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.

Why Do We Doubt (Matthew 14:22-33)

         08/27/12                    Why Do We Doubt?               Grace UMC
As a pastor, I have met many people who, because they are not pastors, think that they are unable to understand or explain the Bible.  They are quick to point out that they have not gone to seminary and so they are aware that there is much about the Bible that they simply have never been exposed to.  While many people have to endure their seminary experience, I loved seminary.  I learned a lot and got challenged in every kind of way you can imagine.  However, even though I think that seminary can be a wonderful experience, I am all too aware of the fact that there are times when seminary training does no more than teach people to read the same passages in the same ways over and over again, never learning anything new, never growing, never imagining that there might be something simple that speaks volumes that they might have missed.  Often times, these kinds of things are completely unrelated to the things you learn in seminary; that is to say, they are things that laypeople are every bit as equipped to discover as clergy.  In fact, it may be that lay people are even more prepared to notice them since they don't have their heads filled with all kinds of issues that may or may not be related.
I say all of this because I am amazed at how often a little detail, that I have never noticed but has been in the passage the whole time, something that seems so simple, will hit me like a ton of bricks.  This is the case with this passage we have just heard.  It is so simple that it doesn't seem like much at first.  It is so obvious and basic that the story simply couldn't have continued if it wasn't the way it is, and yet it is routinely ignored.  Let us consider the story.
Jesus has just fed the five thousand.  He had his disciples start across the Sea of Galilee while he stayed behind to dismiss the crowds and then he went off by himself to pray.  Several hours later, he was still on shore while the boats had gone on ahead.  A storm rose up and the disciples, experienced boatmen, were unable to make any progress, but here comes Jesus walking on the water.  At this point, Peter does something interesting; he decides that he is going to get out of the boat.  But first, he wants to make sure that he isn't dreaming or that all the hard work hasn't made him start seeing things.  He asks Jesus to invite him out of the boat, which he does.  At first, Peter does pretty well, taking a few steps as if he were on land.  However, his fear and doubt begin to get the better of him and he begins to sink, so he cries out, "Lord, save me!"  Jesus grabs him and chastises him a little, saying to him "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"
Now, we could go on all day about the virtues of faith and obedience, about how important it is to trust that, when God tells us to do something, we shouldn't doubt but do it with all our might, that Jesus has given us no reason to doubt him, and all those are good things to remember.  However, there is just one detail that seems to me to be absolutely crucial to this passage that I feel that we keep forgetting.  Peter loses faith and the consequences are significant.  After all, he starts to sink and it is serious enough to provoke a critique from Jesus.  However, we must never forget that, even when all this happens, Peter doesn't drown.  Now that seems a little bit silly, doesn't it?  Isn't it obvious that Peter doesn't drown?  After all, he is in the rest of the story of Jesus' life and he continued to be in ministry long afterward.  It is so clear that Peter does not drown that it doesn't seem worth mentioning.
And yet, I think it makes all the difference in the world.  Look at it from this point of view.  The disciples are being overwhelmed by the storms.  They simply cannot make any progress, even with all their strength.  Then along comes Jesus, just taking a stroll across the stormy sea; not concerned, not even working up a sweat.  It is as if the dangers of the storm and the sea simply do not exist for him.  They certainly aren't impacting him the same way they impact the disciples.  Peter looks out and, because a disciple in ancient Israel was accustomed to doing everything that his Rabbi did, and seeing that it is better to walk on the water than to be defeated by the storm, asks to be invited out of the boat.  Eventually, he starts to doubt and begins to sink.  So now we have three different kinds of people.  We have Jesus, who has absolute faith in his ability to walk on the water, we have Peter who has a bit of faith, but it isn't as strong as he might like, who has some success but then his faith begins to fail, and we have the other disciples who were so terrified of the storm that they didn't dare to get out of the boat at all!  The point is that not one of them died that day.  Not one of them was defeated by the storm.  In fact, the storm was defeated by Jesus when he stepped into the boat and they all made it safely  to the other side.
Why didn't Jesus sink?  He didn't sink because his faith was so strong that he simply could not be defeated by the storm.  Why didn't Peter sink?  He didn't sink because when he went down, he was secured by Christ's hand grabbing him.  Why didn't the disciples sink?  Because Jesus calmed the storm and made a way when there had not been a way.  Not one of the disciples made it to the other side on their own strength; Jesus made it possible, even for those whose faith wasn't even strong enough for them to get out of the boat.
It is very easy to get caught up with the quality of our faith.  We look at ourselves and we see how often our faith has failed.  We look at others and we see how much stronger their faith seems to be than our own.  The single most significant issue that marked the Reformation was a revolt against the kind of attitude that said that you had to do all kinds of things right before God would accept you.  If you sinned, you needed to do penance, and if you didn't do it, it didn't matter what else you did, you still fell short of salvation.  There was always this sense that the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ wasn't quite enough, that God did most of it, but we still had to finish the job.  That kind of attitude only leads to pride, if we think, wrongly, that we have it all together, or despair when we realize that we don't.  If that is our position, than we can only say that Peter wasn't good enough because his faith wavered and the other disciples were really not good enough since their faith didn't even go as far as Peter's.  We would have to say that the story of Jesus walking on water is a story of the radical failure of humanity to be good enough for God.
