Old First

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

2012-02-01T16:43:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

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

2012-02-01T16:34:00.004-05:00

by Jakob Steinhardt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

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

2012-01-14T17:22:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

January 8, A Passionate Spirituality of Engagement

2012-01-05T16:22:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

January 1, The Holy Name, and the Circumcision of Jesus

2011-12-30T08:31:00.000-05:00

Numbers 6:22-27, Psalm 8, Galatians 4:4-7, Luke 2:15-21

Did you know that New Year’s Day was not always January 1? It used to be March 25. The first day of the year has varied in different times and places, but in the British colony of New York, as late as 1751, the new year was reckoned to start on March 25. But our congregation held worship on January 1 anyway, and it was not for New Years. It was the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus.

Now this may strike you as an awkward thing to celebrate. The awkwardness of it is partly why the ecumenical church prefers to call it the Feast of the Holy Name, which is the title in our lectionary. And after all, the gospel lesson does report the announcement of his name. But in Biblical terms, the circumcision is more important than the naming. Just ask any Jew.

You know that Jewish boys are required to be circumcised eight days after they’re born. The ritual is called a bris. After the bris the family has a party, which traditionally had been a feast for the whole community. Circumcision was a cause for joy. But Christians find the whole idea a bit embarrassing and even controversial, especially because of its medical implications and how it pains a little child. The circumcision of girls is a matter of human rights and sexual oppression. At least the Bible never allows for female circumcision. It’s only for males, and that means that it’s another of God’s judgments on masculinity.

Circumcision is the mark which means a Jew belongs to God. It is the sign that he is not his own. He is branded as God’s property, and so are all his offspring, as you can interpret by the location of the sign upon his body. The sign is both a judgment and a promise.

In Genesis 17, God required Abraham to circumcise himself and all the males of his household as the sign of the covenant God made with him. Four hundred years later, in Exodus 12, at the first Passover, when God renewed the covenant with the whole people of Israel, circumcision was confirmed as the mark of Jewish identity. It has often been a costly mark. In 168 BC, the Seleucid emperor who was ruling over Palestine wanted to force the Jews to live like Greeks, and he made circumcision illegal at the pain of death. That led to the revolt of the Maccabees, and the affirmation of circumcision as a badge worth dying for. It has always cost a lot to be a Jew. To be an heir to the covenant with God is both a blessing and a burden, though the burden is worth it.

And so our Lord was circumcised — to be fully a Jew, to be one with his people, to bear the costs they have to bear, and to be an heir to the covenant and its obligations. So were his twelve disciples, and all the first Christians. But what about the Gentiles who started to convert? Should they be circumcised? The early church debated this, as you can read about in the Book of Acts and in Galatians, from which our second lesson comes. Some voices argued that the inclusiveness of the gospel should not change the obligations of the covenant. They felt that to be a Christian you also had to be more or less a Jew. The debate was settled when the council of the apostles unanimously agreed that Christians can be equally Jewish or Gentile and remain that way, and that circumcision is indifferent, neither required nor prohibited, and simply a personal choice.

The Circumcision of Jesus was not celebrated as a Christian feast until the Sixth Century. It took a two-step process to establish it. First, in the Fourth Century, the church was officially established in the Roman Empire. Soon the 25th of December was quite arbitrarily chosen as the legal holiday to celebrate the nativity. Eight days later is January 1, which began to be observed, and then that was also made a legal holiday. But the establishment of the church also resulted in in evolving anti-Semitism, and over the succeeding centuries the Jewishness of Jesus began to be devalued. The Roman Church began to emphasize the naming of Jesus over his circumcision, and the title got changed to the Feast of the Holy Name.

Ultimately, in 1442, the practice of circumcision was officially prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church and made a mortal sin. This automatically condemned every Jew in Europe to hell, and the Biblical badge was made a cause of fear and shame and a mark of discrimination and anti-Semitic cruelty.

The Reformation made a change in this. The Reformed Church reaffirmed the Jewishness of Jesus and the Jewishness of the Bible, and it reaffirmed the celebration of the Circumcision of our Lord. And the Dutch Reformed Church celebrated it here in America for many years. When our congregation stopped it, I don’t know, we don’t have the records. Did we get embarrassed? Were we getting too refined? When did we start using our religion to avoid the things of fear and shame instead of using it to face them? Jesus did not avoid the suffering of his people or their oppression by the Romans. He was crucified because he was a Jew. He was mocked by the Roman soldiers because he was a Jew. He would have been discriminated against by many Christians throughout history, and in America as well. He would have been murdered in the Holocaust.

What we mark today is that for our salvation, God became a Jew. On Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, we mark that God became a human being, and today we mark that God became a Jew. As Galatians puts it, “born of a woman, born under the law.” The Jewishness of Jesus is not incidental. But his Jewishness is not just a matter of ethnicity. He already had that at his birth, just by having a Jewish mother. His Jewishness was a matter of Jewish faith and observance, and that is what began for him at his circumcision.

So what does this all mean for us today? Well, I'm not sure. It’s an open question for me, and I’m not sure what it all means. But it must affect the way that we imagine God. Look, if we say that Our Lord Jesus was bodily resurrected from the dead, in the flesh, and then that he ascended into heaven at the right hand of his Father, whatever that means, it does mean that there is a Jew at the right hand of his Father. I believe that that requires us Christians to have a special honor for Jews and for Judaism.

Not that we should avoid our differences and disagreements. For example, ironically, Jews do not believe that one of them is a member of the Holy Trinity and we do. To worship the Triune God paradoxically requires us to embrace the Judaism of Jesus. Not that we become Jewish ourselves. He was circumcised for us, not us for him. But to honor God, we need to honor God’s real history in the world, God’s commitments and God’s covenants and God’s associations. We Christians are adopted into a way of life with God which Jews are born into. We are in this not from birthright but from grace. And that must affect our view of ourselves as much as it affects our view of God.

Second, we have to embrace the suffering of Jesus for the sake of our salvation. He began to pay the cost for us already on the eighth day of his life. We embrace more than his teaching and example. To learn the Christian faith we need to learn the costs he had to bear and why had to bear them. And because Jesus is God incarnate, that means that God was circumcised, and that God’s own self was bearing that cost. Can you imagine God this way. Not just the child, not just Jesus, but God in heaven, God accepting the mark of commitment and the badge of discrimination upon God’s self. God taking our bleeding and our shame and fear into God’s own self. This is the God we can love, a God who can feel how much it costs to love, and a God who knows how much it costs us to love God back. It is a cost worth paying, it is blood worth giving, it is a name worth wearing, an adoption worth accepting, and a blessing worth receiving.

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

Christmas Eve 2011: God's Latest Masterpiece

2011-12-28T12:49:00.000-05:00

Hans Memling's Nativity

The following homily is not based on any one scripture text. The Christmas Eve homily at Old First comes very early in the service, and is always a general welcome and introduction to the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols which follows it.

Good evening, and welcome, I’m happy to welcome you here tonight. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, whatever your belief or unbelief, we’re glad you came to celebrate with us the Incarnation of Our Lord.

This is the first time, I think, that we at Old First have celebrated Christmas Eve with the use of a harpsichord. There it is, up there in the balcony, and Aleeza will be using it to accompany our singing as well as to accompany all her musicians and soloists which she has gathered for tonight. This not the first time, however, that we have celebrated Christmas here in this Upper Hall. We did it back in 1890 and 1891 when we were using this space as our church because the main sanctuary was still under construction.

We are sorry that we cannot offer you this service in our glorious sanctuary. We cannot offer you the majesty of the organ or the magic of the chandelier. You cannot enjoy the glimmer of the candlelight in the lofty vaulting of the ceiling. Because that ceiling is not safe. The engineers tell us that all the plaster ribs in the ceiling are loosening and compromised. It isn’t from water damage — it’s a structural problem of the original design, which has recently begun to fail.

So thank you for climbing those stairs. We are meeting up here because there is no room for you all in the Lower Hall. Yesterday a group of volunteers had to go up and down those stairs for hours in order to bring in everything and make this humble place a worthy church, and I thank them. And last night, I was the last one here, doing final odds and ends, and in the quiet I looked around at what they had done, and I saw that it was good, that it was very good.

Soon you will listen to the nine lessons which trace the tale of our salvation, from Adam and Eve to faithful Abraham to the prophets of Israel to the angels and shepherds to the climax of the Incarnation. The great mystery of the Incarnation is that the Lord God, the creator of the universe, took on human life and human flesh, without thereby becoming any less God or any less human.

Why would God do such a thing, why did God become incarnate? “For us and for our salvation,” says the Creed. It was for salvation that they named Jesus, which means “savior”, for he is born to save us from our sin. The Incarnation is not because God is so impressed with us and wants to be one of us; it’s because we’re sinners who need salvation. And so the wood of the manger foreshadows the wood of the cross, and the swaddling clothes his funeral shroud, and his virgin birth his resurrection. For us and for our salvation.

But I do think God also did it for God’s own joy — this creative God, this artistic God, this musical God. The Incarnation is God’s Mona Lisa, it is God’s Magic Flute. which God delights in. I will not claim this is God’s single masterpiece, considering the vast expanse of inter-stellar space and the glory of the galaxies and the infinite bounty of the stars.

Who knows what other planets there may be with life, with creatures like us who are spiritual and moral. Who knows what miracles the angels sang upon those planets. Maybe those creatures did not sin, and all of them are Unitarians. Maybe on one planet absolutely everyone is Jewish. (Maybe there’s a planet which is a total swamp and everyone is Dutch Reformed.) But on this one planet God allowed for creatures to rebel and sin in order to require the Incarnation. Which God was waiting for. And after ten billion years, suddenly, like out of nowhere, God said to the angels, “Watch this.”

Like an artist God allowed this planet to evolve, and our history to develop, and this tale to unfold, until the stage was set, and the Romans took their census, and the inn was full, and the stable open, and the shepherds ready on the hillside. The girl gave birth. God pointed to that one angel, and the angel walked in among the shepherds. God cued the chorus of the heavenly host, and they sang, and God’s new opera rang out. The music of glory within humility, the universe into poverty, holiness into squalor, divinity into flesh, and justice kissing peace. Dichotomies are reconciled, colors are conjoined, and sounds are conceived that till now even the angels regarded as impossible. But they loved it and maybe they enjoyed their bucolic audience.

My spirit tells me that God rejoiced in this, that God rejoiced in this new work, and all the stars of heaven sang for joy before the Lord. The Lord God looked on this new masterpiece, and God saw that it was very, very good.

The Incarnation, the Incarnation for God’s pleasure and delight, and God takes special pleasure in sharing it with you as a gift for you and your salvation. So it was good of you to climb those stairs tonight. You were right to come up here to share the joy of God, and to sing for the delight of God, and to know God’s pleasure and God’s love.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, All Rights Reserved.

December 18, Advent 4, "Hail, Mary, Full of Grace"

2011-12-17T09:30:00.000-05:00

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16, Magnificat, Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:26-38

(NB: This sermon draws from Heidelberg Catechism 88-90 and the Canons of Dort III/IV 10-13.)

You could take the story of the Virgin Mary as a fairy tale, a Cinderella tale. A lowly servant girl gets lifted up to royalty. Cinderella has a fairy godmother, Mary has an angel. Could this one fairy tale be true? St. Luke reports it as history and invites you to believe that it is true.

Many Christians have doubted it. They believe that it’s a made up story, and they don’t believe the miracle that’s at the center of the story, they don’t believe that a virgin can conceive, that a woman can generate a child in her womb without the sexual participation of a man. Well, Mary didn’t believe it either. She said, “How can this be, if I’m a virgin?”

If it’s hard for us to believe today, it was even harder to believe back then — it was less conceivable. In Bible times they did not understand what we take for granted in reproduction. We know that conception requires the contributions of both a father and a mother: the sperm cells from the father and the egg cell from the mother. They didn’t know that. They knew about the seed from the father, but they did not understand that a woman has eggs in her ovary. They believed that the woman was like the soil in a garden, and only the passive receiver of the seed from the man planted in her.

Today we also understand that the majority of living organisms reproduce asexually. But not the so-called higher animals. Certainly not mammals. But recently biologists have discovered that the “whiptail” lizards of the Southwest desert have only females. There are no males. The females generate new lives inside their ovaries without the need for males. So, from what we now know about biology, we can conceive of a virgin birth easier than Mary could.

But we are not lizards, and conceiving it is not necessarily believing it. It remains a miracle. It took the power of the Holy Spirit to conceive a life in her, and it was unique. It did not happen again to Mary. The younger brothers of Jesus were conceived in the normal way, with Joseph as their father. It did not happen to Elizabeth. Her miracle was different, because she and her husband still were lovers, even in their old age.

Conceiving it also needs believing it. Believing it depends on how you take the promises of God. Can you trust the promises of God even when those promises seem impossible? How big is your God, how powerful? How active is your God in the world, how passionate, how loving, how present, how personally invested? Mary was able to believe it. First she doubted it, but then she believed, and I think that was only because the Holy Spirit conceived belief in her. The Spirit conceived belief in her no less than it conceived the child in her. Her believing opened her conceiving.

Not that it was ever easy to believe. Once she believed, there were whole new difficulties. Her belief would cost her very much. Oh yes, she recognized the privilege of bearing the future King of Israel, but she would also recognize how much she’d have to sacrifice to bear this blessing. Her right to her own body, her right to her own life, her sweet young life. Her right to her husband Joseph, and his right to her. She would never have a normal life. If we find it difficult to believe in the Virgin Birth, it was especially difficult for Mary.

Why should we even try to believe in it? What’s the point of it, what does it mean for us, what promise does it carry? It has both a negative and a positive.

The negative is the contradiction of the rights of man and the power of man. I use the word “man” advisedly, for mankind and for manhood. Everything masculine is excluded. This miracle is feminist! No thanks to anything we celebrate in manliness. No thanks to strength or to authority, no thanks to honor or mastery or leadership, no thanks to the courage of David or the wisdom of Solomon. What a relief, what a gift, what a turn in human history this contradiction is, and it’s taking millennia to embrace it.

