Romans 5:1-11

05/29/11 Romans 5:1-11 Hudson UMC
One of the things that we as Christians say with quite some frequency is, "God loves you." When we can see that someone is being hateful in the name of God, we realize that something is wrong, because we know that, as the Bible says, "God is love." Even if there is nothing else that we can agree on, surely we can agree that God has tremendous love for his people.
The question that we need to ask, however, is, "What do we mean when we say that God loves us, or that God loves other people, or that God is love?" Where do we get our definition of "love" that we use when we say these things? I must admit that, whenever I hear someone give a sermon or talk at a church or some other Christian gathering, I cringe if I ever hear the preacher say, "Webster's Dictionary defines (whatever term) as..." Webster is an important resource. He wrote what has become the standard dictionary for most Americans. However, we have to remember where definitions come from. Words do not just drop down out of the sky, fully formed, absolutely clear in their meaning. Rather, they are formed over years of use within a particular community, being shaped by how they are used, in particular contexts, particular times and particular places.
What this means is that words can mean different things depending on who is saying it. For example, if you are sitting in an auditorium full of people and someone you do not know declares that they "love all of you," it means something very different than if your mother, father, or spouse tells you they love you. The reason is that they are using the word "love" in very different ways. When someone comes from a very different culture, we have to be very careful to make sure we understand what they want to say, because words that we use one way in America might have significantly different meanings somewhere else. The same is true if we are the ones traveling. There have been many stories of people traveling throughout the world who have had embarrassing moments because they used the wrong word by mistake.
All of this is to say that we need to be very careful to make sure we understand where our words get their meaning. Sometimes I use the word "love" to speak of deep feelings that are connected to serious commitment. However, that isn't the only way I use the word. Sometimes I use it to say that I love certain music, that I love pizza. That's a pretty wide range of meanings for just one word. What do the Biblical writers mean when they use the word "love?" Do they mean it like a husband and wife love each other? Do they mean that God loves us like we might love pizza? Or do they mean something else entirely?
I do not think we can emphasize strongly enough that, when we are dealing with God, we need to take our cue for what words mean, not from our culture, not from our own personal experience, but from God's actual revelation of himself in Jesus Christ. If you take nothing else from the five years I have been blessed to be your pastor, take this. Jesus Christ is central to everything; to our faith, to our lives, and, yes, even to our words. If we really allow the reality of Christ to shape everything about how we interact with the world, we will find that, often times, our previously formed conceptions of love, mercy, power, compassion, perfection, and everything else, are radically transformed; but we also find that they are deeper, more powerful, and more consistent than ever before.
Let me give a somewhat complicated parallel from science. Albert Einstein developed his Relativity Theory in order to help put our understanding of the universe on a firmer foundation. At the end of the day, much of relativity theory rests on a single, crucial insight: The speed of light is constant for all observers, that is, everyone experiences light traveling at about 186,000 miles per second. That doesn't sound all that revolutionary, but let's see what happens when we take it seriously. If you are on a train and you fire a gun, how fast is the bullet going? Well, it is obviously the speed of the bullet plus the speed of the train. Well, let's say that you are on a train and the train is going into a tunnel, so you turn on its front light; how fast is the light going? We want to say that it goes 186,000 miles per second plus the speed of the train, but we would be wrong. It is still the same speed, still the original 186,000 miles per second.
That is only the beginning of the changes that Relativity Theory makes to our everyday concepts. Before Einstein is done, light bends because of gravitational fields, time moves slower and distances contract the faster you travel, and nothing seems certain anymore. But when all the dust settles, we realize that not that much in our daily experience has changed. We still have to figure out what we are going to eat for lunch, we still have to live our lives, but we find that, when all of the implications of Relativity Theory are played out, the universe still makes sense; it actually makes better sense than it ever did before. It is simpler, it is more complete, and it is more completely reliable than it was before.
The reason why I bring this up is because it has a striking parallel in Christianity. At the end of the day, there are not all that many central insights in Christian faith. However, those central insights take our definitions of love, power, and everything else, and radically transforms them. Unfortunately, we find ourselves, all too often, forgetting the astonishing transforming power of these insights because it seems to us that, whatever else they might have to teach us, surely our words are clear, surely we understand things like love and power.
And yet, I don't think this is the case. If we really believe that Jesus is God in flesh, it has a dramatic influence on our concepts and the definitions of our words. I am going to build up to how the fact of Jesus Christ transforms our understanding of "love," but I want to look at another idea, the idea of power, first, not only because it will provide a good warm up to make sure we understand this kind of transformation before we turn our attention to the love of God, but also because it is another concept that gets twisted so often in our modern world and could use some careful thought.
We read in the Bible that, when the angels who stand before the Triune God cry out in praise and adoration, one of the things they say is that God is omnipotent, or almighty. The question that we should ask is, "What does it mean that God is almighty or omnipotent?" For many people throughout history, this has seemed like something of a silly question. After all, isn't it obvious what it means? We all know what power looks like, why not just multiply that understanding of power by a million or a billion, and say that is what God's power looks like? It makes a certain amount of sense. After all, it is something that we can relate to, it is something that, if we had that kind of power, we could imagine using it that way. What this means is that God's power has tended to be understood as something that is abstract and impersonal. We all possess small amounts of power; some political and military leaders possess a greater amount of power, but God has all power.