Maybe it does teach us that, but is that all that it teaches us?  I don't think so.  It seems to me that there is something profound that is here that goes above and beyond what it says about our ability, or at least our track record, to do what we should.  Peter's faith wavers, but Jesus catches him.  The disciples can't move their boat forward, but Jesus calms the sea.  The success that saved all of them was not in any way, shape or form based on their abilities, as we see with the other disciples, or even in the strength of their faith in Christ, as we see in Peter.  The success of the whole trip depended on the strength and faithfulness, not of the disciples, but of Christ.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul takes an entire chapter and points out that the Jewish people, and remember that Paul was Jewish, shouldn't boast in the fact that God gave them the law if they don't even follow it.  He pointed out that if the Gentiles follow God, even if they have never heard the law, they are more fully God's people than the Jews were who had the law but didn't follow it.  What is amazing is that he immediately follows this up with a question that might be put to him.  "Then what advantage has the Jew?  Or what is the value of circumcision?"    The question is basically this, "The Jewish people, by and large, were not accepting Jesus and being transformed.  Is there really anything special about the Jews?"  Paul's response is passionate.  "Absolutely!  For in the first place, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God."  God had singled the Jewish people out for special interaction through the years and spoke to them in a special way.  But the question could come back.  "Paul, but what if some of them, or even most of them, were unfaithful?"  Paul's response is amazing.  "Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?  By no means!  Although everyone is a liar, let God be proved true."  Every pastor, every Christian, could be a liar, but that does not make God any less truthful.  Every human being could be absolutely faithless, but that does not mean that God has become unfaithful.
That is why everyone made it safely across the sea.  Peter's faith didn't get them across and the other disciples' lack of faith did not prevent Jesus from delivering them.  It was the faithfulness of Christ that does not give up when we make mistakes or when we aren't as good as know we should be that made it happen.  When we talk about having faith, the point isn't, or at least shouldn't be, to get all excited talking about how strong my faith is or how strong your faith is.  When we say we are saved by faith, we don't mean that faith is something that we do and, because we reach a high enough level of faith, we are considered good enough for heaven.  In many ways, that is just taking the Medieval notion of salvation by works and substituting faith in as the new work that we have to do.  Now, instead of having to reach a certain level of moral perfection, we have to reach a certain level of perfection in our faith, in order to be saved.  That is what the Reformers fought so hard to get rid of.
When we say that faith is important, what we mean is that it is the one in whom we have faith, that is important.  It is not a question of how much we believe but in whom we believe.  We are saved by grace through faith, but the reason that we are saved is not because we are so good at being faithful, but because Christ is so good at being faithful.  The good news of Jesus Christ for the one who has never done a good deed in their lives and has never even given a thought to God before is that, when they stand before God they can say, "I have nothing to bring.  No deeds that made people think that I was a good person, no wise words that built up my brothers and sisters, nothing of any value at all.  If what Jesus did on my behalf and in my place isn't good enough, then I have no other hope.  All of my trust, all of my hope is in Christ and if it fails, I have nothing left.  I would be as lost as Peter if Jesus had not grabbed him when he began to sink."  What makes that good is because that is all that is asked.  In fact, it is the only thing that any of us can say before God.
So why do we doubt?  That is the question that Jesus asked Peter.  What if the question about why Peter doubted is not a question of criticism, that is, what if it wasn't a way for Jesus to say, "Peter, you know you are supposed to believe, so why did you doubt?"  What if the question was a real one, one that Jesus asked because he simply could not understand why Peter could have any reason to doubt?  I can imagine that Peter might answer like many of  us would.  "But Lord, I got out into the middle of the sea and I began to realize that I can't do it.  I can't walk on water, so I began to doubt because I found myself doing something that I am not able to do and I didn't think that I could keep it up."
What would Jesus' response be?  If the real point of faith is for us to have strong faith just for the sake of having faith, as if faith in an of itself is a good thing, or if we take the modern attitude of self-help and the power of positive thinking as our guide, the question, "Why did you doubt," would be, "Peter, why did you doubt?  Do you not trust in the power of believing in yourself?  Keep trying and you'll make it someday."  But if that is not the case at all, if the point of faith is not that we believe but that we believe in Jesus, not that we trust our own abilities to do anything but trust in Jesus, who lives his life in us and through us, then the question is not, "Peter, why did you doubt yourself," but "Peter, why did you doubt me?"  Jesus was the reason why Peter could walk on the water in the first place.  His own abilities had absolutely nothing to do with it.  There was no reason to doubt because the ultimate responsibility to stay on top of the water didn't lie with him but with Jesus.
So that is the question for us this morning.  Why do we doubt?  And by that I don't mean to say that there is not room for a healthy curiosity about what we believe about God.  Anyone who has had a substantial conversation with me knows that I am all about probing beyond popular opinion about God.  What I mean is, if God has loved us so much that he stepped into our world of space and time in order to become one of us and one with us; if he was willing to not just come but to take our brokenness upon himself and take it all the way to the cross in order to deal with it once and for all; and if he did all of this, not when we had our act together but while we were yet sinners, before we even gave a first thought to God, why should we doubt whether God really loves us, whether God actually cares about us, whether God actually wants to redeem us and be reconciled?
Listen to Paul's reflections on this topic.  "What then are we to say about these things?  If God is for us, who is against us?  He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?"  If God loves us so much that he did that, why would we doubt that he wants to finish what he has started?  Paul continues.  "Who will bring any charge against God's elect?  It is God who justifies.  Who is it to condemn?  It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us."  Paul is saying that the only one in all of the universe who is in a position to bring a charge against you or to condemn you is God, but this is a God who not only loves you with a love that will not let you go, but one who has gone through tremendous lengths to make that love real for you and prays for you, even to this day.
Our God is not a God who sits up in heaven with a chart to keep track of whether you are good enough or whether you have believed hard enough or not.  Rather, he is a God who calls you to do things above and beyond what you were ever capable of on your own, to do things that are amazing from a human point of view.  And in the midst of that calling and empowering, you might make a mistake, but you can trust that, when that time comes, Christ will grab you so that you will not drown and remind you that you do not need to doubt, because your trust and faith are not in yourself, but in him, and he has strength to support all of creation.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Not the Same Weapons (1 Samuel 17:31-51)