The contradiction of manhood is the symbol of the more inclusive contradiction of mankind, of humankind, including women, a contradiction of the rights of man, and human self-reliance, and on all our efforts to solve the deepest problems of the world, whether those problems are public or private, from the international to the personal. The Virgin Birth is the contradiction of our power to achieve salvation, from the salvation of our banking system to the salvation of our culture to the salvation of our souls.

But there also is a positive, and the positive is an invitation, and the invitation to comfort and to joy. The positive promise is that the Holy Spirit does conceive in you the salvation that you cannot generate yourself. The Holy Spirit does it working silently inside you as you listen to the spoken Word of God outside you. You believe the promise of God, and as you believe it the Holy Spirit conceives it. Indeed, you won’t believe it unless the Holy Spirit first conceives the seed of faith within you. It’s the Spirit’s gift of your salvation, from the salvation of your soul to the salvation of your mind for what you have to do next week to the salvation of your emotions to be able to love your loved ones. It’s an invitation to comfort and to joy. And it’s an invitation to hope.

I was talking to a Christian friend this week who was discouraged in his life. Let’s call him Kevin. Kevin asked me if he would ever be truly happy. “Why am I always so critical of other people? Why do I so seem to get people mad at me? Why are friendships hard for me? Why am I afraid? Why can’t I get over this?” He was feeling powerless to solve the problems of his personality.

I found myself saying to him,“But I can see the New Kevin in you. I have been seeing the New Kevin inside you for a long time now. Yeah, you’re down right now because you’re feeling your Old Kevin so much. Well, sorry, you’ll never be free of that Old Kevin till you die. That’s how it works, that’s why we have to die. But death is a relief, because when you die you slough off your our old nature and what’s left is only your new nature. And I can see that New Kevin in you now.”

I told him not to try to conquer his old nature or try to master it. I told him that the joyful way was rather keep his mind on his new nature. I told him to imagine his own virgin birth, that his old self was always giving birth to his new self, the new self which the Holy Spirit had conceived in him. I encouraged him to believe that it was true. I encouraged him to believe it about himself, by believing in the promises of God, maybe not as spoken by an angel privately, but as spoken in the congregation every week.

And you have to hear it again each week, like news, because there is cost and sacrifice along the way, and because of the noisy gossip of your old nature, you have to hear the real news again each week. You need to keep listening to God’s promises and challenges in order to imagine your new nature, in order to conceive of the growth and development and even the education of the child of your new self. So I told him to keep believing in the child of his new self, instead of trying to master his old nature. And his believing would be conceiving. They’re both a receiving of the gift, the gift of the Spirit within you, the gift of the love of God. I told him all this to give him hope, and comfort, and point to the way of joy instead of mastery.

So when you hear it said that people cannot really change, that we really cannot change our personalities, that once a drunk always a drunk, that really changing your personality is a fairy tale, you can agree. We can’t. We are powerless. But there is another fairy tale that’s true, and it’s tidings of comfort and joy, and it’s meant to give you hope.

This is why we love the Virgin Mary. She is you, you are she. You are a Virgin Mary. The Holy Spirit has come upon you, and the power of the Most High has overshadowed you, and the new you born in you is holy, and you will be called the Child of God. For nothing is impossible with God. And every week you say, “Here am I, the handmaid of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word.”

December 11, Advent 3: "I Am Not the Messiah"

2011-12-15T15:50:00.003-05:00

A guest sermon by our seminarian, Mr. Arin Fisher.

John 1:6-8, 19-28

1:6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

1:7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believethrough him.

1:8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.

1:19 This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levitesfrom Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”

1:20 He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.”

1:21 And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Areyou the prophet?” He answered, “No.”

1:22 Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those whosent us. What do you say about yourself?”

1:23 He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Makestraight the way of the Lord,’” as the prophet Isaiah said.

1:24 Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.

1:25 They asked him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither theMessiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?”

1:26 John answered them, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom youdo not know,

1:27 the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of hissandal.”

1:28 This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.

The text from John today fits ideallyinto the Advent schedule: it features John the Baptizer leading the way for theinitial coming of Christ. Though, to be sure, no one has any idea who John iswhen he arrives on the scene. The text from parallel gospels says that Johneats locusts and wild honey. I think that, if he had been born in America, wewould be more socially inclined to link him to one of the Georgian hillbillies fromDeliverance than to a propheticversion of Christopher McCandless or Wendell Berry. He was, quite simply,wholly other.

And he was doing something that the Pharisees hadn’t sanctioned:he was baptizing. So, naturally, they had questions: they wanted to know who hewas and by whose authority he was baptizing. And he confessed that he was not the Messiah, not Elijah, and not theprophet. And finally he identifies himself in the words of an other, theprophet Isaiah, as a “voice in the wilderness.” John says to the Pharisees,Christ is already among you and I’m not worthy to untie his sandals.

Kenosis. Kenosis is a Greek word that means emptiness, but theologically it’s aself-emptying so as to be completely receptive to God. So John self-emptied,making himself available and receptive to God’s calling. In the text weencounter John already having undergone a kenotic self-emptying. He was avessel, a prophetic voice. But I doubt he had always been that receptive toGod’s calling. Maybe he was a troubled youth at some point—or maybe he hadconstructed some kind of life plan that he thought sounded neat. We don’t knowabout John’s ambitions—he never wrote a memoir—but we know what he did: heemptied himself of his own will and received God’s instead. Then he ate locustsin the wilderness while baptizing people.

I imagine it would have been intimidatingto be approached by the priests and Levites, skeptical of his credentials andconnections. Regardless of whether he was intimidated, he did his bit: heproclaimed that Christ was soon coming. That’s where the text leaves us. Johnwas completely receptive to his calling. John surrendered himself to God’swill. This does not mean that kenosisrequires losing yourself. On thecontrary, kenosis means making roomfor God to call you to use your gifts, to call you to be in the world as Johnwas: as a sign of Christ, which we do best when we’re ourselves rather thansome contrived street preacher.

Sobefore John could even find his identity in his calling, he had to emptyhimself of his previous less satisfying identities and simultaneously recognizehis actual calling. Some might call John foolish, perhaps, for resisting. Andsome might call me naïve for advocating for identity crises. But the truth isthat we live in a country obsessed with self-creation. We hear things like, “Oh, he’s a self-made man.” Or: “Oprah! She built what she has from nothing.”Granted, that is more than true. There is, however, a price to be paidfor fabricating around us a society as artificial and mechanized as our own,and the price is that we can exist in it only on the condition that we adapt ourselvesto it and play the game

This is ourpunishment—the social form we have adopted cuts our consciousness to fit itsneeds. Its imperatives tailor our experience. The social form says that, at anycost, we must be passionless, unemotional, and docile, merging our identitywith our need for success and with our careers, rather than molding our successand careers to our affections, spontaneity, and heart. And it is not only ouremotional world that dies in this form: the world of our creative imaginationand intelligence is also impoverished. Humans can create the most sublime art,and humans can at the same time create the most depraved systems of oppression.Our kenosis begins here. We arecalled to be ourselves, not theselves that social form would have us be, but the selves that God has beencalling us to be. The trick lies in recognizing God’s calling through all thenoisy identities that social form have thrust upon us.

I rememberhow nervous I once was before a date, and my roommate told me: Just be yourself. I appreciated hisadvice, but if there’s anything less helpful in the world than being told to beyourself, I don’t know what it is. We instantly become self-conscious whenwe’re told to be ourselves. We analyze our walk, our smile, our inflections,our gestures—nothing feels natural. But if John the Baptizer is any help, I’dsay we are to be ourselves, but withcareful attention to what we know God is not calling us to be, and then withspecial attention to what God iscalling us to be. When we can isolate what we know we aren’t called to be, we have begun to live into kenosis, because we start to make moreroom for what God will finally call us to be.

In the season of Advent we arecalled to be in anticipation of Christ. One way we can be in anticipation ofChrist is to begin kenosis andrecognize, as John recognized, that we are notChrist, and so we have something to hope for. I think we have all heard of orknow people who forget they’re notJesus: people who suffer from a Messiah Complex. These people, whilewell-intentioned, try desperately to absorb the world’s suffering. Which isimpossible. And self-destructive. Ican hardly take care of myself, much less the world. I’m happy to release any hyper-ambitiousuniversal responsibility—I don’t want tobe Jesus, is what I’m trying to say. But, at the same time, we’re called tobe in the world, not as saviors, but as we are, using our gifts, doing thethings we love, and even doing things we don’t love but that need to be done.So when we are given the amazing freedom not to be Christ for the world, we arefreer to be more authentically ourselves.

Inundergrad, I had trouble remembering that I was not my parents. It’s perhapstrue that if you ever saw me in a shoulder-length wig and in sensible heels,you might mistake me for my mother. I have her ironic eyes, her severe jaw, andher hefty teeth and charming smile. It’s a pity I never inherited her socialgrace and Midwestern modesty. If you met my father, you’d recognize me in his self-conscioussmirk and his inability to lose graciously when playing chess. But, alas, I amnot my mother, nor my father, though they are both a part of me, and I bearsigns of them, like my teeth. So I can say that because I am not Christ, nor mymom, nor my dad, I came to know part of who I am: I am a gay seminarian, a closeted poet, anda hippy-dippy Christian. And the worldneeds me to be a gay seminarian, a closeted poet, and a hippy-dippyChristian. And the world needs you to be who you are, not who the world would prefer you to be.

I say thatI know part of who I am because frequentlywe learn much about who we are from what others tell us about ourselves.Without the devastating but honest realitycheck from my poet mentor, I would still be deluding myself, believing I am, asI actually once claimed to be, the reincarnation of Walt Whitman. It tooksomeone else to tell me that I’m not who I thought I was because who I thoughtI was was a fantasyself I constructed to avoid the reality of the gifts I hadbut desperately did not want to recognize. The gifts we have more often thannot lead us to know who we are and what God is calling us to. For me, I wasbeing called into seminary and the church, though I’m still learning who I’mcalled to be in the church as I hone the gifts I have. I am not a charismaticpreacher—I can’t sweat, and spit, and cry, and use theatrical movements tobring you closer to God—so in that lack of a gift—in that empty space—I trustthat the gifts I do have willcompensate for my dry temples, and together we will find an identity inanticipation of Christ, who was, and is, and is still to come.

We have acouple weeks left before Christmas, which means we have a couple weeks left ofAdvent. This is a season of great joy and, at times, greater anxiety. Betweenlast-minute shopping and work and family and travel and the cold, how can weremember that this is precisely the time to be living into kenosis? This is the time to release those things that you’re notcalled to because when you cling too tightly, it’s much harder to be a sign ofChrist in the world. So we have a couple weeks left to emulate John and releasesomething, to create some empty space. It is precisely that space we have yetto empty that Christ will fill. And there, in that empty space, is preciselywhere we will begin to bear the sign of Christ, and what was once our proudestwitness to the world of our own greatness will soon become our testimony to theworld of the greatness of God.

December 4, Advent 2, Giving Aid and Comfort to Park Slope

2011-12-07T15:55:00.001-05:00

Photos by Jane Barber of JaneBarberDesign

Isaiah 40:1-11, Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13, 2 Peter 3:8-15a, Mark 1:1-8

Our second reading is from the Second Epistle of St. Peter to the little congregations in what now is Turkey. It is frequently and easily misunderstood. For example, the meaning of the word “elements” is not the modern scientific sense as in chemistry and physics, like the elements of hydrogen and oxygen, but the ancient philosophic sense of the principles and powers which dominate our lives. The modern examples would be the so-called “iron laws” of politics and economics, like the iron law of wages or the iron law of population, or the laws of the market.

Today these elements take form in ideologies that dominate our life and limb, like terrorism or Communism or fascism or apartheid or nationalism or free-market capitalism. In St. Peter’s time they took form in gods and goddesses and the mythical power of the Rome Empire. That the early Christians did not believe in these things did not exempt them from the Roman power over them.

The Roman authorities regarded Christians as seditious and atheistic: seditious for allegiance to a Jewish king instead of Caesar, and atheistic for not honoring the Roman gods. They tolerated this as long as they were mostly Jews, but as the proportion of Gentiles increased they were seen as a threat to the Roman way of life, and the persecution started. How should the little congregations deal with this? Submission? Isn’t that appeasement? Resistance? Armed resistance, like in the Books of Maccabees? Revolution? Be patient, writes St. Peter, be at peace, be comforted by what you cannot see but what the Lord is truly doing in the world. Trust the revolution, the one that’s happening behind the scenes, beyond the boundaries of human expertise.

That cosmic imagery in the epistle is standard metaphor for revolution. You know that when we won the American Revolution we called ourselves “a new constellation in the heavens,” and we put a circle of stars in our flag. When the British surrendered at Yorktown, their musicians played the song, The World Turned Upside Down. For the recent revolution in Libya, the metaphors of St. Peter are almost literal. The loud noise of the bombs, fire dissolving the elements of Qaddafi’s power, the earth beneath his fortresses exposed and everything done in them disclosed. These are the metaphors for revolutions of magnitude and power over everybody’s life and death, and Second Peter’s extra metaphors express the coming of the Kingdom which has already come, is coming, and will come.

The little Christian congregations were truly revolutionary—the Romans were right about that—but not to take up arms. Neither fight nor flight. They need not fear the fearful things they faced if they held to the vision that the Kingdom of Heaven was all around them, invisible but not distant, as close as oxygen, as present and as powerful and as invisible as daylight. Courage, don’t give in, be patient enough to be at peace, trust the long-term revolution of the Son of God.

The way that Isaiah said it all was “Comfort, comfort my people.” It was a message for a time of crisis and stress and loss. He didn’t mean the comfort of pillows and easy-chairs. He meant the old meaning of comfort as in “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” Com-fort, fort, fortress, fortification, fortify. Comfort is both the strength you need to stay with God has given you, and the softness of holding an infant in your arms.

The Reformed Church is unique among denominations in having made a doctrine out of comfort. That’s because the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 opens with this question, “What is your only comfort in life and death?” The answer is, “My only comfort is that I am not my own, but I belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and set me free from the tyranny of the devil.” Etc.

