June 10, Proper 5: The Authentic Self of Jesus

Genesis 3:8-15, Psalm 130, 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1, Mark 3:20-35

“Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Okay, that’s a nice thing for the Lord Jesus to say to the people around him inside the house. But outside the house, where Jesus’ mother was, when she found out what he said she will have felt embarrassed and ashamed. She will have felt dishonored. I can imagine his siblings retorting that to do the will of God is to honor your father and your mother, like it says in the Torah. I can imagine this only confirming their belief that their big brother was over the edge, and should be stopped for his own good. Not to mention for the reputation of their family.
The opposition to Jesus has begun. Already in the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark. The mounting opposition is the shadow of the good news. You can understand the motives of the opposition. The Middle East has always been a powder keg, and no less then. The situation for the Jews of Galilee was not much different from the situation of Jews and Christians of modern Syria and Lebanon. Everyday life was always in the balance. Naturally the leaders felt they had to keep control. And Jesus was threatening the balance. They did not understand what he was up to and they couldn’t predict what he’d do next.

This committee of legal experts on the Torah has come up from Jerusalem to investigate and issue an opinion. They decide he is a sorcerer, that he has real power, but it’s the unclean power of the enemy. Of this opinion Jesus is unforgiving. “You can slander me,” he says, “and I can forgive you. But you cannot slander the Holy God and ever get away with it. You guys have not just denied God, you have disreputed God, you have equated God and Satan.” So the parable has an innermost meaning which is a terrible judgment. It is they themselves who are in the power of Satan. Their own house is divided and it will not stand, nor will their kingdom stand. Jesus predicts the very destruction of Jerusalem which they were trying to prevent, just forty years later.

Why doesn’t Jesus work with them? Why doesn’t he meet them half way? I would have. He doesn’t. With him it’s all or nothing. Take him or leave him. One of you told me this week that St. Mark’s gospel is the most radical of the gospels, and it’s true. Jesus says, “Here I am. Just me.” No deals, no complications, no family obligations, just God, the Holy God, the Spirit of God, the God of freedom, and Jesus in his radical freedom.

He doesn’t say it, in just those words, “here I am,” but he models it. It’s what we talked about last week. It’s what his mother had said just thirty years earlier to the angel Gabriel. “Here I am,” hineini. Isaiah said it when he saw the Lord within the temple, as we saw last week. Moses had said it, Abraham had said it, it’s what you say when you realize you’re in the presence of God.

Eve and Adam did not say it, in our lesson from Genesis. I heard a magnificent sermon on this once by a rabbi from Argentina. He said that when Adam was hiding from God in the trees of the garden, that meant he had lost his true humanity and could not say, “Here I am,” which is nothing less than what it means to be a human being. They thought that they were being free, when they ate of the forbidden fruit, free from having to do the will of God, but instead they were in bondage to their guilt and their shame. That’s the power of Satan in our lives, the guilt that makes the fear of God a negative fear, the shame that takes away our freedom.

And in that bondage, they became inauthentic human beings. In their answers to God’s questions they dissembled. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. Even after they come out of the trees they still keep hiding behind their words. They could not say, “Here I am.” They had lost their both their authenticity and their freedom when they chose to be disobedient to God.

You might know that my son is an artist, and when I was with him in Germany a couple weeks ago he asked to read an essay which he told me had inspired him. It was an essay on creativity by the famous American psychologist Carl Rogers. It was a very good essay. It talked about how creativity must be grounded in the authentic self. There can be creativity which is negative and destructive, and that’s when it arises from a self which is not truly authentic, from a self which is damaged, dis-eased, corrupted, abused, in bondage, and not “true”. What Christians might call an unclean spirit, or even the power of Satan, which is guilt and shame. The awful creativity of Adolf Hitler comes to mind. But positive and productive creativity arises from the authentic self.

This gets close to what we see in Jesus here, and what the Lord Jesus offers us. Here’s a take-home: It is an obligation for us Christians to do the work required to be authentic in ourselves. To do the self-examination, to learn the self-awareness and discretion, to practice the self-control of sanctification and humility, to study the lessons of our losses and be candid with our suffering. It is not a shameful thing for you to seek professional counseling and therapy to work on this, because our culture today is so confusing and confused. But to do this work is also to notice your encouragements, the love and the support you get from other people, and their challenges to you. You want to stop excusing yourself and hiding behind your explanations and placing the blame on others. Your goal is to just say, “Here I am.” It is a position of marvelous freedom. It’s the freedom that we see in Jesus.

This freedom can be dangerous. We all know people who refuse to be accountable. We all know people who take this freedom for self-indulgence. And yet the abuse of it does not deny the use of it, abusus non tollit usus. The fact that Picasso was such a philanderer and that Van Gogh committed suicide does not deny the value of their freedom or their creativity, nor the truth of the lesson of inner authenticity.

This freedom is most dangerous when we make of it an idol, which we do so frequently in America (and in other ways in the rest of the world as well). We make our freedom an absolute and a value in itself. But our freedom is not for ourselves, that we shall do within the garden whatever the hell we want to do, but a freedom for coming out of the trees to stand before the Lord with honest authenticity and without calculation.

But who can be this free? We all have obligations. You are not free not to pay your Income Tax. You are not free from your body or your blood pressure. My father is not free from his cancer nor are we, his family. And I don’t want to be free from my vows to my wife, or from my obligations to my children. I want to be authentic in my obligations and my relationships because my authenticity is not for myself but for my God and what God calls me to.

The freedom of Jesus was clearly a freedom in community. He did not say that he had no mother or brothers; what he said was the people right in front of him were his mother and brothers. When you say it to God, “Here I am,” you also have to be saying it to the people who are right in front of you. Your authenticity is not for yourself, but for community, for fellowship, for creating fellowship and community with those people you find in front of you. It’s so that you can say to me, “Here I am.” And not just “take me or leave me,” but “you take me, and I take you.”

You have to be careful with this. You are not Jesus. You cannot be as radical as he was. You can start on this with people whom you trust are dedicated to the will of God. They may not do God’s will of God the same as you. They may be Jewish and do God’s will by the Torah. They may be Muslim and do God’s will by the Holy Koran. I have learned that I can have this kind of Godly authentic brotherhood with Jews and Muslims. But I’m guessing that easiest for you will be other Christians who do God’s will by watching Jesus in the gospels. But you see it is for love. You grant the person before you the freedom you need for yourself. And in that mutual freedom you can practice love. This freedom is for love. Our goal is always love, because our goal is always God.

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

May 6, Easter 5, "What's to Prevent Me From Being Baptized?"

Acts 8:26-40, Psalm 22:24-30, 1 John 4:7-21, John 15:1-8

My sermon series for the Easter season is on the questions which are asked within the scripture lessons. Today our question is what the Ethiopian eunuch asked Philip. “Look, here is water. What is to prevent me from being baptized?” That was not rhetorical. It was a real question.

If that were me in the chariot instead of Philip, I’d have to say, “Well, when’s the next time you plan to be back in Jerusalem? I can’t baptize you today. You have to meet with the Board of Elders first, I can’t just baptize you on my own. When I was installed in my church in 2002 I made a solemn promise to conduct my ministry according to the rules of the church, so my conscience would prevent me.

You know, I do get unchurched people calling me up to ask me to baptize their children, and I tell them that baptism is not just a private act or a family affair. It’s an act of the church. We don’t do it privately, we do it in the midst of the congregation. It’s about membership among God’s people, it means participating in a congregation. So I’d have to answer the eunuch’s question with my reasons to prevent it.

Philip would have his reasons too. First of all, the eunuch was a Gentile, and at this stage of the church, there were no Gentile Christians yet. Baptism was a Jewish act for Jewish people. John the Baptist began to baptize for the revival of Israel, and for the Jews of his day to identify with that revival. What did this pagan have to do with Israel, even the Israel which honored Jesus as its Lord? No Gentile had ever been baptized yet, and Philip could have said that such an innovation in baptism was not for him to make, since he was not an apostle, but only an evangelist and deacon.

Second, the eunuch was going back home and therefore leaving the company of the people of God. He would not be part of any congregation. Baptism is not a private act, it’s about membership among God’s people. With whom would this guy have communion? Philip could have said that it’s impossible to be a Christian on your own.

Third, there was Deuteronomy 23:1: “He whose testicles are crushed or whose male member is cut off shall not enter the congregation of the Lord.” No eunuchs allowed. It’s very clear. Don’t bother saying, “That’s just the Old Testament.” The Old Testament was the only Bible Philip had. And it’s from the heart of the Bible, the Torah, and what did Jesus say against “removing one jot or tittle from the Torah.” I’m sure that this verse was especially what the eunuch had in mind when he asked his question. I’m sure that a man who had invested such time and money to make a pilgrimage from Ethiopia to Jerusalem will have known about this verse, and worried about it every day for all the weeks he traveled in his chariot.

