Peter Roberts was his newcaster on the half-hour, and they had this thing called the "John Gambling Research Foundation." Gambling was the straight man, and Roberts the cut-up.
Why they got such a kick out of grackles, I don't know, and just what they said about them, I can't remember. But what I think they must have noticed is that grackles (being blackbirds) are smart and audacious, and they have attitude.
I remember, from my childhood, listening to the radio at the breakfast table on weekday mornings, how John Gambling and Peter Roberts used to joke about grackles. John Gambling was the host of Rambling with Gambling on WOR. (My mother never missed.) Peter Roberts was his newcaster on the half-hour, and they had this thing called the "John Gambling Research Foundation." Gambling was the straight man, and Roberts the cut-up.
Why they got such a kick out of grackles, I don't know, and just what they said about them, I can't remember. But what I think they must have noticed is that grackles (being blackbirds) are smart and audacious, and they have attitude.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Spiritual Formation 7: Community
Sermon for Lent 5
Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45
03/09/08
Heidelberg Catechism 88-90
Q88: What is involved in genuine repentance or conversion?
A: Two things: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new.
Q89: What is the dying-away of the old self?
A: It is to be genuinely sorry for sin, to hate it more and more, and to run away from it.
Q90: What is the coming-to-life of the new self?
A: It is wholehearted joy in God through Christ, and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to.
This story marks a decisive change and innovation in the doctrine of the resurrection. As you might know, the Jews in Jesus’ day did not believe in immortality like the Greeks did or like most modern people do. They believed that when you died, you died, and your soul went down to Sheol as a shadow that would soon evaporate to nothing but a memory.
The afterlife was not big in Israel, and it’s hardly noticed in the whole Old Testament, which is remarkable against the background of Egypt from which they came, for Egypt was obsessed with the afterlife. The Hebrew Bible is all about the value of true religion for this life. It is all about the Promised Land; not heaven, but land.
But then there was a problem. The Babylonians had removed the Jews from their own land and carried them off to exile in Babylon. So much for the value of true religion in this life. How discouraged they all were.
So Ezekiel gives them a prophecy. The vision of dry bones. This was not meant to be literal, it was to suggest the renovation and return of Israel to the Promised Land.
And then in later years they started to take it literally. The Jews began to believe that all the Jews who ever lived would be brought to life again some day, and they all would have the happy life they should have had upon the Promised Land.
This was the doctrine of the resurrection that Mary and Martha were hoping for, the final resurrection at the end of time, when God would fully keep his promises to Israel, to all the Israelites who ever lived, the promised life in the promised land.
The decisive change in the doctrine of the resurrection is with Jesus saying that the resurrection is not distant but right up close. To Martha he says, it is right now, with me, where I am, he calls himself the resurrection and the life. (She’s thinking, "Jesus, I love you, but what are you talking about!") He’s saying that the new life he offers is not a reward at the end but a new kind of life for now, right now, whenever you live in obedience to my word, to my word of life.
Well, just how powerful is Jesus’ word? What he demonstrates with Lazarus is that his word is stronger than death. But how can that be? For death is the final great surrender. A dead man by definition is unable to respond to anything. Unless it’s the word of Jesus.
Here Jesus is able to get a dead man to obey his word, and just in that obedience is life, the new life. His word is powerful, and loving, and life-giving, converting death to life. And the message of the gospel is that’s also true for you, his word has power to convert your old nature into your new nature. If any of you here are interested in converting your old nature into your new nature, his word has to power to do it.
When I was eight years old, I was sitting in my father’s desk in his study upstairs in the parsonage on Herkimer Street, just a couple miles from here. I was reading one of his heavy books. I remember as if it was yesterday that my dad came in and said to me, "Danny, some day you’ll be a theologian." Did he know the effect that that would have on me? How powerful his word to me would be? What he said was way ahead of me, but I believed him, and what he said to me became more true of me gradually every day. That word was good news.
When I was about ten years old, a doctor told me that with my shoulders and my hips my body was more like a girl’s. That was bad news. When I was eleven my mother told me that I was supposed to have been a girl. Did either of them know the effect that those words would have? Especially when I compared myself to my strong and athletic older brother?
Words are very powerful, even when they’re only memories. As when a person said to you, "I know you can do it." Or when a person said "You stink." Or when a person said, "I love you."
When Jesus ascended into heaven he left his powerful words behind him, as well as a community of people who believe his words, and keep responding to them in obedience. The gospel writer recorded these words for the generations like us who will never hear Jesus directly. And yet his words have continued to be so powerful. It’s important for us to know them.
The words of Plato and Shakespeare are also powerful, but they are dead. Jesus said of himself, "I am the resurrection and the life." He means that his words are more than powerful memories. If he is the life, capital L, then he is alive. Before the face of God, somehow, and also among us, in the form of his Holy Spirit, still saying those same words.
He is at work within his words, he moves them around, applying them to us to work in us, and moving us around as well. His word converts us, putting some part of ourselves to death, and bring some new part of us to life.
His word converts us as a group, a group of people, which is why we gather every week. We gather to listen to the Bible, and not merely for information, or new ideas, or the defense of certain doctrines, but in order to have a meeting with God where God does work on us, converting us a little more each week. Our worship service is meant to be a process that converts us from just a collection of individuals into a congregation, a community, and it converts individually as well.
The dying-away of the old self and the coming-to-life of the new—I want to do it, how do I do it? Should I try this, should I try that? It’s as simple as listening. As listening to the life-giving word of God. And if you’re having trouble listening, just be still. Being still is a kind of repentance, because you are not speaking to justify yourself. And if you have trouble being still, then first just breathe. Like the bones in the vision of Ezekiel. Just breathe, and when you are slowly breathing you can start to listen.
And you can hear Jesus say this: "Lazarus, come out. Joe, come out. Jane, come out."
His word is bad news for your old self, and you can let it slowly die, though you are also allowed to weep and grieve for it, for didn’t Jesus weep? His word is good news for your new self, creating life out of your death, describing your new nature as the way that you might be. His word is always ahead of you, directing you, and every day it becomes more true of you.
Technically, though, we are unable to hear him and listen, because we’re dead. But he doesn’t let that prevent your listening. Just by speaking to you, he makes you able to hear. You are voice-activated.
He does this because he cares about your name. Remember, the resurrection is not a reward at the end, but the result of his love for us now. He does this for you because he wants community with you. He starts the community with you already. He started before you were alive, while you were still dead. He started to speak to you, and just his speaking brought you back to new life, a life you help to create when you talk back to him.
As I look at this passage, it strikes me that Jesus did this miracle not so much for Lazarus as for Mary and Martha. I mean, what did Lazarus care? The gift that he gave them was a restoration of their community, those two sisters with their brother. He restored them to community. That’s a great part of the resurrection and the life.
And that’s the last thing I want to say to you about our spiritual formation groups. I’ll that I’ve said in the last six sermons about conversion and formation holds true, but the main reason for these groups is very simple: just community. The simple community of Mary and Martha and Lazarus and Jesus, the original small group, who just like to be with each other face to face. That will be the main goal of our small groups. Because that is a great part of God’s intention for your resurrection and your life.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45
03/09/08
Heidelberg Catechism 88-90
Q88: What is involved in genuine repentance or conversion?