How does this play itself out in our daily lives? Because we tend to think of God as a micro-manager, who spends all his time making sure everything happens in a way that is just so, and never has anything happen that isn't exactly what he wants, we end up with these terrible dilemmas. If God unilaterally causes everything that happens to happen, what becomes of human freedom? Are we nothing more than elaborate machines who seem to travel around and interact with people and make decisions but, in reality, are just part of a complex program that is running its course and things could not have been other than they are?
Another question is the classical "Problem of Evil," which asks, "If God is All Good and God is All Powerful, why is there evil in the world?" I imagine that most of you are familiar with this question, or something like it. Because of the way the question is put, there seem to be only three possible answers. First, that God is not all good; second, that God is not all powerful; or third, that evil doesn't really exist, or isn't all that bad. For many people, myself included, these all sound like horrible answers that don't seem to match up with what we read in the Bible at all. But what else can we say? It seems that we are trapped. My response to such a question is that I refuse to answer it the way it is phrased. It shows us that we have not yet allowed God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ to transform our understanding of our terms. After all, how do we see the power of God manifested in Christ, not to speak of God's goodness or the seriousness of evil?
In Christ, we see that God's power is not manifested in the kind of power that we often see and use as human beings, the power of brute force, but rather a power of suffering love, a power that takes and absorbs all the power that evil thinks it has. It is not a power that stops evil from happening, but one that endures the evil and overcomes it through death and resurrection. Yes, this means that when we say, "God will get me through this trial," we do indeed mean, "God will get me through this trial, even if it kills me," for we may indeed die because of our trials, but we have learned, in Christ, that God's power is not stopped by death and destruction, but overcomes it with resurrection. If that is the kind of power that God has, we realize that thinking in deterministic ways doesn't help us understand power, but clouds our vision and hinders our understanding of God.
Let us turn our attention to love. What did we hear Paul say in his letter to the Romans? "For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." Paul is pointing out that God's love is not like human love. Human love, after all, is almost always in response to receiving something, either because we have received love, or because we think someone is beautiful, or we admire their works. In any case, Paul's point is clear: human beings do not tend to lay our lives down for those who hate us. Our standard response to being hated is to hate in return. We might lay down our lives for a great cause, for one we respect and admire, but when it comes to our enemies, we don't want anything to do with it.
But this is not what God does. If the Bible is nothing else, it is a detailed account of why God would have been completely justified in abandoning his people; and indeed, the evidence is so overwhelming at times that it would not be exaggerating to say that there is not a human being in the world who would have such radical patience as God has for us and his people who have gone before us. If God had turned his back on Israel, no court in the world would convict him of being unjust. If he had decided to break covenant, nobody could say that he was the guilty party, as his people had broken it over and over again.
And yet, God does not behave like we all too often do. God had every reason to turn his back on us, and yet he refused to do so. He could have washed his hands of us and turned us over to destruction, but that is not what he did. Instead, he laid down his life for us. But what kind of people did he lay his life down for? Righteous people? People who have their acts together? People who are already holy, or at least, holier than some of those other people? Nothing of the sort. Paul assures us that, when Jesus Christ died for us, he did so, "While we were yet sinners." Christ did not die for a holy people or a worthy people, but a sinful people, a broken people. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.
This actually sheds some light on Memorial Day, where we remember those who have served in our armed forces, especially those who have perished in doing so. While I will not say that every soldier who has ever fought for his country was truly conformed into the image of Christ, soldiers who die on behalf of people they do not know are about as close as we get to seeing the sacrifice of Christ played out among us ordinary human beings. The fact of the matter is that America is not full of only people who are worth dying for, according to a human way of thinking. In addition, there are many people who scorn those who have died for them, who ridicule those who have died to keep them safe, and yet, there were those who were willing to die nonetheless. When a soldier signs up, they do not say, "I am willing to die, so long as everyone appreciates what I have done for them." Rather, they say, "I am willing to die, regardless of what may come." The closest analogies to the death of Christ, who died before we were born, and while we were yet sinners, are the deaths of those who serve, both those who died for us before we were born and while we were yet sinners.
And yet, as powerful as that is, and as much as we owe to such people, we must not forget that, in Christ, God himself died for us, laid down his majesty so that we might share in it. To see human beings lay down their lives for one another is a breathtaking thing, but to see the Lord of all creation do the same should make us drop to our knees in praise and adoration. Soldiers die because we human beings are broken. To some degree, unfortunately, it cannot be otherwise. However, that God would die for us, on our behalf and in our place, is a gift that we cannot even begin to understand.
There is one more thing that we learn from Paul's amazing statement that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that is what it tells us about what we need to do or who we need to be before we come to Christ. Nothing at all. There is nothing that need stop you from giving your life, for the first time or more fully, to God. Even if you have not been as faithful as you feel you ought to have been recently, what is that to you? Christ died for you while you were still a sinner, how much more will he give himself in love and forgiveness to you who have already been transformed, to one degree or another, by his almighty power? God gave us everything long before we ever gave him a good reason to do so. Just as God's unfathomable love toward us did not rest on anything that we have done, so God's continued love does not rest on our works, but only on grace. God has died for us, let us respond in faith, knowing that the God who died for us while we were yet sinners is trustworthy, even to the end. Let us pray.

