The Elijah Syndrome

          10/28/12                "The Elijah Syndrome"           Grace UMC

One of the narratives in the Bible that has always fascinated me is the account of Elijah up on the mountain with the still, small voice.  The attitude we see in Elijah seems to me to be so incredibly common, not least in myself, that I have started to call a particular habit of speaking and thinking, "The Elijah Syndrome."  But before we can spell out what that looks like, we have to understand the narrative as it stands and within its context.

Elijah was a mighty man of God.  He had performed many miracles before this and would perform many more after it.  Recently, there had been a three-year drought that had devastated the entire Northern Kingdom of Israel because King Ahab so stalwartly refused to listen to the God of his ancestors.  Elijah was the one who said the drought would come and had become almost synonymous with the right hand of God, bringing divine judgment down on the nation.  He was a man who was greatly respected and feared.

Eventually, when the time came for the drought to end, Elijah came to Jezreel, the capital city, and challenged the King and Queen along with their pagan prophets that they paid to keep in court.  He said to the people, "How long will you go limping with two different opinions?  If The Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him."  He took, depending on how you count it, either 450 or 850 pagan prophets up onto Mount Carmel and set up a test.  Whichever god responded by sending fire was the true God.  After the pagan prophets cried out for hours, wailing and ritually cutting themselves, Elijah simply prayed and God sent a fire that was amazing in its intensity.  After that, the drought ended and the people put the pagan prophets to death.

But as you might imagine, royalty do not take kindly to the overturning of their authority.  When Queen Jezebel found out about this, she dedicated herself to hunting down and killing Elijah, if it was the last thing she did.  This is where we pick up our text for this morning.  In spite of the fact that Elijah has just been part of a mighty victory, he is running for his life.  He ran so long and so far that he went from Jezreel, which is firmly in the Northern portion of Israel, all the way down to Mount Horeb, the mountain where Moses saw the burning bush which is just across the Red Sea from Egypt.  That night, Elijah stays in a cave in the mountain.

While he was there, God spoke to Elijah, saying, "What are you doing here Elijah?"  Clearly, the God of the universe is not suffering from misunderstanding, he is not simply seeking facts.  We might paraphrase that into a more modern idiom by saying, "Why in the world are you here, Elijah?" or "Just what do you think you're doing here, Elijah?"  Elijah's response is heartfelt.  "I have been very zealous for The Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword.  I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away."  Basically, Elijah is saying that he feels all alone.  Nobody seems to want to listen to God; so much so that they are killing the prophets and Elijah is the only one left who cares about God.

It is after that answer that God sends the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, none of which brought with them the presence of God, and finally calls Elijah out by a still small voice, or the sound of sheer silence.  Elijah, presumably in awe, makes his way to the entrance of his cave and listens to what he is sure will be a profound message from God.  Amazingly, it turns out to be the exact same question he had been asked, not long ago.  "What are you doing here Elijah?"  For whatever reason, Elijah thinks that the best answer he can give to this repetition of the question is a repetition of his answer.  "I have been very zealous for The Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword.  I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away."

I don't know why Elijah gives the same answer a second time.  Maybe he was confused, maybe he thought God hadn't heard him the first time, maybe he thought it was a test to see if he would be consistent.  Regardless of the reasons he may or may not have had, it seems to me that God was looking for something else altogether.  After God gets the pity speech for the second time, he takes a very different approach.  Paraphrasing somewhat, it is as if the conversation goes something like this.  "Just what do you think you're doing here, Elijah?"  "Well God, nobody likes me.  I know you have called me to be faithful but I feel so alone.  Everyone is out to get me."  Dramatic displays of power and gentleness.  "Let's try this again.  Just what do you think you're doing here, Elijah?"  "Well God, nobody likes me.  I know you have called me to be faithful but I feel so alone.  Everyone is out to get me."  (With a big sigh) "Alright Elijah, this is what you are going to do.  You are going to get up and head back North.  Anoint this person as king over Aram, anoint that person as king over Israel, and anoint that other person as your successor.  Oh, and by the way, there are over seven thousand people who have never bowed down to the false gods that you seem to have no idea about."

