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Dream Small Dreams

Jason Micheli — June 17, 2013 — 4 Comments

This Sunday I delivered the baccalaureate sermon for West Potomac’s 2013 class. The text was taken from Genesis 12 and Genesis 15, two accounts of God’s promise to Abraham.

You can listen to the sermon but note that towards the end I played an audio clip from the film American Beauty. The clip is audible but just barely in this recording:

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Before I begin this afternoon, if any of you would like to live tweet this baccalaureate service, I’ve set up a feed for you. It’s #myparentsforcedmetocometothis

It’s no surprise that some of you are here today listening to me against your will, but that just makes it like a normal Sunday service for me.

It occurs to me, though, that some of you might be here not against your will but by accident.

For instance, if any of you studied Latin during your West Po time, then you know that the root word in baccalaureate is Bacchus, the name for the Roman god of drunken revelry and sexual debauchery.

If you know your bibles you know that Abraham was no stranger to drunken revelry and sexual debauchery. Even so, if any of you came here today expecting a bacchanalia instead of a baccalaureate, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait 9 months for Greek Rush.

Seriously, as one of the pastors here, I want to welcome you to Aldersgate Church, and I want to thank you for the invitation to speak. As a Methodist, it’s not often I get to preach to people under 65 years of age.

Just kidding- but not really.

Actually, I shouldn’t lead with an age joke. With each passing day I’m increasingly aware that even though when I look in the mirror I still see someone about your age, when you look at me you see someone as old, dull and passionless as your parents.

Just think-

The year I graduated from high school is the year you were born.

The year I graduated is the year you were born!

The moment I realized that earlier this week is the moment I started to hate every last one of you.

Things were completely different the year I graduated from high school.

For example, that year Washington DC was mired in partisan gridlock, the White House was consumed by controversy and scandal, Charlie Sheen was in and out of rehab and an aging Bruce Willis starred in yet another Die Hard movie. It was a completely different world- a world you couldn’t possibly recognize.

This is my 3rd or 4th baccalaureate sermon. Frankly, I’m not sure how I keep getting invited to deliver these considering the fact that I’m philosophically opposed to them.

For one thing, I’m opposed to baccalaureates because you don’t need an inspirational sermon at your graduation- YOU’RE GRADUATING!

That’s exciting enough; you don’t need anyone like me adding words to it.

You’re done.

You’ve been in school all day long for almost your entire life, but now you’ve made it. You’re finished. No more SOL’s, AP’s, GPA’s, SAT’s, PSAT’s.

It’s all over. You’re graduating.

You no longer have to pretend you actually read Ethan Frome.

The next time you’re asked a question about advanced math will the day your son or daughter asks you for help with their math.

And you won’t be able to.

But who cares? Because you’re done. You’re graduating.

From this point forward, if you can avoid a major felony you can avoid group showers for the rest of your life, and the next gym class you’ll be forced to attend will most likely be water aerobics at your cardiologist’s orders.

Because you’re finished. You’re graduating.

Once you get your cap and gown, if you so choose, you no longer have to spend any time with anyone who knows what you looked like when you were 13 years old. You don’t need an inspirational speech for something that exciting.

For another thing, I’m philosophically opposed to baccalaureate sermons because it’s just too hard to capture graduates’ attention. You’re understandably busy thinking about other things: beach week and summer vacation and your first semester at college- and all the things that that entails which can’t be spoken of in this sanctuary.

But really, the main reason why I’m at philosophic odds with baccalaureate preaching is because I can’t remember a single word of the sermon from my own baccalaureate. I remember the school choir sang. I remember a classmate read Dr. Seuss’ Oh the Places You’ll Go- ironically the person who read that still lives with his parents in the same neighborhood we grew up in.

And, I remember an aging, white-haired minister named Dennis Perry preaching, but I don’t recall a single word of what he said.

If I had to guess though I’d bet probably the gist of his message was ‘Dream Big.’

That’s what graduation messages are always about, right?

Carpe Diem and all that. Transform the culture. Turn the world upside down. Your future is whatever you make of it. Anything is possible.

Dream big.

I have a different message for you. I figure if you’re going to forget every word I say then I might as well tell the truth.

Here’s my message for you: Dream Small.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t dream big.

Obviously, your West Potomac education has equipped you well to pursue whatever God might be calling you to in this beautiful yet broken world. Your families and teachers have given you everything you need to dream big.

In fact, dreaming large, big dreams comes naturally for us. I mean, you’ve grown up in a culture in which you’ve been exposed to an average of 4,000 advertisements a day- a day!

My 4th grade son did the math for me: that comes out to 26,280,000 advertisements during your lifetime.

26 million times our culture has tried to convert you, indoctrinate you, into pursuing the bigger, the better, the mega.

You all are the products of helicopter parents and tiger moms. You’ve been told your whole life that you’re gifted, you’re exceptional, you’re above average. Your whole life you’ve been told that you can do whatever you put your mind to.

You don’t need me to tell you to dream big, but maybe you do need someone to tell you to dream small.

Now, I know that dreaming small probably isn’t your first takeaway from the scripture passage that George read today.

The story of Abraham is the stuff of big, bold, baccalaureate-type dreams. After all, God calls Abraham out of obscurity and promises Abraham that if he dares to venture forth from his home into the unknown then Abraham’s future will be like the stars in the sky.

That may be the most obvious takeaway from Abraham’s story but it’s not the only one.

The ancient rabbis believed that Abraham’s father was idol maker. Whether that’s true or not, Abraham did grow up in a culture populated by a pantheon of gods- useful gods who could be fashioned out of wood and stone, gods that could be sought out when you needed them and put back on the shelf when you didn’t.

Abraham grew up with gods who were visible and confined to particular places and people and called upon only on particular days.

But this God who calls Abraham is different, different from the gods he grew up with.

This God who calls Abraham just calls.

Unlike the gods he grew up with, this God who calls Abraham is invisible.

Invisibility- that’s scripture’s way of speaking of God’s omnipresence.

Because God is not precisely there, God can always be here, which is to say, everywhere. God can’t be seen anywhere precisely so that God can be found everywhere.

What we tend to take away from Abraham’s story is this big, one day, dream of a future as bright as the stars in the sky.

But you can bet that what Abraham took away is the discovery that the God who hung the stars in the sky is everywhere.

That’s why Abraham can set out into the unknown unafraid because there is no where Abraham can go in his life where God isn’t already.

And if this God is everywhere, if there is no where this God isn’t, then that means that what’s important isn’t just the one day you have at the end of your big dreams for your future.

If God is everywhere, then what’s important is your every day.

Each and every day.

You may not realize this yet but trust me. There’s a lie behind those millions of commercials you’ve been hit with in your lifetimes.

And maybe there’s even a lie in some of what your parents and teachers have told you.

Real joy isn’t found at the end of graduate school. It doesn’t come with a diploma; it’s not waiting for you at the end of a career path. It doesn’t come knocking when you have the right salary or the toys that go with it.

Real joy is found right here in the details your every day life.

This week is a time for you to imagine all the possibilities in your future so it might hard for you to imagine that some of your best days, when you feel like all is right with the universe and what you’re doing means something and you know why you’re here and your heart swells in gratitude and joy– well, believe it or not, those will be days when you’re just going about everyday life in ordinary ways.

The reason they won’t let a preacher speak at your graduation is because in my line of work I talk to all kinds of people every day, people who have achieved everything they set out to do in this life, who made it to the top of the ladder, and after they’ve gotten there, what they’ll tell you 9 times out 10 is that it doesn’t mean all that much.

That’s why it’s so important to dream small, to find and cultivate joy in the little things of your daily life and the people around you and not hitch all your hopes for happiness on a one day in the future.

If you won’t take it from me, take it from Lester Burnham, the main character in the film, American Beauty. The movie came out when you were watching Dora the Explorer so you may not have seen it.

Lester, as played by Kevin Spacey, is mired in the boredom and emptiness of what was supposed to be a ‘successful ́ American life.

He is finally awoken from his suburban slumber by fantasizing about Angela, who he thinks is the girl of his dreams (his wife Carolyn notwithstanding).

So Lester falls into the trap of thinking that happiness is to be found in the fantastic, in a dream-world that is something other than his mundane, everyday existence. But just when he is about to attain his dream, he realizes that what he’s wanted has been right in front of him this whole time. It’s just that his fantasies and dreams blinded him to the all the delights enfolded in his own little world.

And so the film closes with Lester, having been shot, giving this moving, post-mortem soliloquy:

I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn’t a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time« For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars« And yellow leaves, from the maple trees, that lined our street« Or my grandmother’s hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper« And the first time I saw my cousin Tony’s brand new Firebird« And Janie« And Janie« And« Carolyn.

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me« but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, and my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst« And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life« You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry« you will someday.

For too many people, just like Lester, that ‘someday’ comes too late. I see it all the time in my line of work.

And so I want you to realize today what Abraham discovered that day when God dared him to count the stars in the sky.

God is everywhere. Anywhere you go. In every place. In whatever you do. Alongside whomever you’re with.

Not one day far off in the future. But in your every day.

And that’s where your education comes in.

Because, as St Augustine said, education is not about what you know but what you love.

If your teachers and parents have done their jobs, then they haven’t just given you knowledge about the world. They haven’t just given you tools to succeed in the world.

They haven’t just equipped you for a career. They’ve trained you for joy.

If your teachers have done their jobs, they’ve invited you into the nooks and crannies of God’s creation: into the fascinating complexity of science or the emotional power of music, into the play of poetry and prose or the dazzle of digital media.

If your teachers and parents have done their jobs, your education hasn’t been about making the grade or getting into the right college. It’s been about getting you to wonder, to puzzle, to take delight in the every day world and people around you.

I know you’re going to dream big dreams. Given the culture in which you’ve been conditioned, you have no have no choice but to dream big.

But dream small too. And do so every day.

Because the goodness of God in your life is just as surely here and now as it will be there, one day.

In Postings, Preachments Abraham, American Beauty, Baccalaureate Sermons, St Augustine, Vocation

Pastor Dad: Everything We Need

Jason Micheli — June 14, 2013 — 1 Comment

Chapter 7 of Mark Driscoll’s ebook, Pastor Dad: Biblical Insights into Fatherhood, is entitled ‘Protecting from Sin and Folly.’

Predictably Driscoll focuses so much on sexual sins you’d think this is the only subject which parents need to teach their children.

As a counter to Driscoll, I thought I’d post this old Father’s Day letter/sermon to/about my boys from 3 years ago.

Everything We Need: Galatians 5.1, 13-24

Dear Gabriel and Alexander,

First, my apologies. I had meant to write this letter and give it to you on Father’s Day. Unfortunately I have this job where I have to work most weekends so instead you’re getting it a week late. In any case, I hope you will take this letter, tuck it away somewhere and save it for a day when you want some advice and life wisdom from your old man. I’m guessing that day will not come until you are in your forties so make sure you store this in a dry place.

You might be wondering if this should not be the other way around. Maybe you should be the ones writing me a letter. After all, what kind of self-aggrandizing, cheese-ball writes his kids a letter on Father’s Day and then reads it from the pulpit? Gabriel, if you do happen to ask yourself that question, the answer is your godfather, Dr. Dennis Perry. I got the idea years ago when I was just a teenager, listening to the letters he wrote to Jess and Ben.

You should know I went through a phase in my theological development where I didn’t think it appropriate to talk at all in sermons about mothers and fathers and children. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day aren’t liturgical holidays, after all, and Jesus seemed to have had a complicated relationship with his own family.

I can tell you I’ve disappointed no small amount of church ladies with my previous refusals to preach Mother’s Day sermons. Obviously its because of you two boys but these days my thinking is changed. I can’t help thinking that if the Gospel has no bearing on our everyday, ordinary decisions and relationships then the incarnation- God taking flesh and dwelling among us- was kind of a waste of time.

Alexander, by now you’ve spent not quite two of your seven years with us. Just as if I’d held you at your birth, I honestly can’t recall a time you weren’t with us. As much as the extra weight around my middle, the weight of your head on my shoulder feels a part of me.

X, when I think of how far you’ve come since you first came to live with us and when I think of all the obstacles you have overcome, I’m filled with pride for you. And my faith is reinvigorated. I know your success is not because of your mom or me or even entirely because of you. I don’t often talk about seeing God at work in my life for fear of intimidating people who don’t see their lives that way. X, you are one case where I feel no need to be reticent.

Since we promised to be your forever home I’ve watched you go from just a handful of English words to turning the pages of Roald Dahl. This year I’ve seen you step out from your fear of getting something wrong to try new things- and, okay, maybe you should’ve been more afraid of skiing.

And this year I’ve discovered just how empathetic you are Alexander. With everyone. I can’t guess what path you will choose when you are older, but I pray its one in which you get to exercise this gift that God’s given you.

Gabriel, you make me laugh. I hope you always will. Some parents wonder what their children will be like when they are older. Considering how often I catch you hiding in the closet eating cheetos and cookies, I mostly wonder how big you’ll be when you’re older.

Gabriel, this year you’ve learned to ride your bike, your skateboard and to jump in the pool- all with reckless abandon. As the Fantastic Mr Fox says, that’s your trademark. This year you’ve also developed your potty humor and sarcasm to heights previously unmatched for a four year old. While some will say you couldn’t have inherited this from me genetically, I like to think it certainly has come by osmosis.