A: Two things: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new.
Q89: What is the dying-away of the old self?
A: It is to be genuinely sorry for sin, to hate it more and more, and to run away from it.
Q90: What is the coming-to-life of the new self?
A: It is wholehearted joy in God through Christ, and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to.
This story marks a decisive change and innovation in the doctrine of the resurrection. As you might know, the Jews in Jesus’ day did not believe in immortality like the Greeks did or like most modern people do. They believed that when you died, you died, and your soul went down to Sheol as a shadow that would soon evaporate to nothing but a memory.
The afterlife was not big in Israel, and it’s hardly noticed in the whole Old Testament, which is remarkable against the background of Egypt from which they came, for Egypt was obsessed with the afterlife. The Hebrew Bible is all about the value of true religion for this life. It is all about the Promised Land; not heaven, but land.
But then there was a problem. The Babylonians had removed the Jews from their own land and carried them off to exile in Babylon. So much for the value of true religion in this life. How discouraged they all were.
So Ezekiel gives them a prophecy. The vision of dry bones. This was not meant to be literal, it was to suggest the renovation and return of Israel to the Promised Land.
And then in later years they started to take it literally. The Jews began to believe that all the Jews who ever lived would be brought to life again some day, and they all would have the happy life they should have had upon the Promised Land.
This was the doctrine of the resurrection that Mary and Martha were hoping for, the final resurrection at the end of time, when God would fully keep his promises to Israel, to all the Israelites who ever lived, the promised life in the promised land.
The decisive change in the doctrine of the resurrection is with Jesus saying that the resurrection is not distant but right up close. To Martha he says, it is right now, with me, where I am, he calls himself the resurrection and the life. (She’s thinking, "Jesus, I love you, but what are you talking about!") He’s saying that the new life he offers is not a reward at the end but a new kind of life for now, right now, whenever you live in obedience to my word, to my word of life.
Well, just how powerful is Jesus’ word? What he demonstrates with Lazarus is that his word is stronger than death. But how can that be? For death is the final great surrender. A dead man by definition is unable to respond to anything. Unless it’s the word of Jesus.
Here Jesus is able to get a dead man to obey his word, and just in that obedience is life, the new life. His word is powerful, and loving, and life-giving, converting death to life. And the message of the gospel is that’s also true for you, his word has power to convert your old nature into your new nature. If any of you here are interested in converting your old nature into your new nature, his word has to power to do it.
When I was eight years old, I was sitting in my father’s desk in his study upstairs in the parsonage on Herkimer Street, just a couple miles from here. I was reading one of his heavy books. I remember as if it was yesterday that my dad came in and said to me, "Danny, some day you’ll be a theologian." Did he know the effect that that would have on me? How powerful his word to me would be? What he said was way ahead of me, but I believed him, and what he said to me became more true of me gradually every day. That word was good news.
When I was about ten years old, a doctor told me that with my shoulders and my hips my body was more like a girl’s. That was bad news. When I was eleven my mother told me that I was supposed to have been a girl. Did either of them know the effect that those words would have? Especially when I compared myself to my strong and athletic older brother?
Words are very powerful, even when they’re only memories. As when a person said to you, "I know you can do it." Or when a person said "You stink." Or when a person said, "I love you."
When Jesus ascended into heaven he left his powerful words behind him, as well as a community of people who believe his words, and keep responding to them in obedience. The gospel writer recorded these words for the generations like us who will never hear Jesus directly. And yet his words have continued to be so powerful. It’s important for us to know them.
The words of Plato and Shakespeare are also powerful, but they are dead. Jesus said of himself, "I am the resurrection and the life." He means that his words are more than powerful memories. If he is the life, capital L, then he is alive. Before the face of God, somehow, and also among us, in the form of his Holy Spirit, still saying those same words.
He is at work within his words, he moves them around, applying them to us to work in us, and moving us around as well. His word converts us, putting some part of ourselves to death, and bring some new part of us to life.
His word converts us as a group, a group of people, which is why we gather every week. We gather to listen to the Bible, and not merely for information, or new ideas, or the defense of certain doctrines, but in order to have a meeting with God where God does work on us, converting us a little more each week. Our worship service is meant to be a process that converts us from just a collection of individuals into a congregation, a community, and it converts individually as well.
The dying-away of the old self and the coming-to-life of the new—I want to do it, how do I do it? Should I try this, should I try that? It’s as simple as listening. As listening to the life-giving word of God. And if you’re having trouble listening, just be still. Being still is a kind of repentance, because you are not speaking to justify yourself. And if you have trouble being still, then first just breathe. Like the bones in the vision of Ezekiel. Just breathe, and when you are slowly breathing you can start to listen.
And you can hear Jesus say this: "Lazarus, come out. Joe, come out. Jane, come out."
His word is bad news for your old self, and you can let it slowly die, though you are also allowed to weep and grieve for it, for didn’t Jesus weep? His word is good news for your new self, creating life out of your death, describing your new nature as the way that you might be. His word is always ahead of you, directing you, and every day it becomes more true of you.
Technically, though, we are unable to hear him and listen, because we’re dead. But he doesn’t let that prevent your listening. Just by speaking to you, he makes you able to hear. You are voice-activated.
He does this because he cares about your name. Remember, the resurrection is not a reward at the end, but the result of his love for us now. He does this for you because he wants community with you. He starts the community with you already. He started before you were alive, while you were still dead. He started to speak to you, and just his speaking brought you back to new life, a life you help to create when you talk back to him.
As I look at this passage, it strikes me that Jesus did this miracle not so much for Lazarus as for Mary and Martha. I mean, what did Lazarus care? The gift that he gave them was a restoration of their community, those two sisters with their brother. He restored them to community. That’s a great part of the resurrection and the life.
And that’s the last thing I want to say to you about our spiritual formation groups. I’ll that I’ve said in the last six sermons about conversion and formation holds true, but the main reason for these groups is very simple: just community. The simple community of Mary and Martha and Lazarus and Jesus, the original small group, who just like to be with each other face to face. That will be the main goal of our small groups. Because that is a great part of God’s intention for your resurrection and your life.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Monday, March 03, 2008
The Event for the Homeless at Old First
Common Ground » Blog Archive » HomeTeamNYC Houses 28 in One Day
Check this link to see the web page, and check the extra photos page.
Check this link to see the web page, and check the extra photos page.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Spiritual Formation 6: Seeing and Believing
Lent 4
1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9
03/02/08
Heidelberg Catechism 88-90
Q88: What is involved in genuine repentance or conversion?
A: Two things: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new.
Q89: What is the dying-away of the old self?
A: It is to be genuinely sorry for sin, to hate it more and more, and to run away from it.
Q90: What is the coming-to-life of the new self?
A: It is wholehearted joy in God through Christ, and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to.
Lest you think that conversion is always the same, look how different this story is from last week. With the woman at the well, Jesus was very present, you can imagine her looking him over and as she does it he looks into her eyes. But the blind man never sees Jesus till the end.