Comfort and freedom. Comfort from belonging to Jesus, and therefore not belonging to myself nor any other element nor any system of the world. Freedom from the tyranny of the devil and freedom from the tyranny of myself and freedom from the dominion of every system or element or ideology of the world. A freedom more revolutionary than any yet produced by political revolutions, which always go to seed towards some new form of tyranny, because all flesh is grass. This is the freedom of the love of God, the love that is the power of the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Heaven which surrounds us and envelopes us and comforts us.

The Reformed Church was born within the persecution of the Holy Roman Empire and it flowered within the tyranny of Spain and it won the revolution of the Netherlands and then it got the power and the wealth and they began to interpret their comfort materialistically. They made an empire of their own to satisfy their appetites, and they came to North America to make a buck. The people of our congregation who eventually supported the American Revolution did it not for love of liberty but for free trade, and you can look it up. Our church has never been known for public stands on issues of the day. People have been asking me if our church is out there giving aid and comfort to Occupy Wall Street, and I tell them that it’s not the kind of thing we do. Now yes, the Lordship of Jesus makes very great claims upon the issues of wealth and equity, which we may not sidestep, but I believe the special mission of Old First is a different kind of comfort.

This Sunday marks ten years of my preaching here. I knew when I came that we had building issues facing us, major multi-million dollar building issues, but we never expected it to be the sanctuary ceiling falling down. So now we’re in a time of stress and loss and crisis. Last August I was making some plans for the next couple years of my life, and those plans did not include the ceiling. Who of us ever really gets to pick our issues? Our issues pick us. Don’t you find it true yourself? How few of the things that you are dealing with right now did you anticipate two years ago. You know so little as you move through life. That’s why you need the gift of freedom, if only in order to improvise, and it’s also why you have to find your comfort not in your own control or in the offerings of the systems of the world but in the gospel’s cosmic truth about the world—that Jesus is Lord and you belong to him. You have so little to go on to decide so much, so you have to believe that God has confidence in you.

So after some time of inner stress and crisis, I have committed the next couple years of my life to leading you in fixing the ceiling of our sanctuary. It’s not what I expected to be doing, and I don’t know how to do it, but I believe that this congregation can do it, even though none of us know how yet either, and I believe that we should do it for the sake of our peculiar mission as Old First. Not for a mission of restoring an historic building, but for the mission of offering to our community a sacred space, a sacred place where homeless men are welcome home, a sacred place of sufficient beauty to uplift the soul of anyone who is seeking spirituality and hope. A place where the voice of Zion is lifted up with strength to say to this neighborhood, “Here is your God.”

Every valley shall be lifted up and every hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain. That’s what we’re going to do in there, only with plaster and ribs and gypsum instead of hills and valleys, but we will be preparing the way of the Lord. We love to worship in this Lower Hall, it has a wonderful intimacy that we do not get out there, this is our private space and that sanctuary is a public space, and that’s because it is for mission, for the voice to cry with good tidings. Here is your God. Here is the truth about the world, and to know the truth will set you free, and to know who is behind the truth will comfort you.

This will challenge us. We don’t suffer the challenge of persecution, but this will challenge us. That’s one proof that it’s our mission. We’ll have to get even more spiritual. We will have to explore the freedom we have from fear and from want of money, and the freedom to believe and the freedom to speak. We’ll have to trust each other more and pray with each other more and go deeper with each other, and we’ll have to triple our involvement in small groups. This will challenge us but the payoff will be great. In the meantime, we have the comfort of this Lower Hall which is far more like a church than the barn we worshiped in from 1654 to 1662 our first six years. We have the comfort of each other and our voices. We’re up against different challenges than those little congregations to whom St. Peter wrote his letter, but we have the same promise, and we can have the same patience, and the same determination, because we know what we can’t see, that the globe of this planet is surrounded by the cosmic Kingdom of the Love of God.

With Apologies

2011-11-28T14:17:00.001-05:00

Dear Friends: I have not posted a sermon for several weeks, and it will be a while before I do again, I imagine. I have been preaching my sermons differently---not from a written manuscript, but from an outline. Sorry!

Daniel

October 30, Proper 26, True-Type Characters (#5 in the Character series)

2011-11-02T11:30:00.000-04:00

Joshua 3:7-17, Psalm 107:1-7, 33-37, 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13, Matthew 23:1-12

I’ve been a pastor for thirty-one years, and I still hesitate to call myself Reverend Meeter. It’s not the formality of the title that bothers me, or that I doubt that I deserve it (any less than anyone else), but I do feel ambiguous about it, and this gospel lesson is partly why.

I have always found it easier when the title was not in English. In my first parish in central Jersey I was Tiszteletes, which is Hungarian. In Ontario, I was Dominee, which is Dutch. In Hoboken I was called Padre sahib, which is Gujarati. When the youth group there wanted to call me something else, I asked them how they addressed their teachers, so they decided to call me Doc. In Grand Rapids it was often Dominee again. These titles all mean the same as “master” or “rabbi” or “father,” so they violate what Jesus says. But they’re foreign, and thus a little counter-cultural, and I feel them as less about status and more about affection and aspiration. I feel those especially in “Dominee.”

When I came here ten years ago, I said it didn’t matter much what people called me, except, again, the children should do as they did with their teachers. It had not occurred to me that the kids would address their teachers by their first names. That was unthinkable to those Gujarati kids in Hoboken, and it’s still uncomfortable to me, but it does not violate what Jesus says. We call him by his first name when we pray to him, and he’s the Son of God for heaven’s sake. Though he did let people call him “rabbi” and accepted Thomas calling him “Lord”.

I have never felt ambiguous about wearing a collar in public or vestments here in church. I have a special role in church, I have been appointed to an office, and as an officer I wear a uniform. Like a cop. My uniform makes me publically available. If I’m wearing my collar on the subway, very often someone asks to talk to me and I end up praying with them on the train.

Jewish men wear these phylacteries when they say their morning prayers. Inside the leather cases are fragments of the Torah, because when they put these on, they enter into their role as brides of the Torah. I can imagine the affection and the aspiration these things develop. It’s like dressing for your wedding or putting on jewelry for your lover. You’re entering a special activity, you’re going to play a role, you dress the part, like wearing the proper robe at a wedding feast, as we saw in Jesus’ parable just three weeks ago. You have been graciously welcomes into God’s sovereignty, so play the part.

There’s a little boy who lives in the apartment beneath us who has been shy of me till now, but this morning he held the front door open and he said to me, “I’m strong,” and he showed me the green plastic ring on his hand and he opened his coat and I saw his costume and he proudly announced, “I’m Green Lantern.” That's the power of aspiration.

In this series of sermons I’ve been using a theatrical metaphor for character development. You can think of your character as the role that you are writing for yourself in the unfolding drama of your life. There’s theatrical language in our gospel for today. In verse 5, Jesus says, “they do all their deeds to be seen by others,” and his term for “being seen”, θεαομαι, from which we get “theater,” suggests they’re putting on a show. But they would say, “That’s right, we are, we are being symbolic, in order to remind the people.” Doesn’t Jesus say himself, “Let your light so shine before men, that they might see your good works, and give praise to your Father in heaven.”

In the following chapter Jesus calls them “hypocrites”, and that too is theatrical, and not originally a negative. A υποκριτης was an actor or a player on a stage. You played a character, and your character was someone different than yourself, of course. In certain theaters you would even wear a mask. So when Jesus calls them hypocrites, he’s saying that they hide behind their pious masks, they’re putting on a show, they’re just acting. Sort of like Willem Dafoe playing Jesus in a movie — listen to what he says on-screen, don’t do what he does off-screen.

The point of course is your integrity of character. Your integrity. Your public face and your private soul. What you present and what you protect. Your “purity”, in the sense of being a single substance through and through. Can I be true to myself no matter what role I’m playing at the moment, or do I show different faces in different situations? Does it help to have a special costume underneath your clothes, and a secret ring upon your hand?

So, for example, if I wear collar, that suggests I am a man of prayer. But do I look like a man of prayer no matter what I wear? In social situations or at meetings, does my body language display that special mix of both energy and rest that comes with spending time in prayer? When I talk to people, does my manner display that special mix of courage and humility that comes with talking to God? How about you? Does your body language express your citizenship in the sovereignty of God?

We all aspire to be persons of such integrity. You are here because you want to have integrity through and through. You are hear because you want the way you act to be the way you are. You don’t want to wear a mask. And yet you sometimes feel like you have to, that if people really knew some things about you, then what would they think, and you might lose your position, or their esteem. You feel like you’re always having to compromise yourself to get through life. You don’t think of yourself as a hypocrite, but you feel like they make you wear a mask sometimes, and you have to be careful not to let too much out. Maybe your situation keeps you from being too much out, maybe you have to hide yourself, and this can take a toll on you. When I was a pastor in Ontario, we saw frequently that men who had been in the Dutch underground in World War II had major family problems afterward. They had learned too well to dissemble. Your own situation is probably not that bad, but the human condition is that we all need mercy when it comes to integrity of character.

Is the challenge a burden? Yes, a heavy burden, when you look at it. But when you accept it, and start to carry it, you discover this burden is light. This is that special burden that when you carry it, it holds you up. It’s not a dead burden, it has lift to it, it’s full of the Holy Spirit’s life and energy. It’s the special burden of the gospel, the burden of the Word of God, which both challenges you and comforts you, the Word of God. As St. Paul says in our epistle, these words that we read out and repeat and echo here each week, they are human words, but they carry the Word of God which is at work in you. You can trust that the Word of God is at work in you to carry you from your private to your public, to help you get into your role, to put your soul into your face, and to teach your body language to express your deep convictions.

This is why you learn the Bible stories. Not so much to study them, but to get them into your head, for God to use them to help you make those choices by which you develop your character, and also for God to use to comfort you when your frustrated in your choices and integrity. Yes, you should study the Bible too, but let me suggest you do that in a small group, where it’s less of a burden, like we offer here at Old First. But don’t ever read it too hard or too heavy — read it lightly, trust the repetition and enjoyment, simply to get familiar with the Word of God so that God can use it in your head, and God will.

Here’s what I can promise you: coming to know the character of Jesus will help you with the gradual integrity of your own character. And more, to learn the character of Jesus is to learn the character of God. And as the face of Jesus is inside your imagination, so much more the Spirit of God in alive inside you to develop you. The burden of your integrity is not on you. The burden of your integrity is on the love of God for you. So you may feel ambiguous about yourself, just as I feel ambiguous about being called “reverend,” but you can find your comfort and your certainly in the love of God for you. I can tell you that the way to have integrity of character, in and out, through and through, is to let yourself believe the loving Word of God.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Brooklyn charity in need after fire 9/29/11 : Currents

2011-10-21T15:02:00.000-04:00

Brooklyn charity in need after fire 9/29/11 : Currents

October 23, Proper 25, Satisfied Characters

2011-10-21T14:41:00.000-04:00

Deuteronomy 34, Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17, 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13, Matthew 22:34-46

Moses had to end his life with one great disappointment. He never got to enter the Promised Land, he never got to enjoy the great goal of his life. He had to be satisfied with God. The rest of the people got to have their dwelling place in the Promised Land, while his dwelling place had to be the Lord. Was his the greater satisfaction, despite his disappointment and his sacrifice?

We’ve been saying for the last few weeks that your losses and your failures serve better than your successes for developing your character. Not that success itself is bad — you need to have some success in life. You can even pray for it, as with the last line of Psalm 90: “Prosper for us the work of our hands, O prosper the work of our hands.” Prosperity is permissible, but prosperity does not build character.

Why is this so? What’s so great about failure and loss and suffering? Is it not because these things force you to learn your limits? You have to learn where you end. You have to learn that you are dust, you have to learn that your life is like the grass — in the morning you are new and fresh, and in the evening you fade and wither. Such negativity is positive for character. “The years of our life are three-score and ten, or by reason of strength fourscore, and we are soon gone, and we fly away, so teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom.” Teach us to learn our limits, and we will be better, and happier, and generous.

Not necessarily. We all know people whose loss and suffering make them bitter, unsavory and mean, angry and defensive, or overly competitive or overly acquisitive. They have their reasons to believe that the state of nature for human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and we have no choice but to live accordingly. We all know people like this.

Perhaps the difference is that to make good from your losses you need to have something outside yourself to hope for, something beyond your limits to believe in. This is why military service builds character when the soldier is fighting for what he can really believe in, but not when the whole point of the battle is uncertain, as we have discovered with our veterans of recent wars. That something beyond your limits to believe in has taken various forms in human history. In ancient Egypt it was immortality — as a compensation for human pain and suffering, to share the immortality of the gods. As pervasive as this was in Egypt, the Children of Israel left it behind them when they left Egypt. The aspiration to immortality is totally absent from the Torah and the faith of the Hebrews. There was no monument to Moses, no pyramid, no obelisk, no sarcophagus, no mummy. They grieved for him for forty days, and then they let him go. They had to be satisfied with God.

On the other side of them was Mesopotamia, and the empires of Babylon and then Assyria, which were dedicated to the accumulation and centralization of political and economic power. Power was their compensation for the pain and suffering of life. In other civilizations the aspiration has been greatness, or glory, or honor, or prestige, or fame. This was the Hellenistic aspiration, and then the Renaissance ideal, and then the Humanist ideal, and in the secular world it’s still held up. It’s what’s behind the Olympics, and it’s the assumption of our schools, especially our private ones, and it is not without its value.

But functionally this classical ideal has been replaced, in America and worldwide, by the aspirations of nationalism, on one hand, and on the other of materialistic consumerism, a double aspiration in a dangerous combination. And so people have come to believe that the primary task of our governments is to grow our economies, our own national economies in competition with those of other nations. The further problem is that because our current economic system requires our economies grow by means of consumption, we end up becoming competitive consumers. I have spoken of this before, but it bears repeating because it’s so pervasive.