AMEN

Joshua 1:1-9

05/22/11 Joshua 1:1-9 Hudson UMC
Today, we honor those who are graduating from high school this afternoon. Though the sermon will be focused on issues pertaining to graduation, I would encourage all of you who are not graduating from High School today to not space out, because I believe that you will find that what I have to say applies to you as well, at least if you have ever graduated from High School.
There is really no example in the entire Bible that really corresponds to our modern understanding of "graduation." To say, of any person in the Bible, that they graduated in the same sense that those are graduating today, would be very much mistaken. However, there are a few examples of people who, if we allow for some pretty serious differences, might help us to understand a bit of what graduation looks like from God's point of view. The closest thing we have in the Bible to a "graduation sermon" or speech is at the very beginning of the book of Joshua, but before we can think about what this kind of speech tells us, we need to spend some time recalling the story of Joshua.
Joshua was born, as with all the Israelites of his time, in Egypt as a slave. He was a young man when God delivered the people of Israel from Egyptian rule and he quickly became a follower of Moses. He, and another man named Caleb, were one of the teams of spies sent out into the Promised Land of Canaan in order to see that the land was good. Unfortunately, though the teams of spies brought back evidence of the fact that God had promised them a wonderful land indeed, they also told the Israelites that the people who already lived in the land were giants, next to whom they looked like grasshoppers. Even though their enemies seemed incredibly big and strong, Joshua and Caleb insisted that they obey God and take the land that had been given to them. After all, what are giants compared to the power of God?
The resulting story would be funny if it were not so tragic. The nation as a whole rejected Joshua and Caleb and decided to leave the land that they had been rescued to have. After they heard that God was going to make them wander in the wilderness for forty years, until everyone who turned their back on him died off, they decided that they should try to do what they had been told to do in the first place. The only problem is that, though they would have been successful if they had gone up to the Promised Land in the first place, they were soundly defeated. Instead of trusting in God's strength and knowing that their victory consisted in their obedience and not in their physical strength, they thought that they could lay claim to God's promise without doing things God's way. In doing so, they transformed a promise into a right, and the result was disastrous.
So, as is well known, the people of Israel did indeed wander through the wilderness for forty years. Over time, everyone who was alive when Israel was delivered from Egypt died off; everyone, that is, except Joshua, Caleb, and Moses, though we will come back to Moses. During this time, Israel ended up in several battles and Joshua served as a soldier and then as a mighty general. Eventually, the people, who were all different than the people who had started this journey forty years earlier, were about to enter into the Promised Land. However, though Moses had led the people for so many years and, in spite of the fact that his eyesight was good and he still had his strength, God was not going to allow him to enter into the Promised Land with the rest of the people because he had not obeyed him as he should have in the wilderness.
What this means is that someone had to lead the Israelites into the Promised Land. They could not just go in leaderless, but needed someone to guide them. This responsibility came to Joshua. This means that he had to fill the shoes of someone who had led the people for decades on end, who was the most important person involved in the deliverance of his people, and try to lead these notoriously stiff-necked people into a new land and try to keep it all together.
And yet, he had good training. He had a tremendous trust in God that he nurtured from a young age, the same trust in God that inspired him to insist that the people go up against astonishingly overwhelming odds, knowing that, if God did not fight the battle, it was surely lost. He had spent years of his life training under one of the most dynamic leaders in the history of the world, learning how to handle people and how to lead effectively. He had served as the leader of Israel's armies, armies who had either been slaves with no military experience, or the children of such slaves, with even less military experience. He had to take people who did not know anything about strategy and discipline and teach them to fight together as a coherent body.
There was lots of training, but training for a job is one thing and actually doing that job is something else entirely. He had to take information and experience he had gained as a second in command and become the one who is in charge of everything. Is it a similar job, absolutely, is there some overlap, certainly. However, to go from being one who serves the one in command to being the one with whom the buck stops, is a very significant thing. The point is that the training did not stand on its own, but had to be taken and applied to a radically new situation, a situation that could not necessarily even be anticipated by the training.
In our modern context, we tend to think of graduation to be more of an end than a beginning. It is the end of high school or the end of college. It is the end of our formal education and now we move on to the next stage in our lives. That was then and this is now. We are no longer high schoolers, so high school no longer plays a role in our lives, no longer shapes the way we think, the way we live. We have served our time, and now we need to direct our attention to college, which we might see as bearing only a passing similarity to high school, or we are on our way to the work force, to be independent.
But that is not what we see in the cases in the Bible that are similar to graduation, and it is not what we really mean in our modern times when we speak of graduation. Regardless of whether you excelled in your academic work or just got by, the fact remains that you have gained skills in high school that you would not have picked up anywhere else. You learned in your mathematics classes to manipulate and understand how numbers relate to one another; you learned in your English classes how our language is put together and how to think critically about what people say and write; you learned in your social studies classes that the world is much bigger than just the part that we can see at this stage in our lives and that we should know something about that world. You learned in your classes on the arts about the beauty that is out there. If you played sports, you learned teamwork and physical discipline. In some ways, though, the most important thing that you learned, whether you liked it or not, is how to do work that you did not want to do and how to learn what you did not want to learn. That skill alone will make your life easier and better, certainly, it will be far richer than if you had not learned it.