Jesus spends most of the story out of sight off stage, and the poor guy’s conversations are with everybody else and the coming-to-life of his new self is against opposition, and he ends up on the street corner having to wonder if it was worth it. Who ever said that the coming-to-life of the new self was going to be all peaches and cream? No wonder people tend to stay with the miserable old nature that they know.
Of course this story is about both sight and insight. The poor guy is seeing things for the first time, and he’s having immediately to see beneath the surfaces in ways he never had to. He’s got to stand on his own two feet now, now he’s got to look out for himself, and he’s got to start making judgments now and sizing people up. It’s one thing to see, it’s another to read what you see. He can see people now, but he’s got look inside them too!
In the story from 1 Samuel, God tells the prophet to look not on appearances but on the heart. I can just hear Samuel say, "I know that, I’m a prophet!" I love the down-to-earth and almost comic interaction between God and Samuel, like God is right there next to Samuel, standing invisibly at his shoulder.
(Well, the gift and burden of prophecy is to hear the words of God we are deaf to but that are all around us anyway, to see what we in our blindness thought was invisible but is right here anyway. The community of Jesus is meant to be prophetic, we are to see and hear what the world finds hard to believe, and to be witnesses of that.)
This story is comic in that after it tells us to look on the heart and not appearances it also tells us how handsome David was. I wonder is the Bible playin’. I can tell you that if you read the rest of First and Second Samuel, you’ll see that the Bible is critical of David, showing his underside, always suggesting the self-regard beneath his heroic generosity, but at the same time the Bible always loves him. Like how you might feel about FDR. What a stinker. How we loved him. Like how God must feel about each one of you.
Look, we have to make judgments about each other. We’re primates, after all, like chimpanzees and baboons, and unlike orangutans we are primates of a social sort, so we always have to be judging each other and explaining ourselves to each other. And do we not spend an awful lot of time explaining ourselves to each other? And don’t we expend a lot of energy calculating our behavior in advance of the judgments of each other?
But if this is natural and organic then why do we find it problem? I think it’s because among th primates our species is especially spiritual, and we live by ethics, not by ordinary nature. We are the animals that distinguish between the "is" and the "ought." We are the animals that have to see behind the surfaces, because we are so spiritual.
In our spiritual conversations, we need to listen behind the words. When we face each other in our small groups, we need to look beyond appearances into each other’s hearts. That is the speciality of religion, to put what seems apparent into parentheses, and to judge each other and the world not by what is now but by what we hope for, and what we believe will be.
That sets up a problem. To do this can be to go too quick to deeper judgement, and to not credit what the other person is telling you. We think we know better. Especially if someone is suffering, because of our religious practices we think we know better. The Pharisees were doing their religious job by judging the guy that Jesus healed, they were getting past the appearances. How could they believe him when they knew better, that the Messiah would scrupulously keep the law of the Sabbath. But what they needed to do was believe him. At face value.
So there is another dialectic here. Like I’ve said in prior weeks, spiritual formation means you have to keep in balance two things which might seem opposite. Here too. In spiritual conversation you have to listen behind the surfaces, but at the same time, you have to believe what the other person is telling you about herself, himself.
Yes, you will have your own take on what the person says, you question that person’s interpretation, you naturally use your judgement as a social primate, but you also have to believe what the person tells you. You have to say, "I believe you." In our small groups there’ll have to be a lot of this: "I believe you."
We have been conditioned by psychotherapy to think that healing happens when you finally tell the truth about yourself. Not so. Healing starts to happen when somebody else believes you, no matter how troubling or subversive or impossible. Not someone you are paying to believe you, but someone whose life is not made any easier by the truth of what you are saying. When that kind of person believes you, well, then the healing can begin. When my believing you costs me.
You might have figured out that I prefer to see myself as a conservative. Some of you are aware that at one time I was conservative on the matter of homosexuality in the church. I used to follow the debates about what caused homosexuality, whether it came from childhood sexual abuse or whether it was the fault of one the other of the parents, which, of course, is exactly that response of the disciples to the blind man when they said, "Who sinned that he is blind." Jesus has no time for this. For Jesus it’s always: How shall I to respond to you now?
I had to be converted. Not by my speaking or confessing, but by my listening and believing. In my third parish, a man in our congregation came out to me. He was the son of a Southern Baptist preacher. He told me he had always loved God. But he had hated himself because he loved other men. He kept repenting and begging God to change him and heal him. He told me that at last he came to know that God loved him as gay, and he accepted that. Would I?
When he told me this I felt convicted. Should I believe him? What about my own theological categories, that I should interpret his experience better than he himself? I felt what the blind man’s parents felt, for if I believed him I could be in trouble with my denomination. (And it is true that I lost the confidence of my closest Reformed Church colleagues at the time, except for my wife, who was ahead of me.)
I decided to believe him. I decided to believe him what he told me about himself, and that he knew his own heart, and that he knew his own experience, and so that instead of my trying to change him, maybe I had better change myself. And I am grateful to him since, especially since I have come to experience the generous love of many gay and lesbian believers.
It could be some other example. A truly spiritual conversation can further your conversion, just in your listening and believing will be another step in your spiritual formation. For isn’t it to love your neighbor as yourself? And doesn’t God listen to you and believe you? Because God loves you.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9
03/02/08
Heidelberg Catechism 88-90
Q88: What is involved in genuine repentance or conversion?
A: Two things: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new.
Q89: What is the dying-away of the old self?
A: It is to be genuinely sorry for sin, to hate it more and more, and to run away from it.
Q90: What is the coming-to-life of the new self?
A: It is wholehearted joy in God through Christ, and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to.
Lest you think that conversion is always the same, look how different this story is from last week. With the woman at the well, Jesus was very present, you can imagine her looking him over and as she does it he looks into her eyes. But the blind man never sees Jesus till the end.
Jesus spends most of the story out of sight off stage, and the poor guy’s conversations are with everybody else and the coming-to-life of his new self is against opposition, and he ends up on the street corner having to wonder if it was worth it. Who ever said that the coming-to-life of the new self was going to be all peaches and cream? No wonder people tend to stay with the miserable old nature that they know.
Of course this story is about both sight and insight. The poor guy is seeing things for the first time, and he’s having immediately to see beneath the surfaces in ways he never had to. He’s got to stand on his own two feet now, now he’s got to look out for himself, and he’s got to start making judgments now and sizing people up. It’s one thing to see, it’s another to read what you see. He can see people now, but he’s got look inside them too!
In the story from 1 Samuel, God tells the prophet to look not on appearances but on the heart. I can just hear Samuel say, "I know that, I’m a prophet!" I love the down-to-earth and almost comic interaction between God and Samuel, like God is right there next to Samuel, standing invisibly at his shoulder.
(Well, the gift and burden of prophecy is to hear the words of God we are deaf to but that are all around us anyway, to see what we in our blindness thought was invisible but is right here anyway. The community of Jesus is meant to be prophetic, we are to see and hear what the world finds hard to believe, and to be witnesses of that.)
This story is comic in that after it tells us to look on the heart and not appearances it also tells us how handsome David was. I wonder is the Bible playin’. I can tell you that if you read the rest of First and Second Samuel, you’ll see that the Bible is critical of David, showing his underside, always suggesting the self-regard beneath his heroic generosity, but at the same time the Bible always loves him. Like how you might feel about FDR. What a stinker. How we loved him. Like how God must feel about each one of you.