I can’t believe you’re four years old. I already miss the sound of you tramping down the hallway at 11:30 at night, wrapped in your red Nationals blanket, asking if you can watch Deadliest Catch with your mom and me.

But this year we’ve noticed other things about you boys too. For example, Alexander I’d no idea you could recite the Lord’s Prayer all by yourself, and Gabriel I don’t know when you learned to hold your hands out to receive- rather than take- communion.

I saw signs of your spiritual development all year, such as the afternoon this spring I listened to the two of you arguing in the backseat of my car about the nature of the Risen Christ. Alexander, I heard you positing that the Risen Jesus is ‘kind of like a Jedi, like Obi-Wan after he dies.’ Gabriel, on the other hand, you felt the Easter Jesus had more in common with Gandalf from Lord of the Rings because when he comes back from the dead ‘he’s sparkly.’

That’s hardly all. There was the evening at the dinner table when you, Alexander, matter-of-factly explained that Jesus and God are one and the same and, in your own words, you explained how Jesus was present at creation. Not too shabby for a first grader.

And there was the Easter night this Spring when we were all serving the homeless in DC with some church people when you, Gabriel, looked at me with complete seriousness and explained that we were doing what we were doing because Jesus had been homeless too.

When people hear this about you, its possible they’ll chalk it up to you being a couple of preacher kids. They’d never believe that in our house we actually talk more about bluegrass, baseball and the X-Men. Despite wearing a robe once a week and having some people call me Reverend, the truth is I don’t know how to plant this faith in you any better than any other parent.

No, the growth of your faith is a testimony to the Church- not just to Aldersgate Church specifically but to the Church with a big C, to the Church as a sacrament, to the Church a visible means of a grace we can’t see with our own eyes.

You’ll learn one day, if you’ve not already, that the Church is often easy for people to mock and parody. The Church can be easy to criticize and it can be a convenient scapegoat for disillusionment. Nevertheless, its every bit as true that the Church can transform people. Of that, you are already exhibits A and B.

Gabriel, one afternoon this summer while we were at the pool you pointed out how I had a couple of gray hairs on my chest. You then said: ‘Daddy, you’re old. Are you going to die soon?’

I like to think the gray hair is just part of my plan to look more and more like Sam Elliot, but even if that doesn’t work out for me the gray hair at least puts me in a better position to begin offering you sagely wisdom. Are you ready?

Here it is:

When you get older, one day and probably many times thereafter, you are going to wonder: DO I HAVE ENOUGH?

Enough what? you might be asking. Enough of anything.

I’m starting my 10th year in ministry and my 6th year at Aldersgate, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about people its that there’s one anxiety we all share. Its an anxiety about not having enough: money, time, love, health, security, faith.

You should know, boys, that question’s as old as the bible; in fact, they even asked it in the bible. A teacher named Paul wrote a letter about it.

Gabriel, you already know some of it. Thanks to Mrs. Mertins and the Aldersgate Day School you know all about the fruit of the Spirit. But somehow I doubt Mrs Mertins taught you that Paul writes about the fruit in the middle of a long argument about circumcision. I imagine it is hard to explain circumcision with construction paper.

If you were to read Paul’s letter now, I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me it was confusing, that you tripped over words like Flesh, Law, Justification and, naturally, Circumcision.

Here’s the thing- when you push all the confusing parts to the side, what you discover is that Paul is writing to people who wonder if they have enough. Only their question is: Is Jesus Enough?

These people loved Jesus. They believed in him and had faith in him.

They believed Jesus was enough to get them into heaven; they just didn’t think Jesus was enough to make sense of their practical, everyday lives. They wanted something else that would tell them what to do and what not to do, who to be, and where to go with their lives. So they hoped that something called the Law could give them the answers that, let’s face it, everyone wants.

We do not argue too much about the Law anymore, but the fact is boys: every moment of your lives you’re being bombarded with messages about what to wear, what to desire and buy, how to think, who to fear, what to hate, where to belong, what is possible and what you should aspire to.

So its no different than it was in Paul’s day. Everywhere you are confronted with messages telling you that Jesus is not enough to make your way in the world.

In response, Paul says we should ‘live by the Spirit.’

X, you asked me not too long ago what the Holy Spirit is. And I said it was like wind or breath, something that is everywhere even if you can’t see it. I could tell from the look on your face that that was a singularly unsatisfying answer.

I think in general Christians are too sloppy when it comes to talking about the Holy Spirit because really its simple: the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus.

The Spirit is Holy because its Jesus’ Spirit. The Holy Spirit is how Jesus is at work in the world today. The Spirit does what Jesus did and if the Spirit allegedly does something Jesus would not have done then, chances are, its not really the Spirit.

When Paul says that we should live by the Spirit, he means we should follow Jesus: mimic his life, practice his teachings, apprentice our lives to his life. He is the mold we should pour our lives into.

That’s where the fruit of the Spirit comes in, Gabriel. Paul says that if we apprentice our lives to Jesus then our lives will be filled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faith, gentleness, and self-control.

Some bibles have Paul saying ‘There is no law against such things’ but, really, in the Greek, it says: ‘There is no shortage of such things.’

In other words, Paul is saying our lives will resemble Jesus’ life. And not only is that is enough for your life, really its everything you need.

God doesn’t give you everything you want- you’ve probably learned that already.

God doesn’t give you everything you need to be happy and free from disappointment and suffering.

But God does give you everything you need to follow him. That’s what we were made to do and that’s what the fruit of the Spirit means.

And that brings me back to the Church, boys- the Church with a big C. Because our lives are meant to bear fruit; our lives are meant to look like the life Jesus lived. So its not that your faith can ever be just one part of your life.

The moment you become a disciple your life suddenly becomes something for you to cultivate and grow. And you can only do that among the People we call Church. You can only do that by learning how to worship and pray, by learning how to give and forgive, by serving and sharing another’s burdens.

I hope when you are my age you have not forgotten that. I hope none of us have.

Love,

Dad

In Postings, Preachments Father's Day, Father's Day Sermons, Galatians, Mark Driscoll, Pastor Dad, Preaching Paul

The Stars are the Light of the World

Jason Micheli — June 3, 2013 — 6 Comments

Here’s this weekend’s sermon from Romans 4.1-5 for our series, Justified. You can also download it in the iTunes store under ‘Tamed Cynic.’Or, you can listen to the sermon here:

Over Memorial Day Weekend I joined 1,000 people from around the world at for the Taize Gathering at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

Taize is a monastery in Burgundy, France. Every week the brothers of Taize welcome thousands of pilgrims to their monastery in France to participate in the rhythms of their communal life.

Once a year some of the more than 100 brothers take their ‘community’ somewhere else in the world for a pilgrimage gathering.

This year the brothers were invited by the Lakota Nation to welcome pilgrims to Pine Ridge.

Just as pilgrims do at the monastery in Taize, we spent our time at Pine Ridge worshipping 3 times a day, sharing simple meals, and sharing our faith stories in small groups.

On Saturday of the Pilgrimage Weekend, after morning prayer and breakfast, we were assigned small groups to reflect on the morning scripture lesson.

I was told our small groups were assigned according to the order in which we’d registered for the Pilgrimage, but I swear it was due to some some cruel, cosmic joke I can’t be sure.

The seven of us in my small group sat down in a circle in the dry, prairie grass.

   Directly across from me in the circle sat a white-haired, tie-dyed Episcopal Bishop from Berkley, California.

Next to the lady bishop sat a gay Episcopal priest from San Francisco.

   Next to him sat a Unitarian lay person from Boulder, Colorado.

   Next to him, a Catholic civil servant from Paris, France.

   Next to her, a women’s studies PhD candidate from Barcelona, Spain.

   Next to her, on my left, was a man who looked like a shorter, plumper, balder, older version of me- except he was dressed sloppy and had an unkempt beard.

   His green Velcro sneakers, red tube socks and Trotsky eyeglasses screamed ‘European Socialist.’

   And finally in the circle, there was me.

We began by going around the circle, introducing ourselves.

I went second to last. As I’m want to do, I tried to charm them with self-effacing, sarcastic humor.

‘I’m a Methodist pastor from Virginia,’ I began, ‘and I just gotta say my congregation back home would be shocked to hear that I could be the most conservative person in any group.’

No one laughed, which, I suppose, just proves how liberal they all were.

‘You didn’t tell us your name,’ the Bishop said with a tone of voice that suggested what she really meant was: ‘I’d prefer not to make your acquaintance.’

‘Sorry, my name’s Jason’ I said, ‘Jason Micheli.’

And when I said ‘Micheli,’ the shorter, plumper, older, balder version of me shouted: ‘Micheli! Italiano!’

He shouted ‘Ciao!’

And then got up and embraced me like Gepetto rescuing Pinocchio from the Island of Lost Boys.

He rubbed his sweaty beard across my face as he man-kissed me on both my cheeks, and then he began ticking off the names of people he insisted I must be related to back in “Roma.”

Wiping his sweat from my face, I gestured for him to introduce himself.

He adjusted his glasses and said in a thick accent: ‘My name is Tomaso.’

Tomaso told us he was a scientist, a geologist, from Rome. And then he laughed nervously and said: ‘I am not a Christian. I am not a person of faith.’

Both times the accent landed heavy on the ‘not.’

Our bible study felt forced. Everyone in the group kept deferring to the bishop and, being Episcopalian, the bible was an unfamiliar to her.

The bishop said the types of knee-jerk things you’d expect an Episcopal Bishop from Berkley, California to say.

And- you’d be proud of me- initially, at least, I bit my tongue and didn’t respond with any snarky comments.

That is, until I remembered she wasn’t my Bishop- at which point I started to interrupt her with thoughtful, sober comments like:

‘Of course, you think that. You’re a tree-hugging, liberal, Baby Boomer Episcopalian from California.’

In truth, I wasn’t really interested in our bible study- because, really, I was dying to ask Tomaso, the paisano to my left, why he’d flown all the way from Italy, driven all the way from Denver, agreed to sleep in a horse pasture and go without running water and spend 4 days with Christians and celibate monks if he was NOT a person of faith.

When our bible study wrapped up, I grabbed Tomaso by the elbow and I said: ‘Tomaso, call it professional curiosity, but what are you doing here if you’re not a person of faith?’

And, a bit anticlimactically, he said: ‘Because my wife made me come.’

‘Well, that’s nothing new. Half the men in my church are there because their old ladies force them to come.’

Tomaso chuckled and grabbed his book- a science fiction novel- like he was about to leave, but I said: ‘Tell me- why don’t you consider yourself a person of faith?’

He smiled like a professor who’s not sure how to water down his material for a freshman class, and then he launched into what sounded like a well-rehearsed litany. His reasons against faith.

‘I am a scientist’ he began, ‘and there is no scientific explanation for a 7 day creation, for an incarnation, for a resurrection.’

‘Gosh, there isn’t? I guess it’s a good thing scripture doesn’t try to explain them scientifically then, huh?’

My sarcasm apparently didn’t translate because he just kept ticking off his reasons for not believing:

How the virgin birth is based on a mistranslation.

How faith is just a psychological crutch.

How the Gospels don’t always agree with one another.

How the Church has been responsible much evil and injustice.

How it’s superstitious to think bread and wine can become anyone’s body and blood.

How St Paul endorses slavery and sexism.

How Revelation is about Rome not the Rapture.

How scripture is not the literal Word of God but instead bears all the messy fingerprints of people like you and me.

His list was surprisingly long and surprisingly unoriginal. And when he got to the end, he held out his hands like a magician, whose just disappeared his assistant, and he said:

‘See, mi amico, there’s nothing left for me to believe. There’s nothing left for me to be a person of faith.’

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‘Abraham believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.’

There may be no other sentence in the Old Testament that has been more significant to followers of the New. And more misleading.

God told Abraham that he and his wife, Sarah, would have millions of descendants- as many as the stars in the sky.

Abraham believed God and that was enough for God to credit Abraham as ‘righteous.’

Ever since Martin Luther, the Founding Father of Protestantism, Father Abraham has served as Exhibit A for what we think it means for us to have faith:

Abraham did not lift a finger to be saved.

Abraham did nothing to earn or deserve it.

Abraham simply believed in God.

Abraham was saved by faith alone.

At least that’s what we think Paul means in Romans 4.

But here’s the problem:

When we reduce Abraham to an example (for us) of someone who has faith in God and is rewarded accordingly- we lose the biblical plot of what God is doing IN and THROUGH Abraham.

And when we lose that plot, the seam Paul’s entire argument in the Book of Romans unravels.

Because the argument Paul is weaving from Romans 1 to Romans 16 is that what we discover in Jesus Christ is God making good on a promise first made to Abraham.

Because when you go back to the Book of Genesis, you notice:

It doesn’t say Abraham believed IN God.

It says Abraham believed God.

It doesn’t Abraham accepted God as his personal savior.

It says Abraham believed God.

That is, Abraham accepted something God said.

Abraham believed a single thing God said.

A very specific thing God said.

Abraham believed the promise: the promise that his children would be like the stars in the sky.

But this promise, it isn’t about God providing Abraham with progeny.