Some consumption is necessary (you need to consume food to stay alive), but we’re in a fix because our system requires us to ignore that there are limits on our wealth, and to keep our economy growing at such and such a rate requires us to keep on buying more consumer goods, and to believe that we need them, and thus keep ourselves from being satisfied. And in this whole mix, the cultivation of the qualities of good character is disincentive to success, as is revealed by the raft of recent books on all the characters of Wall Street. According to Michael Lewis’ latest book, the government of Greece started digging itself into a hole when in order to enter the Eurozone it decided to be deceptive about its national debt, and so they enlisted Goldman Sachs to help them with financial structures which were deliberately deceptive and eventually destructive, but which made a lot of money for Goldman Sachs. It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s the characters. It’s not at all simplistic to say that the political and economic problem of the world today are really ethical and spiritual.

God made the world to have enough for all, but not if we’re all competitive consumers. So for the sake of the world and for the sake of those around you and even for the sake of yourself, one of your jobs as a Christian is to learn how to be satisfied, to cultivate the gift of satisfaction. Let me say it again, it’s a take home: One of your jobs as a Christian is to cultivate your satisfaction. To do this job requires you to learn to discipline your desires. What is that you want? What is that you think you need? These are good questions to ask yourself. If you’re having any trouble in your life, or if you’re facing some big decision, you might sit down and ask yourself all this. What do you desire? What do you require? What do you require to be happy, and what are your standards for success? Ask yourself, What are the limits in your life that you accept?

You might feel in this some resignation. Maybe some disappointment. Let me suggest you rather regard it as reconciliation. Not just with the facts of life, but reconciliation with the God who gave you life. It’s the teaching of the scriptures that you won’t be satisfied with anything unless you’re satisfied with God, and it’s the witness of believers through the ages that when you are satisfied with God, then you will become satisfied with everything else. You can believe it, and I have seen it, and I feel it in myself that even I am coming around to it.

Moses is for all of you. You can see places you can’t get to, you can see things you can’t have, you can even see promises that go to other people than yourself. But those things do not satisfy unless your soul is satisfied with God, and it’s only God that can satisfy your soul.

So here is my resolution of the problem I posed earlier, how pain and loss and suffering can enhance good character when you have something beyond your limits to hope for and believe in. For Christians that is not immortality but a living God who is faithful without limits; it is not power but a God who is righteous and seeks justice; it is not greatness or glory or honor or prestige or fame, but a God who is loving to the point of sacrifice and calls us to be servants of this love. Desiring this God is the aspiration past your limits which helps you develop a character which is fitting for the Sovereignty of God, a character characterized by satisfaction. Isn’t it lovely that when Jesus commands you to love God and to love your neighbor, he’s commanding you to do what satisfies you most. Yes, you do need to learn your limits, but you also need to recognize your gifts, and a very great gift that you have been given is the capacity to know the love of God. In order to be satisfied, let yourself be loved by God.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

October 9, Proper 23, Kingdom Characters #3, Lovely Aspirations

2011-10-07T12:37:00.001-04:00

image copyright © Mount Carmel Ministries, all rights reserved.

Exodus 32:1-14, Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23, Philippians 4:1-9, Matthew 22:1-14

This parable is the Monty Python parable, the Marx Brothers parable, the Three Stooges parable. Whatever is comic, whatever is confusing, whatever is vengeful, whatever is violent, whatever is impulsive, whatever is short-sighted, if there is any unfairness, if there is any impatience, that is this parable. Is this really what the Kingdom of Heaven is like?

For today I will say two things: first, the finish of this parable is not within the parable, but in your response to it, and second, the Kingdom of Heaven is offered as free for all and open to everyone and absolutely welcoming, but once you find yourself in it, the Kingdom has its expectations. Of course the poor guy had just been pulled into the party and had no chance to get a clean robe on, but what about you who hear this parable: the kingdom is near, so dress for it. Act the part, if you've been made a part of it.

It’s analogous to Exodus 32. The Children of Israel had not asked God to lead them out into the desert. They had only asked for relief from the misery of their slavery. God gave them more than they asked for, God gave them freedom from the realm of Pharaoh and then all the blessings of the realm of God. But they do not act the part. They use their freedom to indulge their fears and appetites. “Make us gods that we’re familiar with. Make us gods who will serve us and who will not challenge us. Make us gods who have no expectations.”

The Realm of God is welcoming and gracious. You find yourself within it. Maybe you started coming to church, and then you began to see the Realm of God behind you and before you. Or maybe you were baptized into it, and you grew up knowing you were in it; you grew up knowing that “The Lord is near.” However you find yourself within it, you face its challenge and its expectation that you act the part, and that you have a certain kind of character. Which might daunt you, except that its expectation is most natural. Not the kind of “natural” the flesh regards as natural, with our distractions and idolatries, with our typical indulgence of our fears and appetites, but the “natural” of God’s original intention and design, the truly human nature which we can aspire to.

This is the third sermon in a series of sermons on “character”, the kind of character that goes with being a citizen within the Realm and Sovereignty of God. Your character is the rôle that you are writing for yourself in the long-term drama of your life. Your character is not static but dynamic, and you develop your character through your choices that you make through time, each choice affecting your further choices. Your choices have momentum and a trajectory, which affect your posture and your attitude, your uprightness and your soundness as you address your life. Your choices leave a residue—your look and your smell, whether you are savory or unsavory. The combination of that residue and your attitude is the character you show the world.

My method in this series is to ask the Sunday lessons what they might tell us about character. This week is easy. “Finally beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything praiseworthy, think about these things.” A list of virtues to aspire to. Actually not so much a list as a field, because these virtues are not discrete, they overlap, they weave into each other, they blend into the fabric of the robe to wear within the Realm of God.

What’s remarkable about this list is that these words are not narrowly Biblical. St. Paul does not take them from the Torah and the Prophets. That may be because the Christians in Philippi, as indicated by their names, were not Jews but Greeks, and in Hellenistic culture, these virtues were already familiar. And so any new convert could recognize these virtues and immediately aspire to them. But I think there’s something else. These virtues are not peculiar to God’s people. They are the truly human virtues, which many cultures have aspired to. And so to live within the Realm of God is not to live apart in some utopia, it is to live within the restoration of humanity and the reclamation of human culture. The Realm of God is what the world desires even when it does not know its own desiring. You don’t have to be a believer to see the virtue of these virtues.

Whatever is true: αληθη, that is, genuine, honest, sincere, and true;
whatever is honorable: σεμνα, pious, noble, stately, and honorable;
whatever is just: δικαια, right, righteous, trustworthy, and just;
whatever is pure, ἁγνα, chaste, holy, unsullied, and pure;
whatever is pleasing, προσφιλη, lovely, winsome, and pleasing;
whatever is commendable, ευφημα, well-spoken of, reputable, commendable;
if there is any excellence, αρετη, any virtue, any excellence;
if there is anything praiseworthy, επαινος, worthy of admiration and esteem, anything praiseworthy — think about these things.

Get your mind off yourself, and get it on these aspirations. That means, paradoxically, not to focus on making yourself better, or whether you’re improving, like Mayor Koch, always asking, “How’m I doing?” Don’t worry about your own success at these or your performance. It’s not like learning the piano or the violin, where you have to think about your fingering, it’s like singing: you hear the notes, and from within you rise to them, your body is designed quite naturally to sing. And God designed your mind to think about these things and your soul to aspire to them, you were made for these virtues to be natural, you were not made to aspire to your appetites and self-indulgences or to be governed by your fears and your idolatries. Keep your eyes on the virtues and not upon yourself, and you will be joyful; when your attention is not on yourself you will rejoice and again rejoice. Choose for them. Be guided by them in your choices. Set them up as targets and keep aiming at them when you make your choices and decisions. Yes, put them up as slogans on the mirror in your bathroom. Get tee-shirts printed up with the words on them in some nice pattern, maybe shorts would be more telling. Wear these virtues like clothing, if they’re still outside you, and you can live into them.

Now these virtues are not only idealistic, only for the good times. They’re especially for the bad times, the critical times. The Epistle to the Philippian Christians is lovely and pleasing but it’s not House Beautiful magazine. Their situation was more like the Diary of Anne Frank. They were regarded by the Romans as seditious in their loyalty to Jesus as their Lord, their worship of the God of Israel was illegal in the city, so you can imagine the pressure they felt when they crowded in their little homes to break the bread. No wonder Euodia and Syntyche gave each other friction. St. Paul advises them to have a common mind: not sharing their own minds, but the mind of Christ. The mind of Christ who stood firm against the pressure of his opposition, but yet whose gentleness was known to all. The same should be the character of the congregation; that should be their reputation in the city of Philippi. These virtues are for witness and community.

Today we baptize Claire. We commit to a community in which she can learn these virtues by watching us aspire to them, by watching us make our choices and decisions in the direction of our aspirations. We commit to develop our own characters this way, and we want to populate this community of Jesus with a cast of characters in which she can take her place and add her voice and act her part. Today she is our joy and today she is our crown. Her future is what we love and long for, and as much we love her, she is even more beloved of God.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

October 2, Proper 22, Knowing the Law, Knowing Christ, #2 in the series, Kingdom Characters

2011-10-01T13:59:00.000-04:00

Photo copyright © 2010, by Jane Barber, http://www.janebarberdesign.com/, all rights reserved.

Exodus 20:1-20, Psalm 19, Philippians 3:4b-14, Matthew 21:33-46

Last Sunday I began a series of sermons on “character”, the kind of character that goes with being a citizen of the Kingdom of God. Last week I said that your character is the rôle that you are writing for yourself in the long-term drama of your life. I said that your character is not static but dynamic, you develop your character by the choices that you make through time, each choice affecting your further choices. I said your choices have momentum and trajectory, which affect your posture and your attitude. I said your choices have a residue, and the combination of residue and attitude is your character.

My method in this series is to ask each new set of Sunday lessons what they might say about character. This week is easy. The Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are the handy guide to character development for Jews and Christians. That’s why they’re up on the reredos in our sanctuary, because they were read out every week in the old Dutch Reformed liturgy. That’s how I learned them by heart as a child, by hearing my father read them out every Sunday morning.

Only two of the ten are stated in the positive. For special emphasis, because of how distinct they make the culture of the Israelites. The distinction of the Sabbath Day is obvious, and it has many social and economic implications, especially that laborers get a day off every week, which was unheard of and unwelcome, and had specially to be ordered by God.

But what’s distinct about honoring your parents? Well, in Egypt and all the other nations it was the nobility that you had to honor. The ordinary life of most people was regulated by social class and economic class, and you had to show honor to people of privilege: “Your majesty, my lord, your highness, your honor,” no matter how they treated you.

But God’s people are a society of radical equality and a single social class, without nobility, except— you are never the equals of your parents, and they are your nobility whom you must honor. This too has many implications, but not for today.

Eight of the ten commandments are in the negative, and that’s because they presume our freedom and initiative. You tell a slave what he must do, because he has no freedom, but your daughter has freedom and initiative, so you instruct her differently: you set limits for her, and tell her where she may not go and what she may not do. These negative commandments are like the fences of your yard. The rabbis described them as a fence, which metaphor Jesus uses in his parable, in the first verse. The fence around the vineyard is the Torah, the Law of God.

One of the most important gifts we give our children is a sense of boundaries. It’s as necessary to tell them what they may not do as what they may do. Many parents seem afraid of this, and maybe they fear the reputation of the negative. We see them give their children too much choice, too much freedom, more than they can handle, and children don’t know where to stop, and they end up with characters combining selfishness with insecurity. Maybe many parents don’t have good boundaries for themselves, and they transfer onto their kids the unchecked combination of their own fears and their own desires driving them. Adults need boundaries too, and God gives you boundaries precisely because God has also given you the gift of freedom.

Boundaries provide resistance to your freedom, and it’s resistance that helps you build your character. As with physical exercise, you only build your muscle strength with resistant exercises, so the boundaries of God’s law give resistance to your freedom for the building of your character. The judgments of God are the opposition to your ego for the cultivation of your character. But according to St. Paul, the law of God is not enough. There has to be a further energy and motivation. For him it is a passion and desire which he identifies in Philippians 3:10-11: “I want to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” That’s my own personal verse, by the way, my core directive, the verse I want the preacher to preach on at my funeral.

What does it mean to “know Christ”, especially in terms of cultivating character? Well, of course, there’s emulation: he’s an example and a model for you in your choices. And there’s devotion: he is your Lord, as you repeat in the Apostles Creed: “And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.” Devotion to a Lord means service and obedience, which also guide your choices.

But St. Paul means more than that, something spiritual and transcendent. “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.” We know him on this side of his resurrection, between his resurrection and his return again, we know him not as a close friend here with us, but as the ascended Lord, into whose person is packed the new creation of the world, the new world that is coming, which he embodies in himself. The new world is ahead of us, it’s already established and waiting for us to get there, when we ourselves will somehow attain the resurrection from the dead.

That new world is not just a dream for the future, it’s a reality already in the future, on the other side of the boundary of death, a reality made by God, with a life and a power invested backwards, sort of, from the future into the presence of Christ. You share in that power which he exercises in the world by your knowing him. By knowing him, especially in worship and in prayer, you open your life to the power of his Spirit which gives the energy and motivation to the choices which you keep making in your life.

St. Paul also says a negative. “I want to know the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.” Why the negative? Well, remember that I referred last week to an article from the New York Times magazine, and the title of that article is this: “What If The Secret to Success Is Failure?” Just as failing and then getting through your failure is essential for cultivating your character, so sharing the suffering of Christ and then conforming to his death gives you the resistance and the boundary you need. This sharing and conforming provide the inner opposition of which I spoke last week, the repentance and humility, the ordeal that you work through each week freely, the often painful self-awareness which leads to greater empathy and love. It’s a kind of training.

St. Paul ends with an athletic metaphor. So let’s say the commandments are the fences and foul lines and the strike zone and the bases, and let’s say that knowing Christ is the actual playing of the game. It’s only by playing that you develop your skills, the skills of character, and you can improve your skills even when you lose a game. You can risk, you can try, you can gamble and experiment, because it has already been won for us by Christ, the victory is not just a dream, it’s a reality that has power for us now, and you can make free choices with courage. You know, courage does not mean no fear, courage means going through your fear to do the right thing anyway, even if the right thing means sharing his suffering. And the point of being configured to his death is not that you be crucified, but that your natural fear of death and your natural fear of loss do not control your choices, not even the loss of honor or reputation or esteem, all of which he lost on the cross.