Look, we have to make judgments about each other. We’re primates, after all, like chimpanzees and baboons, and unlike orangutans we are primates of a social sort, so we always have to be judging each other and explaining ourselves to each other. And do we not spend an awful lot of time explaining ourselves to each other? And don’t we expend a lot of energy calculating our behavior in advance of the judgments of each other?
But if this is natural and organic then why do we find it problem? I think it’s because among th primates our species is especially spiritual, and we live by ethics, not by ordinary nature. We are the animals that distinguish between the "is" and the "ought." We are the animals that have to see behind the surfaces, because we are so spiritual.
In our spiritual conversations, we need to listen behind the words. When we face each other in our small groups, we need to look beyond appearances into each other’s hearts. That is the speciality of religion, to put what seems apparent into parentheses, and to judge each other and the world not by what is now but by what we hope for, and what we believe will be.
That sets up a problem. To do this can be to go too quick to deeper judgement, and to not credit what the other person is telling you. We think we know better. Especially if someone is suffering, because of our religious practices we think we know better. The Pharisees were doing their religious job by judging the guy that Jesus healed, they were getting past the appearances. How could they believe him when they knew better, that the Messiah would scrupulously keep the law of the Sabbath. But what they needed to do was believe him. At face value.
So there is another dialectic here. Like I’ve said in prior weeks, spiritual formation means you have to keep in balance two things which might seem opposite. Here too. In spiritual conversation you have to listen behind the surfaces, but at the same time, you have to believe what the other person is telling you about herself, himself.
Yes, you will have your own take on what the person says, you question that person’s interpretation, you naturally use your judgement as a social primate, but you also have to believe what the person tells you. You have to say, "I believe you." In our small groups there’ll have to be a lot of this: "I believe you."
We have been conditioned by psychotherapy to think that healing happens when you finally tell the truth about yourself. Not so. Healing starts to happen when somebody else believes you, no matter how troubling or subversive or impossible. Not someone you are paying to believe you, but someone whose life is not made any easier by the truth of what you are saying. When that kind of person believes you, well, then the healing can begin. When my believing you costs me.
You might have figured out that I prefer to see myself as a conservative. Some of you are aware that at one time I was conservative on the matter of homosexuality in the church. I used to follow the debates about what caused homosexuality, whether it came from childhood sexual abuse or whether it was the fault of one the other of the parents, which, of course, is exactly that response of the disciples to the blind man when they said, "Who sinned that he is blind." Jesus has no time for this. For Jesus it’s always: How shall I to respond to you now?
I had to be converted. Not by my speaking or confessing, but by my listening and believing. In my third parish, a man in our congregation came out to me. He was the son of a Southern Baptist preacher. He told me he had always loved God. But he had hated himself because he loved other men. He kept repenting and begging God to change him and heal him. He told me that at last he came to know that God loved him as gay, and he accepted that. Would I?
When he told me this I felt convicted. Should I believe him? What about my own theological categories, that I should interpret his experience better than he himself? I felt what the blind man’s parents felt, for if I believed him I could be in trouble with my denomination. (And it is true that I lost the confidence of my closest Reformed Church colleagues at the time, except for my wife, who was ahead of me.)
I decided to believe him. I decided to believe him what he told me about himself, and that he knew his own heart, and that he knew his own experience, and so that instead of my trying to change him, maybe I had better change myself. And I am grateful to him since, especially since I have come to experience the generous love of many gay and lesbian believers.
It could be some other example. A truly spiritual conversation can further your conversion, just in your listening and believing will be another step in your spiritual formation. For isn’t it to love your neighbor as yourself? And doesn’t God listen to you and believe you? Because God loves you.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Sermon 5 on Spiritual Formation: Conversation and Conversion
Lent 3, February 24, 2008
Exodus 17:1-7, Psalm 95, Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42
Heidelberg Catechism 88-90
Q88: What is involved in genuine repentance or conversion?
A: Two things: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new.
Q89: What is the dying-away of the old self?
A: It is to be genuinely sorry for sin, to hate it more and more, and to run away from it.
Q90: What is the coming-to-life of the new self?
A: It is wholehearted joy in God through Christ, and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to.
The lection from the Gospel of John is one of the most remarkable in the Bible and it’s the subject of one of our Tiffany windows in the sanctuary, the Woman at the Well. The story is so rich I could make ten sermons out of it, and if I were an old-fashioned Calvinist I might. One of my previous sermons on this lection is posted on my blog. Today I’m taking it a different way.
We take a step back first. Way back, to the beginning of the Bible, the first verse of Genesis. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and the Spirit of God brooded upon the face to the deep. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light."
The way that God created was by speaking. God spoke and it came to be. God said, "Let this be," and the world answered, "We’ll be that." The world was formed by answering God’s speech. The formation of the world was a response to God’s Word.
Genesis 1:1 is quoted by the prologue to the Gospel of John. The prologue is the famous passage we read on Christmas Eve. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Over the centuries the Christian tradition has tended to hear this verse in terms of philosophical theology, where the Word means an Idea, an Idea that takes Form. God created by having an Idea and then commanding the world to take the Form of that Idea, like Michelangelo with a block of marble, only God did not use hands but words.
Well, yes, but this morning I want to take it differently, as connected to the rest of the Gospel, as with our lection this morning, as meaning something like this, "In the beginning was the Talk, and the Talk was with God, and the Talk was God.
You know when it means when a boss says this to an employee: "A word!" That’s going to be a short conversation with a lot of weight, a little talk that had better make a difference.
In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was the Talk. In the beginning was the Conversation. The prologue is suggesting something about God, something which Jesus expresses in chapters 14-17 in his long soliloquy in the Upper Room, that there’s a conversation between the Father, Son, and Spirit, a private conversation, which Jesus brings us into and which the Holy Spirit carries back out to us, and our audacious sharing in the inner conversation of the Holy Trinity is what starts to form us as a community, a spiritual community. And we Christians dare to think that as our little community of Jesus is being formed by our sharing in the Talk of God, in some small measure we even begin to know the Mind of God.
The prologue is also suggesting something about humanity, and about our place in the world. It was at the creation of the world that God first made public the Trinity’s private conversation. Creation is not commanding speech and dumb obedience, it’s life-giving conversation. As God speaks the world into being, more and more it’s able to answer, until the appearance of human kind, who are able to talk back to God, on behalf of the other creatures. Our connection to God is not just for ourselves, but for us to speak with God for the rest of the world.
The Gospel of John is the gospel of conversations. Like Matthew it has sermons, like Mark it has actions, like Luke it has metaphorical soliloquies, but distinctive to John is an emphasis on conversation. And the longest conversation with any individual is with the woman at the well.
This conversation broke the rules and crossed the proper boundaries. The Samaritans and the Jews were like the Sunnis and the Shiites or the Serbs and the Croatians, their differences were theological and political and hateful. Jesus crossed those boundaries. He crossed the boundary of kosher. Her water jug will have been unclean, and drinking from it he’ll make himself unclean.