The promise is that THROUGH Abraham God would create a new and distinct People in the world.

The promise is that the way God would pick the world back up from its Fall, the way God would heal the world’s sin, the way God would bring forth a New Creation would be by creating a New People.

The promise is that through Abraham God would create a People who would do what Adam failed to do, a People whose trust in God and trust in one another would provide an alternative to the ways of the world.

The stars God promises to Abraham- they’re meant to be a light to the world.

That’s the unconditional commitment God promises and that’s what Abraham believes.

And God, scripture says, reckons that to Abraham as ‘righteousness.’

Now if, as I told you weeks ago, ‘God’s Righteousness’ is a specific biblical term that refers to God’s commitment to undo the injustice of the world and usher in a New Creation, then Abraham being ‘reckoned righteousness’ means Abraham was credited, acknowledged, signed up as a participant in God’s New Creation work.

Abraham didn’t believe everything he could possibly believe about God; in fact, plenty remained that Abraham still struggled to believe:

Abraham lacked faith that he and his wife’s old bodies could produce new life.

Abraham doubted the events in his life would pan out as God had predicted.

Abraham questioned God’s justice and mercy.

But despite his doubts, despite his questions, despite those parts of God’s Word he scratched his head at and crossed his fingers through- what Abraham always believed, what Abraham always had faith in, what it always meant for Abraham to be a person of faith, the person of faith, was his faith in this single promise:

The promise that God so loved the world, God would not give up on what he had made.

That just as God’s first creation began with God calling into the void ‘Let there be light,’ God’s New Creation would begin by God calling a People who would be a Light to the world.

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Sunday afternoon, a group of us there for the Pilgrimage weekend made another pilgrimage.

To Wounded Knee.

The place where the US Army, without provocation, slaughtered over 300 Indians, little more than a hundred years ago.

2/3 of the victims were children…with their mothers.

In 1973 Wounded Knee became the site of a standoff between Lakota Indians and the Federal Government. Resulting in more violence.

Wounded Knee remains a festering reminder of suffering and injustice that persists to this day.

So on Sunday afternoon, in reverent silence, we loaded on to 3 school buses.

And silently we rode the 30 minutes to Wounded Knee, riding past shacks and trailers and the kind of poverty that seems to fit a 3rd world nation better than this one.

When we arrived at Wounded Knee, the brothers put on their gleaming, white-as-light, monastic robes and then they led us all, silently, down the road and up the hill to the graveyard.

Some locals from the reservation were there, loitering, sitting on top of rusted, broken down cars and squinting at us with justifiable suspicion.

There’s a church there by the graveyard. It had ‘Fuck you white people’ spray-painted on the sanctuary doors.

An old woman was in the graveyard planting flowers by an old tombstone while a young woman tamped down the dirt of a freshly dug grave.

The mass grave, the hole where the victims bodies had been dumped, is at the center of the cemetery.

Brother Alois, the head of the monastery at Taize, motioned silently for us to make a circle around the mass grave.

I glanced around the circle at all the people, literally, from all over the world, from as many nations as there are stars in the sky.

Then Brother Alois held out his hands for us to take hold of one another’s hands.

Then Brother Alois bowed his head and so did we.

And then we prayed. Silently.

For a long time.

Silently- because how else do you pray when some of the people you’re holding hands with share the same names as the bodies you’re standing on top of and still suffer the consequences of so many empty words?

As Brother John, another monk, had told us the previous morning, we were going to Wounded Knee:

‘as people of faith, to a place of broken promises, to be a silent, visible sign of a different promise, the promise that the God who made the world in love will, with us and through us, redeem it.’

Many of us kept the silence as we rode the way back from Wounded Knee. After we’d returned to our campsite, I ran into Tomaso. Both of us were coming out of adjoining Port O’ Johns and reaching for the hand sanitizer.

‘If it isn’t Doubting Tomaso’ I said.

‘Mi amico, how are you?’

‘I’m not sure. I just got back from Wounded Knee.’

‘How was that?’

‘Did you not go?’

‘To pray?’ and he laughed like it was a ridiculous notion. ‘No, I stayed here and read my book.’ And he held up his sci-fy novel.

‘Like I tell my wife: faith is the easy way out in this world.’

‘Easy? How can someone with a PhD be so stupid?

Jesus has done a lot of things in my life but made my life easier is definitely not one of them. Faith hasn’t been my way out of the world; faith has thrust me into the world: to places I’d rather not go, to pain and poverty I’d rather not have weigh on my conscience, to people towards whom I’d be happy not to feel any responsibility.

Easy way out? Are you a complete idiot?

Most of the time, to believe in God is to feel heartbroken over all the places you see God absent in the world. I just watched and prayed as a 20 year old Indian girl wept over a mass grave beneath her and a hopeless future in front of her. Faith isn’t an escape from the world’s problems; it’s a summons to wade waist deep into its problems.

I know you’re a geologist, Tomaso, but does that mean you have rocks in your head?’

I thought to myself.

But instead I squirted some Pure El into my hands and I said- the only thing I said:

‘Easy way out? That’s and interesting indictment coming from someone who spent the afternoon relaxing in his tent, reading a trashy novel.’

Doubting Tomaso laughed and said: ‘Like I said, there’s too many things I don’t believe ever to be a person of faith.’

‘Tomaso, you don’t seem to understand that, being a pastor, I’ve heard all the reasons not to believe before and, as a Christian, I struggle with all of them myself.’

‘Why do you care so much about me anyway?’ Tomaso asked, ‘Do you care about ‘my salvation’?’ he said with sarcastic air quotes.

‘That’s just it- it’s not about you and your salvation. Ever since Abraham, it’s never just been about you, you selfish coward. It’s about God calling- God needing- people to be light for the world’ I wanted to scream at him.

But I didn’t.

And he finished wiping the Pure-El into his hands and said ‘Ciao.’

And then he walked back to his tent, and with the world just a little bit darker for it.

In Podcasts, Postings, Preachments Abraham, Faith, Justification by Faith Alone, Martin Luther, Paul, Pine Ridge, Preaching Romans, Righteousness, Romans, Taize, Wounded Knee

Clay Jars

Jason Micheli — May 29, 2013 — 2 Comments

Last week I posted a reflection on the passing of a member of my congregation. The post struck a chord with a number of people despite many not knowing the deceased. You can read it here.

In light of that resonance, I thought I’d post the homily I wrote for his funeral service.

Clay Jars – Jeremiah 18 & 2 Corinthians 4

Afflicted in every way, but not crushed. Perplexed, but not driven to despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed.

Les Norton, as he himself told me during his many “constructive criticism” visits to my office these past 8 years, read every word of his bible several times over and then some.

Les loved scripture.

In fact, in his later years, whenever Les would wake up confused or disoriented, he would recite the Psalms to himself. The scripture he’d read so many times during his long life came to calm and ground him as his life came to an end.

Les loved scripture, and I learned it straight from Les’ lips that he harbored a particular affinity for St Paul, the one formerly known as Saul, the one who formerly made it his business to stick his nose in the business of the Church.

Indeed, during one of his frequent visits to my office, I once suggested to Les- in love- that his affinity for the Apostle Paul must due to his sharing a similar personality to the former Pharisee.

And because Les loved scripture and had read every word of it, Les knew enough to not know whether I had just commended him or insulted him.

I remember he just squinted at me for a few moments and then changed the subject by calling me ‘young fella.’

Les loved scripture. While we never talked specifically about 2 Corinthians 4, I’d wager that Les would give his stubborn, grudging approval to today’s passage.

After all, Les loved St Paul and this text is one of Paul’s greatest hits. Paul’s rhetoric here in 2 Corinthians 4 nearly reaches off the page and stops you in your tracks, and burrows deep into your memory.

Paul’s rhetoric here in 2 Corinthians 4- it’s like a great line of a famous speech, like “the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.” I know from Les’ own lips that that line, like the Psalms, was a constant companion to Les when he served deep in the belly of the Massachusetts during World War II.

And so I think Les would approve of this scripture text in which St Paul uses high altitude rhetoric and soaring description to describe the life of faith as you and I carrying treasure.

Inside clay jars.

I think Les would give his stubborn, grudging approval to this scripture text. He might even smile and point his finger at me and say ‘you got me there, young fella.’

I think Les would approve because Les, who loved and read his bible, would notice St Paul uses high rhetoric and soaring description to distract you and me from the fact that he just called us ‘clay jars.’

Vessels made of clay.

Not exactly an unambiguous comment.

After all, things made of clay can be beautiful but they can be brittle too- all at the same time.

Things made of clay come with rough spots as well as smooth, polished spots. Things made of clay always contain imperfections, some visible and some unseen. Yet when it comes to things made of clay, it’s those very imperfections- the ratio of rough to smooth spots, beauty to brittle- that make each and every clay jar unique.

And it’s those imperfections, that uniqueness, which proves that each and every clay jar was made by hand.

Was created.

By an Artist.

Who had exactly that clay jar in mind.

And intended to be a gift to someone in the world.

I can’t think of a better metaphor for who Les was than the metaphor Paul gives us in 2 Corinthians 4.

Les was a clay jar. Unique. A gift both to those who loved him, a devoted father and a doting grandfather. The kind of father who still said your boyhood bedtime prayers with you when you came home from college, and the kind of grandfather who asked me about his girls in one of the last sentences he shared with me.

Les was a clay jar. He was a gift to the many whom he served without ever seeking credit for himself, logging countless hours volunteering in all kinds of ways and places.

Les was a clay jar.

Capable of beauty. Capable of being a vessel of grace, and, at the same time, like any handmade art, Les had his stubborn, rough spots that could make you want to shake him or throw him against the wall.

Just ask Dean or Jay- the reason they have no hair is because Les made them pull it all out.

I mean Les was so stubborn that when given the chance to be one of the first Americans on Japanese soil at the end of the war, absolutely refused to go because his commanders couldn’t tell him exactly where he’d be spending the night. That’s stubborn.

Les was a clay jar with both rough spots and beautiful spots.

And though St Paul doesn’t say so, sometimes the beautiful parts take on a deeper beauty because of the rough parts.

And Les and I, as most of you know, had our rough parts.

I’ve been here at Aldersgate for eight years, and for the first five years I ended any mention of Les’ name with the passive-aggressive Southern epilogue ‘…bless his heart.’

For years, Les seemed to me a clay jar with no finish. Just all coarse, rough spots. He was a thorn in my side. He personified ‘church politics.’ He was convinced I didn’t know what I was doing, couldn’t preach my out of a paper-bag and would be the ruination of his church.

I remember my first Sunday at Aldersgate when I was introduced to the congregation. After worship, out in the Narthex, Les came up to me and, without introducing himself, gave me one of his death grip handshakes and then motioned over to Dennis and warned me not to let Dennis teach anything.

And so I replied: ‘Are you kidding? I taught him everything he knows.’

As I’ve shared with some of you, Les has the distinction of being the only parishioner in my twelve years of ministry ever to challenge me to an actual, honest-to-God fist fight.

Showing my own rough, clayjarness, I leaned in close and told Les that if he was going to critique my preaching he first needed to be able to hear my preaching.

And Les responded with another death grip handshake and then challenged me to a fist fight. And it says something about our relationship that my first impulse to this provocation from an 88 year old was ‘let’s go.’

Despite our self-images, despite the pretenses we try to project, despite our best efforts- each of us, we’re little more than clay jars.

Creations with unique flaws and imperfections and rough spots right there along with the beauty the Maker gave to each of them.

And yet when it comes to 2 Corinthians 4, Paul’s poetry about clay jars can overshadow his point.

Paul’s poetry can tempt us into placing too much emphasis on our clay jar-ness.

Because what is very clear when you take an honest look at any Christian, is our brokenness and imperfection. You don’t really have to say much more.

Our clayjarness is obvious to any who takes a good look.

But what is far too easy to miss or gloss over or forget all together in these verses is “the treasure” Paul speaks of in 2 Corinthians 4.

This treasure. We have this treasure in clay jars, Paul says.

Instead of ‘Clay Jars’ the sermon title should be ‘This Treasure.’

This treasure that despite all our imperfections and flaws, despite our clayjarness, we contain and can pass on to others.

Les is no exception, the clayjarness of any of us is a given. This treasure, not the clayjarness, is Paul’s main point.

And the treasure is what Paul describes in the very next chapter of 2 Corinthians: that in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself and that Christ has given us this same ministry of reconciliation.

You and I, despite being clay jars, we’re vessels of Christ’s continuing reconciling ministry to the world.

That’s the treasure inside each of us, says Paul.

Maybe you don’t believe that, but more than anything I want you to know that Les believed it.

Most of you know about Les’ clayjarness.

But many of you don’t know about the treasure, what he did with this treasure inside his imperfect self.

For example, almost none of you know that a couple of years ago I was doing a burial for someone in the community. Not many were gathered in attendance, but Les was there. I had my head bowed and was praying for the departed, but Les must not have realized I was praying. After all, he wouldn’t have heard a plane landing right behind him.

So thinking we were all standing there in silence, Les interrupted my prayer and began an impromptu, heartfelt, gospel-based reflection on death and resurrection and the life of the deceased. Where so many come to church every Sunday but are embarrassed to talk about their faith, Les’ words were worthy of any minister.