         07/22/12              "Not the Same Weapons"        Spencer GUMC
If we were to try to make a list of the Bible stories that are most well known by the church and even the larger culture, the story of David and Goliath would almost certainly be close to the top of the list, along with stories like Noah's ark and Jonah and the whale.  In fact, this story is known and talked about more often, both in the church and out of it, than many of the stories that directly involve Jesus.  It is because it is so fantastically well known that I have felt free to limit the time that I spend this morning retelling it in order to free up time to explore a particular aspect that has been impressing itself on me recently.
At the time when David shows up to the battlefield where he will ultimately slay Goliath, he was not yet a warrior.  In fact, he was nothing more than a kid, likely no more than fifteen years old.  He was so far from being known as a great warrior that even his brothers were amazed that he would volunteer to go head to head with a giant like Goliath.  And yet, though he was young, though he had no credentials, though to all outward appearances, he was nothing more than the youngest of a large family, his appearance at this time and place is inherently political.
Remember that David has been introduced to the reader in the previous chapter, and that introduction took the form of the prophet Samuel, on orders from God, going to Bethlehem and anointing him as king over all of Israel.  This is, from a purely political point of view, high treason, since Israel already had a king, Saul.  It is fascinating to me that in the slaying of Goliath, David is able to defeat the Philistines, the very thing that Saul was not able to do with an army.
All that aside, it seems to me that the most common aspect of this story that gets emphasized in Sunday school, Bible studies and sermons, is the need to stand in faith, knowing that God is far greater than the giants that we see in our lives, no matter how big they seem or how many of them there are.  All of this is entirely true.  I do not mean to minimize that conclusion in any way, shape, or form.  However, I want to place my stress on a different detail, because I think that it is both something that I forget, though it is so obviously included in our normal way of discussing this passage, and because I feel it is something that is very much appropriate in this place and time.
I want to draw your attention to the interchange that David has with Saul, where Saul tries to equip David for battle.  This is what we read.  "Then Saul clothed David with his armor; he put a helmet of bronze on his head, and clothed him with a coat of mail.  And David girded his sword over his armor, and he tried in vain to go, for he was not used to them. Then David said to Saul, 'I cannot go with these; for I am not used to them.' And David put them off.  Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in his shepherd's bag or wallet; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine."
I feel that it is important to stress that, when David went after Goliath, he did not use the same weapons as Goliath did.  Now, this seems like a silly and trivial observation, doesn't it?  After all, we know that, while Goliath had a sword and a shield so big he needed someone to carry it for him, David simply had an ordinary sling with five stones.  However, I think that we often get so caught up in the glory of the victory, that David actually is able to defeat Goliath, that we forget how significant this fact really is.
Think about the sheer absurdity of David's decision.  He is only about fifteen years old, going up against a man who has been a warrior, likely for longer than David has been alive.  Goliath is trained in all the best military strategies, he knows how to use his sword, he knows how to fight, both in battle and in single combat.  David has none of these things.  He has spent his youth far from the battlefield, caring for sheep and playing his harp.  Saul is giving the best advice he knows.  The only way that makes sense to Saul to approach this incredibly significant battle is armed to the teeth, covered in armor and with the best weapon you can find, at least one that was created for battle.  Remember, Saul is no weakling, but is an accomplished warrior himself.  The maidens of Israel used to sing, "Saul has slain his thousands."
David walks out, completely naked from a military point of view, and does not just face his enemy, but defeats him.  What would the people's response have been?  I can imagine it would be something like this.  "How amazing is it that Goliath has been defeated at all, let alone by this young man, let alone with a sling and a rock."  The great glory is that God brought about victory in spite of David's weakness of weapon.
But what if that reaction misses the entire point?  What if God's victory wasn't in spite of David's inexperience, in spite of his unimpressive weaponry?  What if God brought victory precisely because of those things?  What if David didn't just find a way that worked as well in that moment as that of the great warriors, but found the only way that would work?  The fact of the matter is that if we wanted to say that the reason that David was victorious, even with a stone and sling, was because he was such a natural warrior, we would have to say that he could have defeated Goliath with Saul's sword and armor, he just didn't feel as comfortable doing it.  On the contrary, I think that the story forces us to conclude that, if David had gone to the battlefield doing things the way Saul told him to, meeting Goliath with his own versions of his armor and sword, the event would have ended very differently.  David would have been killed, Israel would have been defeated, and the whole history of the world would have changed forever.
But you know what?  Once I noticed that David not only did not fight Goliath using the same weapons, but deliberately avoided anything resembling conventional combat equipment, I started to notice that this is not the only time in the Bible that this kind of thing happens.  It turns out that almost everywhere you turn, there is someone doing something that makes absolutely no sense if we think about if as an outsider but we hardly notice it either because we have been trained for so long to see it as normal or because we are so quick to read the end of the story into its beginning that we never notice how odd it really is.
Perhaps the single best example of this happening is Jesus.  Here is a man who was being called the Messiah, the anointed one, the Son of David.  He was a man who was associated with the restoring of Israel and the hopes and dreams of the people.  He spoke of a kingdom that was coming but yet was already there in his person.  He gathered followers, he spoke against those in authority, and he sharply critiqued the ways that Israel had become just like the pagan nations.  And finally, when the time comes to complete his work, to release the people from bondage, to cast the powers of this world to the ground and shatter them, what does he do?  He dies!  He doesn't march on Jerusalem with a rag-tag army like the Maccabees did over a hundred years before.  He doesn't take up his rightful place on the throne of Israel and restore the Davidic line of kings.  In fact, Israel was still ruled by Rome and the people's lives were not noticeably different after he died compared to before.  When you think of it, it is a pretty funny way of establishing a kingdom.
And yet, we don't say that God established his kingdom here on earth in spite of the death of Christ, do we?  No, we say that God established it through his death, that there really wasn't any other way it could come about, that to try to establish the kingdom of God using the same "weapons" as human kings use would make absolutely no sense at all.  If Jesus' kingdom depended on how well he was able to marshal troops, to combat and defeat trained Roman soldiers, we would have no choice but to say that he was an absolute failure.  And yet, we don't say that, do we?  We don't say that because Christ's death wasn't a sign of his failure, it redefined what it means to succeed.  Success is not an avoidance of death, but an emerging on the other side of death in resurrection.  From the outside, we would have to say that the Jesus movement was kept alive in spite of Christ's death.  From the inside, we know that there was no other way, and to do it in another way, a more conventional way, a way that made more sense to the outside world, would never actually work.