In the chapter just before our text for this morning, we read about Elijah coming to meet with Ahab.  On his way, he meets with a man named Obadiah that he uses to send his message.  Now Obadiah was not a prophet like Elijah.  He did not stand in front of mighty men and women and declare the word of the Lord to them.  Compared to Elijah's deeds of power, Obadiah would seem incredibly unimpressive.  However, he occupied a high position in Ahab's court and, when persecution was about to break out against the prophets of God, Obadiah managed to hide them in caves and gave them food to eat and water to drink.  His faithfulness wasn't showy.  It couldn't be or else people would have died.  And yet, I can't help but think that he is precisely one of those seven thousand people who have never bowed their knee to a false god.  It is not just that Elijah has never met the faithful people in Israel, but he might very well know them and yet not recognize them as faithful people.  And yet, they might actually be doing, in a sense, more than Elijah himself.

This is what I have called "The Elijah Syndrome," a conviction that I am all alone, that I am the only one who feels the way I do, that I am the only one who really takes God seriously.  The Elijah Syndrome can sometimes manifest itself in terms of pity, like Elijah seems to be doing primarily.  "My life is really hard because nobody else around me seems to understand God.  God tells me that his good news is for everyone, but people just don't seem to want to listen."  It can also be manifested in judgment.  "None of you poor souls really understand God like I understand God.  My relationship to God is special.  We are connected in a way that you do not share and you cannot share in it or have any kind of real spiritual depth unless you live out your faith like I do."

A bit of the problem with the Elijah Syndrome is that it is so defensive and isolating and yet, at the very same time, so offensive.  How can anyone respond to a statement like that?  If I am suffering from the Elijah Syndrome, I have a tendency, everywhere I go to be saying to anyone I meet, "Nobody really understands like I do.  People just can't seem to see the God who is right in front of them."  Of course, if I say that to you, I am implying that you are also one of those people who don't understand and who can't see God.  Not only am I saying that you don't understand, I am basically saying that you can't understand, since I have special insight that is not shared by the common person.

What can you say to me if I have that attitude?  I can always dismiss any input you have to offer by saying, "You haven't thought about this like I have.  You can only see it as an outsider."  You are just one of the poor fools that is, at best, ignorant of the truth, or at worst, out to get me as the one faithful person left.  The Elijah Syndrome cuts off all help from our brothers and sisters in Christ and isolates the person in a cave of self-pity and self-righteousness.

The Elijah Syndrome is not something I read about in a book, though I have read many books.  It is not something that is merely an academic issue for me.  I came to understand the Elijah Syndrome through experience, and not, primarily, experiencing other people who had it.  I learned about it so clearly and completely because it is something that I myself have experienced.  Every criticism I can launch against the Elijah Syndrome is one that has cut me first and foremost.

There was a time in college where I had what can best be described as a brush with Fundamentalism.  I had just started reading the Bible with some seriousness for the first time and I became aware that the scriptures had a lot to say about a wide variety of topics.  I was increasingly interested, not just in what the Bible said, but the ways it said it.  I looked around and I noticed that many people that I knew, friends included, simply weren't interested in the Bible like I had become.  In particular, I became fascinated with the Old Testament.  There was so much there that I had never heard before.  However, there were not only stories that shaped my understanding of the history of Israel, there was book after book of judgment on the people of God for not taking him seriously.  I should point out that the problems that I had were not with the judgment itself, but because I did not adequately understand the context of the judgment.

All of these things combined together to set the stage for a perfect storm.  I began to be judgmental of those who smugly dismissed Christian faith.  I may have said, and I certainly thought, that those people were in significant danger of hell.  But my real judgment was reserved for the Christians I knew.  These were people who, it seemed to me, ought to know better.  I could see no reason why the things that seemed to me to be so incredibly important should not seem equally important to everyone else who called themselves a Christian.  I looked around at my group of friends and thought that nobody really cared about God but me.  I looked around at the campus ministries at UNI and even around the United Methodist Church and felt that, if people could just do more of the things that I was doing, the church would be renewed.

A clear example of this kind of thinking came to me through my good friend.  He was having some conflict with someone who was significantly pro-life and who was expressing his displeasure that his home church didn't seem to get as excited as he did about the issue of abortion.  While everyone has their own strong feelings about the issue of abortion, my friend responded like this.  "You can't expect everyone to have the same passions that you do.  Everyone can't focus on the same thing.  Not only would that define what Christians should be about in an incredibly narrow way, it would also leave a lot of important things undone.  For example, the campus ministry I am in leadership with is very much concerned with interracial and global justice.  That is no less Christian and no less of a need."

As has been so often the case in my life, I needed to be able to see my own problems in someone else before I could realize how deep they were in myself.  The next time I read the story of Elijah, I was amazed that I so often do the same thing that he was doing.  I took myself as the standard of what a Christian should be doing, a dangerous thing to be sure, and then, since other people didn't share the same gifts, graces and passions as I did, I assumed they were not Christians or at least that they were sub-Christian.  I never once asked God what he thought.  I simply assumed.