He crossed the boundaries of sex. He will have to put his lips on her vessel. And this is at a well which is dedicated to the patriarch Jacob who met Rachel at a well and fell in love with her at first sight. The woman has to wonder is like Bill Clinton or JFK. He’s certainly not like Huckabee! His disciples show up worried that he’s like McCain.
But he never touches her. He doesn’t play with her or use her. He can see through her, but he does not disrobe her, he lets her speak for herself, he lets her lead the conversation, though his responses are not what she expects. This story is all about the conversation. And the conversation is the means of her conversion.
This is not an ordinary conversation at a well. That happened in the morning, when all the other women came to get their water. And their conversation might have been about her, and why such a woman as she was trouble for the rest of them and trouble for herself. And they would be right. We have those kinds of conversations all the time about each other. But such conversations don’t help conversion, and such kind of talk is not for spiritual formation.
This one is. By the process of what they say to each other she comes to the truth about herself. He offers her a few Biblical metaphors by which she can suddenly make sense of her life and everything she ever did. By what he says to her she can judge herself, but not that she should condemn herself—he hasn’t been sent to the world to condemn to world—he judges her not to condemn her but to justify her, not by any prior good performance, but simply by her receiving his gracious gift.
And his gift is a challenge, every word he says to her challenges her, which she might take defensively, but she answers his challenges, even as she ducks and parries, and in her answering him her new nature is coming to life, in her conversing with him she’s going through spiritual formation, just as in Genesis 1 the formation of the world was from the Talk of God.
The Word of God comes to us in several ways: in Proclamation, like Jesus’ sermons and soliloquies, in Demonstration, like Jesus’ miracles and symbolic actions, and in Conversation. A congregation that is vital has to do all three. Proclamation in the preaching and the teaching. Demonstration in the sacraments and our outreach ministries. And Conversation. The sharing of ourselves in prayer and with each other as we respond together to the Word of God.
In this conversation, Jesus shares himself. He says to her, and for the first time in the Gospel, "I am he." He opens himself. And she believes him. And note that we never get from her some long confession, we never hear some cathartic story of how she got this way and how bad she feels, etc. This conversation is not psychotherapy, and as I said, she keeps her clothes on. This conversation keeps quiet and reserved and most of it goes on inside her head.
The point of conversion is to start converting your old nature to the new one, to let your spirit start giving formation to your flesh. And so we watch her go back to her village but in a whole new way of dealing with her neighbors, and we can see the new and living water rising up within her.
There is direction here for our spiritual formation groups. And there is direction here for how summarily the Reformed church does our Lenten repentance, how concisely and condensed. We just repeat God’s word about us back to God, we just tell God that what God says about us must be right.
Yes, there are times for detailed self-examination and an inventory of your shortcomings, but your new creation is simply to believe the summary of what God says about you. When you confess that you agree, when you answer back to God, then you are already living in that new nature, and you can enjoy the delights that God offers you.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Exodus 17:1-7, Psalm 95, Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42
Heidelberg Catechism 88-90
Q88: What is involved in genuine repentance or conversion?
A: Two things: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new.
Q89: What is the dying-away of the old self?
A: It is to be genuinely sorry for sin, to hate it more and more, and to run away from it.
Q90: What is the coming-to-life of the new self?
A: It is wholehearted joy in God through Christ, and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to.
The lection from the Gospel of John is one of the most remarkable in the Bible and it’s the subject of one of our Tiffany windows in the sanctuary, the Woman at the Well. The story is so rich I could make ten sermons out of it, and if I were an old-fashioned Calvinist I might. One of my previous sermons on this lection is posted on my blog. Today I’m taking it a different way.
We take a step back first. Way back, to the beginning of the Bible, the first verse of Genesis. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and the Spirit of God brooded upon the face to the deep. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light."
The way that God created was by speaking. God spoke and it came to be. God said, "Let this be," and the world answered, "We’ll be that." The world was formed by answering God’s speech. The formation of the world was a response to God’s Word.
Genesis 1:1 is quoted by the prologue to the Gospel of John. The prologue is the famous passage we read on Christmas Eve. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Over the centuries the Christian tradition has tended to hear this verse in terms of philosophical theology, where the Word means an Idea, an Idea that takes Form. God created by having an Idea and then commanding the world to take the Form of that Idea, like Michelangelo with a block of marble, only God did not use hands but words.
Well, yes, but this morning I want to take it differently, as connected to the rest of the Gospel, as with our lection this morning, as meaning something like this, "In the beginning was the Talk, and the Talk was with God, and the Talk was God.
You know when it means when a boss says this to an employee: "A word!" That’s going to be a short conversation with a lot of weight, a little talk that had better make a difference.
In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was the Talk. In the beginning was the Conversation. The prologue is suggesting something about God, something which Jesus expresses in chapters 14-17 in his long soliloquy in the Upper Room, that there’s a conversation between the Father, Son, and Spirit, a private conversation, which Jesus brings us into and which the Holy Spirit carries back out to us, and our audacious sharing in the inner conversation of the Holy Trinity is what starts to form us as a community, a spiritual community. And we Christians dare to think that as our little community of Jesus is being formed by our sharing in the Talk of God, in some small measure we even begin to know the Mind of God.
The prologue is also suggesting something about humanity, and about our place in the world. It was at the creation of the world that God first made public the Trinity’s private conversation. Creation is not commanding speech and dumb obedience, it’s life-giving conversation. As God speaks the world into being, more and more it’s able to answer, until the appearance of human kind, who are able to talk back to God, on behalf of the other creatures. Our connection to God is not just for ourselves, but for us to speak with God for the rest of the world.
The Gospel of John is the gospel of conversations. Like Matthew it has sermons, like Mark it has actions, like Luke it has metaphorical soliloquies, but distinctive to John is an emphasis on conversation. And the longest conversation with any individual is with the woman at the well.
This conversation broke the rules and crossed the proper boundaries. The Samaritans and the Jews were like the Sunnis and the Shiites or the Serbs and the Croatians, their differences were theological and political and hateful. Jesus crossed those boundaries. He crossed the boundary of kosher. Her water jug will have been unclean, and drinking from it he’ll make himself unclean.
He crossed the boundaries of sex. He will have to put his lips on her vessel. And this is at a well which is dedicated to the patriarch Jacob who met Rachel at a well and fell in love with her at first sight. The woman has to wonder is like Bill Clinton or JFK. He’s certainly not like Huckabee! His disciples show up worried that he’s like McCain.
But he never touches her. He doesn’t play with her or use her. He can see through her, but he does not disrobe her, he lets her speak for herself, he lets her lead the conversation, though his responses are not what she expects. This story is all about the conversation. And the conversation is the means of her conversion.
This is not an ordinary conversation at a well. That happened in the morning, when all the other women came to get their water. And their conversation might have been about her, and why such a woman as she was trouble for the rest of them and trouble for herself. And they would be right. We have those kinds of conversations all the time about each other. But such conversations don’t help conversion, and such kind of talk is not for spiritual formation.