Look at just about any hero of the faith.  Abraham was over ninety years old when God called him and told him that he would be the father of a great nation, something that is very hard to do if you have no children and are not likely to have any.  Moses was an eighty year old shepherd with a speech impediment who had burned all his bridges with the Egyptian royalty.  Gideon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into leadership in order to overthrow the nations that were ruling over Israel.  Jonah was a bigot who hated the Ninevites, the ones he was called to preach to, with every ounce of his being.  The list could be made as long as we like.  The point is that if we ever imagined that the standards of the world were the best way to move forward in God's eyes, not a single leader in Israel's history, including David and Jesus, would have been taken seriously.
What can we learn from this?  I am sure we can learn many things, but what I am increasingly convinced of is that it means that we should not pay even the smallest bit of attention to how other people do things, at least if they are people that we could consider, on one level or another, to be our enemies.  If David attempted to meet Goliath using the same kinds of weapons and armor that he used, he would have been killed; if Jesus tried to establish his kingdom like earthly kings, not only would it not have worked, we would have missed out on the real kingdom of God, which is far greater than the kingdoms of this world.
This means that we need to stop looking over our shoulders and seeing if we are keeping up with the Joneses, to see if we are doing the same things as everyone else, because what they are doing has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what we need to be about.  Trying to measure yourself by other people can only lead to pride, if you think you are doing well compared to them, or despair, if you think you aren't doing as well.  The same is true if you think that the only way that God could be calling you to behave is the way others behave.
Allow me to give some concrete examples.  Any of you who have children who are still in school, especially if they are in middle school, are doubtlessly aware of a phenomenon called "drama."  Drama, in this sense, is not to be confused with theatrics.  Drama is an age-old issue with a new name.  It is when one person, or group of people, starts spreading rumors about others, or begins to talk about someone else behind their back.  Drama is the number one complaint I have ever heard from people who are in school.  Seeing that it is such a big problem, and one that everyone seems to notice and understand, what do you think is the number one way to deal with school drama?  More drama!  As amazing as it might sound, the way that people in school most commonly deal with the drama in their lives is to instigate more drama, as if somehow, if we can just get the last word in, everything will be fine.  What is this but a modern example of using Goliath's weapons against him?  The result is never that Goliath is slain, but only that we get beaten, because he is a giant and we are small and he has more experience with them than we could ever have.  The only way to win at the drama game by using more drama is to somehow become the kind of person who is better at creating turmoil than anyone else, and then you may have won, but you have become a person whose self-worth is determined by how bad you can make other people feel.  You can only defeat Goliath using his own weapons by becoming a bigger, nastier, more cruel giant than him, which is no real victory.
When I was serving a different church, there were several churches, within convenient driving distance, who specialized in reaching out to college students.  To that end, they had developed fantastic praise bands, they integrated contemporary culture into their services, and they had an amazing network where new people in the school could be reached by word of mouth.  The people at the church I was serving were noticing that people they knew were traveling to attend these other churches and they wanted to find a way to get them back home.   In order to do that, it was suggested to reinstate our own praise band that had been discontinued by a previous pastor and to try to copy these other churches and do what they do to get those people back.
Now, there are many reasons why this is a problem.  First, there is a big problem with looking at other churches as being our enemies.  They aren't our enemies.  People may have left our church at one point to go there, but at least they are going somewhere, they are still putting themselves in a position of hearing the word of the Lord, of joining the larger body in worship, and learning how to live as Christians together.  There are far too many people in any given town who are simply unreached to worry about those who are still Christians, just a different brand than us.
But beyond that, it is an idea that is doomed.  There is nothing wrong with reinstating a praise band, there is nothing wrong with a church becoming more contemporary.  The problem is when those things are pursued in the belief and with the conviction that they are the way to reach others.  If that church had gotten a band together and said to the people of their community, "You should come to this church because we have a band," they could respond, "So does this other church, and their band is better."  The fact of the matter is that we could never win if that was our strategy.  The churches we would have hoped to compete against had been doing those things for a good twenty years.  They had experience and money invested in it that we could never even come close to duplicating.  It would have amounted to nothing more than looking at other churches and calling them Goliath (a problem in itself), and then saying that the best way to "slay" that Goliath is to do what they are doing.  It would have been as disastrous as if David had fought Goliath with a sword and shield instead of with a sling and some stones.
So I urge you, in every aspect of your lives; in your personal faith journeys, in your relation to the church, in the way you treat people in your workplace, and in every other way, listen to God and do what God tells you to do and do it the way God tells you to do it, regardless of how silly or counter-intuitive it might seem.  If David had said, "No way, God.  There is no way I can go against a giant with just a sling and some stones," he would have never won the battle and would have never become the great king that he was called to be.
On top of that, do not allow other people to discourage you from doing it.  What if Saul had said to David, "You will either fight Goliath my way or you will not fight him at all?"  He would have never defeated him, or even may never have gone out to battle in the first place.  Someone else would have had to fight the giant, maybe without listening to God at all, and that would also have been disastrous.  If God has called you, and he has, he will make it clear what you should do.  Do you wish that your church would develop a particular kind of ministry because it is something you care about and you know that others probably care about it, too?  Go do it!  If someone tells you that it is doomed to failure because you aren't doing it the way they would do it, even if you know that God isn't calling you to do it their way, keep faithful.  Sometimes the greatest victories, as we see in the Bible, come when they are the most unlikely of all.
When God calls his people, he equips them, not in the way that seems best to the rest of the world, but in the way that is actually best for that time and place.  We do not need to worry about what has happened before, or even what is happening right now.  We need to be about participating in what God is doing in the days ahead and we need to join him in that.  I am not sure that I know exactly where that is, and I am not sure that any other single person knows, but I trust that God will reveal it to us as an entire congregation and will do so by motivating individuals and small groups to step forward and make a difference.  God is likely even calling you right now, in this season of your life.  Be in prayer and be encouraged to step out boldly, for it not just a human being who believes in you and supports you, but the very almighty God of the universe.  As silly as it might seem, cast aside your sword and shield and take up your sling and stones, for the weapons that are chosen and anointed by God are better than the best that we could find on our own.  Let us pray.