The implication is that the greatest freedom of all comes when you are free from yourself, you are free from your credentials and your gains, free from your achievements and success, free from everything you think you know, free from what you’re trying to prove to other people, free from what you think you know about yourself, and that’s because what you want to know is Christ. It is so liberating to not belong to yourself, and paradoxically empowering. You are free to choose the only thing you are not free of, the only thing really demanded of you, which is to love, to love your neighbor as yourself, and to love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. You make your choices in order to cultivate a character of love, because you want to know God.

September 25, Proper 21: When Bad Things Happen to a Good Messiah; # 1 in a series, Kingdom Characters

2011-09-24T15:13:00.000-04:00

Exodus 17:1-17, Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16, Philippians 2:1-13, Matthew 21:23-32

Last winter and spring I preached a series of sermons on the Kingdom of God, because the Kingdom of God is the great theme of the Gospel of Matthew. What is the Kingdom, what does it include, what life is like within it, how do we see it, how do we seek it, how do we receive it. Today I’m starting another series, more about us, the citizens of that Kingdom, and what the Kingdom offers us, who seek it, and what it expects of us, who receive it. I will focus this series on the word “character”: Christian character, godly character, Kingdom character.

This focus was given to me by one of you, this past week, when you wrote me in response to my sermon last Sunday. You felt a connection with an article in the Sunday New York Times magazine, describing how two schools in New York City are trying to teach good character. An educator friend of mine sent me a copy of that article the next day. The issue of “character” is in the air. So my plan for the coming Sundays is to ask one question of every set of our scripture lessons: “What do these lessons have to tell us about Christian character?” I don’t know yet what the answers will be. The title for this series is “Kingdom Characters,” in the plural, because we’re not expected to be all the same.

But in our epistle lesson St. Paul challenges us to have the same mind and to be of one mind. Of course he does not mean that we conform our minds to each other, that you conform your mind to my mind or I to yours, but that we all aspire to the mind of Christ—which is a challenge to us all. Character needs challenges. You develop character by working out your challenges, especially suffering, pain, and loss. It was true for Jesus too. He was not an angel, he was a human being, he had to develop his character, especially through the challenge of his loss and suffering, and the shame of the crucifixion.

We can observe the mind of Christ, the mind that we aspire to, when he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, yes, who for the sake of his mission did not defend his honor as the rightful prince of Judea, nor did he hang on to his position as the legitimate Son of David, or grasp the rights of his position as the lawful Messiah of Israel.

To not hold onto your position is something rulers just don’t do. I heard Jimmy Carter tell Charlie Rose that he considered his presidency a failure, simply because he did not get reelected. How much of what Barack Obama does is driven by his natural desire to get reelected; it is what rulers do, they want to hold on to their positions. Not Jesus, though. What he held to was his mission, even at the cost of his position, trusting that the God who had commissioned him would see him through the fear and trembling to work it through. This was so unusual his opponents didn’t know what to make of him and so they were afraid of him. And that too was part of his suffering, that he was feared and opposed by those he came to save.

Look at the gospel lesson. It takes place the day after Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered the city like a prince, and cleansed the temple like he owned it, throwing out the money-changers who no doubt had to give a cut to the temple authorities. Of course the authorities want to know what right Jesus has to do such things, and what are his credentials. His question back to their question is right on point, because the answer to his question is the same as the answer to their question. And they do have an answer, but they will not say it, because they fear the people and they want to protect their position. They can’t be certain that the people will rise against them, but to people in power every potential threat is a real threat, as Dick Cheney has written.

They weren’t bad people, the chief priests and the elders. Jesus was pushing all their buttons. They were in a tough position, between the Romans and an unruly populace, and so to keep things under control they hang on tight to their position, and they back off from the right choice, the risky choice, the courageous choice.

Stanley Hauerwas has written that your choices and the succession of your choices are what determine your character. Your character is not static but dynamic, you work it out by the choices that you make. And the choices you make today both open up and close off the further choices of tomorrow. Your choices have momentum and a trajectory, they position your inclinations and your leanings and your posture and your attitudes as you address your life. Your choices also leave with you a residue, with things like compassion and sympathy and with what that magazine article called “grit”, and with other things like shame and guilt. The composite of these attitudes and aptitudes you can call your character, the role that you have written for yourself in the ongoing drama of your life.

In the ancient Greek dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the characters are always in bondage to the choices of their past. This bondage is compounded by the grip of Fortune, with a capital F, and by the selfish ambition of the gods and goddesses. You get the same thing in the Iliad and Odyssey, which is what the Philippians will have been educated in.

So they must have found it liberating, and maybe a little scary, to learn from the Gospel that neither Fortune nor the gods have any such power, and that the Lord Jesus offers freedom from the bondage of your past. You are always free to choose what’s right, even when it’s difficult. Jesus offers that freedom to the chief priests and elders, they still have the choice to heed the parable and let go of their position and be welcomed into the Kingdom. With the Lord Jesus, every judgment is an invitation and every challenge is a welcome. But for you to receive his freedom he requires of you a transformation instead of just an adjustment in your trajectory, and that transformation risks the loss of your position, and so you regard his challenge as an obstacle.
How you handle obstacles and opposition is the real test of your character. If you aspire to the mind of Christ, you will face opposition from the outside, certainly, but the more critical opposition is from inside yourself, when you oppose yourself by means of repentance, or with that long term character trait of “humility”. That’s a challenge if you want to get ahead. The only way to get to be Caesar, for example, was by selfish ambition. But by humility I don’t mean softness, and by repentance I don’t mean groveling. I mean resting from your momentum, not pushing your trajectory, risking your position. Emptying of everything but yourself. That is the mind of Christ.

Which has its benefits. It means you do not have to defend yourself or prove yourself. Jesus did not defend himself to the priests and elders, he knew who he was. He did not have to assert his authority or fight for his position, because both his authority and his position were grounded in his character. You can have that freedom too by being grounded in your character when your character is a Kingdom character, sharing the mind of Christ.

He emptied himself. He did not grasp at the rights of either his earthly royalty or his heavenly divinity. He emptied himself because that is God’s character anyway, this is the God who bends towards us—who yields to us, who yielded, for example, to the complaining of the Israelites. That is the character of God, and Jesus kept choosing for that kind of character his whole life, even to the loss of everything he had. And so his Father gave it all back to him as a gift, a greater position, and the name above every name, the name of “the Lord”, Adonai. We Christians believe that Jesus is rightly called the Lord God because he had in him the fullness of God’s character. When you aspire to the mind of Christ you are aspiring to the mind of God.

I close with a paraphrase of that final verse in our epistle: “Work out your Kingdom character in fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to desire and to choose for God’s good pleasure.” And God’s good pleasure is nothing other than Love. God’s love is built into God’s character, so that I can even say that God can’t help it, loving you. And that certainty of God’s love is the position in which you stand.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

September 18, Proper 20: When Good Things Happen to Bad People

2011-09-15T17:17:00.000-04:00

(photo by Jane Barber)

Exodus 16:2-15, Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45, Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16

Our gospel lesson is called the Parable of the Vineyard. The Parable of the Vineyard is pictured in the stained glass window on the north wall, in the right-hand panel. You see the figure of a worker standing at a grapevine, and before him is the inscription from Matthew 20:4, “Go ye also into the vineyard.”

I have never seen this subject in a stained-glass window in any other church, and I would love to know why this subject was chosen, and if it was chosen by the Lott family, the old Brooklyn family who gave it. In 2002 the window took on new meaning for us after the accidental death of Alan Q. Hayes, an elder here. The bookmark in his Bible was at this parable, so that’s what I preached on at his funeral. His death was unfair. And the parable is about when our feeling of unfairness affects our belief in God.

A vineyard is harvested as quickly as possible, so that the grapes can be pressed all at once. As the day wears on, and if the crew is running late, you hire more hands. That’s expected, and you can pay the later workers less. But this owner didn’t pay them less—he was generous with them, which the early ones felt as unfairness instead of generosity. But it was fair, objectively, because the owner paid them what he promised them. But we resent the gifts that other people get when we don’t get them too.

In this parable Jesus does a couple things. He pictures how we are with the grace of God when we see it lavished on other people than ourselves. And he illustrates his own ministry, and why so many good people among the Jews found him offensive. It’s not that he was not loving and gracious with them. It’s that he was no less as loving and gracious to bad people as he was to good people. He is generous to everyone, not as they deserve it, but as they need it. Jesus does not give out points for good behavior. That means there is no point to be good, except just to be good. Being good has to be its own reward. And being good will not exempt you from suffering and sorrow.

Twenty years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote that best-selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I was always troubled by the book’s implicit assumption, that it’s okay when bad things happen to bad people. Jesus turns this upside-down. If Jesus wrote a book he’d call it, When Good Things Happen to Bad People. There’s a take-home for today: What is the distinctive message of Jesus among all the religions of the world? Answer: “When Good Things Happen to Bad People.”

The way of Jesus was the way of God in Israel. You see it in the story of the manna from Exodus. He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack. God blessed them as they needed it, not as they deserved it. God provides, God does not reward. You can’t impress God, you can’t win God, you can’t control God, you can only receive from God.

The children of Israel hardly knew this God. They’ll have been much more familiar with the gods and goddesses of Egypt than with this god of their distant ancestors, who had been silent for 400 years, this god, for all they knew, whose kingdom was the desert and whose palace was a mountain, where they have to go to meet him. Well, they were now his guests, in his realm, and as his guests they felt he was obliged to feed them. It was only proper hospitality that God should gave them manna. Moreover, they were purchased by blood from slavery to the pharaoh, by the blood of the Passover lamb, and now they belong to this god, and as his servants they have the right to proper rations. God is obliged to give them their rations as long as they’re on the march.

I think Moses is upset because of the way they asked for it, not asking in faith, but as complaining, insulting God, slandering the liberation God won for them. Ingrates! Well, they’re afraid. They are free, but they don’t know what freedom means, and freedom is scary. They don’t know what to expect from this god, and their years of slavery had trained them in distrust and resistance. Through the whole of the Exodus they are passive-aggressive, defensive, untrusting, unbelieving, always acting in victim mode.

People prefer the misery they know to the freedom they can’t predict. They would not have left Egypt voluntarily, despite their suffering there. The plagues were designed to force them out as much as to make Egypt let them go. The Red Sea was a barrier not only to Pharaoh’s armies but also against their going back. They were resistant to God’s grace and generosity. They are a microcosm of the human race. They are us. We all experience God’s generosity as unfairness.

The manna is a gift designed to train them in receiving grace. We need to be trained in receiving grace, because we are unable to receive it even when we need it and crave it, so God helps and trains us in receptivity. God was teaching Israel the discipline of receptivity by sending the manna six days out of seven, with double on the sixth day, and none on the seventh. It was an exercise in trusting and obeying, a training in receiving.

Why do we resist God’s grace? Maybe we sense how much it challenges us. Either, like the Israelites, we’re trained to be victims, or like the vineyard workers, we have a notion of our own deserving and we don’t like to be treated out of generosity. Both of these are selfishness, the one developed as a survival strategy and the other the natural compulsion of self-regard. In either case, God trains us to get out of ourselves. God challenges the Israelites to look up, to look out into the desert, and there they see the glory of the Lord. They had to look up into what they were afraid of.

God trains us also in the patterns of receptivity. One of the reasons that Our Lord instructed us to celebrate Holy Communion frequently is because it is a very physical enactment and reminder of our need for receptivity. We have to come up to the table, and hold our hands out to receive, worthy or unworthy. You’re worthy only if you’re willing to be counted among the unworthy. It’s a gift to teach us the reception of God’s gifts. It’s another gracious circle. The gifts of God in particular are designed to teach us how to receive the gifts of God in general. We are willful people, and proud, and fearful, and the world is unkind and unfair, so we are reminded and rehearsed in the disciplines of receptivity.

A take-home here is that progress in the Christian life is not about getting better and better at being good. That way lies the temptation of merit and deserving. Progress in the Christian life is getting more and more receptive to God’s grace. It is learning to say “Thank you, God, thank you for your mercy.” Even while walking through the desert, and risking hunger and thirst. Do you want to be a better Christian? Don’t work on your performance. Work on your receptivity and gratitude.

It’s hard to say thank you when you feel like you’ve been suffering. It was suffering for the vineyard workers who had worked all day, and were hot and thirsty and exhausted, to stand on line for their wages, and watch the other workers get paid the same for much less work. Your suffering is watching others get a break when you don’t, and when, time after time, you get what you have coming to you, but they get more. Your suffering is to accept God’s providence which never provides you with what you deserve. Your suffering is to accept that merit is irrelevant. But so is faith. Your suffering is to accept with open hands your life as you are dealt it. And that’s what faith is too.

Your suffering is a worthy investment. It yields a life of confidence and joy. St. Paul says that it’s a privilege to suffer for Christ. St. Paul suffered double, as a Jew among the Romans and as a Christian among the Jews. He wrote Philippians from jail. The Philippians suffered by an allegiance to Jesus as Lord, which was illegal in a Roman military town, and they could be rounded up at any time. The privilege is not to seek out suffering, but to recognize the fact of it, and rightly to interpret it, and to regard it not as victimization but as a privilege. That’s what love does. You can clean toilets as a victim, or you can clean them out of love.

You suffer by living in-between, between the great huge gift way ahead of you, and the many small gifts behind you, and right before you the unfair, broken world which God has promised to save but hasn’t yet. You stay within it and you bear your part of it. Your suffering is in your receptivity, your awareness of incompletion, that things are not how they’re supposed to be, and you still believe, you believe in the goodness you have seen in your own life and in the gifts you have received, passing as they may have been, or as mixed with pain and grief, or as ordinary to the eyes as bread, but seeing it as bread from heaven with your eyes of faith and hope and love. The love of God trains us to receive the love of God.