It is so easy to do this.  It is so easy to get caught up in the things that we are passionate about; after all, we are passionate about them. We think they are important, perhaps the most important things in the world and we can't imagine why other people wouldn't see them the same way; and if our passions are even remotely close to things we could make an argument are related to the Christian life, such as reading the Scriptures in my case, then it doesn't take much to be like Elijah and cry out to God that we are all alone, that nobody else understands God like we do, that we are even being persecuted for our devotion.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes what I have come to understand as one of the single most ignored passages in the whole Bible.  This is what he says.  "Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions.  Some believe in eating anything while the weak eat only vegetables.  Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them.  Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?  It is before their own lord that they stand or fall.  And they will be upheld, for The Lord is able to make them stand."

This was Elijah's problem.  He was a particularly prominent man of God.  He had done amazing things.  If you judge every Israelite by whether they have performed as many miracles as Elijah you aren't going to have many "real" people of God before long.  What Elijah had to learn was that God is not interested in the yardsticks that we use to judge ourselves and others.  He simply doesn't ask us whether someone is faithful or not, which is a good thing since we all fall short and might find ourselves on the wrong side of the dividing line if he did.  God is more graceful than humans are, than we are, and that is good news.

There are times when we feel tremendously lonely, that we are the only ones who do what we do.  Whether we never even dream of saying it out loud, even just to God, or whether we have alienated those we love by our declarations that nobody else understands or that nobody else is faithful, it is easy to get caught up in the Elijah Syndrome.  If you have the Elijah Syndrome today, know that the God who has worked mightily in you is working mightily in others, even if it doesn't look like you think it should.  If you have loved ones who seem to have it, remember that when God shook Elijah out of his attitude, it was not in the wind, earthquake or fire, but in the still, small voice, in the place of intimacy and trust.  It was the gentleness of God that opened Elijah's eyes.

You are not alone, even when you feel alone.  The Lord is with you and so are your brothers and sisters in Christ.  If you can't see God's work in them, go looking for it.  It is there, and it is every bit as glorious as the work of God in you.  Let us pray.

AMEN

What is Baptism? (9/30/12)

         09/30/12                       Matthew 3:13-17                Grace UMC

Baptism is a practice that is at the core of every tradition within the church.  It marks us off as members of the body of Christ, it symbolizes our union with Christ, and it is our way of showing that we as a community are all bound together.  We do not baptize ourselves but are baptized out of ourselves and into Christ and we are baptized only once because when we are baptized, we are not declaring to the world anything that we have done but what God has done.

I love baptisms because they are a wonderful opportunity to join together and remember what is at the core of our faith, what binds us together.  We have an opportunity to reaffirm our own commitment to Christ and to be bound together all the more closely with every human being who is joined to our body.  I hope that you will indulge me a bit this morning, a morning where I have had the great privilege to baptize my own son, to share some convictions about baptism that are bigger than me, bigger than all of us.

Nearly everyone who is here has been baptized, either as an infant, or in response to a profession of faith as an adult.  If someone claims Christian faith and yet has not been baptized, there is a significant urging from the church as an organization as well as from other Christians to move forward to baptize them.  But why?  Why should we be interested in baptism like we are?  What exactly is it?  What does it do?  Why does it have such a central role in the life of the church?

Many people have different opinions about the nature of baptism.  There are people in the world who see baptism, whether of infants or adults, as a kind of "get out of hell free" card, where simply the fact that one has been baptized is what matters, that something has happened that trumps everything else.  We see this view whenever parents get their children baptized, even if they have never had any real participation in the church of any kind, it is just something that is important to do.  To give credit where credit is due, when one considers how awkward it can feel to ask something of a church to which you have no real connection, just the act of getting one's child baptized can be a tremendous act of courage.

There are other people who see baptism as nothing more than an effectively empty ritual.  This shows up most often in people who have their children baptized simply because it matters to someone else, usually a close relative and not because of any response of faithfulness.  It also shows up, interestingly enough, among those who would deny baptism to infants, where baptism is nothing more than a confirmation of a faith already received.  The baptism itself is not truly important, only the faith that is confessed in connection with it.

But what is baptism?  In a sense, it is a sprinkling of water or a dunking in water, but that is not all it is.  It is a practice that goes to the very core of our Christian faith and is vitally important.  In order to understand that, we need to turn to the fascinating event of the baptism of Christ in the River Jordan by John the Baptist.