Like treasure from a clay jar.

I’ll give you another example.

Many of you know that we raised about $40,000.00 for the sanitation project in Guatemala this Lent. Almost none of you know that 1/4 of that total was given by Les, more than any other donor before he had any reason to believe he didn’t have much time left.

When I told him he should be proud of the good his gift will make happen, he responded that he felt it was his obligation.

And then Les, ever the clay jar, requested that I carry his gift down to Guatemala myself in cash.

When I asked if this was to insure 100% of his gift went where it was needed or if he was merely trying to get me cavity-searched at the airport, Les responded with trademark chuckle and a ‘we’ll just see.’

Treasure in a clay jar.

But here’s the real ‘treasure’ I want you to know.

A week before he died I went to visit Les in the hospital. He was weak, emaciated and slightly disoriented. He smiled when he saw me. Even though he was dying, he still had his death grip handshake. He grabbed my hand and tried to hug me.

The first thing he mentioned was how he’d woken up the previous day to discover Dennis sitting by his bedside.

‘I guess he did teach you a thing or two’ Les spoke no louder than whisper.

I leaned in close to his ear and I said: ‘I told you…I’m the one who taught him everything he knows.’

But Les didn’t laugh. No trademark chuckle. He was very serious with something to say.

He pulled me towards him and with dehydrated lips he said:

‘Can you forgive me for the ugliness I showed you in the past? I reckon I was in the wrong…’

I smiled and said: ‘Ditto.’

‘I still could’ve taken you in a fight,’ he said mouthed hoarsely.

‘Try it old man’ I replied loudly into his ear. His smile quickly became another cough.

And then I prayed for him.

And even though I was the one who traced the sign of the cross on his forehead, he was the minister in that moment.

He was the clay jar, rough in places and beautiful in places, unique with flaws that bore the fingerprints of his maker.

He was the clay jar who knew what treasure he’d been made to be a vessel of.

He was the clay jar taking up the ministry of reconciliation, Christ’s ministry, for himself.

He was the one that knew what truly matters when all is said and done isn’t our flaws and imperfections because we’re all just clay jars.

What matters is what we finally do with this treasure with which we’ve been entrusted.

And that’s the thing about working with clay…clay can be willful to work with, clay can act stubborn in the Maker’s hands.

Sometimes with clay it’s not until the very end of its making that you can finally see the shape its been taking this whole time.

In Postings, Preachments Clay Jars, Forgiveness, Funeral Sermons, Ministry, Reconciliation

Vitamix Jesus

Jason Micheli — May 20, 2013 — 6 Comments

Here is this weekend’s sermon from Romans 3.21-31 for our series, Justified. As a visual, I had boulders form a wall with a chasm between ‘us’ and God to demo how the ‘plan of salvation’ is often illustrated.

You can listen to the sermon here

Or you can download it in iTunes under ‘Tamed Cynic.’

A couple of years ago my wife and I made the decision to get rid of our cable; so that, now we get zero channels on our television. You can imagine how popular that decision was with our children (not).

Even though our boys still claim to hate us and curse the day I sealed our cable receiver in its box and shipped it back to Verizon, Ali and I think it was a good and even necessary decision.

For one, we thought it was ridiculous to keep paying the mortgage payment that is the Verizon cable bill.

For another, we didn’t want out kids exposed to a constant stream of advertisements that train them to want and want and want and want and want.

More.

Of course, if you asked my wife why we got rid of our cable, she wouldn’t mention any of those reasons. No, she’d tell you it was because her husband- me- is a complete sucker for informercials.

A pushover, she’d say. An easy mark.

And it’s true.

If I was surfing the channels and I heard the words ‘set it and forget it’ fuggedaboutit, I was hooked, convinced I absolutely needed to be able to rotisserie 6 chickens and a side of ribs at one time.

If I was flipping channels and came across the informercial for the Forearm Max, I’d spend the next 2 hours shamefully amazed that I’ve made it this far in my life with forearms as pathetic and emasculating as mine.

If I saw the commercial for the Shake Weight, my first thought was never ‘that seems to simulate something that violates the Book of Leviticus, something my grandmother said would make me go blind.’

No, my first thought was always ‘that looks like something I need.’

So we got rid of our cable, but that hardly solves my condition.

There are advertisements everywhere.

A few months ago, near Valentine’s Day, Gabriel and I went to Whole Foods to get some fish.

At that point, I’d been on the infomercial wagon for 18 months, 2 weeks and 3 days. But guess what I discovered they were doing back by the seafood section?

Uh huh, a product demonstration.

The person doing the demonstration was a woman in her 20’s or 30’s.

For some inexplicable, yet very effective, reason she was wearing a black evening dress that reminded me of the one worn by Angelina Jolie in Mr and Mrs Smith, which then reminded me of the dress worn by Angelina Jolie in Mr and Mrs Smith.

Whether the woman doing the demo did in fact look like Angelina Jolie or just had the same effect on me- my memory cannot be trusted.

‘Hey, let’s stick around and watch this’ I said to Gabriel, who smacked his forehead with here-we-go-again embarrassment.

In addition to the slinky dress, the demonstrator was wearing a Madonna mic which pumped her bedroom voice through speakers, which beckoned all the men in the store to obey her siren call.

The product she was demonstrating that day was the Vitamix.

Have you seen one? Do you own one?

If you haven’t or don’t: the Vitamix is like the Bentley of blenders.

Angelina pulled the Vitamix out of its box like a jeweler at Tiffany’s. And then in her sleepy, kitten voice she went into her schtick:

‘The Vitamix is a high-powered blending machine for your home or your office. It’s redefining what a blender can do. The Vitamix will solve all your blending problems.

With this 1 product, you won’t need any of those other tools and appliances taking up so much space in your kitchen.’

And as she spoke, I wasn’t thinking: ‘Who needs a high-powered blender for their office? Why does a blender need redefining? It’s just a blender.’

No, I was thinking…

‘This could solve all my blending problems. If I have this, I won’t need anything else.’

I looked down at my side, Gabriel was transfixed too.

The first part of her demo she showed off the Vitamix’s many juicing and blending capabilities. But then to display the diversity of the product’s features, she asked the crowd: ‘Who enjoys pesto?’

And like a brown-nosing boy, desperate to impress the teacher, the teacher he has a crush on, I raised my hand and spoke up: ‘I do. I am Italian after all.’

And she smiled at me- only at at me- and said: ‘I’ve always had a thing for Italians.’

Aheh.

‘Can you cook?’ she asked me. And I nodded my head. Like Fonzi, too cool for words.

‘Even better’ she purred.

And then she pretended to be speaking to the entire crowd even though I knew she only cared about me.

‘Have you ever noticed how the pesto you buy in the store never looks fresh? It’s dark and its oily.’

And we all of us, we nodded like Stepford Husbands.

‘But when you try to make pesto at home (and she held up her hands like this was a problem on par with AIDS or world hunger) food processors and traditional blenders just won’t do will they they?’

And then she looked my way, like I was a plant in the audience.

Hypnotized, I said: ‘No, they won’t do’ even though I’ve been making pesto since I was 10 years old and I can’t say I’ve ever had a problem.

She licked some of the pesto off her spoon as though it were a lollypop or a popsicle or… and and then she said in her come-hither voice:

‘I’m not married (sigh) but if I was…this is what I’d want…for Valentine’s Day.’

I drove my new Vitamix home that afternoon.

I showed it to my wife, presenting it to her like a hunter/gatherer laying his bounty at the foot of his woman’s cave.

And then I got back in my car and drove it back to the store in order to return it because as my wife pointed out I already had a blender and a food processor and who could convince me to buy this ridiculous thing and what am I, an idiot?

Sure, I’m an easy mark, but how could I not be?

Take it from someone who knows what he’s talking about: Commercials and product pitches- they’re more powerful and persuasive than any preacher.

Just think, you’re exposed to 3 thousand advertisements a day. A day. And every last single one of them operates on the same, simple, seductive formula:

They identify a problem- maybe a problem you didn’t even know you had until they told you that you had the problem- a pesto problem say.

And then they make you a promise: this product can solve your problem (and maybe all your problems).

And best of all, it’s easy. All you have to do is make a decision, say ‘yes’ to this product.

There’s nothing else you have to do.

3 thousand times a day we’re told we have a problem and we’re offered a solution and we’re promised there’s nothing more we need to do.

3 thousand times a day.

And so it shouldn’t surprise us that many Christians pitch Jesus according to this same marketing formula.

‘Faith in Jesus’ gets treated like a product in a sales pitch. In some churches, this sales pitch is called ‘the plan of salvation.’

The ‘plan of salvation’ makes for great advertising.

It’s simple.

It’s cheap. It hardly costs the customers anything.

And like any good infomercial, it’s lends itself to a visual demonstration.

First, it identifies a problem: You’re separated from God.

The emptiness in your life, the sense of something missing, the guilt and shame you feel underneath- it’s because you’re separated from God.

It’s called sin and because of sin there’s a great chasm between you and God.

You’re here and God’s over there.

And there’s nothing you can do, no good deed, no matter how hard you try, there’s nothing you can do to get from where you are to where God is.

Second-

The plan of salvation sales pitch offers you a solution to the problem: Jesus Christ died on the cross so that you might no longer be separated from God.

If you have faith in Jesus Christ, then your problem? Gone. Shazam.

Your sin? Dealt with. You will be right with God.

You will be “justified” by your faith in Jesus Christ.

And Third-

The plan of salvation- like all sales pitches- ends with a promise too good to be true.

It’s free. It doesn’t cost anything. There aren’t 3 Easy Payments of $19.95.

None of the cost is passed on to you.

Better yet, if you choose this product while there’s still time, if you have faith in Jesus Christ, there’s nothing else you have to do, there’s no further obligation required.

It says it right here on the packaging: “You are justified not by your works but by your faith in Christ

For most of you, even if it wasn’t hawked to you in an infomercial kind of way, this is the product you were sold.

The problem is your sin, your separation from God.

If you have faith, if you have faith in Jesus Christ, if you have faith…

Then you’re justified, you’re made right with God.

And there’s nothing else you need to do because you’re justified by your faith not by your works.

For most of you, even it didn’t come packaged in a slick sales pitch, this is the product you were sold.

And maybe you’ve never given it a second thought.

But some of you have. I know.

Some of you were sold this ‘faith in Christ product’ and then one day you took out the instructions.

You took out the instructions, and what did you read there?

Something more than the salesman promised you.

You read Jesus saying that you should be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect, and you read Jesus laying down a whole lot of ‘woes’ if you’re not working to be perfect.

You read Jesus saying I am the vine and you are the branches and if you do not bear fruit with your faith, then you will be pruned away.

You read Jesus warning that ‘when I come back, I will separate the sheep from the goats according to whether or not you gave water to the thirsty or clothing to the naked or food to the hungry.’

Because if you didn’t, Jesus Christ will treat it like you didn’t do it for him.

We’ve all been sold this ‘faith in Christ no more work necessary’ product.

But when you actually open up the instructions to this product, you read Jesus’ brother warning that ‘faith without works is… no good.’

Or you read Paul- Paul!- saying that one day we will be judged by our character, by our work, by our deeds, by the fruit the Holy Spirit has harvested from our faith.

The promise that was sold to us doesn’t match how the instructions say this product is meant to work in our lives.

But to discover that, you’ve got to dig into the fine print.

The truth is always in the fine print.

The fine print is always where you realize what the actual cost is going to be.

And when it comes to fine print, there is no better example than today’s passage from Romans 3.

If you open your pew bibles, you’ll see that today’s text actually comes with fine print- footnotes that imply something far scarier than the fine print in your credit card bill.

The fine print in the case of today’s text- it comes down to just two words: Pistis and Christou.

The word ‘pistis’ is the Greek word that gets translated as ‘faith.’

But the word ‘pistis’ doesn’t mean ‘rational assent’ or ‘belief’’ and certainly not ‘a feeling in your heart.’

It means something closer to ‘trusting obedience,’ and so the better way to translate the word ‘pistis’ isn’t with the word ‘faith’ but with the word ‘faithfulness.’

And the word ‘Christou.’

Obviously that’s the word for Christ or Messiah. Christou is in the Genitive Case.

And the best way to translate it is not ‘in Christ’

The best way to translate it ‘of Christ.’

When you read the fine print in Romans 3, you realize Paul is saying something different than what you were sold.

He’s not saying we are justified by our faith in Christ.

He’s saying it is the faithfulness of Christ that justifies you.

Now, I know you’re probably thinking ‘Jason just likes to be a smarty pants and this doesn’t make any difference.’

To the smarty-pants charge: guilty, I say.

But to the other charge: I say it makes all the difference because Paul wants you to see something that is both better news and far more demanding than the ‘faith in Christ’ product that was hawked to you.

For Paul, it’s the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah that justifies us.

It’s Christ’s faithfulness that makes us right with God.

It’s Jesus’ trusting obedience, not just on the cross but all the way up to it, from Galilee to Golgotha, that zeroes out the sin in our ledgers.

For Paul, Christ’s faithfulness isn’t just an example of something. It’s effective for something. It changes something between God and us, perfectly and permanently. Just like Jesus said it did when he said: ‘It is accomplished.’