I’m guessing he had set his hope on another verse, although a verse less central to the Bible, from Isaiah chapter 56: “Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely divide me from his people,’ and let not the eunuch say, ‘Behold, I am a dry tree.’ For thus says the Lord: to the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and hold fast to my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name which shall not be cut off.”

But his arrival in Jerusalem will have been after the stoning of Stephen, and the beginning of the persecution of the disciples, and the temple police will have been at threat level orange. Not even Philip himself would have been allowed into the temple. The closest the eunuch could have gotten was the outer court, where the animals were bought and sold, and even then he’d have to slip some money to the police for them to look the other way.

So after this exclusion, on his way back home, he’s reading Isaiah again, just a couple handsbreadth over in the scroll, chapter 53, the words he read aloud with Philip. Those words cut very close to his experience. Not only being cut off from the temple to which he’d made his pilgrimage, but also his castration in his childhood. In the image of Isaiah, he’d been like a sheep under the knife and a lamb about to be cut. “In his humiliation justice was denied him.” Of course it’s this passage he’s reading. He felt like he was in it. He had been excluded from the temple and excluded by the Torah, but he found himself included in the prophecy.

It’s with a cultured objectivity that he asks Philip his first question, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” But behind his objectivity we can read his interest: “Can this also be about me? Am I included here?” So Philip answers this first question by teaching him the apostolic interpretation of Isaiah—that the prophet says these things about Jesus, in his suffering, in his rejection and exclusion, in his loneliness and death.

And the eunuch is the one who makes the leap of faith. Then Jesus is together with me here. If he’s identified with me, why should I not identify with him? What’s to prevent me then?

For Philip to overcome his reasons to prevent it, he has to believe that the water was there in the desert by providence, not coincidence, and that the eunuch’s question was there by providence. He knows the angel had put him on this road, and the Spirit had ordered him into the chariot, and how providential was it that the pagan was already reading scripture. He has to figure that if this little temporary congregation was good enough for God it was good enough for him. And if God is laying Isaiah 56 over Deuteronomy 23, what’s to prevent him from doing it as well?

The eunuch asks the question, and we never hear Philip’s final answer, we only see his action. We are not told what his baptismal formula was. We are not told that he did not use the baptismal liturgy of the Reformed Church in America. We are told how the eunuch felt, that he went on his way rejoicing, but we are not told what Philip felt, only that he must have felt dizzy and disoriented, having been snatched away by the Spirit. It doesn’t matter what Philip felt. What matters was his action.

The action of love is what we mean when we talk about Christian love, the love of Christ, the love of God. It’s not the love of feeling, it’s the love of action. You do the action, and the feeling may follow, you do the action of love enough to develop a general attitude of love and the feeling of love will follow, but you don’t wait for the feeling. The love that Philip enacted for the eunuch was not based on his feeling, nor was it even a favor. It’s not that Philip did him a favor. Philip owed the eunuch what he gave him, he owed him the action of his love.

A Christian congregation is a group of people who gather together to try to perfect their love in real and concrete ways. You come here every week to learn this love which comes from God, to attach to it like branches on a vine, and in many small ways to practice and perfect it. Today we celebrate that six more of you have decided to commit to this community of love.

I can imagine what might prevent you. Your previous experience of church  might have been very good, and then look at us—we are bound to disappoint you. Or it might have been bad, and then look at us—it’s deja vu all over again. Or it might have been okay, not great, not bad, and here you go again, everybody smiles and lots of nice talk but not much more. You can imagine yourself like Philip here, running through the reasons of what could prevent you.

But somebody put you on this road. And you found us reading scripture out loud, and in that scripture looking for ourselves. Look, here we are, what is to prevent you from loving us? From loving each other? I believe that’s how you have to understand what you are doing today. You’re not joining a church so much as committing to the perfection of love. To the perfection of the love which you have received in your own life from God. God bless you for committing to this love.

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

April 29, Easter 4, "By What Power Do You Do This?"

Acts 4:5-12, Psalm 23, 1 John 3:16-24, John 10:11-18

The Easter season is eight Sundays long, from Easter Day to Pentecost. During this season my sermons are a series on the questions which are asked within the scripture lessons. Last week’s question was “Why do doubts arise within your hearts?” This week’s question is “By what power or by what name did you do this?” It was a hostile question from the interrogation of Peter and John. But it’s not an unfair question. It’s always fair to ask it of the church. Whatever it is we do as a church, by what power and by what name do we do it?

The easy part of the question is “by what name”. Not by the name of the Reformed Church in America, nor by the name of the universal God of all enlightened men, but by the name of this particular person, Jesus of Nazareth, who was raised from the dead by the God of Israel, elected by God to be the Messiah, and designated by God as the one in whom the world will find its salvation. Which means that whatever we do as a church to contribute to the salvation of the world, we do it under the name of this Lord Jesus.

But what is the meaning of salvation? Salvation means one thing for Buddhists and another thing for Hindus, and something else for Muslims and something else for Jews. What’s included in salvation under the name of Jesus? The salvation we Christians are supposed to look for, officially at least, according to the Nicene Creed, is “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” Last week I said we can look for this not only at the end of the world but in the now of the world, and we can see it in a homeless man getting a job and a uniform and a car. Salvation can mean a broken person restored to dignity and productivity.

That’s what it looked like two Sundays ago, in the story of the disabled panhandler at the gate of the temple, who was healed by Peter and John. That’s what Peter is being questioned about today. What Peter says in the original Greek is that a man who was “disabled” was “saved,” so that the man could stand there “sound and whole”. So the gift of soundness and wholeness is the meaning of salvation here, of his rising up into his full humanity, so that instead of his begging outside the temple he many now stand inside the temple for the praise of God, and then walk back out of the temple to his neighborhood and love his neighbors now and be productive in the city. Such is the salvation which came to him under Jesus’ name.

The harder part of the question is by what power do they do this. What is the power of the church? We ask it today in full awareness of the church’s weaknesses, and its record of corruption and division. Despite the scandal of the church there is a power for good which still gets through, and what is that power? By what power do we do what we do every week? By what power do we speak to Park Slope and the surrounding neighborhoods in which we live? Can it be as simple as the power of love, or what the gospel calls “the power to lay down our lives?”

Last Monday night we had our monthly elders’ meeting. The first part of the meeting was a pleasure. We interviewed the people who want full membership in the church and to commit to this congregation. They want to identify with this flock of sheep. We received them and blessed them, and after they left, we had to move on to business not so pleasurable. We addressed a potential conflict in the church. We had to sort through certain actions by specific persons, and the What and the Why of statements which they may or may not have made, and what did that require of us.

Who do we think we are we do this work when Jesus calls himself the one shepherd of the flock? We do not want to be hirelings. We do not run away when difficulty comes. In the Reformed Church we appoint the elders to be under-shepherds of the flock, in order to express his shepherding in real time with real people. Not that we feel so courageous in ourselves. We recognize our weaknesses. It’s “in fear and trembling that we work out our salvation.” We try to work the power of the love of God. We apply the power of God’s love directly to the realities of our common human life within the troubles and confusion of the world, even the small world of Old First.

The power the elders have is the “power to lay down our lives” for the sake of the flock. We do this in many small ways. We sacrifice the hours of our evenings, although we’d rather be at home. On the matters at hand we offer in turns our own personal judgments, and then we lay them down to the judgments of the other elders. Last Monday night there were three of us who judged one way, and one the opposite way, and two were in-between. By the end of our discussion the five of us had laid down our judgments before the challenge of the one. What that one elder called the rest of us to was a very deep kind of justice. And if justice can be understood as the right distribution of love, then what he called us to was a very advanced kind of love.

It was not a case of just giving in. It was not an example of inaction or disability. It was a case of that one elder challenging the rest of us, including me, and challenging us to hope against hope, and doing it in such a humble and loving way that we were lifted up. It was a little bit of salvation. You understand that I cannot tell you what the particular matter was, but you need to know the good news that this kind of healing can happen in a church. And you need to know that we do this among the elders for your sake, we do it for the soundness and wholeness of this body of Christ of which you are a part. We do it as a small community of six people in order to model what the community of Jesus can be for our congregation as a whole. We take care that the life we live together in this church may express and experience “the life of the world to come.”

We express it for the world and for the life of the world today. The metaphor of the shepherd was an ancient metaphor for kings. Today the shepherds of our lives would be the politicians we elect to power and authority. The great tragedy of this magnificent democracy of America is that our politicians are afraid to challenge our nation like our one elder did. In order to get elected they indulge our insecurities and pander to our prejudice. They will not lay down their possible reelection or continuing in power for the sake of justice or hope. They are hirelings whose power lacks the true authority of love.