Sermon for 9/11, Proper 19, What You Did Ten Years Ago

2011-09-15T16:42:00.001-04:00

(photos by Hugh Crawford)

See Louise Crawford's Park Slope Patch report on the service.
Exodus 14:19-31, Exodus 15:1b-11, 20-21, Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35

Let me tell you what you did ten years ago, Old First, let me tell you and remind you. Ten years ago, on that Tuesday morning, when the smoke was over Brooklyn and the paper raining down, some of you knew right away that you had to open the doors of the church for sanctuary and shelter. You kept the doors open all week, every day, until the following Sunday afternoon. You did this for everyone, no matter what religion or no religion. And the people came, they sat in here in shock and grief and many came to pray. You hosted them, you gave them music for their souls. You hung up sheets of newsprint, and you put out markers, and people wrote their thoughts and prayers. The people responded with gratitude.

The sheets are up there on the walls and in the narthex. You should read them. They are part of you. Even if you were not here then, if you only came here recently, they are now a part of you, of this community of soul on soul and spirit touching spirit back through three-and-a-half centuries, you today are still the hosts and the stewards of these real prayers of real people in their time of need.

Some of the prayers were written on that first afternoon, for people known to be working on the 73th floor of building 2, for example, or in the Windows On The World. It was not yet known how many had been killed. There are prayers from later in the day, from survivors just come home, prayers of thanksgiving for having gotten out alive, but also prayers for the cops and the firemen, for Squad One, name by name, as the rumors came that they were lost. There are prayers from Wednesday and Thursday, prayers for those still missing, prayers for those who were trapped in the rubble and for those who were toiling on it, prayers of hope and prayers of grief, many statements of love and a couple words of hate, prayers by Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus. Prayers in French and Spanish and Hebrew and Hindi and Japanese. Prayers for the President and prayers for peace, very many prayers for peace, prayers for an end to the cycle of violence and prayers for no more war—which in the next ten years we did not listen to.

Few of the prayers are signed. But we don’t have to know the names of those who wrote them, because they prayed for all of us, not only for you who lived here then, but also for us who lived beyond New York, around the world. These prayers were personal at first, but over the decade they have become more universal, and when we read them now they blend into a great, thick prayer, a single prayer of many different voices.

A couple years ago these sheets were damaged. We had stored them up in the steeple, and then the tornado blew a window in, and it threw these sheets around and some of them got soaking wet, and the ink and colors ran together and the words were blurred. They look like abstract water color paintings, with random broken phrases legible. It seems right somehow, and fitting, that the thoughts and prayers have blended into each other, and have blended into the choruses of heaven.

On that first Friday evening, I came here too, with Melody. We had just driven here from Michigan. We saw the people sitting in the narthex and in the sanctuary, with their candles and their flowers, sitting in small groups or alone, and we saw all these sheets, still new and fresh. We walked down Seventh Avenue, and every other church was closed up tight. But you were open. You had discovered your mission to offer sanctuary to anyone seeking spirituality and hope. That’s why you are being blessed by God, Old First, even in your struggles and your weaknesses.

None of those sheets have prayers of victory, like in our reading this morning from Exodus 15. Maybe the members of Al Qaeda were praying like that, but no one here was praying like that. It might have been different if the pillars of smoke and fire were pillars of salvation, like for the Israelites at the Red Sea, but the fiery pillars here were of destruction and of loss. In Exodus 14:31 it says that the Israelites saw the great work that God had done, and “they feared the Lord and believed in the Lord.” Well, those prayer sheets reveal that many Brooklynites who saw the great evil those terrorists had done were able still to fear the Lord and believe in the Lord. The record is there, and we are the witnesses.

So now what? At least two things. First, you have to keep on doing what you did then, Old First, this mission given you by God, to offer sanctuary to anyone seeking spirituality and hope. You did it this summer too with the respite shelter. You can learn new ways to practice this, with our building, with our small groups, and in your personal relationships.

Second, you have to make another kind of sanctuary in the midst of human sin and violence, and you do this by forgiveness. Forgiveness not just as a single act, but forgiveness as a system, a cycle, which goes the opposite direction of the cycle of vengeance and violence. Violence generates further violence, and you oppose that cycle with the cycle of forgiveness generating more forgiveness. That’s what Jesus means when he says that his Father will not forgive us if we don’t forgive others. It’s not that God is punishing for not forgiving, it’s that God has built the world this way, that forgiveness is a cycle which you have to enter into in order to receive from it.

Forgiveness is not easy, especially the ones who wronged you don’t deserve forgiveness and and they don’t repent. This takes work. When the Lord Jesus says seventy-seven times, he means a single evil that someone does to you can be so hurtful and destructive that every day you have to forgive him all over again. You did forgive him yesterday, but then today you see how much your life is still affected by his sin, and you have to forgive him once again. It’s about remembering and forgiving, not forgiving and forgetting. It’s not even about accepting. And forgiving might include non-violent resistance. Seventy-seven times, remembering and forgiving again.

You need to remember what they did ten years ago, and tell the awful truth of it, for another sixty-seven years, and then forgive them, for, as Jesus said upon the cross, they didn’t know what they were doing. To forgive means to be free of it, to not let your freedom and your future be determined by their sin. You make a space of freedom in the world of human misery and suffering, you make a space of love and justice in the world of human violence, you make a sanctuary of peace.

This is what you did, Old First, and this is what you are called to do, in partnership with all your friends in the community. And you can do it because you love God who first loved you.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

September 4, Proper 18: The Costly Method of Reconciliation

2011-09-02T12:12:00.000-04:00

(photo © jane barber: www.janebarberdesign.com)

Exodus 12:1-14, Psalm 149, Romans 13:8-14, Matthew 18:15-20

The take-home for today is right up front, the gospel lesson, the method of Matthew 18, the three-step process of reconciliation, the discipline of making peace. Learn this pattern, take it home, start to practice it. The point is not that you have to say something every time someone offends you. Good grief, we’re all sinners, we’re all clumsy, we bump each other all the time, and ordinary life is a contact sport. You can’t call every violation. But, when you do have to call a violation, when you do have to say something, this is how you have to do it.

First you have to go alone, in private. This is to protect your offender, to keep him from public embarrassment. You see, this step expresses love and it requires love. It’s hard. It’s so much easier to complain about him to other people, and to undermine his reputation. But it’s love to go to him in private. Especially when you have cause to be angry at him. This love is not love as a feeling but love as ethical action. It is hard, it is a sacrifice, to consider his interest in spite of his offending you.

The second step is to take a couple witnesses. If the first step was to protect the offender, this step is to protect you. If she hasn’t accepted your sacrifice, now you are vulnerable and open, and you need to protect yourself. Love does not require you to make yourself a victim. It is not a bloody sacrifice you make, but a sacrifice of thanksgiving. You need to honor yourself as much as you have honored her. This is a hard step too, because it’s getting complicated, and you’re bringing other people in, and having to explain it without prejudice. You might decide to let the whole thing drop. Jesus does not require you to go the second step. But if you feel you cannot let it drop, then this is the only second step that you may take.

How do you know whether to drop it or not? Well, will you be tempted to resentment, will it fester, will you get bitter, will you act victimized, which becomes its own offense? Just by bringing in those witnesses you are refusing to be victimized. You do have the right to go the second step, because you opened with an act of love and in good faith, and you deserve to not let the refusal of the offender to be last word. This is not just self-respect, this is about the importance of truth in the world, the ethical importance of the true story, the version of the story which is true. There is more to community than just our feelings and relationships—there also is integrity. Words have power, stories have power, and the truth itself deserves a hearing. You owe it to the world that some fair measure of the truth is stated and confirmed by witnesses.

And if he still doesn’t listen, then you have to consult with the witnesses whether to go the third step. And their vote should count more than your own. They may encourage you to take it to the church. For Roman Catholics, that means the hierarchy, who deal with it. For Mennonites you do the opposite, you bring it to the congregation as a whole. The Reformed Church takes it down the middle, you bring it to the board of elders, the officers in whom the congregation has invested its discretion and authority. The pastor chairs the board of elders, but the pastor has no vote. The elders have to follow some very strict rules for doing this, rules that go back to 1586, stringent disciplines that really protect the offender, and which keep requiring attempts at counsel and reconciliation all along the way. In my thirty years of ministry I’ve watched elders do this several times, and it’s always painful for everyone involved, the elders too.

No elder likes to do it. We wonder what right we have, who do we think are we, we have our own failings too. But Jesus says that even in our weak and stumbling efforts, God in heaven will back us up. He’s saying that headquarters will back us up if a few of us do it in his name, and by implication, according to his standards. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to keep loving.

What does it mean to treat him as a “Gentile and publican”? It can’t mean to shun him and have nothing to do with him. In Jesus’ time that was impossible anyway. It doesn’t mean stop loving him. The author of this gospel was a publican whom Jesus loved. Jesus ate and drank with publicans and sinners. He’s talking here about the special sacred meal of the Passover. Gentiles were not circumcised, and publicans, to do their jobs, had willfully to keep themselves unclean, so they could not share the sacred meal. And that’s the sanction of the elders, the only sanction they have, to ask the offender not to take communion (which no elder wants to do). The suspension is temporary, unless the offender keeps being adamant, and only then the excommunication.

My own grandfather, because of his adultery, was suspended from communion by the elders of the Third Christian Reformed Church in Paterson, New Jersey. It was just months before I was to be baptized there, and that’s why I’m not named for him, it would have really hurt my grandmother. But my parents did not shun him, they kept loving him, and eventually he came to live with us here in Brooklyn, and he and I got very close, and that’s why I speak Dutch. Eventually he repented to my grandmother, and she took him back, and the elders in Paterson reinstated him; they had never excommunicated him. They waited years for him to come around, which eventually he did. And my little brother got named for him.

Go back to the first step, of going to meet with your offender one on one. Who wants to do this kind of thing. Keep your distance and protect yourself. Have good boundaries. Let people do what they do. Everyone is fallen, everyone has weaknesses and makes mistakes. Just get over it. Go to church, worship God, go home, and be responsible for your own life. People have to figure out their own mistakes, and people who won’t, well, they’re not going to listen to you anyway. Oh, I know.

Here’s why we go through with it. First, because we owe it to our offenders, it is our obligation (Romans 13:8). The translation of Matthew 18:15 is misleading. What Jesus actually says is this: “If your brother sins against you.” Not “another church member” but your brother, your sister. You can choose what church to be a member of but you can’t choose who your siblings are. They are given to you without your choice at all. And you have obligations to them no matter how you might feel about them. It’s organic. The church is not just some voluntary associations, it’s mystical and spiritual, it has a reality beyond ourselves, it’s the body of Christ, and how you behave in it as how you behave for Jesus Christ. You owe it to others because they belong to Jesus Christ.

Second, it’s so much needed by the world. The world has so much need of reconciliation. And the church is called to model it. The church does not belong to us. It belongs to Our Lord, and it is his chosen instrument for the healing of the world. If we belong to the church we do not have the right to say “No” to the mission Our Lord has given us. Maybe we should add it to our Old First mission statement. We are witnesses, not that everyone is nice and good, but that ordinary fallen people can work reconciliation. That it can be done and should be done. Of course there will always be some persons who will not reconcile, whom we just have to hand over to the hidden work of God, but we can practice it enough for it to be believed in as a realistic way of living in the world.

Third, we do it for the sake of love. The revolutionary love of Our Lord is always misunderstood and resisted and defended against, and if the best defense is a good offense, then offences will come against the works of love. To live within this kind of love requires you to see it through.

And fourth, you do it to reflect what God has done for you. We go in private to our offender because God sought us out in private. We sacrifice our ease and comfort remembering what great sacrifice Our Lord has done to reconcile ourselves to God, the sacrifice of his own life, which he did for love. “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us. O Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, grant us thy peace.”

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 26: Guest Sermon by Kelvin Spooner

2011-06-29T16:45:00.000-04:00

Praising God in Times of Distress

On Psalm 13

Note: Elder Kelvin Spooner is our Seminary Intern this summer. He is also Vice President of the historic Elmendorf Reformed Church of Harlem. Kelvin will be preaching most Sundays this summer.

Giving honor to God who is the head of my life; to Pastor Meeter, the shepherd of this flock in the Body of Christ; to the Consistory and Great Consistory of Old First; to all the members and guests gathered here today: Thank you for the opportunity to worship and fellowship with you this summer. Standing in front of you in this cathedral-like setting felt a bit overwhelming the first time I walked through the doors, but the words of welcome and encouragement that I have received from you has decreased some of my anxiety and I look forward to working with you this summer.

As you know, I am a seminarian at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary and your pastor, Dr. Meeter, is one of my professors and now he is one of my mentors. I know that I will learn much from his vast experience and knowledge. Preaching every week this summer is a new experience for me, but by the grace of God, He will give me a Word to share with you that reveal the glorious wonders of our heavenly Father, the grace and mercy of the Son, Jesus Christ; and the movement of the blessed Holy Spirit in our lives. I pray we will learn and grow in spirit and truth together as we take this journey side by side over the next two months.

Prayer - God of grace and truth, without you I can do nothing as I ought. Clothe me with your Sprit, that with joy and reverence I may lead the worship of your people and worthily proclaim the gospel of your love to the glory of your name; through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.

This morning I want to speak on the topic: Praising God During Times of Distress based on Psalm 13. Distress is a human emotion that all of us experience during the course of our lives. When we are distressed we are at a low place in our lives. When we are distressed we sense, feel, and experience grief, suffering, pain, anguish, agony, and misery. We hear and read about, on a daily basis, of how people are distressed. I can only imagine the distress of the families who lost their loved ones in the pharmacy store massacre in Medford L.I.; or the distress of the families of the young man killed recently right here in Brooklyn for bumping in to another person at a party. Most, if not all, of us have experienced distress over the loss of a loved one. But distress occurs not only when we experience the pain of death, but in many other situations in our lives. The tough economic times we are in has caused many people to lose their jobs and left wondering how they will make ends meet (I was one that lost my job because of it, but thank God, I was able to find another one); broken relationships in marriages and in families, and sickness (both physical and mental), are just a few of the areas that can cause much distress. When we look biblically, the story of Job is a heartfelt story of a person in great distress that suffered tremendous personal tragedy. (If you are unfamiliar with the story of Job, I encourage you to read it. It is a fascinating book in the Old Testament). And our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ experienced the greatest distress of all by allowing himself to be nailed to a cross for our sake.