AMEN

"Trinity Sunday" 2012

         06/10/12                  "Trinity Sunday" 2012               Grace UMC
Over the years, the worldwide church has suggested that local churches take certain times of the year and set them aside to talk about certain things.  For example, in December, we talk about Jesus being born and in the early Spring, we talk about the Resurrection of Christ from the dead.  There is nothing magical about these times; they could have just as well been different.  But the thing that is wonderful about this is that it gives us a pattern, a way to live our lives together as Christians that allows us to weave the key parts of the story of God's interaction with humanity into the very fabric of our lives so that it more deeply makes up part of who we are.
It is about this time of year that this pattern suggests that we should talk about the fact that the God we worship is not just a single isolated individual, marked simply by unchangingness and perfection.  After all, even the pagan Greek philosophers thought that God was like that.  Rather, the God we worship is a community of three Persons that are all bound together in the same Being.  That is to say, we worship a God who is Triune.
I would imagine that many of you have either not heard any sermons on the Trinity or, at least, not too many of them.  Why is that?  After all, we declare that we believe in the Trinity every time someone is baptized and we imply it every time we take communion.  In fact, the creeds that have historically bound the church together are deeply Trinitarian, both in form and content.  One could say that the Trinity forms the basic grammar of our Christian faith.  John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was profoundly Trinitarian, though not everyone has noticed it.  In his sermon on the Trinity, after he had made a point of stressing that Christians can disagree on a wide variety of issues, says this.  "But there are some truths more important than others. It seems there are some which are of deep importance...surely there are some which it nearly concerns us to know, as having a close connexion with vital religion. And doubtless we may rank among these that contained in [the words] 'There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: And these three are one.'"  Wesley, who was so willing to be flexible on a number of significant issues, wouldn't budge on the Trinity.
Why is that we as Christians are so reluctant to talk about the Trinity in which, we say, we believe?  I don't think it is really all that much of a mystery.  After all, most people have never really heard the Trinity related to and connected up with their basic Christian faith and experience.  Now why not?  Why shouldn't a belief that lies so close to the heart of Christian faith be strongly related the very core of that faith in practical terms?  I think it is because we have had a tendency to start by saying, "Yep, I believe in the Trinity.  I'm not entirely sure why I believe in it, but they tell me that I should, so I'll go with it."  Once we do that, however, and it happens among scholars just as often as among laypeople, we have a doctrine that we hold because we were told to, not because it resonates with the depths of our Christian experience, and now we have to make sense of it.
But how do we make sense of it?  We sometimes use images like an egg, which is one egg but is made up of yolk, white, and shell, or water, which can be solid, liquid, or gas.  Now, whatever else those images might do, they certainly don't make us say, "Now I understand why the angels of heaven hide their faces before the glory of God and cry 'Holy, Holy, Holy!"  Even if we use more sophisticated images or ideas, we often set out to explain how three can be one and how one can be three in a way that doesn't really relate to what God has actually done in Christ.  I am not in any way blaming people for doing this, so don't feel bad if you have used those kinds of explanations.  After all, what better examples do we have?  In many ways, the history of the church has let us down because for the last 1,500 years, it is as if we have said, "We talked about the Trinity once upon a time but now we all agree, so let's stop thinking about it."  Then, it is only when someone comes along and says that the Trinity is nothing more than confused mathematical thinking, that we realize that we don't have a good answer.
Why is it that we should care about the Trinity?  The short answer is that it is bound up with the depths of our Christian faith.  Not a single other religion or philosophy has developed a doctrine of the Trinity like the church has.  In spite of all the times that it has been pointed out that the word "Trinity" does not appear in the New Testament, Christians have never yet been convinced, in general, to give it up.  There is something about the nature of Christian faith, that is unique, which drives us to consistently say that we have to think of God as one Being but three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  That something is the living reality of Jesus Christ.
Belief in the Trinity formed the major center of debate within the church for about a hundred years.  People wrote book after book on all sides of the issue, there were councils where the leaders of the church had heated discussion about it, bishops were exiled when they did not agree with the dominant opinion in their area at the time.  To us about 1,600 years later, it might seem hard to understand what the big deal was.  We might be tempted to think that the debates over the Trinity were like how our contemporary debates often are, either two sides who just like fighting and will fight over anything they can, or else a debate that has gotten out of control because both sides basically agree, but can't realize it.  However, neither of those things is the case.
The reason why the Trinity matters and why there were Christians who quite literally laid their lives down for it is because it goes to the very root of our Christian lives, whether we always realize it or not.  The very basic fabric of your faith is Trinitarian in nature and the fact that we worship a Triune God bears its mark on your most fundamental Christian experience.  John Wesley concluded his sermon on the Trinity with these remarks.  "But the thing, which I here particularly mean is this: The knowledge of the Three-One God is interwoven with all true Christian faith; with all vital religion...I know not how any one can be a Christian believer till he '[has],' as St. John speaks, 'the witness in himself;' till 'the Spirit of God witnesses with his spirit, that he is a child of God;' that is, in effect, till God the holy Ghost witnesses that God the Father has accepted him through the merits of God the Son: And, having this witness, he honours the Son, and the blessed Spirit, 'even as he honours the Father.'  Not that every Christian believer adverts to this [that is, not every Christian talks about their faith in distinctly Trinitarian terms]; perhaps, at first, not one in twenty: But if you ask any of them a few questions, you will easily find it is implied in what he believes."
The fact of the matter is that, if you are a Christian, if God has cleansed you with the blood of Christ and transformed you through the power of the Holy Spirit, you are already Trinitarian.  Wesley said that we could easily find that this is true if we just ask a few questions.  If I were to ask you, “Are you accepted in the eyes of God?”  You would say to me, “Yes!”  Then I would ask you, “How were you accepted by God?”  Your answer would be something like, “Because God became a man in Jesus Christ and died for my sins.”  Finally, I would ask you, “How did you come to know that you were accepted?”  Your answer might not be quite like this, but it would be similar.  “Because the Spirit of God bore witness in my heart that I am a child of God.”  Our very most basic Christian experience is rooted in the fact that God is triune.