It’s not in the power of the church to correct this in our nation. We are not given that. What’s in our power is rather to witness to the nature of God’s salvation of the world and to give credit to our witness by how we express it in our lives as God’s community. We commit to this expression. By our membership we stand for it. When we say that salvation is by no other name under heaven, we do not mean it as a judgment about non-Christians, for we don’t know God’s boundaries, we only know God’s center, and the center is that God has committed to that specific kind of salvation and that specific kind of power for good and that authority of love which in God expressed in real time in the person whose name was Jesus of Nazareth.

We are tempted to look for resurrection power in supernatural healings which are indisputably miraculous. No miracle is ever undisputed, as Peter and John found out. No act of love is indisputable, unless it’s seen through love. But I can call on you to work your miracles. In the small things you do in daily life, by how you give yourself to love and to its challenges, especially against the power of the doubting and the fearing of the world. Your acts of love seem insignificant. But they are part of that one great thing God is doing in the world, that great long plan of salvation.

If it seems slow, it is the patience of God’s love. If it seems weak, it is the vulnerability of God’s love. If it seems uncertain, then be encouraged by the signs of it, which you can see through love. And here’s the answer to our question: The power is love, and God could do it in no other way, because God’s name is Love.

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

Open House on May 20

Sunday, May 20: Sacred Sites | Old First Open House

1 pm - 5 pm

A statewide event sponsored by the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
Sunday May 20 is a chance for our neighbors, city and state, to get to know Old First, tour our lovely sanctuary, hear our spectacular organ, and learn why Old First, it's people and its building are special to everyone in the greater community.

Schedule of Events:

1:00 -- Michael Devonshire, Director of Conservation, Jan Hird Pokorny Associates, Inc. will speak about “The Importance of Historic Preservation”.

1:30 - 2:30 -- Music by Aleeza Meir, Organist, Old First Reformed Church, performed on our sanctuary's 1891 Roosevelt pipe organ.

Ongoing 1:00 - 5:00 -- Guided and Self-Guided Tours of the Sanctuary.

On Display:

• The History of Old First since 1654
• Programs and Organizations Old First supports in the Community
• Programs within the Church

For Sale: Decorative Plates with historic engraving of Old First, and
Windows: Old First Reformed Church, a full color book of our sanctuary stained glass

April 22, Easter 3, "Why Do Doubts Arise Within Your Hearts?"

Acts 3:12-19, Psalm 4, 1 John 3:1-7, Luke 24:36-48

Today is Easter Sunday number three. The Easter season is eight Sundays long, from Easter to Pentecost, seven weeks, forty-nine days plus one. The season is divided into forty days and ten days by Ascension Day, which will be on May 17.  During those first forty days, on the six Sundays of those forty days, the Lord Jesus kept showing up to be with his disciples.

The record states that his appearances were real, and in the flesh, but also contradictory. On the one hand he would suddenly appear and disappear, and make his way through solid walls and closed doors, as if the normal laws of nature didn’t apply to him, which suggests he was, what, maybe a disembodied spirit. On the other hand he could eat a piece of fish, and apparently digest it, which suggests he was a physical creature of familiar flesh and blood. It’s confusing. How shall we make sense of it? It’s like Jesus could receive at will the benefits of  the laws of nature (the broiled fish!) without being bound to the laws of nature (the walls!).

The Biblical scholar N T Wright describes it as Jesus apparently existing in two dimensions simultaneously. At his resurrection he began to exist in another dimension, the future world, the future of this world, the life of the world to come, in which there will be no sin and no corruption, where he is now and to which he calls us. But for those first forty days he also continued to exist in this dimension of the world, within the lines of time and space, of days and weeks, of geographic locality, of  human history, under the laws of gravity and of the biology of digestion. There was an overlap of forty days in which he existed in two dimensions of the world at once.

It’s hard to explain — it’s impossible to explain, but it’s like the laws of the future world take precedence over the laws of this familiar world, so that he was freely able to be in our familiar world and accept its laws at will, or not. It’s like it was up to him. What this also suggests is that the Kingdom of God embraces and engages the world of our familiarity but the laws of the Kingdom of God take precedence.

The disciples can’t make sense of this. (You might be thinking I can’t either.) They can’t make sense of all this new and conflicting and even contradictory information. And that’s why they have doubts, that’s why their doubts arise within them. Of course they doubt the whole possibility of his resurrection. It’s not just modern scientific people who doubt his resurrection. They doubted it back then. They knew the laws of nature. They knew that dead bodies don’t come alive again, not after they have leaked out their blood, and after the putrefaction which gets irreversible in under an hour. They did not have our modern methods of refrigeration, nor of socially keeping their dead bodies out of sight, so they knew it better than we do, that dead bodies don’t come back alive again. The disciples are reported in all four gospels as having first greeted the news of his resurrection with unbelief. The bodily resurrection is both the linchpin of the Christian faith and also the hardest thing to believe. Of course their doubts arose within them.

Doubts can arise from lack of evidence, when there is not enough to believe. But I think more frequently our doubts arise from too much evidence—from too much evidence to synthesize. It’s like when you get to know someone and you know his character and then he says something or does something which bothers you and makes you doubt his character. Which evidence shall you believe? Both sets of evidence may be true. You have to decide which set of evidence controls the other set.

The Lord Jesus famously says “the meek shall inherit the earth.” You want to believe it is true, which is partly why you are here today. You claim him as your Lord, and you want to believe what he says. But he’s contradicted by so much evidence in our familiar world. The strong inherit the earth, the assertive inherit the earth. That the Lord Jesus is wrong (or at least irrelevant) is assumed by the foreign policies of all the nations in the world. For evidence take the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian private property in the occupied West Bank, or the expansion of American frontier settlements on the lands guaranteed by Congress to Native Americans.

If America ever was a Christian country, then it was in our interest to read what Jesus said about “inheriting the earth” as a metaphor for going off to heaven when we die. But if he meant it the way he said it, as the earth, the land, the real and physical earth, which is what is implied by the physicality of his bodily resurrection, then it both convicts us in our history and it is contradicted by history’s evidence. You have cause to doubt what Jesus said. And so you face this choice: whether to give precedence to the laws of the Kingdom of God over the apparent iron laws of economics and politics and history, and whether the skimpy evidence of Jesus’ resurrection controls the massive evidence of greed and sin and death.

Look at your own life. You have contradictory evidence in your own life. You know you are a Christian. In many ways your life is so good and loving and so in tune with God. But you keep making those same mistakes, and hurting people in that same old way. As you get older you gain some victories over some old sins but you seem to have learned new sins! Your attempt to synthesize what you can believe about yourself is what gives rise to your doubts. You finally cannot synthesize the evidence; you have to prioritize it: which laws take precedence, which beliefs control the others. This is how to understand what our Epistle says, that “All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”

What it means to “hope in him” is to put your trust in the little evidence he offers, to take on the faith the signals of the gospel. That allows you to relocate the doubts which rise in you. You don’t stop doubting; you settle your doubts. You take your doubts and move them over and settle them down on top of the compulsion of familiar evidence. It’s not that you have to deny the familiar evidence, or doubt the lessons of human history, or doubt the laws of nature, lest you keep injuring your nose by trying to walk through closed doors; but you weigh the evidence and learn to doubt its certainty. You can doubt the confidence of conventional wisdom, as far as this present world goes, you can doubt the pretensions of its expertise and the permanence of its experience. You still embrace and engage the world, but you live according to the laws of the life of the world to come.

Let me finish with a story which offers a little bit of evidence of the power of the resurrection. It’s not as dramatic as Simon Peter raising the lame man up on his legs. But it is close to a miracle. You know that part of my ministry is pastoring the homeless men on Seventh Avenue. All the evidence admits that any gains these men may make are minimal. Maybe I can get them rooms of their own, which is a very good thing, but still you see them on the street, panhandling.

Six years ago a homeless guy named Gary Lee was sleeping on our stoop. I was able to get him a room. We tried to get him a job, but there was no work for him. He tried to make some money shining shoes on Flatbush Avenue by the Q train, but the cops kicked him off for having no permit. We got him into a program, and I heard he was getting some training. I hadn’t seen him for a year or two.

On Maundy Thursday I was walking up Seventh Avenue and I heard a car pull up and I heard my name, “Rev. Meeter, Rev. Meeter.” I thought “Who is this?” in my usual crabby way. I went over to the car and looked inside. “Garry Lee!”  Driving a car, and dressed in a uniform. “Gary Lee, whose car is this?” He grinned at me, “It’s my car, Rev. Meeter. And I’m working at an agency in Red Hook, I got my permit to drive their van.” I was ecstatic. “Gary Lee, Gary Lee!” He said, “I want to thank you, Rev. Meeter. You helped me out, you stood by me, you stayed with me.” Right there in the Avenue I leaned into his window and I prayed with him.