It is during these times of distress that we may wonder: How do we pray when our hearts are broken? When the events of our lives have turned us upside down and God has done nothing to prevent it? How can we pray when we are angry with God? When the One in whom we’ve put our trust no longer seems trustworthy? These questions have been raised for centuries and to find some answers we can look to the Psalms. I have heard it said, Dr. Meeter, I think I might have heard it from you, that the Psalms is the hymn book of the Bible. The Psalms are the voice of the people collected over several centuries, of ancient Israel. It is the poetry of the Hebrew people and it vividly expresses individual and collective thoughts, emotions, and feelings in their living, in their worship, and in their relationship with God. And their voices may certainly apply to our thoughts, emotions and feelings in our living, in our worship, and in our relationship with God today.

In this hymn book of the Bible there are many different kinds of songs, there are songs of praise, there are songs of thanksgiving, there are wisdom psalms, liturgical psalms, and royal psalms. But the type of psalm we will examine today is the song or prayer of lament, which Psalm 13 belongs to. A lament is a complaint, an objection, and a protest of what God is, or is not doing in our lives. During times of distress we question or get angry with God. I remember a couple of years ago, a dear friend of mine passed away. He was a person I knew since high school and we are/were about the same age. He was a devout and mature Christian who was an inspiration to me. He thought he had the flu but was diagnosed with cancer in February of that year. By December of the same year he was gone. Why did God take away this devoted husband this ambassador for Christ? It did not make sense to me and for a while I became angry with God for taking my brother in Christ away.

The psalmist in Psalm 13 was experiencing his own anguish and this psalm reveals three themes to us of how we can praise God during our times of distress. The first theme contained in (vs. 1, 2) reveals to us and allows us to know that during times of distress we can show our disillusionment and disappointment to God (We can let God know how hurt, upset, angry we may be). The psalmist asks God four times, “How long?” How long will you forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear this pain? How long will my enemy be exalted over me? Each successive complaint becomes more harsh and intense. The psalmist is crying out to God from the depths of his soul. No holds, barred; no holding back. No hiding how he truly feel. In our times of distress we must open our hearts and be completely honest with God with what is on our hearts and what we are feeling.

The psalmist in (vs. 3, 4) calls on God to answer him. It is not a passive petition but an active one. We do not know the problem or situation that the psalmist is facing but he is not asking God to resolve the problem, he is expecting God to fix the situation. When we are open and completely honest with God we may petition Him for a response. Psalms 5 says it best, “Give ear to my words O Lord, consider my sighing. Listen to my cry for help my King and my God, for to you I pray. In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.” In our times of distress, we can make our requests known to God, lay them before His throne of grace and wait in expectation, in anticipation, knowing He will respond.

In (vs. 5, 6), the psalmist suddenly shifts from anguish to praise. His attitude changes from complaining to God to complimenting God; he moves from the language of protesting to the language of praise. The text does not reveal if the psalmist’s particular problem is solved, but the text does reveal a number of aspects about the psalmist’s relationship with God. First, the psalmist trusts God. Trust is all about being dependable, trust is about being reliable, trust is about having confidence in, and the psalmist is confident in God. He knows that he can depend on God. Second, the psalmist knows that God’s love is steadfast. Steadfast love is God’s unchanging love, steadfast love is God’s unconditional love, steadfast love is God’s unending love, and steadfast love is God’s everlasting love. Third, God has saved the psalmist and God has rescued him, which is a cause for celebration. The thing about distress is that it happens not once, not twice, but several times over the course of our lives. Fourth, the psalmist knows that God has been good to him in the past and God will always be good to him. Fifth, the psalmist understands who he is and who he belongs to. He addresses God personally by calling him “my God”. They have a relationship. They have history. They talk to one another. And we have that same opportunity. I love the way our Heidelburg Catechism, in its first question, What is your only comfort, in life and in death, frames for us to whom we belong: That I belong-body and soul, in life and in death-not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

In our times of distress, we can praise God because He desires for us to be totally open and honest with Him; we can lay our requests before Him and wait in expectation; because of His steadfast, unchanging and unconditional love for us, we can be confident that He will respond, rescue, remain at our side no matter what pain, suffering or anguish we may be experiencing; and we can go to God because we belong to Him, in body and in soul, in life and in death.

To Him who loves us and freed us from our sins by His blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. (Rev. 1:5-6).

June 19: Trinity Sunday: Commissioned by the Trinity

2011-06-17T14:02:00.001-04:00

Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20

Our gospel lesson is the last five verses at the end of Matthew, the final words of Jesus to his disciples. We call these final words the Great Commission. The commission includes our using a new name for God. Now, you know that God has several names. In Genesis 1, God is Elohim, the plural form of El, or Al, or Allah. In Genesis 17, with Abraham, God used the name El-Shaddai, or God Almighty. In Exodus 3, God commissioned Moses to use a new name, Yahweh, or Adonai, the Lord, the Eternal. In Matthew Jesus commissions us with a new name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three names together, always together, the name in which we are baptized, the name which defines how we relate to God.

Three discrete names means three discrete persons, one of them being Christ himself. He is God, but a different person than his Father, as is the Holy Spirit. Three names, three persons, and yet one God. The unity of the one God has a texture which Jesus opens up to us by means of this new name. Not that he explains it, but he commissions it. We accept the commission, though it is challenging. It’s not for convenience that we confess the Holy Trinity, but from obedience.

The doctrine of the Trinity has tested the church throughout the centuries. It’s been the cause of conflicts and an excuse for wars. Our original conflict with Islam was because it was Unitarian, not because it was violent—Christendom was just as violent. Our supposed rationale for persecuting Jews was the crime of Unitarianism. To be a Unitarian of any sort was punishable by death. Such defensiveness of a doctrine suggests a fragile doctrine.

The presenting problem of the Trinity is the status of the person of Jesus: how can Jesus be God, and not his Father, and we still say that God is One? It is a stretch. It took the Apostles years to work it out. Well, it took years for Columbus to work out that he landed in a new world, not the Orient. It took rethinking everything. The resurrection forced the disciples to rethink everything they knew of God. I suspect that even Jesus, before his resurrection, did not fully comprehend his status and identity.

The status of Jesus is the problem for Jews and Muslims and Unitarians, but the problem for many Christians is the status of the Holy Spirit. Last month some of us were discussing the difficulties of the Christian faith, what we found problematic, and two of you said that you didn’t get the Holy Spirit thing. God the Father, yes, God the Son, yes, but why speak of the Holy Spirit as a separate person? The Spirit is an energy, a force, a power, a wind, a breath, a fire, a dove.

Well, I am commissioned to teach it to you as best I can, though no one fully can. The Trinity is unique, incomparable, incomprehensible, as it must be if it is God. If I said I had it fully figured out and I could neatly explain it, that would tell you not to believe me. We only have analogies and images, which all break down.

Let me use the image of a tree. God the Father is the trunk of the tree. God the Son is the branches and the leaves. And God the Holy Spirit is the seeds. If you look at a tree you see the trunk and the branches and leaves, but not the seeds. A seed falls to the ground, and it is hidden in the earth. But the seed is the concentrated essence of the tree. More so than the trunk or the branches or the leaves. The seed at one point is a tree in full. No matter how tiny, the seed has the soul of the tree in it, all the concentrated tree-ness of a tree, which will open up with all the textures of a growing tree. You could say that a tree is one seed’s strategy for making other seeds. Which would be wrong. A tree in its reality is the dynamic movement from the compact unity of a seed into the textured richness of the tree and back again into the seed.

The Holy Spirit is the soul of God and the concentration of God. The Holy Spirit is more purely and essentially God than are the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit is not an add-on, but the deepest self of God, the deeper personality behind the majestic personality of the Father and the comely personality of the Son. The Holy Spirit is the most essential God because that is what God is, pure spirit, the purest spirit that there is, the great spirit, the original spirit, without limit, without boundary, unconstrained and uncontainable, without sex or gender, neither male nor female. If God is anything, God is spirit, purely and wholly spirit, God is the holiest of spirits.

It’s a common mistake to think of the Father as the essential God, that the Father is the one God we believe in with Jews and Muslims, and then we add Jesus, so that we have God and Jesus. That mistake is rightly criticized by Jews and Muslims. The God of Abraham and Moses is not the first person–God the Father–to which we Christians add a second. No, the God of Abraham and Moses is the undivided Spirit who is holy, holy, holy.

We didn’t see the Father in God until Jesus spoke to God that way, and we didn’t see the Son in God until the resurrection. We began to see their distinctive personalities, the Fatherly personality of one and the child-like of the other, which we can relate to, because of the way God made us. But both their personalities express the hidden personality of the Holy Spirit, which is going to be harder for us to relate to, because it is purely spiritual. The personality of the Holy Spirit has to be hard for us because it’s not like a parent and not like a child, it has no human analogy, it has a personhood which is purely God and a personality absolutely unique, which must of course remain a mystery to us. It is the point that we might not see the need of it, because this third person is absolutely God without clear reference to our human experience. And it’s the character of this personality to be hidden. Not absent, but hidden, as hidden as a seed, as hidden in you as the life that fills your body, which no scientist can isolate.

We are told enough about the Spirit’s personality to know that the Holy Spirit does love fellowship. Look, just as the seed loves to open up into the fulness of the richness of the tree, so the soul of God loves to open up into the fellowship of three persons. And this same soul of God wants fellowship with us. The Holy Spirit comes to us. It enters us and is hidden in our lives. For love. The Spirit is so loving that it keeps saying “you, you, you,” not “me, me, me.” And it keeps pointing away from itself to the persons of the Father and the Son. But it is a person who does that, who enters you, with preferences and initiative, it is the Lord, the Lord in your life and the giver of your life.

The take home today is your commission. Let me set it up. You have two commissions: the one from Jesus in Matthew and the one from God in Genesis 1:28. God commissioned the male and female to fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over every living thing. But we executed our commission sinfully, filling the earth with violence and subduing it with greed and with the dominion of our misery. Thus all of God’s investment in salvation from Abraham to Moses to Israel to Jesus and his death and resurrection, for his teaching and his authority, for the salvation of the world and all the nations of the world, by means of us who are commissioned by our baptism in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are Christians in order to be proper human beings, not the other way around. Salvation is not against creation, but for the restoration of creation, only the new creation will be richer and deeper and more lovely from the sadness that it knows.

You need to have power in the world. According to Psalm 8:6, that’s what it means to be a human being. But your personal power must always be under the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Your power must always serve the glory of the Father, not yourself and nothing else. In the name of the Son, your power is humble and repentant, seeking reconciliation. In the name of the Holy Spirit, your power is always exercised in fellowship and love, never on your own, and never for yourself. That kind of power is the hidden power of the soul of God in you, a power which must always feel like Love.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 12, Pentecost: Watching Whales With God

2011-06-09T10:56:00.000-04:00

Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104:24-34, 35b, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13, John 7:37-39

Note: Much influenced by A. A. Van Ruler's little book, God's Son and God's World.

Psalm 104:26: “There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.” The Leviathan is the sperm whale. God made the whale to sport in the water. The whale enjoys its life. The enjoyment of the whale expresses the enjoyment of God, for God enjoys the life of the world. Verse 31. “May God rejoice in God’s works.” God enjoys watching whales. I’m not joking. When we say that God “so loves the world,” that love isn’t only charity, it’s also pleasure and enjoyment.

God takes pleasure in the ordinary world of plants and animals, of people going out to work and coming home at night. God enjoys the cultures of Judea and Cappadocia, the cultures of Pontus and Asia, the languages of Phrygia and Pamphylia. The sounds of their dialects, the way they sing, and how they cook. Pentecost tells us that God embraced their languages as perfectly suitable to express God’s Word.

Here is a very big difference between the Gospel and our sister religions. The languages of Hebrew and Arabic are necessary and irreplaceable for Judaism and Islam. But what God did on Pentecost tells us that God’s Word can come equally in every language. More than that, the fullness of God’s Word requires all of them. Not in unison but in harmony, every language contributing its own peculiar genius of expression to the expanding fullness of God’s Word. The Kingdom of God can be expressed in every culture equally. To Jews and Muslims we Christians look libertine and profligate, but we risk that in order to serve the ever-expanding life of God.

God enjoys the world. The whales and the ships. God enjoys the creatures of creation, but also the crafts of human culture. I wonder if God especially enjoys a beautiful ship, with lovely lines and shining sails. I am certain that God is especially grieved when such a ship is used to carry slaves.

God enjoys the world so much that God moves in; God inhabits it. Here is a very big difference between the Gospel and Hinduism and New Age spirituality, which teach that the world itself is divine, and that what we call God is the spiritual expression of the world. But the Bible teaches that God is eternally other than the world, and free from the world, and free in the world, and free for the world. God inhabits the world not in terms of identity, but in freedom and in love. God’s love for the world is not self-love, for that is never free, but other-love, the love of someone or something always other than yourself. It’s from love that God wants to be close to the world and in the world.

The Bible tells us that God does this in a textured way. A sovereign way. A way of freedom and direction. The texture is that God inhabits the world not as the Father, and neither as the Son, except for those thirty-three years of his incarnation when our Lord inhabited one small location in the world, so that by design and for our salvation, he was in the world but the world was not full of him. The texture is that God does inhabit the world as the Holy Spirit. As light inhabits the galaxy. As the waters cover the sea. As the atmosphere fills the surface of the earth. So the Holy Spirit fills the world.

And yet the texture is this as well: Holy Spirit fills the world not as one-third of God, but as the whole of God. The texture of the Holy Trinity is the whole of God is present in each of the three persons. Where the Spirit is, the Father and the Son are, but in the mode of the Spirit. Where the Holy Spirit is, the whole God is. This texture is a mystery, and next week, on Trinity Sunday, I will explore the texture of the Trinity, and how the Holy Spirit is just as much a person as the Father and the Son.

But today let me say that we confess the Holy Spirit as the Lord and the Giver of life. The personality of the Spirit is distinguished by life and energy and power. Where the Spirit is there’s life and power, and when the Spirit inhabits us the Spirit energizes and empowers us.