I particularly love Matthew's account of this event because he so wonderfully brings out the issues that are implied in the event and makes it absolutely clear that there is something here that is more than meets the eye.  What has John been up to?  He has been proclaiming the word of the Lord, reclaiming the prophetic tradition of ancient Israel, and preparing hearts for the coming of the Savior.  Integral to his whole ministry is baptism, but it is a very specific kind of baptism; as Luke tells us, it was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  What does it mean to receive baptism at the hands of John?  It means that you are a sinner, that you are aware of your sin, that you are genuinely sorry for your sin and you are repenting, that is, changing your behavior, because of it.

Now, all that is well and good, but something strange happens one day.  One day, while John is baptizing people, Jesus comes up.  This is what we read.  "Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him."  Nobody made him get baptized, nobody even specifically called him to suggest that it would be a good way to start his ministry.  He takes the long journey from Galilee, way up in the North of Israel, all the way down to a river south of Jerusalem, to be baptized.  Normally, I would imagine, John would be thrilled that people would come to be baptized.  After all, it is deeply symbolic of confession and repentance and a new life devoted to God.  But John isn't entirely happy that Jesus is there; not that he is upset, but profoundly confused.  "John would have prevented him, saying, 'I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?'"

On the one hand, we could say to John, "Look.  You know that he is the Messiah that you have been proclaiming, you knew it even before you were born.  You, of all people, know just how important he really is.  Why are you questioning him?"  And yet, it shows that John is actually a very good theologian, someone who knows exactly what seems to be at stake here.  To him it is clear that he has no business baptizing Jesus.  Jesus is the very one sent by God to transform the world, why on earth is he coming to be baptized?  If there is anyone in the whole world and throughout all of history who doesn't need to be baptized, it is Jesus.  What is going on?

This is an issue that we have to take quite seriously in the church today.  After all, we believe the book of Hebrews when it says this to us.  "Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession.  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respects has been tested as we are, yet without sin  Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need."  We believe that Jesus, for all his solidarity with us, never committed sin, which means he does not need to repent, which means he does not need a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin, which means it seems very hard to understand why he has gone to John to seek such a baptism.

What are we to make of this?  There are a few skeptical opinions that I want to throw out there, not because I find them convincing, but because they show us how serious this is.  Some have said that Jesus is not really any different than we are, that he needed repentance just as much as we do.  This view says that, in spite of the fact that Jesus is "better" than us, he still needed all the same things we do, which means he received baptism because, just like us, he needed it.  Another view is that Jesus only understood that he was the Messiah when he was baptized, which means he might have gotten baptized without realizing that he didn't need it.

But does that help us?  Not at all.  According to Hebrews, it is crucially important that Jesus didn't sin.  If that were not true, we would have no real high priest who can speak for us before God.  The gospel would come collapsing to the ground.  There are, of course, people in the world who would love to see the gospel crash to the ground, but I think we need to consider one more explanation, more fully true to the text itself, before we go there.

John does not want to baptize Jesus but what does Jesus do?  He insists!  "But Jesus answered him, 'Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.'  Then he consented."  Jesus knows exactly what he is doing.  He even forces John's hand, in a sense, to do something that John is not certain he should do with a calm reassurance of, "Trust me.  Whatever it may look like, it actually is the right thing to do and it needs to happen."

Let me put it this way.  Jesus willingly and very deliberately submits himself to a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin, but he doesn't have any sins to confess.  For me, this raises a very important question.  If Jesus doesn't have any sins and yet insists on having John baptizing him, whose sins is he confessing?  Yours and mine.

This is what baptism is all about.  We are baptized, not because we already have things together, not even because we realize just how big our problems are.  We are baptized because Christ was baptized on our behalf and in our place, who took our sins on his own shoulders and confessed them correctly when we so often can't even confess our sins all that well.  And you know what?  It is a good thing that he did that because, if you are anything like me, you aren't very good at repenting.  I know that, all too often, I confess my sins only to turn around and commit the same darn sins again, sometimes in the same hour of my repentance.  If my salvation is fundamentally based on how well I repent and transform my own life, I am in a lot of trouble.  The reason why Jesus can proclaim forgiveness so freely is because he has not just died for us, but has taken our place even in repentance and confession, doing perfectly what we always seem to do imperfectly.