The power of the resurrection. A little skimpy contradiction of the familiar evidence. I accepted his thanks but it wasn’t really me. I just held him by the hand. He’s a believer. It was the power of the name of Jesus, coming through me, to engage his doubt about himself, and settle it down on top of the all evidence on homeless men like him, and free up his belief in the new world for himself, which his Lord Jesus was calling him to. I invite you to choose for that as well, to settle your doubt upon your certainties, and to free up faith to rise within you to belief. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.

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

Guest Sermon for April 15, Easter 2, by Arin Fisher, our seminary intern.

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Today I’ll be working with the gospel text. It’s about fear, anxiety, doubt, and the ultimate call to faith, all of which seem to be universal themes for the experiences of many today. Fear about the economy. Anxiety about just about everything. Doubt, at least for me, is reflexively activated, and usually when I have too much time on my hands. And the call to faith, which we feel sometimes at odds times and in odd places, reinforces this idea of a Christian lifestyle. I’m sure we’ve all heard this doubting-Thomas story before. It’s one of those go-to Christian stories, and because it’s one of those go-to Christian stories, it’s hard to hear it as news. But the ultimate question the text has been asking me is whether I can confidently and honestly do as Thomas does when he says to Jesus, “My Lord and my God.”

My therapist’s favorite story to psychoanalyze begins in high school. My parents were rather secular, and there aren’t terribly many open and affirming congregations like Old First in northern Michigan. A friend brought me to her youth group, and I chose that church as my church. My pastor recommended that I see a “Christian” therapist for reparative therapy. Reparative therapy, for those of you who haven’t heard of it, is a therapy that’s designed to make gay people straight. It’s been denounced as ineffective and mentally and sexually harmful by most national psychiatric and social welfare organizations, but certain churches and family organizations swear by it, citing a single study published in 2001 as evidence that it works. It’s what Marcus Bachmann got in trouble for when Michelle was still running for the Republican nomination. My parents thought I was seeing a therapist to come to terms with my gayness and to address a friend’s suicide, whereas, in reality, my therapist was convincing me that I was unloved by God because I was not a “man of God.” My therapist was not only spiritually creepy, but often a little handsy. I’ll spare you the details, but I’m sad to say I thought his methods were merely unorthodox, so I kept seeing him. As it turns out, it’s not unusual for reparative therapists to be “ex-gays” themselves, self-repressing for years and years and then using their positions of pseudo-authority as opportunities for release. Following the meetings with my therapist, I would drive my minivan home and try to coerce God into making me straight. But to no avail.

Instead, as I tormented myself theologically, God told me to buck up and chill out. Life didn’t need to be as hard as I had been making it. But I tested God until well into college, and I haven’t learned yet how to buck up and chill out. I find it fascinating that I haven’t left the church completely. Honestly, though, I have disdain for the gays who have left. I feel like they’re giving up too easily. They, of course, could say that my nostalgia for the church is, in the same way, giving up too easily.

It’s not unusual to pass through a spiritual phase in which you bargain with God or pray for absurd things like parking spaces or for—you know—a brand new sexuality. Or to hold your faith hostage pending some resolution to a problem or situation. There’s something very On-the-Road and healthy about spiritual phases, or journeys. My favorite theologian and mentor James Alison once illustrated for me his conception of spiritual identities, but I think it works well for anything in which transition, growth, and evolution change us. At the beginning, you’re on the bank of a lake, just like everyone else. You look out at the water, and you see a swim platform right where the clear, predictable, sandy shallows start to become darker, colder, deeper, and full of seaweed. You swim to the platform, but it was harder than you thought it would be. So you rest there, drying off in the sun, until you’re ready to swim beyond it. And then you swim beyond it.

We all have stories in which we’ve tested God. It’s biblical, after all. Thomas does it. Jacob actually wrestles with God, or an angel, or whatever. Job does. Jonah does. It’s more human than not to wrestle with God. I’d be interested to hear from you about what you did—or maybe still do—to test God. But it’s a spirituality I’m happy to have abandoned for now. What this kind of spirituality exposes, I think, is more our self-doubt than our God-doubt. I’m happy to have realized that, in fact, God doesn’t work that way. How does God work? I don’t know, but not that way. We shouldn’t dull or smother our doubt with superstitious spiritualities. There are better spiritualities. Having faith is hard enough before adding to it exponentially-increasing disappointments from ever-failing God-tests. And we shouldn’t flatter ourselves into thinking our God-tests are justified or somehow especially conclusive. Because they’re not. And they never will be.

The text says that the disciples meet in the house and lock the doors “for fear of the Jews.” First of all, no, not “the Jews.” The “Jews” includes diverse sects and traditions, some of which couldn’t care less about the disciples. I’m always inclined to distrust the author of John, the evangelist. I don’t think they’re scared of the Jews. No, they’re scared of Christ’s resurrection. They’re not scared of “resurrection” itself because in chapter eleven they had seen Lazarus raised from the dead. They understand that resurrection lies well within God’s capacity. They’re afraid of Christ’s resurrection. It would mean that he had actually predicted the time of his resurrection, and that he really had been the Messiah all along. It would prove that something was actually at stake in the crucifixion. That Jesus wasn’t as crazy as they all had secretly thought. And it would mean they had just royally screwed up. Jesus had recruited them, asked them to keep watch at Gethsemane, but then they fell asleep. And now Jesus has come again to recommission them.

But Thomas, also called the Twin, wasn’t at the house when Jesus appeared the first time, and he doesn’t believe the stories the other disciples tell him. The others insist that Jesus was there! Just where Thomas is standing! They recount his commissions: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” and “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Thomas has to admit that that indeed does sound like Jesus, but he scoffs. Not because he doesn’t believe his friends, because on some level he does believe his friends. He just doesn’t want to believe his friends. Unlike Lazarus, Jesus was executed, shamefully murdered as a criminal and as the sacrifice of a violent, religiously-enthusiastic contagion. Jesus had been utterly passive. Thomas felt guilty, and he knew that he and his friends were complicit in the contagion when they failed even to attempt to neutralize it, and Thomas fears that God actually could be resurrected from such an execution. As Paul says, the cross is a scandal. But how could someone shamed by the crucifixion be a Messiah worthy of resurrection? How could one so powerless, so passively violated by our violence, be God? Thomas says he’ll believe when he sees the wounds for himself.

In the end, this story isn’t about Thomas at all. It’s about Christ. Christ knows what Thomas needs to believe. Thomas doesn’t need to see Christ’s wounds to believe Christ’s resurrection, but to believe Christ is the Messiah. Seeing his hands and side prove that Christ was a man and a God. My trouble is whether what was good enough for Thomas and the other disciples is good enough for us today. Thomas was Bronze Age. Thomas was illiterate and a teenager, but he wasn’t thick or stupid. Maybe just a little unsophisticated. Thomas was, in fact, the resident skeptic of the twelve.

I preached a sermon on Thursday morning for my preaching class final, and one of my best friends praised it for completely resisting the temptation of cynicism. It’s hard for me, a natural-born skeptic, to squelch my misgivings, theological or otherwise. But in the text, Christ never rebukes Thomas’s doubt, because it’s honest and it’s innocuous. That’s the difference between skepticism that is intended to dislocate and honest-to-goodness doubt. There’s never any judgment. Probably because doubt and belief aren’t mutually exclusive, and often the most enthusiastic believers, whose certainty can be socially and psychologically disconcerting, are those who doubt most of all. Because belief and certainty are most definitely not the same thing.

That said, the purpose of the text is not to overemphasize the legitimacy of doubt, but to encourage belief in Christ. In the coda, the final couplet, the evangelist writes: “But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” The good news is that if Christ is the Messiah, we have what we need to believe, and it’s coming through the radical self-giving of Christ. No amount of doubt can smother that kind of grace.