The point is that, even if you do not go on to major in any of the major areas of study from high school, even if you do not feel as if trigonometry was something that you needed to learn in order to do the job you will get someday, it all goes toward developing skills and habits that will help you in the future. Your math might look different, but it never goes away completely. The areas of the world you pay attention to might change, but global events will still be important, as we have seen in recent years, to be sure. You may not think that you will ever use the interpretative skills you learned in your English classes, but you will find that you have a better grasp on human nature than you would have if you did not learn them.
All this is to say that graduation is really not an end at all. You have been given a set of skills and your high school diploma says that you are ready and able to use them at any time. You are now better educated than the majority of people in the world. You have doors opened to you that are not open to others and were not open to you all that long ago. You do not only have the ability to walk through those doors, but the responsibility to do so. Graduation is the beginning of a new phase of life.
I am speaking to all of the graduates as one who is a graduate himself, one who, in fact, just graduated again last week. The things you learn at one period in your life, even if they seem useless at the time, often come back and prove valuable in a later season and you will be amazed at how the education that seems as though it has taken forever to acquire will benefit you and those around you as the years go on.
It would be appropriate at this time to think about the stories in the Bible where someone "graduates" in one sense or another. Joshua graduated from being a spy so that he could become a general. He graduated from being a general so he could be the leader of an entire nation. Elijah was one of the mightiest prophets in Israel's history. He achieved tremendous victory, defeating evil king Ahab and restoring God's rule to the people. He was a hero in the land. He had a disciple named Elisha. When the time came and Elijah was going to leave, Elisha begged that he might receive a double portion of the anointing that Elijah had. When Elijah was taken away, this was granted and Elisha graduated from being merely a disciple to being a messenger for God who did even greater things than Elijah.
The last major example that I can think of in the Bible is the disciples of Jesus Christ. They were fishermen, tax collectors, guerilla warriors, and others, who were made disciples of a Rabbi, a great teacher, but more than just a great teacher. They were people who had gone through just the basic apprenticeships that everyone else went through, but they were taken and transformed by the Gospel. Eventually, the day of Pentecost came and they graduated from being just people who followed Christ to being people who not only followed him but were sent out so that other people might follow him. They had received the Holy Spirit and they graduated, but their graduation didn't mark the end of their calling, but a more complete beginning. They had been equipped to go out into the world and make a difference, changing lives and bringing good news. They did not, they could not, call it quits after they "graduated," but had to use the skills they learned and use them to be part of a movement that made a real difference in the world.
When people graduate, we often will speak of rights and privileges that graduates receive in return for all of their hard work. And yet, rights and privileges are only part of it. There are also tremendous responsibilities that go along with graduation. As I said earlier, you have new opportunities that you not only can take advantage of, but must do so, in order to make the world better because you have lived in it. That is the kind of responsibility that lays upon you simply as one who has received an education, our responsibility as Christians is far greater. We have been called, we have been commissioned, we are those for whom Christ has died so that we might live. God has endured much to make us those who can make a difference. Indeed, the disciples knew that their following of Jesus was a matter of tremendous responsibility. In fact, it cost most of them their lives to do what they had been trained to do.
My commission that I would give to all who are graduating today is to rejoice in the opportunities that you have been given, for there are many in this world who have not received them. Go into the world and do something that is worthy of the training you have received. And for those who are in this room who have not yet graduated, approach your work and your life as valuable preparation, for it is indeed valuable, even during the moments where it doesn't seem like it. And for those who are in this room who have graduated once upon a time, regardless of how long ago, remember that you never graduated from being a graduate. Indeed, you are still those who have received training and education and a commission from God. Go forth, remembering that you have been set aside by God for his work, to be God's ambassadors in everything you do, from your daily job, to being a parent, to social events, to anything you can think of. God loves you, Christ died for you, and the Holy Spirit dwells within you, as a child of God. Go forth as commissioned soldiers, who serve one who is greater. Let us pray.

AMEN

Colossians 4:2-18

05/08/11

Colossians 4:2-18

Hudson UMC

What does it take to expand the kingdom of God?  What does it take to reach those who have not yet been reached by the transforming power of the gospel?  That, in many ways, is the main thrust of the last passage in Colossians.  Paul ends his letter, as was common at the time, with a list of greetings for various people that are known both to himself and to the people he is writing to.  I will probably not touch on anything he said during those eleven verses, so I apologize for any struggles with names I have caused you.