Jesus did to baptism what he does for us; he utterly transformed it by his grace.  If baptism is a sign that we have repented, that we are already on the right path, then not a single one of us ever deserves to be baptized, because we always fall short.  What Jesus did is step into the Jordan on our behalf and in our place, confessed our own sin, and then, rather than turning back to it, like we all too often do, he took it all the way to the cross to nail it there and put it to death even in his own flesh.  If the first and foremost thing that baptism means today is that we have repented, then it makes no sense to baptize infants, for how can infants repent.  But that is not what baptism is all about.  Baptism is first and foremost a matter of participating in the baptism of Christ, of declaring to the world, "I am a sinner who needs grace.  I trust in what Christ did for me in the Jordan and so I join in solidarity with him, denying myself and my own ability to save myself, taking up my cross, the cross of Christ, and follow in his footsteps.

That is why we baptize infants, who are unable to feel remorse for their sin.  Even though they have never actually committed a sin, they share just as much as you or I in the brokenness of the human condition.  We don't speak of infants and say, "if they sin," but "when they sin."  They are in need of grace just like anyone else and why should we wait to claim their need for grace until they are older?  That would be like not taking your children to the doctor when they are sick because they are not yet able to explain that they do not feel good.

Baptism is not just a declaration of our need for grace, but it is a very public declaration.  The setting for baptism is in the congregation gathered for worship.  This is important for many reasons.  It means that when we declare, of ourselves or of our children, that we are in need of grace, that we are not how we ought to be, other people know about it.  It means that we put ourselves out there for all to see, to admit to all who care to listen that we are broken and we are seeking help beyond ourselves to deal with it.  It is also a profound request for help from those who are gathered.  As the body of Christ gathered together for worship, there are many people who have made similar declarations, who understand how needful it is to have Christian support in every area of life, who know that to try to be devoted to God on our own is impossible.  Whenever someone is baptized, it is a cry for help, but it is a cry that is made in sure and certain hope that help will indeed come.

The public nature of baptism is also crucial because there is an extremely important role that you all play as witnesses and as co-Christians.  You were asked if you will include those who have been baptized into your care and you made a promise, saying, "With God's help we will proclaim the good news and live according to the example of Christ.  We will surround these persons with a community of love and forgiveness, that they may grow in their service to others.  We will pray for them, that they may be true disciples who walk in the way that leads to life."  Those are serious words.  In order to live them out, in order for them to not be so many lies, we must all commit ourselves to being a community of love and forgiveness to surround them with.  This is not a promise that you have made for the first time today.  It is a promise that you have made over and over again.  Every time a person is baptized, you declare your communal commitment to love and forgiveness.  When a child is baptized, the promise becomes even more clear.  You are not making your promise based on what you think he will or will not do, for you don't know what an infant will do in the years to come, and yet you promise nonetheless.  You are promising unconditional love, unconditional forgiveness, unconditional prayer.

In short, whenever someone is baptized, you are asked to promise to uphold your own baptism, to allow Christ to work in you and through you so that you can be his presence here and now and in all circumstances.  Whenever someone is baptized, we promise that this will not just be a community, but a Christian community.  It is a commitment that is bigger than you and me, it is a reality that transcends the concrete particular baptism we celebrate this morning.  With every person who is marked by grace in baptism, we are called to draw all the more closely together, to let love rule just a bit more, to follow through on our promises, even when it is tough, and to be the community that we are called to be, the community that Jesus died for us to be.

So let us join together in the midst of this sacrament that dwarfs all of us together, for it is primarily an act of God, and be reminded of the commitments we have made to each other, not just now, but when each person was baptized.  If you look around the room, you realize that this promise has been made many times.  Whatever may have been the case in the past, let us covenant together to hold one another accountable to it today since our commitment to God must be renewed every day.  Remember, baptism is not about us declaring what we can do, but what God can do, and God can do amazing things.  Let us pray.

AMEN

The Greatest of These (9/23/12)

          09/23/12                  The Greatest of These               Grace UMC

When I was in seminary, I had to try to find my way through the difficult tangle of mass that has come to be known as "modern theology."  Since the late eighteenth century, trying to understand every new movement that came along and the changes that took place in thinking is a cause for headache in even the most brilliant people I have ever met.  Don't get me wrong, not all modern academic theologians are bad.  In fact, some of the best theologians in the history of the church have lived within the last hundred years, but the mainstream of thought took a frightening turn by the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Every once in a while, my classmates and I, who are a fairly traditional bunch who believe that Jesus is the Son of God, God in flesh, that he was born of the Virgin Mary, that he died, was raised from the dead, and ascended into heaven, would find a thinker that didn't seem to be too bad.  Whenever this happened, a student would invariably raise their hand and say, "Dr. Colyer [our theology professor], I think this person makes a lot of sense.  I think they are saying the same thing that I believe."