I think it is one of the most profound tragedies of our contemporary Christian culture that we have neglected the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which is truly the Christian understanding of God.  And why do we do it?  We do it because we can't see how it actually applies.  We are told, perhaps in confirmation, that as Christians, we are Trinitarian, and so we believe it.  It has been seen for so long as so crucial to what it means to be a Christian that we are afraid to deny it, but we could never defend it if someone were to press us on it.  For many Christians, we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place with the Trinity and we are afraid to ask for clarification and often times we don't have any examples of people who think that it matters enough to talk about or think through.
So, what are we really saying when we say that God is Triune?  What we are really saying, what lies at the root of our fundamental, Trinitarian conviction is that, in Jesus Christ, we have to do with God.  When we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that, when we look at Jesus and all the things that he said and did, we are looking at God doing them.  His words are the very words of God, his actions are the very deeds of God.  In Christ, we are face-to-face with God and not just a messenger of God.  Jesus is not merely a prophet, not just one upon whom the Spirit of God rests, but one who is God in his very self, at the core of his being.  We believe that everything that Jesus says and everything Jesus does is truth, that he is the very definition of truth, that he is the truth, and that this truth applies no less when we see him praying to and communicating with his Father in heaven.
When we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that this same God that we come to know in and through Jesus Christ has also taken up residence in the hearts and lives of the people who belong to the Father through the shedding of the blood of Christ.  We are saying that, not only did God so love the world that he sent his only son so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life, but that this salvation does not come like a kind of "get out of hell free" card, but by God coming and redeeming us from the inside out.  In Christ, we see that God loves us so much to limit himself, meet us on our own level, and ultimately take our broken and diseased condition upon himself and condemn our sin to death on the cross.  In the Holy Spirit, we see that God loves us so much as to enter into each of our fallen lives, to meet each of us where we are and to take our hearts and connect them to the heart of Christ, so that our words begin to sound like the words of Christ and our actions begin to look like the deeds of Christ.
This is why we heard that passage from John as our text for this morning.  Jesus says, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.  He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.  All that the Father has is mine.  For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you."  This is one of the most amazingly Trinitarian passages in the entire Bible.  Everything that belongs to the Father in heaven also belongs to Jesus, his Son.  There is nothing of God that is missing in Christ.  Everything we say about the Father, we say about the Son, except "Father."  But that is not all.  The Holy Spirit, to whom Jesus refers as the Spirit of truth, is the one who takes the things of Christ and declares them to us.  The Spirit is the means through which we have come to faith in Jesus Christ, the one who took the blood of Christ and made it real in our lives, who continues to take the things of Christ and make them known to us.  In a very real sense, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the very life of Christ, God in flesh, is made real in our lives so that the blood of Christ begins to pump through our veins and shapes us into people who begin to follow more closely in the footsteps of Christ in his life of love, devotion and obedience to the Father.
So, aside from the fact that the very fabric of our Christian life is Triune, what impact does the Trinity have on our daily lives?  It shapes the way we live because we have not just been made in the image of God, but in the image of the Triune God, the God in whom the relationships between the Persons is every bit as important as the Persons themselves.  This means that we are people for whom our relationships are just as important as who we think we are on our own.  It means that we cannot be the people we were made to be if we insist on doing things by ourselves and always doing things our own way.
​ So, if we are made in the image of this Triune God, we would expect that we are made for relationship and that we cannot be who we were made to be if we do not allow those relationships to touch the core of who we are.  The fact of the matter is that, whether we like it or not, we already are affected by our relationships.  More and more, both in theology and in natural science, it is becoming clear that our relationships make up part of who we are.  If our relationships with other people are not centered in Christ, there is a part of us that is not centered in Christ.  If we surround ourselves with people who do not love the Lord, who live in ways that are not compatible with the Gospel, it is only a matter of time before those relationships begin to drag us away from our God.  However, there are other people whose lives are so characterized by faith that it is the easiest and most natural thing in the world to be a Christian when we are around them.  When we surround ourselves with people like that, it is only a matter of time before we begin to become more faithful, joyful people.  Both of these things happen because our relationships really do affect us.
We are the church.  We are the people whom Paul describes as being the ones who live lives worthy of the calling with which we have been called, who live with all humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another in love.  We are the people who are to make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  We are one body with one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.  If you notice, Paul even speaks of the church in Trinitarian terms.  We are the people who have been made right with God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit; we are the people who give our prayer and praise back in the Holy Spirit, through Christ to the Father.  And because of all that, we are bound to each other, to build one another up, to contribute in our own unique way to the work of God in our midst.
We are Trinitarians because we believe that when we look into the face of Christ lit up by the Holy Spirit, we see the very face of God.  We are Trinitarians because we believe that what God has done shows us who God truly is.  We are Trinitarians because we believe that God does not just sit up, far away from his people, telling us what to do and what not to do, but loves us so much as to meet us where we are, to transform us, and to lift our lives, even here and now, into his presence.  We are Trinitarians because we believe that we is just as basic as me and we live our lives for each other because we know that what happens to you impacts me and what happens to me impacts you.  And finally, we are Trinitarians because God has loved us so much to reveal himself to us as he actually is and not how we would like to imagine him.  And that is good news.  Let us pray.