Do you have what you need to believe? This past week, the infamous psychiatrist Dr. Robert Spitzer confessed that his 2001 study supporting reparative therapy was probably wrong. He has officially rescinded his conclusion that “highly motivated” individuals may be able to change their sexual orientation, and now, the second Sunday of Easter, I can breathe a little easier. Discrediting institutionalized spiritual and sexual abuse is what I need in order to believe in Christ, but not necessarily to believe in the literal resurrection, which isn’t something I’ve reconciled either way. Rather, at the moment, I’m only able to say confidently that Christ has a unique place among our historical activists, philosophers, religious, and political leaders. But the metaphor of resurrection is important for me in the interim as I sort out what my Christology will be. Call me barbaric, or Jesuitical, but for me Christ is risen most gloriously when the bigots who make life hell for young gay people retreat to their sad pseudo-theological lairs, so people like me can refocus on other institutional justice problems. Christ will be risen on an April 24 seminary field-trip to DC to join supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal Occupy the Justice Department to demand that all political prisoners be released. Christ is risen when Michelle Obama and her exquisite under-bite raise awareness regarding veterans’ disproportionate unemployment. I can find Christ risen in many places, but most of the time it’s when justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

And I think we all understand Thomas’s doubt. I don’t think it’s unusual or bad or wrong to doubt. Believing that doubt kills faith is one of the most pernicious lies in the Christian tradition. As Justo Gonzales says, any God you can prove is an idol. Holding doubt and faith in tension is what drives Christians to embody their faith, which was Christ’s commission to the disciples in the text today. All that’s left for us is to hear the commission to forgive and to empower those who can to confess the first and most unambiguous confession that any disciple has left for us: Jesus, “My Lord and my God.”

Unto him that loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and has made us kings and priests unto God and his Father. Unto him be glory and dominion forever. Amen.

Easter 2012: A Feast of Rich Food

Isaiah 25:6-0, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Mark 16:1-8

Preached in the synagogue sanctuary of  Congregation Beth Elohim, where Old First Reformed Church had gathered for Easter (the Old First sanctuary being closed for repairs). Note: Rabbi Gould read the Isaiah in English and chanted it in Hebrew, and Cantor Breitzer chanted and sang Psalm 118 in Hebrew, and chanted the Aaronic Benediction in Hebrew before I gave it in English.

Welcome to Easter. I am glad you are here. Members and friends, Christians and Jews, visitors, passers-by, whatever your belief or unbelief, it’s great that you are here. Easter is public, Easter is not church property. I say that every year, but this year it’s especially obvious!

This 358th Easter at Old First is a very special one, thanks to Congregation Beth Elohim. Rabbi Bachman and I are always looking for new forms of collaboration between our congregations, but I’m telling you we are not so devious as to force it by taking turns in knocking down our ceilings. I’m also telling you that we accept our mutual disasters as mysteries of God’s providence. This synagogue is receiving that providence by loving your neighbors as yourselves, and this church is receiving that providence by blessing the God of Israel.

We bless God for the gift of Congregation Beth Elohim. Its hospitality today is typical of its constant hospitality to our whole community. It’s regarded as inclusive, but the deeper point is a hospitality which is so generous because it’s based in a deep trust in the love of God and a deep trust in the power of the Torah and the Prophets. This congregation acts like you have nothing to fear, and your hospitality expresses that.

We bless God because you have allowed us Gentiles to worship at the center of your most holy place. The walls within the temple are broken down by you. You welcome us to share in your inheritance. You allow us to call ourselves the children of Abraham and Sarah. We are so only by adoption, and we have been greedy interlopers, and cruel to you, and even murderous, and yet today you treat us like brothers and sisters. We bless God for your gift of reconciliation.

We bless God because you not only let us in here, but you set for us a table of rich gifts. You gave us today the gift of Isaiah, in the words that Jesus would have known them. You gave us the music of the prophecy, which we Christians don’t know how to make. You gave us the gift of  Psalm 118, again in the words that Jesus knew, but in music we have never heard before. Every Sunday at Old First we enjoy the rich food of the Torah and the Prophets and the Psalms, all of which we got from you. Your greatest gift to us is the knowledge of God, the Lord God, Adonai, who was your God first, the God of Israel (when our ancestors were worshiping demons in the woods). We bless you in the Name of God.

We bless God for the gift of the Passover which we got from you. The Feast of Freedom. Of liberation, of salvation, of freedom for the sake of service, of liberation not for license but for obedience, for claiming our full humanity. “Let my people go.” It has inspired civil rights throughout the world. It’s the story of light in the darkness, of hope in despair, of life out of death. Our Christian version of Passover is Easter: the feast of freedom from the power of guilt and death. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast, Alleluia.”

We bless God for your gift to us of Jesus, controversial as this gift may be. We take him as the Messiah, and of course you don’t, but we got him from you, and it’s because of him that we are even here to receive your hospitality. Where he worshiped God was not in church, of course, but in the temple or in his own home synagogue. It’s in his name that we are here today. I will boldly presume upon your hospitality to thank you for the one whom we call “Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

We bless God for the gift of the resurrection. We got from you the whole idea of resurrection, “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” That was not our invention, we got that from your rabbis and your scribes and Pharisees, as has been brilliantly established by the Jewish scholar at Harvard, Jon D. Levenson. In different forms we share a common hope: the hope for resurrection is our common hope, and today especially we thank you for this gift to us.

You know there are two lines in the Nicene Creed which Jews can say as well as Christians. The first line and the last. And not much in between, except for the line about Pontius Pilate. The first line says, “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, and of all that is, seen and unseen.” And the last line says, “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” We can say that line together because that’s the gift we got from you, the gift of the hope of a general resurrection at the end of time and the renewal of the world.

The particular resurrection of Jesus is the rub. Why was he resurrected early, and all by himself? His friends were not expecting it, they had not planned on it, and they did not believe at the start. It did not fit with their Jewish hope for resurrection. They didn’t see it as “according to the scriptures,” not at first. And the synagogue still does not, which is our basic disagreement, so that we end up reading the same scriptures differently. And there’s another disagreement. As some Jewish scholars have said, even if he did rise from the dead, he seems to have wasted his resurrection. Where is the Messianic age? Why are the rest of us still dying?

We’re not going to settle that today. But the apostles taught that Christ is the first-fruit, and the general resurrection of the rest of us is still to come, and there’s good reasons for this time in between, for us to live within the hope of resurrection even though we still must die. Think of it: after you have died, when you are on the other side of death, of course you won’t fear death. But to be on this side of death and not to submit to the power of the fear it is the point. To not let your behavior be determined by the fear of death, to not let your heart be hardened by the fear of pain or your love constricted by the fear of loss, that’s already the power of the resurrection, though we still must die.

Think of it: it’s one thing to love your neighbor when the golden age has come and everyone is lovely, but to love your neighbor as the world is now, when there still is sin and suffering and your neighbor is a part of it, that’s the greater love, that’s the miracle of love, and we are called to be workers of this miracle. To develop the capacity for working this miracle and to evolve a new humanity that constantly performs such miracles is one of the reasons that God has allowed us to have this time of unfulfillment when we live by the hope of resurrection though we still must die.

God doesn’t want you to be a feast of raw food, but a feast of cooked food, which means you have to get through cutting and breaking and beating and heating first. If we didn’t have to suffer first, we’d just be nice and natural grape juice, but our patience in our suffering is what turns us into well-aged wines, and the resistance we have to deal with in our loving serves to strain our natural impurities, so that our souls pour out with purity and clarity. The resurrection is a challenge as much as it is a comfort to us. The resurrection of Jesus is the proof that it works.

Finally, we bless God for the gift of the Jewish hope for resurrection, because it means “tikkun olam,” the healing of the world. It’s not the pagan hope of flying off to astral immortality, which means abandoning the earth. The pagan hope has misdirected many Christians, and we need to receive again the Jewish hope of tikkun olam. We bless God for the healing and renewal of creation which the resurrection signifies. Christ has been raised in the body — a body transformed, but still a body. It’s an affirmation of creation, of plants and animals, of gravity and groundedness. It’s a very rich feast which God intends to set out for us, a feast too rich for heaven, too heavy, too thick, too schmaltzy, too schmeery, too fatty, too bouncy, too sexy, too sweaty, too smelly, too many dogs and cats for heaven, and after the feast, cigars, I hope, and for the ladies too. A feast of richness without greed, of love without lust, of power without corruption, of a righteousness of joy, of God’s will for creation, vindicated by the resurrection.

Blessed are you, O Lord our God, king of the cosmos, who gives us the first-fruits of the new creation in the resurrection of Jesus, and who gives the power of the Holy Spirit to live according to that resurrection in the very middle of the world today. Blessed are you, O Lord our God, for calling us to hope, and in that hope to love, and in that love to find our joy.

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

An Old First (SF)

Sacramento Street in San Francisco

January 29, Epiphany 4; Passionate Spirituality 4: Unclean Spirituality

Deuteronomy 18:15-20, Psalm 111, 1 Corinthians 8:1-13, Mark 1:21-28

This casting out the unclean spirit is the very first miracle of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. And it’s easy to get it exactly wrong. The main point of the story is not the miracle but rather the authority of Jesus’ teaching. The miracle is an illustration of the power of the teaching, it illustrates that what Jesus teaches has the power to cleanse what is unclean and to liberate those who are in bondage. The story is a liberation story, and it’s the teaching that liberates.