I will never forget the advice that our professor would give in response to these kinds of comments.  "When reading modern theology, you need to always remember to not just look at the vocabulary, but to look at the dictionary."  What he was trying to point out is that words don't have fixed, unchanging meanings but mean what they mean because of how someone uses them.  Sometimes, you will find that you will hear someone use a familiar term in an entirely unfamiliar way.  Without going any further, our American political season seems to be full of this, where both parties use the same words but mean very different things.

What we find is that this observation is extremely relevant to the church and to Christian faith.  It is true that Christians use different terms than everyone else does, because we speak of incarnation, atonement, salvation, regeneration, and resurrection, but we also use a lot of the same terms that the rest of the world uses.  We speak of churches being successful or unsuccessful, but we do not mean the same thing as the business world does when it uses those terms.  Churches are successful or unsuccessful, not based on how many people come to worship on Sunday morning, not because of money in the bank, and not because they have cool programs that attract people.  The success of a church is determined by whether people are being transformed by the Spirit.  It is something that you simply can't represent on paper.  Church success is not, at the end of the day, something that you can see, but something that you can feel.

If we wanted to, we could make a list as long as you like of terms that Christians and the church use that look and sound like terms that other people use but are significantly different, but that would get boring before too long.  I want to focus more intentionally on the idea of love, because we can hardly find a place where the church and the rest of the world are more different than in our understanding of love.

Over a year ago, having been newly appointed to Grace United Methodist Church, I preached a sermon that used the same text from the first letter of John to explore the concept of "grace."  We have just heard the text again but for a very different reason.  I want to point out that, not only do words mean different things based on how they are used, they also take on different meanings, or at least might mean more, when they are spoken by particular people.

For example, Tertullian was a significant leader in the church in North Africa in the second and third century.  He has gained the reputation of being an extremely strict moralist, that is, he felt that people needed to live morally and that was the most important thing.  Eventually, toward the end of his life, he left the mainstream of Christian faith and joined a heretical group called the Montanists because they were, in his eyes, far more morally rigorous than the rest of the church.  It wasn't too long before he became convinced that the Montanists weren't being moral enough, so he made his own group that was supposed to be even more strict.  The point is that there are lots of times where Tertullian criticizes groups of people for being morally lazy.  That is, of course, a serious charge, but when someone like Tertullian makes it, you have to take it with a grain of salt, because nobody is good enough for him.  However, when he says, "People take this issue far too seriously," and he does say that from time to time, it means a lot.

Here is John, the son of Zebedee, who is writing to the church and talking about love.  What makes his words so interesting is not just that the Bible says it, but that it is John who says it.  Before he was transformed by the power of God through Christ and in the Spirit, John was a harsh person.  In Mark chapter nine, we read, "John said to him, 'Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us."  In Luke nine, we read, "When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.  And he sent messengers ahead of him.  On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.  When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, 'Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?'"

Perhaps most interesting is a story toward the end of Mark's gospel.  "James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, 'Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.'  And he said to them, 'What is it you want me to do for you?'  And they said to him, 'Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.'"  My point is that this is a man who was ready to stop anyone who wasn't part of his own group from ministering to others, who was ready to call down fire from heaven to punish those who did not yet understand, and wanted to sit on a great seat of power and was willing to boldly ask for it.

The story in the early church was that, toward the end of his life, and John was one of the very few apostles who died a natural death, he no longer had the strength to preach like he once did.  He would be assisted in front of the congregation and simply say four words:  children, love one another.  A sermon of four words, but they are not just four words.  They are four words that are bolstered by the entire life that was transformed.  When John speaks of love, they are the words of a man who has known what it is like to be decidedly un-loving, who has wanted power, who has wanted to strike down his fellow human beings.  They are, by their very nature, words of repentance.  They are not naïve words, words that he says just because it sounds like the right thing to say, but words that come out of a long history of having old habits burned out of him and replaced with love.

I want to turn now to the words of Christ that we heard a few minutes ago.  "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."  It is fascinating to me that when Jesus tells us what to do, it is to love one another, but, as I said earlier, we cannot assume, when Jesus says to love one another, that he means exactly the same thing as the rest of the world does when they say it.

How does our society talk about love?  On one level, we speak of love as an emotion that comes and goes; that we do not just fall in love, but that we fall out of love as well.  We talk about love as if it means that to love someone is to make them happy at all times and never seriously challenge them or stand against them or something they do.  We have a thriving sub-genre of literature today that seems to be dead-set on promoting an image of what a romantic, loving relationship can and should be that is nothing less than shocking and abusive.  Sometimes, when we say the word "love," we speak of enduring commitment, even when times get tough.  Other times, when we use it, we talk about how much we love pizza.