This one is. By the process of what they say to each other she comes to the truth about herself. He offers her a few Biblical metaphors by which she can suddenly make sense of her life and everything she ever did. By what he says to her she can judge herself, but not that she should condemn herself—he hasn’t been sent to the world to condemn to world—he judges her not to condemn her but to justify her, not by any prior good performance, but simply by her receiving his gracious gift.
And his gift is a challenge, every word he says to her challenges her, which she might take defensively, but she answers his challenges, even as she ducks and parries, and in her answering him her new nature is coming to life, in her conversing with him she’s going through spiritual formation, just as in Genesis 1 the formation of the world was from the Talk of God.
The Word of God comes to us in several ways: in Proclamation, like Jesus’ sermons and soliloquies, in Demonstration, like Jesus’ miracles and symbolic actions, and in Conversation. A congregation that is vital has to do all three. Proclamation in the preaching and the teaching. Demonstration in the sacraments and our outreach ministries. And Conversation. The sharing of ourselves in prayer and with each other as we respond together to the Word of God.
In this conversation, Jesus shares himself. He says to her, and for the first time in the Gospel, "I am he." He opens himself. And she believes him. And note that we never get from her some long confession, we never hear some cathartic story of how she got this way and how bad she feels, etc. This conversation is not psychotherapy, and as I said, she keeps her clothes on. This conversation keeps quiet and reserved and most of it goes on inside her head.
The point of conversion is to start converting your old nature to the new one, to let your spirit start giving formation to your flesh. And so we watch her go back to her village but in a whole new way of dealing with her neighbors, and we can see the new and living water rising up within her.
There is direction here for our spiritual formation groups. And there is direction here for how summarily the Reformed church does our Lenten repentance, how concisely and condensed. We just repeat God’s word about us back to God, we just tell God that what God says about us must be right.
Yes, there are times for detailed self-examination and an inventory of your shortcomings, but your new creation is simply to believe the summary of what God says about you. When you confess that you agree, when you answer back to God, then you are already living in that new nature, and you can enjoy the delights that God offers you.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Birds and Planets
My morning prayer window looks out over Prospect Park Southwest.
Friday morning I heard my first robin of 2008, cheerfully chirping its morning song. Today I heard a lot of them as I walked through the Park, but they haven't started grazing yet.
Today as I walked down Second Street, from the Park to Eighth Ave, the stoops were all green! Brownstone and limestone with green highlights. Still in winger! From the damp? The warmth?
I've been watching a planet in the pre-dawn sky, over Ditmas Park :). I can't tell if it's Jupiter or Mercury. It's low enough to be seen between the branches of the taller trees. It's my current morning star.
Wie schoen leuchtet der Morgenstern.
Friday morning I heard my first robin of 2008, cheerfully chirping its morning song. Today I heard a lot of them as I walked through the Park, but they haven't started grazing yet.
Today as I walked down Second Street, from the Park to Eighth Ave, the stoops were all green! Brownstone and limestone with green highlights. Still in winger! From the damp? The warmth?
I've been watching a planet in the pre-dawn sky, over Ditmas Park :). I can't tell if it's Jupiter or Mercury. It's low enough to be seen between the branches of the taller trees. It's my current morning star.
Wie schoen leuchtet der Morgenstern.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Sermon 4 on Spiritual Formation: Conversion
Lent 2
Genesis 12:1-4, Psalm 121, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17
Heidelberg Catechism 88-90
Q88: What is involved in genuine repentance or conversion?
A: Two things: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new.
Q89: What is the dying-away of the old self?
A: It is to be genuinely sorry for sin, to hate it more and more, and to run away from it.
Q90: What is the coming-to-life of the new self?
A: It is wholehearted joy in God through Christ, and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to.
You know the reputation of the Marines and how they do basic training: they break you down. You might have individual courage and initiative, but they break you down. You might be an American citizen with civil rights and an instinct for democracy, but they break you down. After they break you down, they build you up, but different—as a Marine.
They have do this because your natural human instinct is to preserve your own life. When you see gunfire coming at you, your natural instinct is to get away from it. But a Marine has to keep going toward it. It is unnatural to be a Marine. To be a Marine you have to born again, if you know what I mean.
Did you know that in the first centuries of the early Christian church, one of the most productive mission fields was the Roman army? Look, these soldiers had been born as Germans and Gauls and Celts and Thracians and they had had to be converted into Romans, loyal to Caesar, who claimed the titles of Savior and Lord. The analogies were there, to convert again, and be loyal to the Prince of Peace, especially if you knew first hand the real truth of war.
The centrality of conversion is a distinction of Christianity, compared to other religions. Judaism has conversion, but Judaism is not an expanding faith, and if you ask to convert to Judaism, the first response of the rabbi is to discourage you.
Islam is an expanding faith, but its pattern is submission, not conversion. It has nothing in it of being "born again." Indeed, Muslims call Islam the "natural religion of mankind." To be "born again" is actually a very Jewish metaphor, and if you convert to Judaism, you are accepting a new ethnicity. You convert to a whole new life. This Jewish pattern of conversion was made expansive by the gospel, and the first response was to encourage you.
Conversion is so central to Christianity it’s also for people who are already born and raised in the faith. At least that is what Protestants say, and we get that from scripture lessons like the epistle and gospel today. We preach to both pagans and our own congregations that "you must be born again." So if somebody asks me if our church is a "born again" church, I rub my nose and scratch my head and hem and haw and then I say, "Well, yeah, kinda sorta."
However, what people mean today by "born-again" is not the original teaching of the first Protestant churches, the Lutherans and the Reformed. The current notion is that everyone has a definable and even datable conversion experience, that there is a linear break between your old self and your new self, a before and an after, that you start out unsaved, and you accept Jesus into your heart, and then you are saved.
And they mean that if you grow up as a Christian you have to do this the same as any pagan. "Once I was lost, but now I am found. Once I was a sinner, but now I am saved." For many modern Protestants the main point of Christianity is getting saved by being born again. Contrast the Greek and Russian Orthodox, for whom the whole point of Christianity is giving praise and glory to the Holy Trinity.
But the original Protestant doctrine is what you see in our Heidelberg Catechism from A.D. 1563. The old self and the new self are not so much before and after but always both and simultaneous, like a double-decker bus. Conversion is not what happens once, dramatically, but what happens daily, in very small pieces, as you choose again and again to ride the upper deck, despite the rain. And conversion doesn’t mean you weren’t less a Christian the day before. Even the holiest saints go through new conversions every day.
In 1989, after we had immigrated to Canada. I was on an two-day bicycle trip to Camp Shalom with Boyd de Waard and Pim de Koning. As we were coming back through the Six Nations Reserve, a dog came out and chased us and got real close to me. I reached down for my air pump as a club to defend myself, but we outraced the dog. Then Pim laughed and said, "You act like an American." "Why?" "Because you could have broken your air pump and you’d have to buy a new one, but if the dog had bitten you the health care would be free."
When you immigrate you have to convert. It’s a daily thing, and it’s a million small things. Converting miles to kilometers and Fahrenheit to Celsius and habits and attitudes and social norms, converting expectations and expressions. Canada is relatively easy, though the differences are far more than Americans expect. Most immigrants have to convert to whole new languages and their new life gets harder and harder to explain back home.