It’s easy to get this story wrong. It’s a mistake to assume the man in the unclean spirit was rabid or looked abnormal. I suspect the unclean spirit was not apparent to his compatriots. I mean the guy might have been unlikable, or maybe known for being contentious, or even one of those guys who might give you the creeps, but it was not with some demonic voice that he challenged Jesus. He regarded himself as reasonable. “Jesus, I see who you are, and I see where you’re going here, and you’re going to mess everything up and get the Romans mad and put us all in danger. You cannot win. It isn’t worth it. So leave us alone.” He thinks he’s making sense.

The man has an “unclean” spirit. The choice of words is important. Mark does not call it an “evil” spirit. If the spirit is evil effectively it is not so essentially. It is not a demon from hell. The Gospel of Mark is not a medieval document. We mistake the event to classify it as supernatural. Yes, it is beyond our rational analysis, but that only speaks to the limits of our mental capacity. The gospel regards the ordinary world as naturally spiritual. This unclean spirit belongs to the natural spirituality of the world. But the world has been disordered by human sin, and so the natural spirituality of the world has been corrupted, confused, out of place, and it infected him. Where it came from we are not told, nor where it went when Jesus cast it out. All we know is that it was no longer making the man unclean.

When the spaghetti sauce is in my plate it’s clean. But it’s unclean when it’s on my nice white shirt. The Brussel sprouts are lovely in their butter on the plate. But then you look away, and your little son who hates to eat them puts them in the pocket of his Sunday pants. Next Sunday morning when he puts them on again he will discover that his pants smell bad. And there’s not much he can do about it. He’ll have to surrender his pants to you to clean them. But he will feel guilty, and he may resist you helping him. He is resisting your authority, the very authority you need to use to help him out of his predicament. How often do we not resist our liberation.

Jesus is teaching with great authority. Who does he think he is to teach this way. He cites no standard reference books, he appeals to no other authority but his own. It’s as if he thinks he’s allowed to speak for God. This is both appealing and threatening, and the unclean spirit has the sensitivity to sense the threat of liberation and the threat of the authority of God. He calls him “the holy one of God.” He does not mean by this that he senses that Jesus is divine, though  Christians are quick to jump to that interpretation. At this point in the gospel it’s no more than that the  recognizes him as God’s anointed, as both a liberator and a threat, like King David.

[Note: I dropped out the following paragraph from my spoken version:]
Or like Joshua, the Old Testament general from whom Jesus gets his name. Joshua led the armies of Israel into the Galilee to liberate the land from bondage to the hideous idolatry of the Canaanites. That was unclean spirituality, and unhealthy too. I’m sure most of the Canaanites were decent people, just trying to live their lives, but they were in bondage. They had made gods and goddesses of the natural forces of the world, the forces of weather and fertility and sex. They feared those forces and they worshiped them and made themselves subservient to them, even to the sacrifice of their own children. Joshua cleared this all out and purged the corruption and cleansed the unclean spirituality. What Joshua accomplished must have looked like a reduction in spirituality, but now there was freedom for simple obedience to the life-giving laws of God. And so too the man in the synagogue was now liberated from the unclean spirit in order to be free to learn and live the teaching of Jesus. Joshua used the sword, and Jesus uses his teaching.

The teaching of Jesus appeals to your mind, to your understanding, to your proper use of reason, to learning and the love of learning. Don’t regard this story as anti-intellectual. The story implies the cultivation of a Christian intellect. You are called to learn the teaching of Jesus in all its richness and complexity. Your Christian intellectual pursuit is for you to receive God’s mission in the world and for you also to share in God’ mission in the world, for the saving of the world and the healing of the world.

Because the gospel story deals in spirituality, we tend to read it in terms of the supernatural. The bias of the modern mind is that the spiritual is somehow supernatural and therefore other than rational and intellectual and therefore contrary to it. The modern bias is that spirituality is anti-rational and often anti-intellectual. Many people are being drawn back to spirituality because of their frustration with the emptiness of modern rationality and the narrowness of the secular intellect. But the teaching of Jesus can answer this frustration and heal this fragmentation, because it offers a spirituality which is not an escape from reason, and a mysticism which is not anti-intellectual. The liberation in the teaching of Jesus is not an escape but a setting us free by setting things to right and bringing things back together and bringing rightful order to the world. The spirituality of Jesus is very much for your understanding and your reason and your mind. So the way to get at this wholesome and healing spirituality is by the open-hearted learning of his teaching.

His teaching attracts us and yet we resist it. We would rather help ourselves and liberate ourselves, but there are some powers and forces in the lives of each of us which no amount of learning or education or self-improvement or self-help can free us from. We are in their grip, and they are spiritual. We modern people don’t like to hear this, especially with our secular and scientific loyalties, but that’s part of what Jesus is teaching us. These spiritual powers can be economic or political, they can have the public form of ideology, or they can be collectively psychological, like the depression of an urban ghetto. Like certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Like that part of Baltimore in the TV show The Wire. In the fourth season one of those schoolboys says, “I know there is another world out there, but I don’t know how to get there.” Or the power can be like the power of addiction, which AA knows is spiritual. And we are powerless to get ourselves free.

But you don’t have to look for special miracles. The teaching of Jesus has that power. We can trust the power of his teaching. So if we let this story direct us in our Christian action in the world, it means that we can count on God using the teaching of Jesus to liberate and cleanse and put right those things in our lives which are disordered and disabling. The story directs us to rely on Jesus’ teaching for God to do the necessary miracles.

Everyone of us here is more or less unclean. For some of you it’s bad enough to be disabling. For some of you its from your early suffering. For some of you it’s from compromises that you feel you’ve made to get through life or to get something of seeming value in return. For some of you it’s your appetites, or your fears, or vows that you have made, commitments in your mind, conclusions you have drawn, or substitute freedoms that you treasure and you want to protect. And often we don’t know that we’re in the power of spirits more powerful than us until we are made uncomfortable by the very teaching of Jesus which we first welcomed. But still you want to welcome it, and that’s why you are here.

The teaching of Jesus is enough to give you get you clean and make you free. Not that it’s a magic pill. It’s teaching. It takes learning and reflection and it is best done by learning it in a group. This story takes place within the community of a synagogue. Nobody likes to be challenged in a group or healed in a group, but the teaching of Jesus is always in the context of community.  Because the goal of the teaching is love. You want to be clean for your neighbor. And you want to be clean for God. Which is a little threatening, but also compelling, because even when you are unclean, God loves you.

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

January 22, Epiphany 3; Passionate Spirituality 3: Sharing Your Faith

by Jakob Steinhardt



Jonah3:1-5, 10, Psalm 62:6-14, 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, Mark 1:14-20

Some of you remember (we’ll call him:) “Harold”. He started coming to Old First about eight years ago. He had just moved to Brooklyn from Atlanta. He had come to New York to work for an activist organization called “Freedom to Marry,” which advocated full marriage equality for everyone, no matter what their sexual orientation. After a couple years he took a job with the Human Rights Campaign, and he moved to Washington DC, so he left our congregation, but I stayed in touch with him.

For the few years Harold was with us, he was a leader among us. He was like an extra pastor. He led us in Bible study, he preached for us, and he taught us to understand marriage equality and embrace it. Harold is prophetic and challenging, but he’s also a born encourager, and we loved having him around. In his youth he was called to the ministry. He had gone to seminary and fulfilled the requirements, but then he was denied by his denomination because he was open about being gay. He was disappointed and discouraged, but he never held it against God.

Why did Harold come to Old First? Why not an activist congregation more outspoken on the issues of sexual orientation? Well, several reasons, but he said that the first thing that brought him through our door was a sign we had out front. The sign we were running that month was very simple. All it said was, “The Bible is on your side.”

I remember having some internal hesitation when I put up that sign. Am I making it all too easy? Am I too much appealing to the Park-Slope feel-good self-indulgent consumer spirituality? What about repentance, what about God’s judgments? Well, anything can be misinterpreted, but what are we doing here, after all, if we don’t believe the Bible is on our side? The gospel is “good news.” That’s what it literally means. Yes, there’s bad news too, but the news that is bad is bad for what is bad, and it’s good for what is good.  It’s even good for what is bad, whether really bad or only thought to be bad. The news is good for what we don’t expect it to be good for, and that’s what makes it “news”. It’s “news to us!” we had not expected it, it was not in our estimation of the world.

“Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.” In that simple statement there are two strange things. The first is that the arrest of John the Baptist would seem to be bad news. A bit unfeeling on Jesus’ part — and wouldn’t a Messiah try to get his cousin out of jail? Or maybe this is like our epistle, “Let those who have [cousins] be as though they had none, and those who mourn, be as though they were not mourning.” Like soldiers in the army. When a lieutenant goes down in battle, the captain does not stop to grieve but only fights the harder, because they are both committed to their common cause of victory.