But I want to get back to the question that seems to be illuminated by this passage.  What does it take to be about God’s business of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ?  As it turns out, the most prominent voice that tends to be heard in reply to this question owes a great deal to our modern American consumer culture.  It treats the church as something of a provider of spiritual goods and services, a place for people to go, like a spiritual supermarket, and pick and choose which of these spiritual goods and services they would like to consume.

When this model is used what is the goal of the church?  The goal of the church is to spend a great deal of time working on programming, so that there will either be a wide variety of spiritual goods and services so that anyone and their brother can come in and find a half dozen ways, that are meaningful to them, to participate in the life of the church, or there will be a focus on developing a handful of spiritual goods and services that are of very high quality so that, though not everyone will find themselves at home in the particular church, those who do will find it very meaningful.  But is that the gospel?  Is that what Paul is doing?  Is that what Jesus asked us, or rather, commanded us to do?  It seems that something is missing.

Think about what this has to say about the nature of Christian faith.  It says that the most important thing about us is what we do, that we have Bible studies, that we have social groups, that we have a choir, that we have a bunch of committees.  All of those are wonderful, by the way, but is it, in the end, what the church is really about?  Are we really no more than the sum total of our programming?  Is the secret to church growth trying to be as much like Walmart as we can be, or perhaps being a smaller and more specialized boutique?

Paul, one of the greatest Christian leaders in the history of the world, would often solicit support from the people he wrote to.  Here, as he is finishing up his teaching, he says that he is hoping to “declare the mystery of Christ, for which” he is “in prison, so that” he “may reveal it clearly, as” he “should.”  Now, it is easy to imagine that, when Paul says that he wants to “declare the mystery of Christ,” he is speaking of preaching and, of course, he is.  However, he is not only speaking of preaching.  For Paul, declaring the mystery of Christ is something that takes place every moment of every day.  It is not something that is reserved for preachers, but something in which the entire body of the people of God is involved, simply because they are bound to Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.  What this means is that you ought not to be sitting there thinking that ministry is something that you do or perhaps something that is done to you.  Ministry is something that is woven into the very fabric of your lives and is something that you are involved in personally, even if you don’t realize it.

Let me give an example.  This semester, I had to write a paper analyzing this congregation’s missional practices and proposing some ways that we might be able to improve, since there is always room for improvement.  Some of you were kind enough to be interviewed as part of the research for this project.  When I began to think about what has happened before I was appointed as your pastor and what I have seen over the past five years, I began to realize that ministry sometimes happened without people having the slightest clue that they are hip deep in the ministry of God, in declaring the mystery of Christ.  There are a few people who have become active participants in the life of this congregation over the past few years because someone invited them.  Often it took the form of a common passion or a need that the new person could fill.  What I was struck with is that the people who were doing the inviting, those who have participated in other ways, would never, in a million years, say that what they were doing was evangelism or consider themselves evangelists.  And yet, that does not change the fact that it was exactly what they were doing and exactly what they are.  Because of our tendency to limit the definition of missionary or evangelist in a narrow way, we often think that we are not missionaries or evangelists, but it is not only what we have been called to be, but what we are.  If you pray for your family and friends, especially if they are not Christians, you are a missionary and you are an evangelist.

It is important that we take a moment and consider the issue of prayer, as it is the other major topic that Paul brings up in the first few verses of our text for this morning.  When we think of mighty preachers, and Paul was certainly a mighty preacher, we think of people who are so keyed into what God is doing and saying that they can just walk into a situation and proclaim in such a way that bears fruit.  Though it seems that way sometimes, we see that Paul does not seem to think this is so.  Paul knows that it is only by prayer that what we do has power and authority, that lives are changed and that hearts are warmed.

He asks the Colossians, “Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving.  At the same time pray for us as well that God will open to us a door for the word, that we may declare the mystery of Christ.”  I can imagine the people responding, “Paul, what are you talking about?  You have traveled all over the known world, proclaiming the mystery of Christ everywhere you go.  Even in prison, you have been engaged in the ministry of evangelism.  Do you really need us to pray for this?  It seems that you have opportunities everywhere you go.”  And yet, Paul is convinced that he needs the prayers of the people in order to be effective.

There are a few members of the congregation who are willing to stand up and proclaim the good news of God to the people of God.  There are others, I am convinced, that would find tremendous joy in doing this, even if they feel too frightened to do so.  However, there is not anyone in the congregation who is unable to pray.  You might not feel comfortable praying out loud in a group of people, you might not feel that you are a good pray-er, whatever that is, but you are all capable of crying out to God and playing a role in the mission of God.