That’s why, for Paul, any of our attempts to justify ourselves are absurd. Of course they are- because he’s already justified us.

Dig in to the fine print and you see that, for Paul, the good news of our justification is not a conditional if/then statement: If you have faith in Christ then you will be justified, then your sins will be forgiven.

That’s not good news; it’s a marketing lure.

It suggests that Christ’s Cross doesn’t actually change anything until we first invite Jesus to change our hearts.

But Jesus didn’t hang on the cross and with his dying breath say ‘It is accomplished

dot, dot, dot

if and when you have faith in me…’

This is why the fine print’s such a big deal!

Because it’s such better news than the sales pitch.

Think about what Paul’s saying:

your believing, your saying the sinner’s prayer, your inviting Jesus in to your heart, your making a decision for Christ- all of it is good.

But none of it is necessary.

None of it is the precondition for having your sins erased.

None of it is necessary for you being justified.

Because you already are justified- because of the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.

That’s it. That’s the good news.

   You can have a mountain’s worth of doubts and you can have faith as small as a fraction of a mustard seed- no worries.

   Because your justification does not depend on you or your faith or lack thereof.

   But on Jesus Christ and his faithfulness.

When you think about it, there’s a reason Paul’s message gets pushed to the fine print. It makes for terrible marketing.

There’s no problem to get your attention.

There’s no bad news to spark your worrying.

There’s no scary threat to provoke your fear.

Paul’s fine print message could never be an informercial because there’s no visual to demonstrate. The chasm that once separated you from God- it’s gone.

It’s already been repaired. By Christ.

Your justification. Already taken care of.

Paul’s message doesn’t follow the sales pitch formula.

There’s no problem; there’s just good news.

There’s no way that’ll sell.

But there’s another reason why Paul’s message gets pushed to the fine print.

Because when you realize that it’s the faithfulness of Jesus Christ that has set you right with God, his faithful life of sacrifice and selfless love, his faithful life of compassion and forgiveness and generosity and boundary-breaking, enemy-embracing love- then you realize…

You can’t just respond to that with “faith,” with “belief,” with “a feeling inside you.”

You can only respond by attempting a life like his- a life that once led to a cross.

You see it’s not there is anything you are required to do. Rather there is now so much you are summoned to do.

When you realize and trust it’s the faithfulness of Christ that justifies you, his faithful life all the way to the cross, you realize…

That what’s been given to you for free- it could end up costing you EVERYTHING.

   And that’s terrible advertising. That’s an awful sales pitch.

   No one would ever buy into that.

   No wonder it’s easier to count ‘decisions for Christ’ than to count people carrying bearing crosses for him.

In Postings, Preachments Justification, NT Wright, Pistis Christou, Plan of Salvation, Preaching Romans, Romans, Vitamix

Speaking a Different Language

Jason Micheli — May 19, 2013 — Leave a comment

Today is Pentecost, the arrival of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples who’d been waiting in Jerusalem, praying in the name of Jesus- we always forget that part. In the spirit of the day (no pun intended), here’s a Pentecost sermon in the spirit of David Sedaris.

Pentecost

Genesis 11.1-9 & Acts 2

Speaking a Different Language

I studied five years of Latin in high school and four years of German.

I can still decline the word for ‘farmer:’ acricola, agricolae, agricolam. And I can recall enough German to appreciate Indiana Jones on a deeper

level.

I studied Greek and Hebrew in seminary, and I still know them well enough to venture into the Old and New Testaments like a treasure hunter armed with a few well-chosen tools.

But when it comes to speaking, when it comes to listening, I’ve never been very good at languages.

I’ve always heard how languages come easier for babies than they do for adults- their minds are like sponges, so goes the cliche. But, really, I think the difference is that no one hands out little treats when an adult finally gets the right word for ‘potty’ or ‘hungry.’

Despite my relative ambivalence about languages, on my second day of my first semester of college I decided to enroll in French class. My roommate and I were sitting in a boring Intro to English Literature course, listening to a beer- bellied, gray-haired professor recite Beowulf in Old English.

And across the hall, in the classroom opposite ours, we both noticed a twenty-something, red-haired woman standing in front of a chalk board wearing a tight leather skirt, teaching French.

We changed our schedules that afternoon.

The French teacher’s name was Isabelle, but, because of the siren-like spell she cast over my friend and I, to this day my wife refers to her as ‘Jezebel.’

My interest in French more or less began and ended with Isabelle but, once I’d enrolled, the college required me to stick it out for three additional semesters.

The good thing about French is that you can get by by approximating an accented mumble. My own accent slash mumble was a hybrid of Charles Aznavour and Detective Briscoe from Casablanca.

I passed the written exams by rote memorization, and I survived the listening comprehension tests by correctly assuming that most French conversations were about Miles Davis or American Imperialism.

After four semesters, I ended up with an A average but the memory of Isabelle lingered longer.

Today I can recall a few French words, but when it comes to understanding, it’s all confusion for me.

And the Lord said, ‘Look, the people all have one language; this is only the beginning of what they will do.

I traveled to France a while ago to spend a week at Taize, an ecumenical monastery in the Burgundy countryside. Taize is a destination for thousands of Christian pilgrims from places scattered all over the globe.

And ‘pilgrimage’ seems an appropriate descriptor when you consider how long and trying and confusing the journey there can prove.

At the beginning of the pilgrimage I was wandering around CDG airport in Paris, trying to locate my connecting flight. The gate number printed on my boarding pass didn’t match the listings on the terminal television screen.

I made the mistake of walking up to the desk at what should’ve been my gate and asking for help.

‘I’m just wondering if I’m at the right gate’ I said. The frenchman behind the counter stared at me blankly and said ‘Oui.’

Not satisfied he’d understood me, I handed him my boarding pass and decided to speak every traveling American’s second language. I just spoke louder: I’M JUST WONDERING IF I’M AT THE RIGHT GATE.’

He looked down at my boarding pass without moving his head- sort of like those haunted house portraits where only the eyes move- and again he said ‘Oui’ even though the sign directly behind him said that particular flight would be landing in Budapest.

I sighed, feeling confused, and as I walked away and he said ‘Thank you. Have a nice day’ in rehearsed non-comprehension.

Not trusting his reassurances, I walked up to Air France’s euphemistically titled Customer Service desk and pressed my dilemma to a young frenchwoman who wore her hair in a matronly bun.

‘You’re American?’ she said in textbook English. ‘And you don’t speak French?’

When I said no she said ‘Oh’ like she was a doctor examining my MRI and had found a suspicious mass.

Then she spoke rapid French to her customer service colleagues and set them all to tittering with laughter. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I was pretty sure I knew who they were talking about.

Not understanding, I walked away confused.

And God said: Come, let us go down, and confuse their language…

The next leg of my journey was by train.

For what seemed like an eternity, I vainly searched around the train station for a men’s room. When I finally found one, there was an old woman standing in front of the stall doors with a mop, absently wiping at the same spot on the floor.

From the cobwebs of my memory, I pulled some of the French Isabelle had taught me. ‘I need to use the restroom’ I told the old woman.

At least I’d thought that was what I’d said. In hindsight, having later consulted my French book, I think what I actually said was: ‘I need to drive your toilet.’

The old woman with the mop looked confused so I repeated it, louder: ‘I NEED TO DRIVE YOUR TOILET.’

And she held out her palm and said: ‘You need to be 25 years old.’ At least, that’s what I thought she’d said.

I nodded and said ‘Don’t worry I’m well past 25’ and I walked over to the bathroom stall. But she kept talking, faster this time, her words lashing at my ankles.

When I turned around to close the stall door, the old woman was standing in the middle of it, holding out her hand and telling me I needed to be 25 years old.

I was about to pull out my passport to prove I was old enough when a tall, blond man with hipster glasses said in a Swedish accent: ‘It costs 25 cents. You need to pay her 25 cents.’

‘Oh’ I said and fished around in my pockets.
‘Sorry for the confusion’ I muttered to her, but she did not understand a word

I spoke.

And the Lord said: Come, let us confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another…

For the final leg of my journey, I had to take a bus from Macon to Taize.

I had my fare counted out in my sweaty hand. For the entire train ride I’d practiced how to ask for a bus ticket. When it was my turn, I stepped up to the driver, an elderly, tough-looking frenchman.

I laid my euros down on the tray and spit out the one sentence I’d been playing in my head like a broken record: ‘A ticket to Taize, please.’

But then the driver asked me a question and, just like that, it was like my homework had blown away with the wind. I had no idea what he was asking me.

‘Lociento, no seh Francais’ I babbled….in Spanish.
The driver clenched his wrinkled jaw and asked his question again, and I just

smiled, feeling confused.

‘He is asking if you want the roundtrip ticket’ the skinny man behind me explained with a German accent.

‘Oh, yes. Yes, please’ I said.

The bus driver tore off my receipt and slapped it down in my palm and began shouting at me: ‘SPEAK THE LANGUAGE. YOU COME TO FRANCE…SPEAK FRENCH!’

The skinny German behind me continued his translating duties: ‘He’s saying that when you come to France you should speak French.’

‘Yeah, I got that part. Danke’ I said and sat down, confused and red-faced.

Therefore the place was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth.

The story of Babel belongs to what is known as the Primeval History.

The Primeval History narrates God’s dealings with creation before God ever called Abraham or commissioned Israel to be a light to the nations.

The Primeval History is not, like the rest of scripture, a particular history of a chosen People. It’s a general history of all humanity.

The Primeval History is Israel’s attempt to project backwards in time and answer some of the questions we still ask:

Where did we come from? Who made us and how? Why is there Sin in the world?

Babel is the climax of the Primeval History.
But the story isn’t just meant to answer the obvious question:

Why are there so many languages in the world?

The story of Babel is also the bible’s attempt to pinpoint the origination of: War
and
Our Fear of the Stranger and Hatred of the Other
Our Suspicion of
And Hostility towards
and Distrust of
Difference.

Because even though the confusing and scattering God does at Babel is meant as a grace to save us from our own hubris, we don’t receive it as gift.

At Babel God creates tribes with different languages and customs and complexions. Different, diverse tribes.

And we respond by creating tribalism.

The energies and ingenuities we’d spent on baking bricks and cutting stone we soon turn to making weapons.

The Sin of Cain and the Sin of Babel mix and, as the Primeval History draws to a close, war is born.

For much of the time, my time at the monastery was as confusing as my journey there.

Going through the dinner line one evening and seeing they were serving a gruel that resembled the porridge from Oliver Twist, I said: ‘No thank you, I’ll just have the bread and the apple.’

The volunteer server, a teenage girl who’d colored the Hungarian flag onto her name tag, she just smiled at me and said ‘Yah’ and then plopped a heaping spoonful on my plate.

One afternoon I asked another pilgrim for the time- I even gestured to my wrist- but I was instead pointed the way to the bathroom.

In the group bible study, I tried in vain to discuss Paul’s Letter to the Romans with folks for whom English was a second language.

It was confusing all round.

And I couldn’t help but think that everything would be so much easier if we all spoke the same language.

That’s pretty much how I felt the Thursday evening I ventured into the monastery sanctuary for the fixed-hour worship.

I grabbed a wrinkled blue paper songbook at the door and found an empty spot among the couple thousand pilgrims. All of us sat on the sloped cement floor facing a terra cotta altar table, above which hung three red-orange sheets of canvas arranged to resemble a fiery dove.

The worship that Thursday night followed the same pattern as all the other nights. Scripture was read. Prayers were spoken and sung. Silence was stretched out longer than any sermon.

Towards the end of the worship, before we took communion, a song number flashed on the digital screen that hung on either side of the altar.

Everyone flipped in their books, a 12 string guitar struck the right note and we started to sing: ‘Da pacem in diebus.’ Give Peace in our Days.

It’s a chant, only a couple of phrases. We sang it maybe two dozen times at first, in Latin. But then I noticed the pilgrims in front of me, a youth group it looked like, they’d started to sing it in German.

We kept singing and after a few more repetitions I could make out French being sung behind me by a husband and wife and their three little children. And after that I could hear French starting to pop out in the crowd from other places in the sanctuary.

We were still singing the same song; it was the same tune. They’d just started to sing it in their own language.

It took me a few times more through the song before I worked up the courage to sing in English, but when I did I heard British accents joining me.

And to my left I could make out the hard consonants of what sounded like Russian and to my right I could hear Italian that reminded me of my grandparents.

And maybe it’s the tune or the words but together, the thousands of us, all singing each in our own language, it kind of sounded like the roll of an ocean wave.

Or like a mighty rushing wind.

And even though there were other sounds I couldn’t make out, other languages I couldn’t identify, I understood everyone of them.

And after we sang we passed the Peace of Christ and a teenage girl with stonewashed jeans and dyed green hair embraced me and said something in my ear.

And I didn’t know what language she was speaking, but I understood.

And when I filed up through the line and held my hands out to receive the Body of Christ, the dark-skinned monk looked down upon me, smiling and softly spoke a few words.

I didn’t know what he’d said, but I’d understood perfectly.

And after the worship service ended and a small crowd of us lingered behind to gather around the Cross, I couldn’t have translated all the whispered prayers I heard but I understood everyone of them.

God doesn’t undo what God did at Babel until Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends upon a crowd of thousands of scattered tribes: “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and parts of Libya, and visitors all the way from Rome.”