The second strange thing is that Jesus was announcing “the good news of God.” That’s rare in the Bible and unique in the gospels. Usually it’s “the good news of the kingdom” or “the good news of Jesus the Messiah.” Here it is just “news of God.” Jesus had new facts to tell about this God, he was announcing that God was starting to operate in ways they did not expect.

The people of Galilee believed in God, and they knew they were supposed to love their God, but they’d had no news of God for centuries. They had begun to doubt that God was even on their side. The Sadducees taught that there was nothing more for them; just do the rituals and support the temple hierarchy and make the best of it until you die. The Pharisees taught that God was angry with them for their lack of holiness, and that a holy God would not forgive their sins until they earned it by keeping scrupulously clean. Another opinion was written up by Josephus, that God had rejected Israel and gone over to side with the Romans. Just check the military news.

Jesus comes with other news. But in the Gospel of Mark, he does not explain the news, as he does in the Gospel of Matthew. What Mark shows is how he acts it out. He demonstrates the news of God — he models it. We will watch him do this in the coming weeks, as we read the lessons from Mark. By watching what Jesus does we learn what God will do. By watching what Jesus is like we learn what God is like. And by extension what God wants.

We know that among the things God wants are chiefly two: that we love our neighbors as ourselves and that we love God most of all. Last week I said that to love God is the ultimate purpose of your spirituality. I said that your spirituality is the distinctive gift of our species of Homo sapiens, and I said that it simultaneously is given to us and has evolved in us in order to connect us to God and the things of God. Two weeks ago, in a sermon which I opened with a list of fifteen issues facing us, I said that our spirituality is also for engaging with the world, and for bringing healing and justice to the world. That kind of healing and justice depends on what God is like, no less than our loving God depends on what God is like. Spirituality goes both ways, to God and to the world, and if the goal of spirituality is love, then it I guess it should be passionate.

Let me remind you one more time why I keep on talking about this phrase, “passionate spirituality.” For the last few years the consistory of Old First has been using a tool for long-range planning called Natural Church Development. NCD is based on the eight characteristics of a vital, growing congregation. By means of surveys of the congregation, we determine which of those eight characteristics is the weakest at our church, and then we address that characteristic to strengthen it. We have done three surveys now, and every time our weakest characteristic is “passionate spirituality.” We are supposed to address it, but we have found it hard to get a handle on. Myself included.

This last time around a couple of our elders have suggested that the survey itself may be part of the problem, because the survey assumes some things that might not fit Old First. The survey questions suggest that passionate spirituality takes the form of energetically sharing our faith with other people. If not preaching to sinners like Jonah, then at least being “fishers of men” by witnessing to our neighbors and recruiting our friends. Well, how shall we do this when we put such a premium on our hospitality to everyone without conditions?

As of today I do not have a nice solution to this dilemma for Old First. I can feel that it has to with that combination in our Psalm today, that “power belongs to God, and steadfast love is yours, O Lord.” That could be a headline for the good news of God that Jesus demonstrates. I can feel that we in this congregation will share it with others by our actions and attitudes as much as by our words. I think of the example of “Harold”. But I also think it has everything to do with our view of God, the God who is the ultimate object of our spirituality.

What is God like, I want to know what God is like. And that will be my focus for the coming weeks. What is this God like whom Jesus demonstrates? I’m inviting you to stay with this, and contemplate what God is like.

Three weeks ago, on January 1, I preached a sermon on the circumcision of Jesus. I said that Jesus was circumcised to be a Jew, which means that one of the three persons of the Trinity is a Jew, and that in Jesus God was circumcised. I had almost scrapped it beforehand because it felt so impractical and irrelevant, but Melody read it through and told me to go ahead with it. I gave it up to God and preached it and I let it go. Two days later I got a call from California, from the president of a university. He had read the sermon on my blog and he wanted me to come out and preach it at a meeting of his board. What? He said he had never heard these things before, and he thought people need to hear them. He is a Jew, and he lost his family in the holocaust, and he had been called a Christ-killer in his youth. He told me that when he read my sermon he wept. He told me that most sermons tell us to be good, but what he wanted to hear is what God is like.

I am not going out there to convert him. I am going to share my faith, but not to convert him. That’s not the point. I am going out there to share the “news of God” as we read it in the gospel, and to celebrate that “the Bible is on his side,” and experience some healing and the love of God. That’s what I am passionate about, the love of God.

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

January 15, Epiphany 2, Passionate Spirituality: Up and Down the Staircase

1 Samuel 3:1-20, Psalm 139, 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, John 1:43-51
“Truly, truly I tell you, you will see the heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

If this were a megachurch I'd be cueing the praise band to start playing Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. A rock and roll version of We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder. In Jacob’s dream it was not really a ladder but a staircase, like on this picture of a Chaldean ziggurat from the world of Jacob. The top of the ziggurat was the house of a god, and the priests of the god would ascend and descend on the staircase. In Jacob’s dream the priests were angels, and then God came down the staircase and actually stood next to him. So Jesus is telling Nathaniel that he himself is the staircase between God and humanity, and that God comes down in him.

Let me tell you about two interviews I heard on the radio, two weeks ago, on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. They were reruns from 2011. The first interview was with the Nobel Peace Prize winner from Liberia, a woman named Leymah Gbowee. She is featured in a documentary called Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which our deacons screened here two years ago. Ms. Gbowee is a Christian peace activist who helped to end the Liberian civil war by gathering both Christian women and Muslim women in vigils of prayer. She said that their spirituality was critical to their campaign. Not just their non-violence and their interfaith approach, but the action of their prayer.

The second interview was with the British biologist Richard Dawkins, who is a campaigning atheist. He argued that belief in God is not just irrational but bad for the world. He said that religion is nonsense because it is not confirmed by science. And then he made an incidental remark which I found telling. He was reviewing how species diverge within the evolutionary process, on islands, for example. And then he said, “Or in lakes, which are just islands of water.” What? “Just islands of water”? No they’re not. Not if you think about it. (Lakes are not "isolated": they have streams in and streams out. The rare exception of crater lakes just proves the rule.) But Dawkins tends to argue by reduction. He reduces his definitions to fit his preconceptions and then he rules out whatever does not fit his definitions. That enables him to rule out spirituality as supernatural and therefore nonsensical, because what is natural is only that which can be verified by science.

Some people are impressed by his arguments and others are dismayed. You need not be either. His arguments are circular and they “beg the question”. He doesn’t speak for science proper but for the ideology of scientism. Now it is true that spirituality cannot be proven scientifically, but that does not make it nonsensical. Spirituality helps to make sense of certain natural phenomena which science cannot measure, like the power of the women of Liberia. Those women are wiser than Dawkins in not dismissing spirituality as supernatural, and their knowledge of nature is richer and more complex. By them you can be impressed, and encouraged in your faith. They show you the richness of spirituality, and the power of its engagement with the world, with the real world, the natural world, including politics.

The combination of politics and spirituality is implicit in the gospel lesson for today. We are at the Jordan River, where John the Baptist has been holding a long-term revival, a camp meeting, awaiting the Messiah, the descendent of the dynasty of David, who has the royal title of the Son of God, a priestly king, both spiritual and political, a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King. The Messiah was identified by John the Baptist, to the crowd, just the day before our lesson. And now the partisans of John the Baptist must consider moving their allegiance on to Jesus.

Jesus has been observing the crowd in order to recruit some followers. He calls out Philip, and then Philip goes to get his brother Nathaniel, who is skeptical. He knows about Nazareth, which he thinks is a dump, and which is never mentioned in the prophecies. But he comes along. When Jesus sees him he compliments him. Nathaniel wants to know how Jesus knows him, and Jesus says that he’s been watching him. Then Nathaniel blurts out, “I recognize you as the Son of God – that is – the king of Israel.” He does not mean by those words that Jesus is God — that recognition will come much later. But he does recognize that, in this Jesus, God has returned to Israel.

Jesus answers Nathaniel by calling himself not the Son of God but the Son of Man. That sounds like less, but to Nathaniel it will mean more. It’s from the prophecy of Daniel, from the vision of a human being getting elevated up to a place in heaven before the throne of God, in order to share in God’s government of all the world. Not just Israel, but all the kingdoms of the world.

That raises the stakes. It also lessens the relative importance of the politics of Israel. Jesus is saying that he’ll be beyond all that. That will present problem to test the interest of Nathaniel.

Are you passionate about politics? Is your passion for a particular candidate, or more for the issues, like justice, or freedom, or the economy and ecology? What are you passionate about? To what do you give your time and your energy, for what are you willing to sacrifice and for what do you freely pay the cost? What do you want to tell your friends about?