It is possible that you might say to me, “But pastor, that isn’t really ministry.  After all, we aren’t doing anything while we pray.”  I wholeheartedly disagree, on both counts.  In point of fact, prayer is indeed ministry.  In fact, it is perhaps the single most important and most needed ministry.  We desperately need prayer.  We need to pray in groups, we need to pray on our own, we need to pray for specific things, we need to pray that God’s will would be done, we need to pray that God be present during difficult times, we need to pray that God would be present during easy times, we need prayer that God would move in our midst, that God would take our actions and multiply their effectiveness and transform the world here and everywhere, and we need to pray in such a way that our whole lives become living prayers so that we might, as Paul instructs the Thessalonians, pray without ceasing.  We have tremendous need for prayer in all of its forms, just like Paul did.

The concern that we are not really doing anything when we pray needs a bit of correction.  Why do we think like that?  I am more and more convinced that we say things like this because we live in a nation and culture that is results and achievement driven.  We want to work hard and get a job done.  Those who behave in a way that brings high achievement are praised by our culture and those who do not produce much in this sense are criticized.

Additionally, we live in a world that is still obsessed with causality.  In spite of advances in Quantum theory proclaiming that, at the most basic levels of the universe in which we live, we simply can’t speak in causal terms, we still hold that model of thinking to be the standard by which everything else is judged.  If we can’t make a clear, undeniable, causal connection between prayer and events, which we can’t, our culture will judge prayer as ineffectual.  However, speak to anyone who makes prayer a vital part of their lives will bear witness to the fact that prayer is indeed helpful, is indeed something that transforms their lives and is something that makes a legitimate difference in the world.  It is true that those who do not pray cannot understand this, but that is no different than someone who refuses to engage in mathematics not understanding the personal satisfaction of working out a difficult proof, or the elation of a scientist who performs a delicate experiment successfully.  There are many things that cannot be understood except by those who participate in them, and, while there are many people who will never understand the beauty of mathematics or the natural sciences because of a lack of training or experience, each of us can engage in prayer, each of us can participate in this vital ministry.

Many people find books like Daniel and Revelation difficult to read and understand.  This is not surprising, as they are written in language that we do not often use that is quite foreign to the Western tradition.  However, they do something that we need to pay attention to.  Both of them retell portions of history from a very different point of view.  Take the virgin birth.  On a purely natural level, thinking only socially and biologically, what do we see?  We see that there is a woman who is pregnant out of wedlock.  She claims to be pregnant with the Son of God, but most people would dismiss that right away, since that is something that, according to our daily experience, simply does not happen.  We see the woman treated harshly because of this experience and her son growing up to be a teacher and a leader.  When we see things this way, especially after the life of Christ, we might find these lives significant, but from a purely secular point of view we would tend to see Jesus’ leadership as the triumphing over oppressive social structures and not being meaningful in itself.

When we read the book of Revelation, we get a different picture altogether.  “Then another sign appeared in heaven; and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads were seven crowns.  And his tail swept away a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth and the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child.”  This seems at first glance just to be a fanciful story that may or may not have a tragic ending.  However, when we realize that it is a telling of the story of the virgin birth, that the woman giving birth is Mary and the child is Jesus, it takes on a whole new significance.  The author is presenting this story in such a way as to point out what was going on in the spiritual realm when Jesus was born.  The language is poetic, but it is no less a real description of the invasion of God into the kingdom of Satan.

What I want to highlight is not any particular part of these prophetic books or to take a solid stand on how they must be interpreted.  To do so would seem foolish, as the greatest bible teachers throughout history have hesitated to do so.  What I want to point out is that there is a whole other way of understanding what is going on that we are simply not able to see from our limited point of view.  God can see things that we cannot and understands that our actions have greater meaning than they at first appear to have.  The point is that we don’t have our world of space and time over here and the spiritual realm over there, but rather they overlap to a significant degree.  When Jesus was born in our world of space-time, war broke out in heaven between, as the text tells us, Michael and his angels against the dragon and his angels.  What we do here on earth makes a difference in the heavens and prayer plays an important part in that.

Being Mothers’ day, it seems appropriate that mothers can give us a great example of what real prayer for the kingdom of God looks like.  All mothers worry about their children.  They want the best for them, they want them to have the best opportunities, and they hope that they will make good choices.  Whenever someone is in a difficult time or making mistakes, there is a mother, somewhere, praying.  That mother may not always realize that she is praying; it might disguise itself as pure worry, but her intense passion and concern for her children, that comes from her great love that she has always had, and always will have, is an inspiration to us all.  Who knows what your prayer does, who knows what sin and trouble you have saved your sons and daughters from by your prayers, who knows what might have been, had they not had a mother who lost sleep because she cared more for them than they sometimes cared for themselves?  This kind of loving concern, of placing others above ourselves, is the kind of selfless giving we are called to in Christ.  This kind of all-consuming passion is a model for our prayer for the kingdom.