The question is, what does Jesus mean when he tells us to love one another, and he tells us right here.  He says, "Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."  Now how has Jesus loved us?  He has existed for all eternity, in perfect fellowship with the Father and the Spirit and then willingly came and joined us in our world of space and time with all the hardship that entails.  Paul expresses this well in his letter to the Philippians.  "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross."
That is the kind of love that Jesus calls us to have.  It is not a love that counts the cost of what is needed before it acts.  It is a love, as the famous passage reads, that is patient, kind, not envious or rude.  "It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."  Perhaps most importantly, it is not a love that waits for the the one it loves to get everything right, or indeed anything right but takes the initiative.  Again, as Paul points out so powerfully, "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 dare to die.  But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us."

Here is a fact for you that, while it might not agree with what we might be naturally inclined to think and it might not agree with insights from the business world or other organizations, nevertheless is true to the gospel.  The single most important thing that will convince people of the truth of the gospel and transform the world is not preaching, it is not church music, it is not Christian programming, and it is not voting Christian values into law.  It is the witness of the people of God who have been transformed by the love and grace of God and then who have lives that share this love and grace with others.  There is no substitute for love.  To again cite that famous passage on love, "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all the mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing."

If you wonder why the gospel doesn't seem to have the impact that it should in the world today, the first thing you should do is look at yourself and ask yourself a question and, for your own sake, do not assume you already know the answer.  Are you living as a witness to the transforming love and grace of God?  If not, that is your first step.  Pray that God would so transform your life that you cannot help but bear witness to God's grace and love.  Pray for the Spirit to move both in your life and in the lives of others so that real transformation might happen.  Do not give up and do not rest until God gives what he has promised.  I don't mean that if you aren't perfect or if you still have problems that God can't use you, but there is no limit to the deliverance and joy that God can give you if you will allow him to.

If so; if your life is marked, every day, by love, if you can look over your life and give thanks to God that, even if you aren't where you want to be, you are no longer where you have been, ask yourself how you can go out and share that with others so that they too can become such witnesses.  Every once in a while, you will hear someone say, in an election season like this one, that if you do not vote, you cannot complain.  You were given a chance for your voice to be heard, even if it is a small one and you didn't take it.  If we aren't being faithful in what God has called us to be about, we have lost all right to complain.  If we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem.

What is the first thing that people would notice when they enter this place?  Is it that the people love each other more than themselves?  Is it that it is clear that God is present in this place, that this is a gathering of people whose lives are marked by grace and in the process of being transformed?  Is it that, even if we can't quite put our finger on it, something significant is happening and we want to be a part of it?  If it isn't, we need to ask ourselves what we can do.

If you look in the New Testament, you will never find a single passage where the church is commanded to put on a well-crafted, professional quality worship service.  There is simply no place that describes the secret to the spread of the gospel as the development of clever church programs.  Nowhere will you uncover a hint that the best thing to do is to look at what seems successful to the outside observer and use that to develop ministries that may or may not resonate with the people who actually do them.  There are only two commands.  The first is to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself.

This command to love is absolutely central.  We are not told that people will know that we are God's people because of our big buildings, or that we have great social services, or that we have captivating preachers, or world-class musicians.  We are not told that the best way to find out if someone belongs to God is by what they affirm as a statement of faith.  We are given one and only one distinctive mark: love. We might wish that we were given something else to do since the idea that we should love one another sounds so much like what we hear in our world today.  In fact, love is actually the hardest thing we could be asked to do since the love with which we are called to love one another, real love, love like Christ's, is not only difficult but impossible.  It is a love that is so completely other than what the world is capable of that a person, a community that loves like Christ loves sticks out like a sore thumb.  They cannot be hidden, like a lamp on a lampstand or a city on a hill.  This is our calling and this is our promise, that we be people who love like Jesus loved because we are the ones in whom the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells.  Divine love and a transformed world are the inheritance promised to us.  Let us go and not just do nice things, Christian things, but go and be the people of God who love one another like Christ loved us so that all will know that we are disciples of Christ and that the world might yearn to join us.

Let us pray   AMEN

Some Reflections on Prayer

Some Reflections on Prayer

What, exactly, is the function of prayer?  One school of thought, which seems in many ways to be the most natural, is to say that prayer is a petitioning to God for things that might not happen otherwise.  For example, we pray that we might receive favor by some bureaucratic entity so that justice might be done, not because we think that they would be favorable whether we prayed or not, but precisely because we are concerned that they will not be.