Immigration is the other image of conversion. We get it from our Genesis lesson. God told Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to a the land that I will show you," and isn’t that like being born again.
I am a dual citizen, both Canadian and American. But the deal is that when I’m in America I am legally only an American so I have to behave like an American. When I’m in Canada I am legally only a Canadian so I have to behave like a Canadian. All Christians are dual citizens as well. Your other citizenship is the Kingdom of God. But with this the deal is different. When you’re in America you have to behave like you belong to the Kingdom of God. Well, to do that requires a constant daily conversion.
Christians have to think of themselves as double. You have two natures in you, the old one and the new. At your death, the old dies off and the new one lives on. Until then, you starve the first and feed the second. That’s conversion.
Christianity gets this kind of double-thinking from Judaism. Islam doesn’t do this; the very power of Islam comes from its unitary thinking. But Judaism always balances the opposites and the apparent contradictions. Not either-or but both-and. And now I have yet another one, and it’s about spiritual formation.
Spiritual formation is both growth and not-growth. Spiritual formation is both natural and unnatural. Spiritual formation is both coming-to-life and dying-away.
Last week I said that spiritual formation is as natural as children growing up. They can’t help it if you just give them security and good food. But the opposite is also true. Spiritual formation is like pruning and weeding and pulling up and cutting off. It has repentance in it, and remorse and pain, and discipline.
Conversion and growth are the alternating current of spiritual formation, the negative current and the positive current, and we can’t reduce it to the one or the other. It’s both.
Next week our lessons have something to tell us about how this kind of conversion can take place in a small group context. This week it’s Jesus and Nicodemus. Next week it’s Jesus and the woman at the well. This week Nicodemus drops out of the conversation, next week she stays in. And even though she’s the sinner of the two, she gets empowered at the end. Nicodemus just falls away.
But John 19 tells us that after the crucifixion it was Nicodemus who bought a hundred pounds of spices for Jesus’ body, and who lovingly wrapped his body for burial and laid it in the tomb. I guess he had been riding the bus by standing on the stairs to the upper deck, and now he was willing to be seen up on top. Imagine his joy after the Resurrection when he could tell the gospel writer the story of his secret meeting with Jesus. In Nicodemus there is hope for us. It just always takes a while.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Genesis 12:1-4, Psalm 121, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17
Heidelberg Catechism 88-90
Q88: What is involved in genuine repentance or conversion?
A: Two things: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new.
Q89: What is the dying-away of the old self?
A: It is to be genuinely sorry for sin, to hate it more and more, and to run away from it.
Q90: What is the coming-to-life of the new self?
A: It is wholehearted joy in God through Christ, and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to.
You know the reputation of the Marines and how they do basic training: they break you down. You might have individual courage and initiative, but they break you down. You might be an American citizen with civil rights and an instinct for democracy, but they break you down. After they break you down, they build you up, but different—as a Marine.
They have do this because your natural human instinct is to preserve your own life. When you see gunfire coming at you, your natural instinct is to get away from it. But a Marine has to keep going toward it. It is unnatural to be a Marine. To be a Marine you have to born again, if you know what I mean.
Did you know that in the first centuries of the early Christian church, one of the most productive mission fields was the Roman army? Look, these soldiers had been born as Germans and Gauls and Celts and Thracians and they had had to be converted into Romans, loyal to Caesar, who claimed the titles of Savior and Lord. The analogies were there, to convert again, and be loyal to the Prince of Peace, especially if you knew first hand the real truth of war.
The centrality of conversion is a distinction of Christianity, compared to other religions. Judaism has conversion, but Judaism is not an expanding faith, and if you ask to convert to Judaism, the first response of the rabbi is to discourage you.
Islam is an expanding faith, but its pattern is submission, not conversion. It has nothing in it of being "born again." Indeed, Muslims call Islam the "natural religion of mankind." To be "born again" is actually a very Jewish metaphor, and if you convert to Judaism, you are accepting a new ethnicity. You convert to a whole new life. This Jewish pattern of conversion was made expansive by the gospel, and the first response was to encourage you.
Conversion is so central to Christianity it’s also for people who are already born and raised in the faith. At least that is what Protestants say, and we get that from scripture lessons like the epistle and gospel today. We preach to both pagans and our own congregations that "you must be born again." So if somebody asks me if our church is a "born again" church, I rub my nose and scratch my head and hem and haw and then I say, "Well, yeah, kinda sorta."
However, what people mean today by "born-again" is not the original teaching of the first Protestant churches, the Lutherans and the Reformed. The current notion is that everyone has a definable and even datable conversion experience, that there is a linear break between your old self and your new self, a before and an after, that you start out unsaved, and you accept Jesus into your heart, and then you are saved.
And they mean that if you grow up as a Christian you have to do this the same as any pagan. "Once I was lost, but now I am found. Once I was a sinner, but now I am saved." For many modern Protestants the main point of Christianity is getting saved by being born again. Contrast the Greek and Russian Orthodox, for whom the whole point of Christianity is giving praise and glory to the Holy Trinity.
But the original Protestant doctrine is what you see in our Heidelberg Catechism from A.D. 1563. The old self and the new self are not so much before and after but always both and simultaneous, like a double-decker bus. Conversion is not what happens once, dramatically, but what happens daily, in very small pieces, as you choose again and again to ride the upper deck, despite the rain. And conversion doesn’t mean you weren’t less a Christian the day before. Even the holiest saints go through new conversions every day.
In 1989, after we had immigrated to Canada. I was on an two-day bicycle trip to Camp Shalom with Boyd de Waard and Pim de Koning. As we were coming back through the Six Nations Reserve, a dog came out and chased us and got real close to me. I reached down for my air pump as a club to defend myself, but we outraced the dog. Then Pim laughed and said, "You act like an American." "Why?" "Because you could have broken your air pump and you’d have to buy a new one, but if the dog had bitten you the health care would be free."
When you immigrate you have to convert. It’s a daily thing, and it’s a million small things. Converting miles to kilometers and Fahrenheit to Celsius and habits and attitudes and social norms, converting expectations and expressions. Canada is relatively easy, though the differences are far more than Americans expect. Most immigrants have to convert to whole new languages and their new life gets harder and harder to explain back home.
Immigration is the other image of conversion. We get it from our Genesis lesson. God told Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to a the land that I will show you," and isn’t that like being born again.
I am a dual citizen, both Canadian and American. But the deal is that when I’m in America I am legally only an American so I have to behave like an American. When I’m in Canada I am legally only a Canadian so I have to behave like a Canadian. All Christians are dual citizens as well. Your other citizenship is the Kingdom of God. But with this the deal is different. When you’re in America you have to behave like you belong to the Kingdom of God. Well, to do that requires a constant daily conversion.
Christians have to think of themselves as double. You have two natures in you, the old one and the new. At your death, the old dies off and the new one lives on. Until then, you starve the first and feed the second. That’s conversion.
Christianity gets this kind of double-thinking from Judaism. Islam doesn’t do this; the very power of Islam comes from its unitary thinking. But Judaism always balances the opposites and the apparent contradictions. Not either-or but both-and. And now I have yet another one, and it’s about spiritual formation.