AMEN

"The Most Frightening Day of the Year" (Pentecost 2012)

05/27/12 Pentecost 2012 Grace UMC

Something I say with some frequency is that Pentecost is the single most frightening day in the entire church year. Often, when I say that, I get funny looks, as though people can't understand why Pentecost would be a frightening day. After all, it certainly seems like it is a time of great joy and celebration. It is indeed that, but it is the most frightening day of the church year nonetheless.

Why is that? I had the tremendous privilege at my last appointment to preach, passage by passage, through the entire Gospel according to John. It took two and a half years, but it was a significant time of growth for myself and, I hope, for others. As we spent a great deal of time looking at that particular account of the life of Jesus, we found ourselves paying attention to what the disciples were doing. It was an incredibly encouraging time because we realized that the disciples were so far from being perfect and unattainable examples of what faithfulness ought to look like, that they were just as messed up as we are. Time after time, we read about disciples putting their feet into their mouths, saying things they immediately regret, doing things that only a moment's worth of reflection would tell them is a bad idea. We realize that if Peter can still be a disciple after breaking his promise to stand by Jesus' side until death only hours after making it, then we can still be disciples in spite of all the mistakes that we make. In fact, Peter makes just about every mistake you could imagine. There is probably not anyone else in the gospel narratives that should fill people who make mistakes, which is everybody, with hope than Peter. Peter was given his name, which means "rock" by Jesus and throughout the gospels, you can't help but think that the name is meant to be ironic, since he is probably the least stable, least reliable disciple of the bunch.

And then comes Pentecost. All of a sudden, the Peter who didn't seem like he could do anything right, the Peter that we all too often can identify with, starts to act differently. All of a sudden, the man who's name "rock" only served as an ironic reminder of how not firm he was, starts to be bold in a new way. The Peter who was unable to stand firm for Jesus in front of a servant girl the night he was betrayed, stands up before thousands of people, including some of the leaders, and proclaims the good news, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him."

What exactly has happened? We live in a world where the disciples have been glorified to an almost unhealthy degree. They were the ones who followed Jesus, they were the ones who wrote the New Testament, they were the ones who took the gospel out to the ends of the known world at the time. They are the kind of people that we sometimes even name our churches after. When we read the accounts of the life of Jesus, it takes us a while to get used to the fact that these people are, in so many ways, just like we are. It is almost as if we are afraid to really say that the people who followed Jesus so closely could be just as broken and messed up as we can be, but that is what we read.

However, it seems that it is right as we are getting comfortable with this idea that the disciples had just as many problems as we do that we run into the story of Pentecost and the rest of the book of Acts. All of a sudden, it becomes much harder to relate to the disciples. After all, how many times have you been walking down the street and someone who is sick asks for help and, simply by reaching out your hand to them, radically and dramatically cure their disease and send them on their way rejoicing? I must admit that it has never happened to me. It is almost as if we have just gotten used to the disciples being just like us and now we are made to come face to face with mighty heroes of the faith, miracle workers and life-changing preachers. What in the world has happened?

I remember the first time that I asked the question, "What is the difference between the disciples in the gospel accounts and the disciples in the book of Acts, and what is it that brought about that change?" There is no real conflict of opinion about what happened. The disciples were radically transformed. Within the space of a single chapter of the Bible, we see just how amazing this transformation really is. At the beginning, the disciples are all huddled together, frightened that the people who killed Jesus would kill them, as his followers. By the end, we find that they are proclaiming the good news of Christ to everyone around, in every language, with such passion and such anointing by the Spirit that over three thousand people, something like a quarter of the population of Spencer [2010 census], gave their lives to Jesus that very morning.

So, if we can see that the transformation went to the very root of who these people were and we could see that, for all intents and purposes, it happened in a moment, we have to ask what actually brought it about. Really and truly, at the end of the day, there are no sociological reasons why the disciples should have changed so radically in such a short period. There must be something beyond the merely natural to account for this. Some people want to figure out other explanations for the miracles of Jesus, but I think that the transformation of the disciples on Pentecost is every bit as amazing and is something that actually goes to the root of your life and mine.

According to our text, the only real difference between the disciples before Pentecost and the disciples after Pentecost was the giving of the gift of the Holy Spirit. The people who were shy, who had so clearly misunderstood Jesus, because they thought he was going to be a political king who would overthrow the people they thought were the enemies of God, who were afraid of being killed because of their association with Jesus became people who stood up and made the name of Christ known to those around them, who did not stop short at just sharing words, but followed through with deeds of love and kindness, and became people who were indeed killed because of their association with Jesus, and went boldly to their deaths.