There have been many who have felt that this kind of view of prayer portrays an undesirable view of God.  After all, it implies that God has to be coaxed into doing good things for us.  It implies that if something happens that we do not like, a reasonable explanation might be that we didn't pray hard enough, or well enough, about it.  It implies that, when something good comes to us that we attribute to the hand of God, it is very difficult to not read the unfortunate consequences of that thing for someone else as also from the hand of God.  It also seems to imply that God, the almighty, is easily swayed by our words and tears.

But what is the alternative?  The major alternative throughout history has seemed to be to say that God is going to do whatever God is going to do, whether we pray for it or not.  Some have asked, "Why do we pray?" if prayer doesn't really make any difference?  Some have drawn the conclusion from this that prayer is absolutely pointless and that we should not pray, though perhaps we should meditate.  Others, notably Calvin, argued that we should pray, not because of any change it might bring about in God, but because of the change it brings about in ourselves.  The retort might be, if prayer doesn't impact God in any way, it becomes pointless (not to mention significantly in tension with the rest of Calvin's theology, which stresses how important it is for our concepts to have significance, not only for us, but for God as well).

Are these really the only two ways (including any minor variations on them) of looking at prayer?  Do we really have no other way of looking at it without either making God remarkably capricious and pliable or making the entire practice nonsensical?  I think that there may be, and it is rooted in the actual life of Christ.

I am of the mind that one of the most concise yet powerful expressions of what the Christian life is to be about is when Jesus says, "If anyone wants to become my disciple he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me."  This idea carries with it the notion that, as Christians, we go wherever Jesus goes, do whatever Jesus does, even to death and, through death, to resurrection.  If Jesus does something, we ought to do it too, even if it has to change slightly because of differences in time and place.

At the very least, this establishes the importance of prayer and the need to retain it, even if we do not fully understand it.  After all, Jesus prays to his Father.  Even if we do not know what that prayer means or how it is paralleled in our own lives, the fact that prayer is important is established by the fact that Jesus, God in flesh, prayed.  That, however, only solves part of the problem.  What exactly does prayer do and how does it work?

Ultimately, I don't think the scripture gives us an unambiguous answer to those questions.  To do so would transform God into nothing more than a machine who does what he does in response to prayer and so the way to get what you want is to make sure you pray in just the right way and, if you don't get what you want, it is because you didn't use the "Magic Prayer Machine" correctly.  God cannot be put into a box but remains free to act or not to act, based on his own view of the situation, which has a degree of insight and comprehension that dwarfs ours.

It seems to me that prayer, at its core, is a bringing to articulation and expression that we find our identity in Christ and that we have renounced ourselves and taken up the cross to follow him.  When we see prayer this way, then we don't simply ask for things, but cry out with Christ, "This is what I want.  Even so, not my will but yours be done."  It is an act of total submission, but it is not a submission that implies passive resignation.  After all, in Christ we see that God's will is not restricted to the natural course of events.  God does not sit idly by when the world is overcome with sin but actively engages, coming to be personally and physically present in his creation.  Jesus did not say, "Something will happen to those who are corrupting the temple," but went in with a whip of cords to drive them out.  Submission to God's will means, as often as not, a call to action that drives us forward.

St. Francis of Assisi is famous for saying, "Preach the gospel always.  Use words when necessary."  This, of course, emphasizes the holistic nature of preaching, that actions do, to cite the famous contemporary proverb, speak louder than words.  However, it sometimes gets interpreted in such a way as to imply that words are not always necessary, or that words can be, whether often or at all, jettisoned from the Christian witness.  This kind of interpretation runs up against the fact that Jesus is not just the Son of God made flesh but the Word of God made flesh.
The point is that, if the gospel transforms us, it ought to express itself in some way in every area of life.  It transforms our actions, to be sure, but it also must transform our words, our interpersonal relations, the very pattern of our thoughts.  It also transforms our relationship to God in a holistic way.  This means that we no longer seek to do things our own way, but God's way, which we see manifest concretely in Christ.  We pray because, as people who are not yet entirely conformed to Christ through the Spirit.  We pray, on the one hand, to remind ourselves that our desires need to change and that we need help from beyond ourselves.  We also pray, on the other hand, because we believe that God actually will speak into a situation and, more often than not, will do so in a surprising way.  Prayer does not imply that God will do anything we ask, so long as we get our prayers exactly right, but that God actually does listen to us and does respond, though in a personal, and not casuistic manner.