Spiritual formation is both growth and not-growth. Spiritual formation is both natural and unnatural. Spiritual formation is both coming-to-life and dying-away.
Last week I said that spiritual formation is as natural as children growing up. They can’t help it if you just give them security and good food. But the opposite is also true. Spiritual formation is like pruning and weeding and pulling up and cutting off. It has repentance in it, and remorse and pain, and discipline.
Conversion and growth are the alternating current of spiritual formation, the negative current and the positive current, and we can’t reduce it to the one or the other. It’s both.
Next week our lessons have something to tell us about how this kind of conversion can take place in a small group context. This week it’s Jesus and Nicodemus. Next week it’s Jesus and the woman at the well. This week Nicodemus drops out of the conversation, next week she stays in. And even though she’s the sinner of the two, she gets empowered at the end. Nicodemus just falls away.
But John 19 tells us that after the crucifixion it was Nicodemus who bought a hundred pounds of spices for Jesus’ body, and who lovingly wrapped his body for burial and laid it in the tomb. I guess he had been riding the bus by standing on the stairs to the upper deck, and now he was willing to be seen up on top. Imagine his joy after the Resurrection when he could tell the gospel writer the story of his secret meeting with Jesus. In Nicodemus there is hope for us. It just always takes a while.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Sermon 3 On Spiritual Formation: Clothing and Community
Lent 1, February 10, 2008
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11
Let me remind you what we’re doing in this series of sermons. The Consistory has put a priority on the development in our congregation of "holistic small groups." We are calling these Spiritual Formation Groups. And I am going to our scripture lessons each week and listening to what they might tell us about Spiritual Formation Groups. This week I can hear two messages in the lessons. First from Genesis, and second from the gospel.
Let me remind you what we’re doing in this series of sermons. The Consistory has put a priority on the development in our congregation of "holistic small groups." We are calling these Spiritual Formation Groups. And I am going to our scripture lessons each week and listening to what they might tell us about Spiritual Formation Groups. This week I can hear two messages in the lessons. First from Genesis, and second from the gospel.
In 1967 a book called The Naked Ape was published by Desmond Morris. The author tried to explain human beings in strictly zoological terms as animals among other animals, as apes among other apes, without any reference to such factors as ethics or aesthetics or spirituality. Many people were delighted and many were offended.
The title of the book was brilliant for marketing, but hokey as science. All apes are naked. A title more scientifically accurate would have been, "The Ape that Feels Naked," but that would give credence to the very ethical and spiritual factors that the author was ruling out.
The fact that we are the apes who feel our nakedness tells us that narrow zoological categories do not suffice for human behavior. We do things that other animals don’t do. When animals feel vulnerable, they hide or they run or they attack. They don’t put clothes on.
Adam and Eve felt naked. Their nakedness was shame to them. They felt shame because of their guilt. We are the animals that feel shame and guilt. We are the animals that have something to feel shameful and guilty about. We are the animals that feel naked when we are naked.
The Christian hope is not a return to primal nakedness. Our vision for the future is not that we will reach a pristine state of nudity. It’s rather that we will be clothed, clothed in our right minds, dressed in righteousness, decked out in gladness, robed in light, walking in beauty. Our Christian hope is not a return to nature, but an advance to a new nature. And that advancement means formation.
And so our Spiritual Formation Groups are not about exposure. You will keep your clothes on. Your nakedness is reserved for only one relationship, with your spouse who loves you intimately, quite literally warts and all. Well, your doctor, too, the specialist trained to heal you. And I won’t condemn you if this summer you go skinny-dipping with your friends, but I won’t join you.
Our Spiritual Formation Groups are not for confessing your sins. Neither are they for therapy or for treating our dysfunctions. You won’t be rehearsing all that stuff from your childhood about your siblings and your parents. (If you need to, I can refer you to a therapist.) Our business will be our present fellowship, engaging each other in the clothes that we are wearing now.
We’re going to do this because you need to do this, for spiritual formation. Your spirit needs to get close to other spirits, and stay close for a while. Not too close. Not so much intimacy as fellowship. Our spirits will dance square dances, not slow dances. There are some aspects of spiritual formation that you can only do on your own, or with a spiritual director, or in silence, but other kinds you have to do in fellowship with other spirits.
What your group will talk about is not yourselves so much as the Word of God in your lives. You will help each other hear the Word of God. You will support each other as you reflect on the Word of God, reflecting forward into your future, and reflecting backward into your past. Yes, there will be sharing, that’s so much of the pleasure and encouragement, but what you share is your response to the Word of God in the real life terms of your own life.
We believe that God talks to us. We believe that God is alive and active and interested in us and that God talks to us. We believe that God has specific and dependable ways of talking to us. We believe that God talks to us through scripture. By means of the Bible.
The Bible is the greatest treasure of the Christian faith and one of its chief frustrations. People tell me that they try to read the Bible and they just can’t make sense of it. Well, of course not, it’s a daunting combination of Paradise Lost and Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales and Hammurabi’s Code.
Protestants make a big deal about everybody being able to read the Bible. But then one group says it means this and another group says that, and anyone can make it say anything. When Jesus was tempted by Satan, his answer to the first temptation was this, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." And so Satan says, "Hey, no problem, for my next temptation I will just quote scripture!"
It’s a Protestant problem. Roman Catholics don’t have the same problem. Catholicism says that the Roman Church’s official interpretation of the Bible has the same authority as the Bible itself. To be fair, it’s a Protestant myth that the Roman Catholic Church was against laypeople reading the Bible. What it was against was the private interpretation of the Bible. It wanted to avoid the Protestant problem of who knows what the Bible means.
The solution to this Protestant problem is not Roman Catholic but catholic in the larger sense, and in understanding the Holy Catholic Church not as a hierarchy but as a community. And that means that we read the Bible in community, in the communion of saints. We read the Bible within the community of people across the centuries and the continents, who lived in the time of St. Augustine and St. Jerome and Luther and Calvin and who live today in Guatemala and South Africa. We read the Bible within the community of our own fellowship. Among the other spirits who are in close contact to yours. We read the Bible in spiritual community. We listen for the Word of God in a spirit of love.
In Jesus’ ministry, he almost always talked to groups. He gave his word to people in groups. I can think of only two cases of Jesus conversing one-on-one: with the woman at the well and with Nicodemus, both of which we’ll read this month. We all have need for times like that. But most of our listening to the Word of God is best done in community.
That’s how I learned to hear God’s Word. In the small group of our family dinner table growing up. Every night, after dessert, we read the Bible at the table. Sometimes a special children’s bible, sometimes the real thing, and then we might talk about it. Over the years, that builds up.
Spiritual formation is a lot like physical formation. With the right conditions it happens quite naturally, almost automatically. The child has a genetic code inside, and if you offer the child a safe, secure, and happy home, and you feed the child the food it needs, the child grows up, she can’t help it, the child’s formation takes its course.
So too with your spiritual formation. It’s not so much that you have to work on it. God offers it to you. God feeds you with God’s word within the fellowship of your small group. No sudden revelations, but it does build up.
I guess the original holistic small group is the Christian vision of God. The Holy Trinity. I suppose that what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share in their timeless eternality is their fellowship and their Word. And that God also offers us.
Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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