This series of sermons is on “passionate spirituality”. Passionate spirituality is a vital sign in which our congregation is relatively weak. Well, no wonder, we’re easy-going, we want to be non-judgmental and welcoming to everyone. With such a bias we risk passivity instead of passion. So what shall our congregation be passionate about?

The purpose of human spirituality is not just for the well-being of ourselves but for beyond ourselves. Its purpose is to connect us to God and to the things of God. Our species is distinct among other animals in this natural capacity. Call it a gift of God, call it a result of evolution, call it both. We call our bodies temples because we believe that our bodies are naturally spiritual as well as physical, and that the spirituality of our bodies is the medium by which we connect to God. Not just to connect to God, but to love God. That’s a core belief we share with Judaism — that the purpose of our spirituality is to love God, to love God more than anything else. That’s the passion in passionate spirituality.

How do we access this God? Jesus call himself the stairway, for going up and down. His person, his story, his gospel, his teaching, his healing, his suffering, his sacrifice, his resurrection, his spirit poured out on us. He is telling his followers that it’s on him that we can lift up to God the world and the things of the world. And also that God comes down to us, to be with us and among us and to love us. It’s not a stairway of escape from the real world, but a stairway of God with us for the salvation of this world.

In a few moments we will have our congregational meeting, and it might not feel very spiritual. We will talk about business and money, how much we spend and how much we need. We will talk about our programs and our challenges. We will talk about the down-to-earth matters of our mission and how we address the real resources that we have. Like our sanctuary ceiling. How much is this really spiritual? Good question. And the answer is in the spirituality of Jesus, and in the connection that he has made between our love of God and the real life of the world.

So my take home today is for the congregation as a whole. We shall find our way into the future if we always start with Jesus Christ, the son of God and son of man. Classic Christianity. Focused, but not narrow. Faithful, but not fundamentalist. Confident but not judgmental. Humble and embracing, centered and inclusive, passionate and rational, spiritual and natural, loving and realistic, ancient and modern, Christ-centered and progressive. We may face with confidence our challenges and uncertainties by remembering to be a community of Jesus who welcomes persons of every ethnicity, race, and orientation to worship, serve, and love God, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

January 8, A Passionate Spirituality of Engagement

Baptism of Jesus, Genesis 1:1-5, Psalm 29, Acts 19:1-7, Mark 1:4-11

Let me open this sermon with a checklist which I took and adapted from a lecture I heard recently by Bishop N. T. Wright.

1. We’re in a global cultural shift from Modernism to Post-modernism. Modernism believes in progress and humanistic ideals, and it produced the great institutions of government and education that we value. Post-modernism doubts how great those institutions really are, and to progress it says, “Yeah, right,” and to humanistic ideals it says, “All I know is what works for me.” Humanity is just individuals with individual needs and individual truths. And so we are watching the general fragmentation of global society. Do Christians have anything to offer here?

2. We’re in a global struggle between secularism and fundamentalism. They fear each other and feed on each other. Most of us Christians are stuck in the middle. The fundamentalists say we’re secularist, and the secularists say we’re fundamentalists, and everything is polarized. We are so afraid of being labeled as the one or the other that we are silent on the issues of the day.

3. We’re watching the unsated idolatry of Mars, the god of war. After the outrage of 9/11, the leaders said, “We have seen evil out there,” and then they said, “We will deal with  evil by dropping bombs on it.” What were we thinking? Must Christians be content with this?

4. We’re in a global crisis of credit and debt and we’re struggling with banking and the purpose of banking. When we hit the credit crunch, and the great banks asked for relief, we were quick to bail them out. But what about the nations of the global south which have been groaning for decades under the load of debt to those same banks which kept enabling the foolish spending of their former dictators? Do not the prophets and the gospel have something to say on this?

5. We are watching the global polarization of the rich and the poor, and the wealth of America is less and less a commonwealth. Do Christians have any prophecy to offer here?

6. We’re watching the increasing unhealth of our global ecology. The cause of global warming is disputed, but the fact of it is not. We are taking increasingly great risks with our landscape and our groundwater in order to extract every last bit of natural gas and oil. We are making deserts of our oceans. If the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, have we got anything to offer here?

7. We’re watching the fragmentation and polarization of our American democracy. We no longer can agree on what “truths we hold to be self-evident,” we are unable to have a civil debate, and our government is unable to address our problems. Can we not offer some new wisdom here?

8. We’re developing the awesome power of biotechnology at the same time we are less and less able to agree on ethics to use this technology. Can we not offer some new creativity here?

9. We’re watching the fragmentation of ethics and aesthetics. We are not able to agree on what is good and what is beautiful. We are developing a brutalist culture with pretty surfaces, and works of art are valued only for their market price. Can Christians not offer some healing here?

10. The polarization of medical care.
11. The fragmentation of the global community into new kinds of nationalisms.
12. The fragmentation of sexual identity.
13. The problem of political Islam.
14. The power of electronic communication both to connect us and to dehumanize our daily interactions.
15. The prurient preoccupation of our media on the sex lives of celebrities at the same time as its silence on the real life conditions of most of the people on this planet.

Have we Christians got anything helpful and healing on these problems that we’re facing?

Let me be clear that I am not saying the church as an institution should be making statements or forging policies on these issues. Not that the church should never ever take a stand on an issue of the day, but it should be rare and only when the gospel is at stake. This is not so much from a lack of capacity or expertise as a matter of the church’s proper mission. But to engage these issues is the calling of the church in the organic sense as the community of God’s people.

I am saying that Christians should be addressing these problems and issues from out of our discipleship and in service to salvation. Not as the institutional church, but as Christian persons in our places of work and play and as Christian organizations which target particular issues. And I am also saying that a function of the institutional church is to nurture the spirituality that you need to address these problems in the world. You need to be spiritual to engage these issues with a view toward healing and justice and peace, and just to stay involved and fight the fatigue you need to be passionately spiritual, which belongs to the mission of a congregation like Old First.

I’m returning to my sermon series on passionate spirituality. Our congregational surveys keep telling us that of the eight vital signs of a healthy, growing congregation, our weakest vital sign is passionate spirituality. This may partly be a function of the survey’s bias in the meaning of this vital sign, and I will address this bias two weeks from today, on January 22. But it’s still a vital sign. This sermon is an introduction, and I hope you can stay with me over the coming weeks.

We are naturally spiritual, just because we’re human beings. The universe itself is naturally spiritual. Spirituality is not something supernatural. We only call it that because it is beyond our ordinary senses and we cannot measure or predict it or control it. But we are estranged from our native spirituality and from the spirituality of the world, which only aggravates the problems in my checklist. And yet it’s not enough to just revive our natural spirituality. Indeed, just doing that can lead us back to ancient pagan bondages. You can be spiritual and still be enslaved.

We need the spirituality of the Holy Spirit, which is the gift of God’s self, who enters into you, as certainly as you are baptized. God’s Spirit enters into your own spirit, into your soul, and your mind and your emotions, within you to inspire you and strengthen you and heal you and to make you whole. The Spirit enable you to hear God’s word and understand it, and then to live it out prophetically and creatively in the world. Prophecy and creativity are gifts of the Holy Spirit.

From Genesis 1. “A wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” That can be translated several ways, intentionally I think. “The spirit of God brooded over the face of the deep.” Like a mother hen broods on her eggs to warm them into life. Like you breathe on your hands, or you breathe into your trumpet to warm it up, or you breathe into your woodstove to bring the fire to life. God breathed God’s Spirit into the ancient deep to waken it and make it ready to listen to the Word of God and then respond to it. “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The Spirit of God goes out into the world, into all the world, ahead of the Word of God, ahead of us, ahead of the church, and we follow it. We follow the Spirit, bringing the life-giving Word of God to all the world God loves, creatively and prophetically, for healing and justice and for peace.

Who are we to do this mission in the world? What resources do we have, what strength do we have, or wisdom or knowledge or expertise? Exactly, we are right to doubt ourselves. But then we hear God say, “With you I am well-pleased.” God finds us quite acceptable to share this mission, because it is God’s mission, after all, not ours, we are only partnering with God in it. It does not depend on us. We are told that the final future of the world already has begun, and the new creation cannot be undone. We are not told what it looks like or how we’ll get there, but we know who holds it and who pledges it.

How do you know that you’ve been given this Holy Spirit? You cannot know it scientifically, you have know it by means of belief. So I’m inviting you to believe that you’ve been given the Spirit of God, and I’m challenging you to be responsible to learn what that means. And yet you can feel the hints and suggestions of the presence of the Spirit within you, and those take the form of your desire for God, and your desire for the love of God. God does not put within you any desire that God does not satisfy. Your desire for the love of God already is a sign that God does love you. With you God is well-pleased.

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.