Now why is all of this frightening? It just sounds like great news, and it is indeed great news, the greatest of all possible news, but that doesn't make it any less frightening at the same time. The reason why this news is so great is because it reminds us, once and for all, that what God has done in Christ is not just something that happened once upon a time, a long time ago, that God did not stop interacting with us once Jesus had died and been raised. It means that the very same God who came among us as Jesus Christ is still at work in us, that the ministry of Christ did not stop when he ascended into heaven, but through the power of the Holy Spirit, it has been entrusted and imparted to ordinary people like you and me. What's more, we see that all our mistakes that we have ever made do not disqualify us from being called and equipped by God to be about his work here and now. After all, the disciples made all kinds of mistakes and yet the Spirit had no problems coming on them. If it could come on the people who scattered when Jesus was betrayed and denied him within hours of pledging their undying loyalty to him, what have we done that makes us think for a moment that the Spirit cannot do in us what it did in the lives of the disciples?

And that is why Pentecost is the single most frightening day in the whole Christian year. The fact of the matter is that many people not only relate well to the disciples in the gospel narratives, but like to relate to them. We love the compassion that Jesus shows to his disciples who make so many mistakes, many of which are so foolish that they are almost laughable, because it reminds us that, in spite of all our own foolishness, God's love and grace is there. Even if we remember that this love and grace is still available, we don't necessarily like to relate to the disciples after Pentecost.

The moment we realize that the only difference between the weak disciples before Pentecost and the bold disciples after Pentecost is the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the moment we realize that this same Holy Spirit that radically transformed those disciples is not only available, but promised, to us, we are forced to ask the question, "Does this mean that God might want to so transform me that I go from looking like the disciples before Pentecost to looking like the disciples after Pentecost?" How can we avoid that question? Well, we might try to say something like, "I love Jesus, but I don't really want the Spirit." However, in what we could call one of the most significant chapters in the entire New Testament, Romans 8, Paul says this, "But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him." It seems that, according to the New Testament, it is simply not possible to really be a Christian if we do not have the Spirit dwelling in us.

When all of these things weave themselves together, we are forced to answer that question from a moment ago, "Does this mean that God might want to so transform me that I go from looking like the disciples before Pentecost to looking like the disciples after Pentecost?" with a loud and resounding "Yes!" Now, that boldness, anointing and strength might look a bit different from person to person. After all, not everyone who was radically changed because of the gospel and the indwelling of the Spirit did the same thing. Yes, the twelve apostles had a strong preaching ministry, but there were more people transformed by the Spirit than just them. We read about seven people selected to be deacons, to help make sure that all the Christian widows in Jerusalem were taken care of. We know there were wealthy Christians who were empowered by the Spirit to give boldly of their resources, not only by taking care of the poor but also by providing the means for the other Christians to do what they were called to do, not least by providing the upper rooms in their homes for the church to meet in.

We know that Paul, one of the people who was changed perhaps more than anyone else, acknowledged that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are bound to one another as the body of Christ, with gifts as different from each other as eyes are from hands and ears are from feet. He says, "We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness."

By all of this, I hope that you take two things to heart. First, make no mistake; if you belong to Christ, you have the Spirit dwelling within you and if you do not have the Spirit dwelling in you, you do not yet belong to Christ, though God yearns for you to receive that Spirit. Though the strongest examples that we see in the book of Acts of people being empowered by the Spirit are preachers and teachers of the gospel, there are a wide variety of gifts that God gives in order to build up the church and if you have not received one of them, you most certainly have received another one. If necessary, recruit the help of friends, but find out where God has gifted and called you.

The second thing that I hope you have noticed is that, in many of you and in many ways, this transformation has already begun to take place. The fact of the matter is that there are at least several people in this congregation who have witnessed miracles in their lives or in the lives of those close to them. Undeniable miracles; miracles that can be explained in no other way than as the result of the almighty power of God intervening in our lives. There are those have seen a transformation, not altogether unlike the one we see on Pentecost, take place in their own lives. There are people who can go into great detail about what their lives were like before God transformed them and what they are like now and the difference is like night and day. There are people who have found strength in times when they thought they would have no strength, who have found boldness in difficult situations, who have tried something new and found that they were really good at it. I know that these people exist, even in this congregation because I have met you, I have heard your stories, I have seen the mark of grace on you, in worship, in studies, in your homes, in the hospital, and even in the grocery stores. I don't want to put anyone on the spot, but if you have experienced the Spirit in your life, if you have had your life touched in any way by the power of God, if you have tasted any of these first-fruits of the transformation of the Spirit, will you please raise your hand as a testimony to the goodness and faithfulness of God.

Those of you who raised your hands (and those of you who could have raised your hand but didn't), share your story. Share it with me if nothing else, but share it with others. Remind others of what God has done in your life. Not only will you encourage them when there may seem to be no hope, but you will remind yourself of what God has done and how far he has brought you. Tell the stories, rejoice in what God has done, fill your hearts with joy that God has transformed your life. Always remember the amazing transformation of the disciples on Pentecost and always remember that the same transformation, in whatever form it may take, is promised to you today just as much as to those disciples two thousand years ago. Who knows? If you can get excited about sharing and hearing what God has done in this community, we might be able to have a Sunday morning where we have a love feast like the first Methodists, where we set aside time to bear witness to what God has done and is doing so we can be reminded of what God has promised he will do, and maybe God will move among us in the midst of that sharing like he did among them.

God has given his Spirit to his people, his church for whom he died. This Holy Spirit is not just some kind of Spiritual substance [spiritual energy goo] that we use for our own purposes, but the high and holy God of all, who takes up residence in our hearts and lives. With confidence that the only thing you need to be transformed into a bold, equipped servant of God is the Spirit that God gives freely to all who believe, go out into the world and do great things! Go heal the sick, go raise the dead, go be the means through which the world comes to know the healing and transforming love and power of God. Let us pray.

AMEN