Just as God comes down at Babel to confuse their speech, the Holy Spirit comes down at Pentecost to fill with them with praise.

And though each of them speaks their own language, each of them is understood.

No more confusion.

God heals the wounds of Babel not by creating a common language, but by creating a People.

A people who, despite their differences, understand one another because they remember what was forgotten at Babel: that you were made to praise God and embody God’s love and serve in God’s name and point towards God’s future.

God heals the wounds of Babel not by creating a new language.

God heals the wounds of Babel by creating a People who are God’s new language.

* This sermon owes, as does my entire theological worldview, to Stanley Hauerwas.

In Postings, Preachments Babel, David Sedaris, Holy Spirit, Language, Pentecost, Stanley Hauerwas

Sermon Shout Out from Scot McKnight: #1 Thing My Kids Have Taught Me About God

Jason Micheli — May 5, 2013 — 4 Comments

Here’s the last installment of my top ten postings about what I’ve learned of the faith from my kids. You’ll have to click over to Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog to read it.

In Postings, Preachments Children, Luke 15, Parenting, Prodigal God, Top Ten, Top Ten Thing My Kids Have Taught Me About God

Sermon Shout Out from Scot McKnight: Wrath Reconsidered

Jason Micheli — April 21, 2013 — 6 Comments

Scot Mcknight has this up over at his Jesus Creed site. This week Dennis continues our sermon series through Romans by looking at Romans 1.18-32 in which lists the symptoms of a creation suffering under God’s wrath, or, better put, suffering un-righteousness. Romans 1.18-32 is the antithesis to Paul’s thesis in 1.16-17.

Since ‘wrath’ is the subject, I thought I’d offer this reflection on God’s wrath from Amos 7.

———————————————-

I’m sure you’ll know what I mean when I say that being a pastor is a lot like having a family member who is constantly in the tabloids.

I mean: here I am with this public relationship with someone who routinely shocks and outrages a reliable percentage of the population. While I can only guess what kinds of questions relatives of Lindsay Lohan and Tiger Woods are forced to answer, I do know the feeding-frenzy kinds of questions I consistently have to suffer thanks to my relationship with a different sort of celebrity.

Example:

This week I found myself in a conversation with a Unitarian Universalist clergywoman named Janice. Interrogation might better describe our exchange. Her every question to me was like the glare and flash of a paparazzi’s camera.

For those who might not know- Unitarianism began a few hundred years ago during the Enlightenment. As such, it was very much a reflection of its time. The Unitarian movement sought to strip traditional Christianity of its primitive, out-dated and superstitious trappings.

In many ways, Unitarianism is like Christianity but with less vocabulary for you to memorize since words like Trinity and Incarnation and Atonement and Resurrection have all been kicked to the wayside.

Janice has long, unnaturally black hair. She was wearing a hippie-sort of linen dress, had tattooed clover wrapped around her arm and, appropriate to her enlightened tradition, she was wearing not one but at least five different religious symbols on her hemp necklace.

She had a notepad on her lap which she wrote in whenever I spoke, as if she were the therapist and I was the delusional, misguided patient. She even kept referring to me as a ‘pre-enlightened’ Christian.

Now I’m sure you all know someone in your family or in your neighborhood who is a Unitarian and I’m sure they’re wonderful people. And I know there’s a Unitarian Church just down the road from us, and I’m sure that it’s filled with wonderful people. So the last thing I want to do is offend anyone when I tell you that I just wanted to slap Janice.

We were sitting around a coffee table: Janice and me and three other clergy from varying denominations. I was the last one to show so I got stuck sitting in a low, awkward butterfly chair with everyone else towering over me. And obviously given my height I’m sensitive to such things.

The chair was narrow across too; it kept me from being able to cross my legs or move my arms and only increased my sense of being trapped and on trial.

Because our meeting had no clear ending, the conversation unraveled quickly with Janice electing herself grand inquisitor. So with me trapped in my butterfly chair, like a reporter from the Enquirer Janice fired question after question at me:

Do you still believe in the Resurrection?

Surely you don’t still believe in Jesus’ miracles do you?

You don’t seriously think Jesus was God-in-the-flesh?

And the virgin birth…don’t tell me you…?

With her every question and my every yes she grew more incredulous.

How do you still hold to a pre-enlightened faith, she pressed, given everything we now know about the universe?

As if to teach me a thing or two about the universe, Janice’s next round of questions proved that she could make time stand still.

She kept me on the defensive, wanting me to explain every inconsistency and every troubling passage in scripture, every wicked thing ever done in Christ’s name, every theological claim we make in here that can’t be proven empirically. And the whole time she kept writing in her notebook!

Towards the end of the interrogation, Janice looked up from her pen and paper and she took a sort of cleansing breath and sighed, and, adopting a good-cop tone of voice, she said: I just don’t see how anyone can reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New.

I kept my mouth shut. By that point I knew exactly what I wanted to tell her but it wasn’t of a theological nature. Besides, I was afraid I might need her help to get out of the butterfly chair.

So I didn’t say anything.

Then she looked at me and she said:

Okay, you tell me. When you read the Old Testament what sort of God do you see?

As much as I wanted to slap her and throw her through the window, the truth is on some days, with certain passages of scripture, it’s a good question.

It’s a good question today because when you read through the Book of Amos you might end up with an answer that troubles you. You might decide that what you see in this book is a God who is incongruent with the God you know in your heart. You might conclude that the God who speaks a Word to Amos can’t be the same One who said to the Father ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.‘

What do you see? It’s a good question.

God asks Amos that same question in today’s text. And in that moment, what Amos sees is how Israel doesn’t measure up, doesn’t make the grade, doesn’t meet God’s expectations. But a ‘plumb line‘ is not the only thing Amos has seen in these seven chapters.

Amos is a prophet, which means ‘seer.‘ Prophets see what will come to pass.

And God has given Amos a lot to see.

Amos has seen God sending locusts to devour Israel’s crops. Amos has seen God ordering a shower of fire to eat up the land. He’s seen God’s anger roaring like a lion. He’s seen God shipping the Israel off into exile. He’s seen God made nauseous by the worship of his People.

And in today’s text he sees God vowing never again to pass Israel by, in other words, never again to forgive.

What do you see?

The hard fact is that in the Book of Amos God threatens to kill and destroy, God promises to send fire and pestilence and famine.

The hard fact is that in the Book of Amos there are 28 different verbs to describe God destroying what he’s created.

The hard fact is that even when you come to the end of the Book of Amos there is no word of hope.

There is no good news.

That wherever God’s mercy is mentioned it’s done so in the past tense because God’s mercy is all dried up, his patience has run out. God’s no longer willing to wait for us to change.

There’s a lot to SEE in Amos.

But I wonder- is that all there is to see?

I spent time not long ago in Cambodia, visiting with our mission partners there. I think it must be because of the language barrier I experienced there but most of my memories from Cambodia are visual. Most of my memories are of what I saw.

And so I don’t recall many conversations I had there. I don’t remember much of what I or anyone else said, but I do remember seeing.

I remember seeing:

Young men fishing for food in a thickly polluted pond.

Toddlers playing tag barefoot in an alley strewn with broken glass while others their age cried for breakfast.

School children walking home from school and disappearing into the smoke and smog of a garbage dump- because that’s where home was for them.

I remember seeing.

An old woman- a Sunday School teacher- sitting in a dark, hot corner of a decrepit old apartment building.

The hands that reached out for bread as I served the Eucharist- rough hands, broken and worn-down hands, wrinkled hands, dirty hands.

Teenage girls praying frantically and loudly and with tears on their cheeks, leaving no mystery about how hard their lives were.

Shanty towns filled with the poor and the forgotten, displaced from their homes in the city to make room for ‘progress.’

What sticks with me is what I saw.

And I’d like to be able to tell you that my reaction to seeing all of that was a sense of fulfillment that despite all of the challenges there this church is doing so much to help. I’d like to be able to tell you that my reaction to seeing all of that was one of humility- humility that the people I met there had such faith and joy despite having nothing.

And even though those things are all true; they’re not what I felt upon seeing everything I saw.

No, what I felt first, what seeing made me feel:

Anger and Indignation – that so many could be forgotten and so many others refuse to see them.

Impatience and Exasperation – that things are still so far from what God intends and so many assume there’s no other alternative.

I wanted to Judge…someone… anyone.

When you read the Old Testament, what sort of God do you see? Janice asked me.

I knew what she was getting at.

I knew she was hoping to checkmate me into seeing that the God of the Old Testament is angry and vindictive and impatient, that He frequently threatens to punish and to destroy and to call off creation completely and start over, that this God bears little resemblance to the One who, while we were yet sinners, died for us.

And the truth is-

If that’s what you’re looking for, then there’s plenty of examples to find. In the Book of Amos especially.

But if you read through scripture and see only an angry, arbitrary God,

then you’re not seeing all there is to see.

We think of prophets as future-predictors, as fortune-tellers. We think of prophets as people that God empowers to see what God will one day do. And so Amos sees plagues of locusts and famines and showers of fire and punishment and destruction.

But as much as that, prophets are people empowered by God to see the present, to see what God sees right now, to see how things are today, to see the things we refuse and choose not to see.

And so when you read through scripture, when you read through the Old Testament, when you read through the Book of Amos you don’t see a God who is arbitrary or petulant or vindictive.

You instead see a God who is righteously angry.

Angry over the way his people use violence on one another. Angry because they value silver and gold more than each other. Indignant for how they obey convention over covenant and for how they’re more faithful to the propriety of their worship than to the message of their scripture.

What you see is a God who is angry because His People refuse to see the poor, refuse to lift up the weak, refuse to remember the forgotten.

When you read the Old Testament, what sort of God do you see? Janice asked.

And I didn’t take the bait. I didn’t say anything.

After a moment or two she closed her notebook and, sounding disappointed, she said to everyone around the table: ‘Well, I don’t see how a loving God could ever be angry.’

And struggling to get out of the butterfly chair, I replied: ‘I don’t see how he couldn’t be.’

In Postings, Preachments God's Wrath, Preaching, Preaching Romans, Unitarianism, Wrath

Jesus I Have Loved, But Paul…?

Jason Micheli — April 15, 2013 — 6 Comments

This weekend the copier ate my sermon right before our Saturday Night service, forcing me to rely on the Holy Spirit (aka: winging it). I couldn’t find it on my computer afterwards either, forcing me to wing it again on Sunday. Apparently, it was auto saved to iCloud. So, the sermon you see below is not the sermon I gave.

You can listen to the actual delivered sermon here, in the iTunes Library under Tamed Cynic or in the Listen widget on this blog. The audio isn’t great because I recorded it on my phone and I was ranging all over the sanctuary while I talked. Sorry.

I can only conclude that by not being able to preach the manuscript you have here, God didn’t think it worth preaching. It’s not a ‘good’ sermon. Too dense, too historical- there’s simply too much I want to say to reform people’s notions of Paul and sermon clarity suffers for it. Homiletical vomit, you could call it.

————————————————–

A couple of years ago I took the Tennleytown train to the National Cathedral for a workshop on preaching. I enrolled in the workshop not because I have any room for improvement (obviously) but because the workshop was being led by Fleming Rutledge, the famed Episcopal preacher.

If you read my blog then you’ve heard me confess this before: that I am susceptible to crushes on older women.

It’s true. Faye Dunaway. Rene Russo. My 8th Grade English teacher, Ms Brock. And at the top of that list, right up there with Mary Tyler Moore, is Fleming Rutledge.

If you don’t know her, Fleming Rutledge has an aristocratic old Virginia accent. She has a Downton Abbey dignity tempered with a twist of Southern irreverence. She likes to wear an old fashioned Geneva collar.

She preaches with sophistication and wit. She loves the theology of Karl Barth, the literature of Cormac McCarthy and the films of Joel and Ethan Coen and she wears her hair in a bun. She is, in other words, the perfect woman.

I mean…. other than my wife.

And so I took the Tennleytown train to the Cathedral not because my preaching needed improvement. Instead, like a teenage boy convinced the swimsuit model is looking right at him from the pages of the magazine, I took the Tennleytown train to be in the presence of my idol.

When I first met her my heart skipped a beat.

When she nodded approvingly as I introduced myself as being from Virginia, I felt flush.

And my infatuation was forever cemented when she began the workshop just as I would’ve begun it: by criticizing her own denomination.

She said that rather than announcing the Gospel, most Episcopal priests preached about Jesus as a compassionate, human teacher. Judging by the collars in the room, I was the only one who wasn’t an Episcopal priest.

To make her point, she asked the dozen of us in the workshop how many of us had ever preached from Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

And the only hand that went up was mine.

And Fleming Rutledge smiled at me. And like an awkward Mr Darcy I smiled back.

And Fleming Rutledge asked why I thought Romans was important.

And because I pore over each new Fleming Rutledge book as though it were a Victoria’s Secret catalog, I knew exactly what to say. I knew exactly what she’d say.

   “Because the Gospels are narratives. Story. Their meaning isn’t self-evident. It’s Paul’s Letter to the Romans that spells out our message.’

   And Fleming Rutledge beamed at me, as though she were about to say: ‘you had me at Pauline Soteriology.’