So, just as Paul was convinced that the ministry God had called him to was simply impossible without the prayer of the people, know that the ministry of this congregation is no less impossible without your prayer.  You might not belong to the prayer team, you might not call yourself a prayer warrior, but you really are a vital participant in the prayer ministry of this congregation and the kingdom of God worldwide.  Pray for the ministry, that we might declare the mystery of God with clarity, as we should.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Colossians 3:18-4:1

05/01/11

Colossians 3:18-4:1

Hudson UMC

I had a professor of New Testament who would begin each course he taught by asking his students what they thought about the apostle Paul.  He has found that many mainline students, and especially female students, are not all that fond of him and his writing and this is for many reasons. In light of today’s context and debates, Paul is seen as affirming and strengthening traditional family roles, especially as it has, unfortunately, tended to keep women in a purely secondary status.  Today’s women are often intensely aware of the fact that, in passages like ours for this morning, Paul requires obedience of wives over and over again, but does not require it of husbands, or at least, does not specifically name husbands as needing to focus on obedience.  When we view these statements about obedience through our Western framework of thought and interpret it within it, we have no choice but to do so in strictly hierarchical terms, where one party is higher and the other is lower.  If we then take this twisted interpretation of Paul and then apply the fact that this isn’t just some random teacher who said this but an apostle of God and that these words are found in Scripture, it seems as though an appeal to Paul is an appeal to the suppression of women.

This does not make many women in our modern society very happy.  I would imagine that, even the women in this congregation who identify themselves as conservative would not be happy with returning to the kinds of cultural roles for men and women defined as they were back after the industrial revolution, where men and only men were allowed to work and women were only allowed to stay home, care for children, and were seen as helpless unless they had a man to take care of them.  In fact, some of the very most conservative politicians in the country today are women, something that would have been impossible a hundred years ago.  Surely, not even the more conservative among us want to bring back what Paul seems to be saying.

Is there any way to look at these kinds of household instructions that might do justice to the love, grace, and liberating power of Christ?  Rebecca D. Pentz, a self-identified feminist thinker, suggests that, perhaps, we could speak of “male” sins and “female” sins.  For example, she speaks of the story of Mary and Martha as an example of how Jesus turns the values of the time on their heads.  Jesus tells Martha that she should stop worrying so much about all the cooking and cleaning and should instead sit, like her sister Mary, and listen to the teaching of a Rabbi, something that was traditionally limited to only men.  In other words, Jesus told her to stop doing what society told her she must do, and instead told her to do what society told her she must not do.

I think that Pentz is on to something here, that Jesus does indeed take our social norms and radically transform them, in some ways so much so that those who have not had the framework of their thought transformed might think that we are overthrowing the way we’ve always done things or even, astonishing as it may sound, going against God’s will for humanity.  However, in spite of the fact that I think that she has a very important point to make, though I don’t think it should be limited to its application to feminism, but to all of our social norms, I don’t think that this way of looking at things helps us all that much to interpret this particular text and those like it in our modern times.  After all, in a world where husbands beat their wives into submission, which is surely evil, do we really need such people appealing to the authority of the Bible that submission is a problem that women have but men don’t?

It is my considered opinion that this entire way of thinking is wrong.  I think that it misses Paul’s whole point to read him this way.  Every time I hear someone interpret this passage along hierarchical and patriarchal lines, I cringe because such an interpretation, discussed within the context of social debates and not within its context within the book, that is to say, its specifically Christian context, has more to do with secular politics and power struggles than it does the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ.

One of the main reasons that I think that the way we often hear passages like ours for this morning is unhelpful, and even destructive, is because it simply ignores a large portion of Paul’s writings.  We are talking about a Paul who said, in his letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  This is the Paul who, in his letter to the Romans, asked that people would greet the leaders in the Roman church, about a third of whom were women, women who were full involved in leadership.  This is the Paul who said, to the Philippians, “I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche,” (both women) “to live in harmony in the Lord.  Indeed, true companion, I ask you also to help these women who have shared my struggle in the cause of the gospel, together with Clement also and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life.”  Here is Paul, affirming that these two women, who are likely the missionaries who are delivering this letter to the people, as companions in the gospel, doing the same kind of work that he is.

The point is that, if this is the Paul that we are talking about, we simply can’t interpret these so-called “household instructions” as rigid, hierarchical rules that gives some people privileges at the expense of others.  We need to remember that, for the first two and a half chapters in this letter, Paul has been focusing first and foremost on the fact that God has come among us in Jesus Christ and that it is Christ that needs to be the center of everything, and not some human made system or ideology, no matter how much sense it seems to make.  If that is the case, it seems to me that, before we start speculating about how we can make the text fit our agenda, we ought to look at the text through Christ and see if that gives us any help.

As it turns out, it does.  If we look at the instruction that Paul gives and take those instructions more seriously than worrying so much about which subgroup it is directed to, we start to notice a pattern.  There are three pairs of advice.  The six things we see Paul telling people to do are:  Subject yourselves to one another, love one another and never treat them harshly, obey the people who are in authority over you, do not provoke or recklessly anger those over whom you are in authority, in all your actions, do what you do, not because you’re being watched, but wholeheartedly.  As Paul says, “Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for” human authorities.  Finally, treat people justly and fairly, for we, too, have a master in heaven.