   And I beamed back, thinking to myself: ‘Score.’

Then Fleming Rutledge turned to the others, the reprobates in the class, and she asked them to share ‘Rev Micheli’s high estimation of Romans.’

The responses trickled up from around the room:

‘Because Paul complicated Jesus’ simple message of love.’

‘Because Romans is difficult to understand.’

‘Because Romans comes with baggage on social issues.’

Finally, a middle-aged priest with a gray beard said: ‘I went into ministry because I love Jesus, but Paul…? his voice dribbled off to a question mark.

Fleming Rutledge looked at him, her eyebrows crinkled in distress.

So, like a prince rescuing his damsel, I interjected:

‘It doesn’t sound like you all have ever heard Paul’s BIG MESSAGE.’

And sure, I wasn’t trying to be profound or insightful. I was just trying to mack on my muse.

But it worked.

‘Jason’s right,’ Fleming Rutledge said- I was ‘Jason’ now- ‘I’m afraid you haven’t heard Paul’s BIG MESSAGE’ she said in her Gone with the Wind accent.

‘And if you haven’t heard Paul’s BIG MESSAGE’ she added, ‘you will never have a Gospel that’s big enough.’

Some of think you’ve heard it before. Paul’s big message in Romans.

But what you’ve actually heard is St Augustine. What you’ve heard is what St Augustine heard in Paul.

Augustine was born 3 centuries after Paul. Augustine grew up an unbeliever in North Africa. He was brilliant and popular. Everything came easy to him. Everything except self-control.

Augustine was what we’d call a ‘horn-dog.’

Beginning in his adolescence and continuing even after his conversion to Christianity, Augustine battled lust and sexual temptation. He once famously prayed: ‘Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.’

Augustine wrote in his memoir that he was at war within himself. He could never bring himself to live as he knew he should as a Christian.

Then one day Augustine was sitting in a garden, weeping in despair, and he heard a boy in a neighboring yard say: ‘Pick up and read.’

And in a mystical moment, Augustine picked up a New Testament and flipped, at random, to a page and read it. It was Romans 13: ‘Let us live honorably… not in debauchery…Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.’

   Augustine thought he’d discovered in Paul someone just like himself, someone who constantly did exactly what he willed he would not do.

   And so what Augustine heard in Paul’s Letter to the Romans was that the Law- who God wants us to be and how God wants us to behave- always leads to frustration and failure because you and I are sinners.

   Sin’s been passed down to us from our original parents, Adam and Eve.

   So any hope we have of eternal salvation cannot rely on us.

   And that was the Gospel for Augustine- that salvation isn’t ours to earn by our virtue. Salvation comes to us from God’s grace.

   Alone.

Some of you think you’ve heard Paul’s big message before, but you heard is actually what St Augustine heard in Paul.

And you know what? Augustine’s Gospel isn’t big enough.

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Some of you think you know Paul’s big picture thesis, but what you’ve actually heard is Martin Luther. What Martin Luther heard in Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

Luther lived a 1,000 years after St Augustine and 1500 years after Paul. Martin Luther was a Catholic monk, an Augustinian monk.

And despite being a monk, despite having given his life to God, Martin Luther was terrified of God.

Martin Luther was convinced that, no matter what he did, his devotion to God was never enough to avoid God’s punishment.

He was so plagued by a guilty conscience that he even grew to hate the God.

He became preoccupied with one question: How can I get a gracious God?

And he searched scripture for an answer.

And then one day Martin Luther happened across Paul’s Letter to the Romans: ‘For I am not ashamed of the gospel…For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith…’

   And what Luther thought he discovered in Paul was someone just like himself someone who was struggling with how they could ever stand before a God who is holy and righteous.

And what Luther heard Paul saying is that because of our sin we have no righteousness of our own. Instead because of Christ’s sacrifice for our sin God ‘imputes’ Christ’s righteousness to us.

   And that became the Gospel for Luther: Christ’s righteousness gets credited as our own and it’s available to us not by anything we need to do but by faith.

   Alone.

Some of you have heard that before, and you assumed it was Paul’s big message. But actually what you heard is what Martin Luther heard.

And you know what? Luther’s Gospel- it isn’t big enough.

pastedGraphic_1.pdf

Some of you think you don’t like Paul’s big message, but it’s not because you actually heard Paul. It’s because what you heard is what John Calvin heard in Paul.

Calvin was born 600 years ago, a long time after Paul. Calvin was born in France and grew up to be a lawyer.

When Calvin was just a boy his mother died. After she died, Calvin’s father, who was not a kind man, sent him away to live with another family.

When Calvin was a man, his only child died in infancy. And then his wife died, after only 9 years of marriage.

From childhood to adulthood, Calvin’s life was marked by sorrow.

Because he was a lawyer, trained in logic and argument, Calvin wanted to know answers to the big questions. He wanted to know Why.

Why, if God is all-powerful do mothers die? Why children and wives die? Why do bad things happen? And, come to think of it, why do so many people not love the God who made them?

Calvin turned to scripture for answers to his questions, to Paul’s Letter to the Romans, chapter 8:

“We know that all things work together for goodfor those who love God…For those whom God foreknew he also predestined… ’

And when Calvin read that he discovered in Paul someone with the same questions as himself, at least that’s what Calvin assumed.

And so what Calvin heard Paul saying in Romans was a message to persevere in the face of sorrow, that God has a plan for each and every life, that from the beginning of the world, God has chosen to save some eternally through Jesus Christ but also to damn others eternally.

And for Calvin that became the Gospel: that God is absolutely sovereign over our lives.

But as big as that sounds, it’s not nearly big enough.

Here’s the problem:

Paul’s Letter to the Romans is actually one, long sustained argument.

It has one single thesis.

It’s like a symphony, made up of motifs and movements and variations that all come together to contribute to one single expression.

And because Romans is like a symphony, whenever you focus on just one part of Romans, the composer’s message gets jumbled and distorted.

Augustine and Luther and Calvin and there are plenty others- they focus on just 1 small motif in Paul.

And as a consequence, they make their Gospel too small.

Because Paul’s not writing about how we’re saved by grace or how Christ’s righteousness gets credited as our own by faith. And he’s not interested in God’s plan for my life.

Even if those things are all true, Paul’s not writing about us.

He’s writing about God.

And the dramatic tension in his writing, the question searching for a resolution, is this:

Has God given up on his promise to Abraham?

Remember, all the way back in the beginning of the bible, in the Book of Genesis, the way God decided to deal with the Adam problem was through Abraham.

The way God decided to deal with the sin in the world was by calling and swearing a covenant with Abraham.

God called Abraham to live in faithfulness to God and by doing so he would be a like a beacon of light that would call others back to faithfulness and obedience to God.

And eventually God promised that through Abraham would come a world-wide family of God’s People, a Jewish and Gentile family that would be the first fruit of God’s new, restored creation.

God promised that to Abraham.

And God promised to be faithful to that promise.

Fast Forward:

The Jews of Paul’s day saw that promise as up in the air.

They worried that God had broken his end of the promise because Israel had so often broken their end of it. That’s the dramatic tension in Paul’s composition to the Romans. That’s the question he wants to resolve in his symphony.

And like any good symphony, Paul gives you a clue to the resolution in the opening theme.

You heard it read today. Verse 17- that’s Paul’s thesis statement.

That’s his answer to the question, that’s the opening theme to the symphony of Romans and everything else is just a variation on it.

‘For in it…’ Paul says, ‘in the Gospel, in the announcement that Jesus, the crucified Messiah, has been made, through the resurrection, the Lord of creation’ (1.3-4).

‘In the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed…’

The righteousness of God- God’s righteousness- is a very specific, technical term in the Hebrew Bible.

The word ‘righteousness’ in Greek means ‘justice’ or ‘justification’ or ‘setting things to right.’

And in the Hebrew Bible it refers specifically to God’s covenantal fidelity: God’s faithfulness to his promise to Abraham.

You see what’s so big and powerful about the Gospel for Paul is that it isn’t about how we make ourselves right in God’s eyes.

What’s so big and powerful about the Gospel for Paul is that the Gospel isn’t about us at all.

Before Romans is about our justification by faith it’s about God justifying himself. It’s about God proving himself to us.

It’s the announcement that, in Jesus’ death and resurrection, God is keeping his word to Abraham, that in Jesus Christ God has kept his promise to deal with the sin of the world, he’s kept his promise to reconcile what’s wrong in God’s world and he’s kept his promise to create a world-wide people of God who are the sign of God’s restored creation.

And this is unveiled, Paul says, ‘through faith for faith,’ which actually your bibles do a terrible job translating because in the Greek its:

‘from faithfulness through faithfulness.’

As in God’s righteousness is unveiled from God’s faithfulness- from Yahweh not forgetting his promise to his people.

And it’s unveiled through faithfulness- through Jesus doing what Israel could not do, showing an Abraham-like trust in God even unto death.

And then Paul concludes his opening theme with a few notes from the prophet Habakkuk:

‘the one who is righteous by faith will live…’

But again, this is Jewish music he’s writing. He’s not talking about us.

He’s reminding us that God had promised this all along, promised that he would make good on his promise to Abraham, promised that he would send a Messiah, a Righteous One, who would live a life of perfect faithfulness and whom God would vindicate in death by raising him up to life.

And all of that would be the overture of God’s new creation.

When you step back and listen from beginning to end, that’s the music Paul wants you to hear.

On Good Friday, I got a message that someone close to me, someone I care about and love, had been committed.

For threatening to commit suicide.

And so just a couple weeks ago, I found myself riding that same train to Tennleytown I had ridden a couple years ago. This time to go not to the Cathedral but to a psychiatric institute to visit.

Just because I’m a pastor doesn’t mean I know what to do in those situations when those situations hit close to home.

Just because I’m a pastor- it doesn’t mean I don’t get overwhelmed with the same questions you do:

Why did this have to happen God?

Where the Hell are you God?

How are we going to get through this God?

What in the world am I supposed to say?

And maybe it’s because the last time I’d ridden that train to Tennleytown I’d been talking about Paul and Romans with Fleming Rutledge, but riding on that train, thinking of who I was going to see, Fleming’s point hit me again:

that if we don’t grasp Paul’s BIG PICTURE then the usual ways we define we the Gospel aren’t Big Enough.

They’re not BIG ENOUGH for someone whose life is upside down and completely out of sorts.

I mean-

It may be true that we’re saved by God’s grace alone not by our own virtue. It may be true but- take it from me- that’s not a Gospel BIG ENOUGH to take to someone in despair.

It may be true that what makes us right with God, what justifies us before God, isn’t anything we do but is our faith alone. That may be true, but you shouldn’t have to take it from me to know that that’s not a BIG ENOUGH Gospel for someone who is crippled by fear.

It may be true that an all-knowing God has a plan for each one of us and every moment of our lives, but I hope you know- I hope you know- that that is in no way a BIG ENOUGH Gospel to offer someone who’s in agony, someone who’s convinced there’s no way out, someone who’s convinced there’s nothing they can do, someone who’s convinced there’s no one there for them.

The only Gospel BIG ENOUGH is the one Paul gives us here in 1.16-17: that what we discover revealed in Jesus Christ is that God never forgets us, never abandons us, that no matter how dark our life seems God doesn’t turn his back on us, doesn’t break his word to us.

God keeps his promise to be with us.

Always.

That’s a Gospel BIG ENOUGH to fit all our other gospels inside.

In Podcasts, Postings, Preachments Augustine, Calvin, God's Righteousness, John Piper, Justification by Faith, Luther, Paul, Romans

Get Over Yourself

Jason Micheli — April 8, 2013 — 2 Comments

* Title courtesy of Dennis Perry.

For the many of you who aren’t part of my church, this is a sermon from Julie Pfister, our Congregational Care Director, who leaves for Utah after this week. Prayers and best wishes to her. Take a few moments to read her sermon; it’s well worth it.

Romans 1.1-7

Just so you know, I did not ask to preach today and I’m not here because I am special or different from any of you. I was told that my story and my voice are important, because I’m a Christian

And that God uses broken people like me.

Although Bible study is my favorite part of the week, what I know about scripture could fit on the tip of a pin.

I guess if a Bible scholar is who they thought you should hear this weekend, they would not have asked me.

So, why did I agree to preach this weekend? Believe me, I have asked myself that question a thousand times over the last few weeks.

Well, I just couldn’t help myself.

Scripture tells me that I am a servant of God – that I am His witness.

I have worshipped with many of you here over the years, but just in case you don’t know me, Im Julie Pfister. I have been married for 27 years to my husband Steve and have raised three children here in Alexandria, just around the corner. I have been blessed to work in the church as a teacher in the Day School…. with the babies. And for the last year and a half, I have served as the Congregational Care Coordinator.

Many of you may know that I am moving in the not too distant future.

My husband must love me very much to have agreed to go to a no-stop light town in South Central Utah to take care of my ailing parents. It will be a long awkward good-bye as our plans change often depending on the latest updates about my father’s health and treatment plan. Although Utah is home for me, we have built a life here in this community. I couldn’t leave Aldersgate for any other reason.

I begged Dennis and Jason:

“please please please….just let me just go quietly into the good night. Let me hitch up my covered wagon and leave at dawn and head west.”

I pleaded….”It’s going to be too difficult to leave and say good bye to everyone. I will end up crying like a zillion times. “

Jason said he wanted you to hear my voice.

It’s not what I wanted.

Then, Dennis, in his infinite compassion and understanding, said

“Get over yourself.

We are going to cry and pray for you at a great party. Get ready!”

So I said yes.

Get over yourself.”

At its very core, isn’t that what knowing Christ is all about? -

Getting over ourselves and becoming a new creation in Christ.

Casting all fears, burdens, doubts, insecurities, hopes and prayers on HIM.

“As God tells the prophet Isaiah, “You are MY witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me.

How could I say no, knowing that scripture tells me that I am to witness for Christ?

For the Apostle Paul, everything changed on the road to Damascus. Saul, as he is known before his conversion, encounters the Risen Lord in a flash of light. He is knocked from his horse and blinded. Jesus asks him why he persecutes Him. He is told where to find a man named Annanias through whom God would restore his sight. Annanias tells him that God has chosen him to spread the good news of the Gospel to the Gentiles

He doesn’t shrug the whole thing off.

Sure, he was blind, and then he could see, but he doesn’t write it off and wonder “

What just happened here?”

That couldn’t have really been God?

There are plenty of people throughout scripture that tried to shrug off attention getters like that.

And we see it around us all the time – unwillingness to see the hand of God in our lives, even when His grace and mercy are as tangible as being knocked off a horse and blinded.

But there are also dozens of examples in scriptures of unsuspecting characters who accept God’s call, even when they were not seeking it. God sought them.

Noah wasn’t looking for an excuse to build an ark. Moses asked the LORD over and over to not make him go before Pharoah. David wasn’t tending his sheep thinking….hum….I think I want to be King.

There are many who believe that if God had not chosen Paul to take the Gospel to the Gentiles, and if Paul had not obeyed, that there would have been no worldwide Christian faith. Most importantly to remember it was not Paul by himself. It was as he said repeatedly, “not I, but Christ in me.”

So Saul becomes Paul, a new creation in Christ and is horrified to think that his old name Saul of Tarsis would dishonor God and freak out those who would hear him preach about Christ.

Paul doesn’t ask for this to happen. He isn’t praying for a testimony of the risen Christ. He doesn’t choose this role. He is busy persecuting those who are spreading the Good News of Christ.

But once God chooses him, He does not turn back.

Unlike Paul, I was already blind.

Blind from fear, mistrust, disillusionment. Blind from bitterness that led to the realization that by striving every day to live a good life, to do the best I could, that my life was not going to be the perfect little picture I had painted for myself and my family.

For me, everything changed one morning.

It wasn’t a conversion in the sense that I did not know Christ as my Savior before that morning. It was just that I was living on the fringes, powerless and afraid that my life would always fall short of being what and who God created me to be.

He just knocked me off my horse and told me that He would change my life. That He is who He says He is.

It was a moment of pure grace and mercy that is at the heart of everything I have felt, and believed, and loved since.

It was an ordinary morning during a moment when I was sitting in a chair and was told to get up and change my life. I did.

I have never looked back. I have faltered and experienced doubt, frustration, fear, panic and all the other emotions that are in our range, but I have never, denied or diminished how God changed me and continues to work in me and through me.

So, what happens when everything changes for you?

You wake up in the morning and start the day as it is required and planned.

Get the kids off to school. Get ready for work. Start a load of laundry. Make a few calls.

What happens when all that just stops and GOD touches you in a way that brings you to your knees?

Do you just shrug it off?

How do you fit a new creation – a transformed life, into a life already in progress.

What happens when you pray and pray and pray that God will show his face?

And then HE does.

Once we claim Him. He claims us.

Paul got over himself quickly, but it wasn’t without cost.

Can you imagine what courage it must have taken for him to seek out Peter and the other apostles to tell them that Christ had appeared to and spoken to him?

Returning to those whom he had persecuted-, even leading to the death of the beloved Apostle Stephen?

Asking to become one of them and to have their blessing to take the Gospel and bring it to the gentiles.

That kind of courage only comes with faith.

The meat of today’s scripture is verses 5-6

“Through Him and for His namesake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith. And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ”

It is about obedience through faith.

Not Paul’s obedience and faith – but ours.

Paul is following Jesus example of obedience through faith.

That’s why for Paul there is really no difference between faith and obedience because having faith means obeying God’s ways all the way to a cross.

Rebellion is much more fashionable than obedience these days.

We think it brings freedom.

Freedom from rules.

Freedom from oppression.

Freedom from THE MAN.

Fleming Rutledge says:

“true freedom is not found in rebellion against God. Rebellion against God leads to the death of the soul and the spirit. Obedience to God may mean the death of the body, but it means life for the world.” How do we carry around in our bodies the death of Jesus?”

This church, these pews have been my trenches.

Many times when the church was quiet, I stormed through the doors, determined to not see anyone along the way, marching straight to the bottom of this gigantic cross.

That was the size of the cross I needed some times.

A giant cross to heal me and calm me from my fears.

To put me back together again.

In these pews and at the foot of that cross I fought for my family, for my children, for my friends, my sanity.

If I could have, I would have gone to the caves where David hid from Saul and cried to the LORD – How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?

This is where I prayed my family together against great odds.

This is where I prayed that God would find a remnant in my heart “to take root below and bear fruit above.” That my family would be a “band of survivors.” And that the “zeal of the Lord almighty would accomplish this.”

The sign in front of the church asks – Does your faith fit your life?

Over the years, some people have gone so far as to tell me that I spend too much time here – –I venture to say that there are many of you out there that are even more of a church rat than I am.

I have been told that I should just get a bed and live here….

That I should “get a life. That I need to balance – yadda yadda.

This is where I got my life back.

This is where Christ became my savior and I became His.

This is where I serve the One who gave my life and my family back to me.

This is where I found my balance.

How could I NOT be here and spend myself for His church and His people?

My prayer has been each morning that God will show me the means to increase my faith, to know and believe that He is who He says He is.

I must listen for the answer to that prayer and recognize opportunities that arise each day to that end.

For the great majority of us, obedience through faith is lived day to day in the humdrum details – being prepared for the daily decisions that show us to be Christians as we claim.

The power in obedience – aligning ourselves with the power of God in obedience to the Spirit: this is the power that overcomes the world. The power that helps us “get over ourselves”

Paul calls himself a servant of Christ.

Paul was a willing servant and slave for Christ.

He was so overwhelmed at how he had been transformed, that he spent himself to express that.

A bond slave of Christ in debt to all.

Paul is the one who told us later in Romans that …

”the Spirit helps us in our weakness.

We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to God’s will.

I have been on the floor at the foot of that very cross, face down, my arms spread – in the shape of the cross….with a prayer in the deepest corners of my heart that I could not give words to. I confessed to God that I had NO IDEA how to pray.

I used Paul’s word’s that told me that the

Holy Spirit would intercede and moan to the Father on my behalf.

I didn’t just know this, I learned this with my Aldersgate sisters as we have worked our way through a dozen Bible studies over the years. Relying on each other to help us through many storms.

I, like John Wesley, had my heart strangely warmed at Aldersgate.

My time spent here with you is sacred to me. Whether you knew it or not, you have been my scaffolding. As I prepare to leave, a part of Aldersgate, goes with me. It was here that I found God, or more precisely that God found me. It was here that a loving, caring congregation accepted me into your midst. I shall be forever grateful. And I know that you will do the same for anyone that walks through these doors in search of a place and a people to find and worship God.

I’ll use the words of Fleming Rutledge again to close. “

The purpose and meaning of worship with fellow believers is to be a people prepared for daily decisions that make our faith fit our life.

As we share the Lord’s Supper together, we rejoice to remember whose spirit it is that bears us up and links us together in the power of the obedience of faith – the faith that overcomes the world.

I offer this in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

In Postings, Preachments Faith, Julie Pfister, Paul, Preaching Romans, Romans

Archives For Preachments

Come On, Share with Others

Come On, Share with Others

Directly across from me in the circle sat a white-haired, tie-dyed Episcopal Bishop from Berkley, California.

Next to the lady bishop sat a gay Episcopal priest from San Francisco.

Next to him sat a Unitarian lay person from Boulder, Colorado.

Next to him, a Catholic civil servant from Paris, France.

Next to her, a women’s studies PhD candidate from Barcelona, Spain.

Next to her, on my left, was a man who looked like a shorter, plumper, balder, older version of me- except he was dressed sloppy and had an unkempt beard.

His green Velcro sneakers, red tube socks and Trotsky eyeglasses screamed ‘European Socialist.’

And finally in the circle, there was me.

How the virgin birth is based on a mistranslation.

How faith is just a psychological crutch.

How the Gospels don’t always agree with one another.

How the Church has been responsible much evil and injustice.

How it’s superstitious to think bread and wine can become anyone’s body and blood.

How St Paul endorses slavery and sexism.

How Revelation is about Rome not the Rapture.

How scripture is not the literal Word of God but instead bears all the messy fingerprints of people like you and me.

Because the argument Paul is weaving from Romans 1 to Romans 16 is that what we discover in Jesus Christ is God making good on a promise first made to Abraham.

The promise is that THROUGH Abraham God would create a new and distinct People in the world.

The promise that God so loved the world, God would not give up on what he had made.

That just as God’s first creation began with God calling into the void ‘Let there be light,’ God’s New Creation would begin by God calling a People who would be a Light to the world.

I glanced around the circle at all the people, literally, from all over the world, from as many nations as there are stars in the sky.

‘as people of faith, to a place of broken promises, to be a silent, visible sign of a different promise, the promise that the God who made the world in love will, with us and through us, redeem it.’

‘To pray?’ and he laughed like it was a ridiculous notion. ‘No, I stayed here and read my book.’ And he held up his sci-fy novel.

‘Like I tell my wife: faith is the easy way out in this world.’

I thought to myself.

Come On, Share with Others

Come On, Share with Others

None of the cost is passed on to you.

And when it comes to fine print, there is no better example than today’s passage from Romans 3.

Dig in to the fine print and you see that, for Paul, the good news of our justification is not a conditional if/then statement: If you have faith in Christ then you will be justified, then your sins will be forgiven.

That’s not good news; it’s a marketing lure.

But Jesus didn’t hang on the cross and with his dying breath say ‘It is accomplished

dot, dot, dot

if and when you have faith in me…’

Think about what Paul’s saying:

your believing, your saying the sinner’s prayer, your inviting Jesus in to your heart, your making a decision for Christ- all of it is good.

But none of it is necessary.

You can have a mountain’s worth of doubts and you can have faith as small as a fraction of a mustard seed- no worries.

Because your justification does not depend on you or your faith or lack thereof.

But on Jesus Christ and his faithfulness.

Paul’s fine print message could never be an informercial because there’s no visual to demonstrate. The chasm that once separated you from God- it’s gone.

There’s no problem; there’s just good news.

There’s no way that’ll sell.

When you realize and trust it’s the faithfulness of Christ that justifies you, his faithful life all the way to the cross, you realize…

That what’s been given to you for free- it could end up costing you EVERYTHING.

And that’s terrible advertising. That’s an awful sales pitch.

No one would ever buy into that.

No wonder it’s easier to count ‘decisions for Christ’ than to count people carrying bearing crosses for him.

Come On, Share with Others

Come On, Share with Others

Come On, Share with Others

Example:

With her every question and my every yes she grew more incredulous.

Okay, you tell me. When you read the Old Testament what sort of God do you see?

I wanted to Judge…someone… anyone.

But if you read through scripture and see only an angry, arbitrary God,

then you’re not seeing all there is to see.

You instead see a God who is righteously angry.

And struggling to get out of the butterfly chair, I replied: ‘I don’t see how he couldn’t be.’

Come On, Share with Others

‘It doesn’t sound like you all have ever heard Paul’s BIG MESSAGE.’

‘And if you haven’t heard Paul’s BIG MESSAGE’ she added, ‘you will never have a Gospel that’s big enough.’

But what you’ve actually heard is St Augustine. What you’ve heard is what St Augustine heard in Paul.

Some of you think you know Paul’s big picture thesis, but what you’ve actually heard is Martin Luther. What Martin Luther heard in Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

Some of you think you don’t like Paul’s big message, but it’s not because you actually heard Paul. It’s because what you heard is what John Calvin heard in Paul.

Here’s the problem:

Fast Forward:

They worried that God had broken his end of the promise because Israel had so often broken their end of it. That’s the dramatic tension in Paul’s composition to the Romans. That’s the question he wants to resolve in his symphony.

You see what’s so big and powerful about the Gospel for Paul is that it isn’t about how we make ourselves right in God’s eyes.

What’s so big and powerful about the Gospel for Paul is that the Gospel isn’t about us at all.

Before Romans is about our justification by faith it’s about God justifying himself. It’s about God proving himself to us.

Come On, Share with Others

At its very core, isn’t that what knowing Christ is all about? -

Getting over ourselves and becoming a new creation in Christ.

Rebellion is much more fashionable than obedience these days.

“true freedom is not found in rebellion against God. Rebellion against God leads to the death of the soul and the spirit. Obedience to God may mean the death of the body, but it means life for the world.” How do we carry around in our bodies the death of Jesus?”

This is where I prayed my family together against great odds.