When we focus on the instructions instead of the subgroups and if we can break ourselves away from the cultural baggage, it is remarkable what we see.  If we take a moment and think about what it might look like if someone were to follow, not just one or two of the pieces of advice, but all of them, who comes to mind?  To me, the only person I can think of who really fits all six pieces of advice is Jesus himself.

I think that this is exactly what Paul is getting at.  Remember, for Paul, what is most important is not a particular set of cultural behaviors, but Christ, the Son of God, God in flesh, God with us and God as one of us.  The most common way that Paul speaks of the Christian life is that we are “in Christ.”  Second only to that is that Christians are those who have received the Spirit, the same Holy Spirit that takes the things of Christ and makes them ours, who unites us to the life of Christ.  Do you see where this is going?  Paul is not so much concerned with supporting the cultural norms of his day, so much less with supporting the cultural norms of our society today, but with getting us to take seriously the fact that Jesus is the center.  He is the center of our faith, the center of our thoughts, and not least the center of our actions.

The fact of the matter is that Paul probably did not make too much of his distinctions between who he gave each particular piece of advice to.  It was common practice for various thinkers to give lists of advice like this.  More likely than not, Paul was using a form of teaching, not because that form was inherently godly, but because it is one that would have been well-known to the Colossians.  I am more and more convinced, especially within the context of this particular letter, that Paul’s big point, the thing that we really need to hear is that, regardless of who we are, regardless of what we think we do well and what we think we need to work on, our model for everything is Jesus and, until we have been conformed to the image of Christ and live lives that are totally characterized by obedience to God and the vitality of the Spirit, we can not, we must not, sit idly by.  We always have something to learn, we always have another area to surrender to Christ, we always have sinful tendencies to be purged out of us.

We in America are extremely class-conscious.  We are intensely aware of how people perceive us and how we would like to be perceived.  We are continually reminded of our maleness or our femaleness, of our youth or our age, of our social class, whether it be high or low.  We are continually told that things like this enter so deeply into who we are that they might just be the most important things about us.  Paul says otherwise.  Paul is telling us that, even when he gives particular people specific pieces of advice, his main point is clear:  We are called to be like Jesus.

Let me put it this way.  Let’s say you are a husband; I pick this one because it applies to me as well.  You are called, according to this passage to love your wife and never treat her harshly.  It might be that you look at your relationship and say, “I do a pretty good job with that.”  What standard do we usually use when we come to conclusions like that?  Usually, it is based on what the image of the ideal husband that we have gathered from various places, from how our own fathers treated their wives, from television, from other relationships that we see and other things.  However, before we respond too quickly to Paul’s advice, we need to remember that Paul has a very different standard in mind when he says this.

A major theme in the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, is that God is bound to his people, not only in an external relationship, where he and his people agree to work together, but that he is a husband to his people.  At one point, Paul says to the Corinthians, “I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy; for I betrothed you to one husband, so that to Christ I might present you as a pure virgin.”  In a passage from a different letter, which is sometimes read at weddings, Paul gives advice to husbands and wives, specifically drawing on this image.  The fact of the matter, husbands, is that Paul is not saying that we should love our wives with just any kind of love, but with the love that Christ has for his church.  Remember, Christ died for his church, he allowed his people to stab him in the back, nail him to the cross, and spit in his face, and yet he did not hesitate to give himself up for them.  This is the kind of love that we husbands are called to have.

The big concern that often comes up is over the fact that women are called to subject themselves to their husbands, but husbands are only called to love their wives.  And yet, when we think of love as defined, not by our culture, where love is fickle and fleeting, but by Christ, it becomes clear that Paul is calling husbands to a far higher standard that he is calling wives to.  He is calling husbands to love their wives so deeply that they are to give up everything for them, to make their needs and desires more important than their own.  I have met many women who have, after realizing this, say, “What woman wouldn’t want to submit to that kind of love, to submit to be served, to submit to be treated like a queen?”

There is a certain wisdom in that, and I am convinced that we would see that our first reactions to Paul’s instructions would all be transformed when seen in light of Christ and not in light of our contemporary culture.  However, in spite of that, the context in which this passage appears in Colossians has me more and more convinced that Paul is making a far larger, far more important point here.  As people who have had the Spirit of God given to us, we are called to live lives of holiness, holiness that cannot be captured in a list of things to do and things to avoid.  What is interesting is that if we take a series of statements or moral exhortations like we have here and we hold them up to the life of Christ as born witness in the gospels, we find that the holiness we are called to bears a remarkable resemblance to the life of obedience and holiness led by Christ himself.

Paul is, by far, most concerned with our understanding that Jesus is the center and that everything we think and believe must be rooted in him if it is to be rooted in reality.  What we need to realize is that, even when Paul shifts emphasis and begins to speak of the kind of ways we ought to live, he has not left Christ behind, but has made him central, even to the moral life.  So, let us let God impart the life of Christ into us through the power of the Holy Spirit, going and doing what Christ did, just as we trust in the centrality of Christ for everything else.  Christ is all in all; let us allow him to be all in all for us.  Let us pray.

AMEN