Last week I said that a benefit of the Ascension for us is that we are given power to fulfill our purpose as Christians. I said that our purpose is for witnessing. I said that a few of us are specially called to witness in the form of evangelism, but that most of us are called to witness in the far more challenging round of daily life, by what we eat and what that says, by what we buy and what that says, by how we invest and what that says, by how we love and what that says. Our daily lives are demonstrations of what life is like in the Kingdom God, where Jesus is the Lord.

I said that we are given power for this witnessing. This power is from the Holy Spirit. We teach that Holy Spirit is given to everyone of us. And yes, you need to ask for it, but you’re asking for what’s already given to you. And we learn today that this power of the Holy Spirit is not antagonistic. It is not antagonistic to the world or to the nature of the world, because the Spirit enjoys the world, and the ships and the whales. The Holy Spirit is not antagonistic to knowledge, nor to study, nor to reason, nor to careful preparation. One of my colleagues does not prepare his sermons ahead of time because he thinks that the Spirit works better without his preparation. That implies antagonism. We had a college chaplain who told the students that when they came to chapel, they should check their minds at the door. But the Spirit anoints your powers of reason. The Spirit takes pleasure in your hard work. The wind of the Spirit will fill the sails of your ship, but you must build the ship, and sail the ship, and that’s hard work, and it takes the best of your mind and your attention and your preparation. The Spirit takes pleasure in human work and craft and culture.

The Spirit is given to individuals and also to the community of the congregation. We breathe the Spirit in, and we breathe it out together. Our breathing out together is the spirit of this church. We have a good spirit here, but in no church is it ever pure, we have some bad breath, some spiritual gingivitis, some tooth decay, but in this church we’re working on our breath. Here’s a take home: Your confession and forgiveness is not just for yourself, but for the health and sweetness of the congregation. You deal with your sins not just for yourself, but for the sake of others. You work on repentance and forgiveness in order to love your neighbor as yourself. Repentance is an act of love, reconciliation is to freshen and sweeten the breath of this community of Jesus.

My next take home is not practical but for your imaginations. I go back to the whale. The whale is a mammal, not a fish, and a creature of both air and water. Unlike a fish it needs the air, it needs to enter the world of air and breathe it in. But it is not made for life in the air, it is made for life in the water, and it spends most of its time submerged, and diving even deeper than other fish. The church is like a whale. From Monday through Saturday, we enter the world, and submerge in the world, and dive down deep. But on Sundays we come up for air. We come to the boundary of life and heaven and we breathe. We roll in the waves, and take our time. We play in the boundary, like the whale which sports in it. “It breathes in the air, it shines in the light.”

Breathing and diving, transcendence and relevance, elevation and habitation, the church is always doing both, as it breathes the Spirit in and out. Worshiping through praise, and also by obedience. Lifting up our hearts to God, and getting down and out into the world. In service and sacrifice, in pleasure and enjoyment. In our ministry, and in our merchandise and medicine and manufacturing. The Holy Spirit inhabits all the vessels of our lives, our distinctive personalities, our homes, our jobs, our play, and all of our relationships. The world is full of the love of God.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 5, Ascension Sunday: Purpose and Power, Comfort and Joy

2011-06-02T12:22:00.000-04:00

Acts 1:1-11,
Psalm 47,
Ephesians 1:15-23,
Luke 24:44-53

Thursday was Ascension Day. Ascension Day used to be a major holiday, and it’s still a public holiday in those countries in Europe which keep the connection of church and state. It’s kept a holiday so that people have off from work to go to church. Well, in America we don’t have the mind for such things anymore, and we think we don’t have the time for such observances, so we mark it on the Sunday following, which is today. But we still mark it because the Ascension of Jesus is an important doctrine and one of the major facts and mysteries in the Apostles Creed.

It strikes me that as you work your way down the Apostles Creed the things in it get gradually harder to believe. I mean it’s not that hard to believe that God created the heavens and the earth. Most people on the planet believe that, in one form or another. It’s not that hard to believe that Jesus was born of a Virgin; modern biology has begun to mimic that all the time in laboratories, and some species of creatures have always generated life that way. It’s not hard to believe that Jesus suffered and was crucified and buried. That’s actually attested in the documents of history.

But then you get to the resurrection, and that’s harder to believe, at least if you take it as it was first proclaimed, that he was resurrected in his body, not just in his soul. And then the Ascension is even harder to believe. Not if you just believe that Jesus went to heaven in his soul, because that kind of idea is assumed by most of the religions on the planet, and even by many of the philosophies. But to believe that he ascended into heaven in his body; that’s more difficult, and it’s much harder to imagine. It’s beyond our reckoning, both in its character and its meaning. And its meaning is complex.

But the Bible treats it as important. St. Luke is the most careful historian in the Bible, and he reports it twice, in our first reading from the Book of Acts and in our Gospel reading. And then the meaning of it is set out several times, especially by St. Paul, and especially in the Epistle to the Ephesians, in which the Ascension is a controlling theme. And neither St. Luke or St. Paul had seen it with their own two eyes. The other apostles all had seen it, but not those two, for they were not yet believers when it happened. So they are the ones who best communicate it to the rest of us, throughout the centuries, who would never see it either.

It happened between Easter and Pentecost. We think of those as Christian holidays, but for the disciples they were still the Jewish holidays of Passover and Shavuoth. It was forty days after Passover and ten till Shavuoth. You can see the Ascension as the completion of Easter and the prerequisite of Pentecost. The Ascension is about both body and soul, and flesh and spirit. It’s the vindication of Jesus in the flesh and his inauguration as the giver of the Holy Spirit. The Ascension is about both history and eternity. It’s about history in his coronation as the Messiah of Israel and about eternity as his exaltation as the Son of God. It’s both a completion and a commencement. It’s the completion of his special work on earth, for which the Lord became a human being and incarnated in human flesh, and one of us, and it’s the commencement of his special work in heaven, at the right hand of his Father, the work for which he maintains his incarnation, the work for which he is still a human being, still one of us.

For us. And how for us? Four things today. Purpose and power, and comfort and joy. Let me start with purpose and power. The Ascension is for our purpose as Christians, and for the power we have to do our purpose.

Our purpose as Christians is to be witnesses. Witnesses to his Lordship and witnesses of what life is like within the Kingdom of God. Witnesses of what life can be whenever we honor him as Lord. For a few of us with special callings, that witness is witnessing in the narrow sense of proclamation or evangelism. That has its place, but it is not for everyone. It is for those who are given special gifts for that, as it is explained in a chapter four of this epistle. Don’t feel guilty if you don’t feel called to go out and do that kind of witnessing. There is a much more challenging kind of witnessing which is for most of us, and that’s the witnessing that you do in terms of daily human life. What you buy, and why you buy it. What you spend, and why you spend it. How you eat, and why you eat that way. Who gets invited to your table, and why. Whom you serve, and why you serve that way. Whom you love and how you love and why you love that way. How you sing and dance. What you rejoice about it, what you take pleasure in. What you suffer, and how you suffer, how you deal with those who make you suffer and how you deal with the pain from it. How you deal with loss and how you deal with abundance, how you deal with death and how you deal with birth, how you are a human being, what it means to be a human being in the world of which Jesus is the Lord. That kind of witnessing is challenging, and needy people notice it.

That’s your purpose, and to fulfill you purpose you are given power. That power comes from the Holy Spirit, which I will say more about next week, on the feast of Pentecost. But the gift of Pentecost depends on the Ascension, for Jesus went to heaven make room for us, and to send the Holy Spirit to empower us who take his place. This power is not given you just for anything. And if you crave it you will not get it. It is the power to be a witness, which includes the power to face your losses and your death, as well as your successes and abundance, which are more difficult.

His Ascension is for comfort and for joy. For comfort, because the Lord of heaven and earth is a wounded human being, who bears our flesh and feels our frailty, but who is fully able to guide the world to his chosen goal. So despite what’s in the news, despite how fearful the world may get, or your distress with how things are going, your disappointment by your own personal performance, your lack of success in many things, the aging of your body, the fraying of your relationships, and the frustration of your aims, you can take comfort in his Lordship. It’s hard to believe, but you can believe him, and from the step of belief you can take the step of worshiping him, and that you will discover that worshiping him comes back to you in comfort.

And for joy. We read that the disciples departed with great joy, despite all that they did not understand. How joyful are you in your life? One of the chief goals of the Christian life is joy. Why are you a Christian? “To be joyful,” that has to be a great part of your answer. And here’s the deal: if you want to be more joyful, increase the measure of the Lordship of Jesus in your life. The joy in your life is a function of his Lordship in your life. Here’s a take home for today: If you want more joy, then you want more Lordship.

Let me encourage you to choose this joy. I don’t mean just enjoyment, not just entertainment, not the idolatry of fun and pleasure to which we are in bondage in America, but joy. Deep joy in the soul. Self-forgetting joy, like self-forgetting love, a joy that cannot be defended nor fully be explained. This joy hangs on Jesus’ Lordship. It is not spontaneous, and you cannot generate it in yourself. You have to choose for it, and that means choosing against some other precious things to you. If you want it, seek his Lordship. Learn the life within his kingdom. Learn to trust his kind of power and praise his kind of greatness and kneel before his love. It always comes down to love. For myself, I have so much joy in my life because I experience so much love in my life, and because I believe in his Lordship, I can see how all that love in my life has its source in God’s inexpressible and irrepressible love for us.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

Sermon for May 29, Easter 6: The Sign of Love

2011-05-27T18:26:00.000-04:00

Acts 17:22-21, Psalm 66:8-20, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21
I had not planned to say anything at all about this Harold Camping “end-of-the-world” thing on Family Radio. I haven’t felt the need to address it since none of our congregation have asked me any questions or expressed any concern about it. The simple response to the whole fiasco is that Our Lord said very clearly that the time of his second coming would not be known to anyone.

But today in our first lesson we have some verses which are depended on by Mr. Camping and others of his ilk. Acts 17:30-31: “While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” Mr. Camping would say that this is what he meant, that the day has been fixed, and that he figured out it was May 21, and if we think the whole thing is a joke, then the joke’s on us. And there is judgment on us too.

I have three friends from college who were members of the church where Harold Camping was an elder forty years ago, the Christian Reformed Church in Alameda, California. That church belongs to a denomination which seceded from the Reformed Church 150 years ago, and in that denomination some of us have relatives. Mr. Camping is not a pastor, but a civil engineer. He reads the Bible mechanically, like it’s engineering specs. He has no emotional intelligence. They say that talking to him is like trying to talk to a computer. He left that church in 1988 because the other members would not agree with him. He belongs to no church now, he says no church is good, that no church has the gospel, and that God has left the church. Just like Mr Camping did. Mr. Camping projects a god who is a lot like himself. (Don't we all?)

It would be funnier if he did not play on the hopes and fears of vulnerable people. One of my cousins figured he’d be raptured, so he went off on a spending spree in Europe, and now he’s got nothing left. He’s got to hope the world will end in October, or else he’s going on welfare, or whatever’s left of welfare.

To be fair to Mr. Camping, the media mistook what he was saying. He never said that May 21 would be the end of the world. He always said that the end of the world will be October 21. He said that May 21 was judgement day, the beginning of the end, with physical signs and manifestations, like earthquakes and suffering and the rapture. Last Tuesday he admitted he was wrong on only that. He says he was mistaken on the signs and manifestations, that they are not physical, but spiritual. There’s a dodge! Ah, the “spiritual” card. He still says that judgement day did happen on May 21, so that if you did not already repent by then, too bad, it’s over, there is no more chance for repentance. You can repent all you want till October 21, but it’s too late baby now, it’s too late. Family Radio is still in business, but they’re just comforting the true believers for another five months of spiritual tribulations. So what will they broadcast on October 22? The Mets in the World Series. That would comfort us true believers in our spiritual tribulations.

Harold Camping is just an extreme version of so much current Christianity, especially on the right. They claim to speak for Jesus, and they quote some of his words, but they distort the gospel as they shout it. They stoke our anger and they stroke our fears. They turn love of country into lust, and freedom into greed, and independence into self-indulgence. If St. Paul were to visit America today he’d say how extremely religious we are, and also how many idols we have. American idols. The projections of what we want for our ourselves. Not just of talent and good looks and greed, but also of military power and economic power and materialism, and of the loss of power, the idols of fear and anger, which we are indulging in America today. But our epistle tells us, “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.”

I wish my cousin had prepared for his being raptured by selling all his possessions and giving the proceeds to the poor. He’d still be disappointed by May 21, but he wouldn’t be ashamed. I wish Harold Camping had told all of his listeners to do the same. He’d still be wrong, but we would all honor him anyway. As our epistle says, “do it with gentleness and fear, so that when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame.”

Yes, we certainly do believe that Our Lord will come again, and we say so in our Creeds. We say that he is seated at the right hand of his Father and so we certainly believe that he is the righteous judge of all the world. But here’s the difference from the distortion. His judgment is not just at the end, he has been doing it all through human history since his resurrection. He does it by his Word and Spirit, as his Word is pronounced among us and as we obey him in the Spirit. He doesn’t do it by sending earthquakes or disasters, but only and always openly, that we may love him and keep his commandments. He doesn’t do it by starting wars and rumors of wars, those are always all our fault. He only and always judges lovingly—that’s how we know it’s him.

His judgement is right now, and active—active in the world, as the words of his gospel take effect within our lives individually and in our cultures corporately. Look at the desire for freedom and democracy in Libya and Yemen, that is the long term fruit of the seed of his gospel and the impact of his judgments. He chooses justice not only for those who believe in him, but for all the offspring of his Father, Christian or Muslim or Jew or Hindu or pagan. He is Lord not only of those who believe in him. He is Lord of all, no matter whether they know him; in him “they live and move and have their being.” His judgment is for life and being. It’s not for the destruction of the world but for the saving of the world.

So now let me give a better translation of our text: While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he summons everyone to turn from their ignorance, because he has fixed a day by which is intending to judge the civilized world in justice, by a man whom he appointed, offering assurance to all by having raised him from the dead.

We have a great mission, bringing the justice and righteousness of Jesus Christ to all of human civilization, the love of him, and the doing of his commandments. I don’t know how long we have, I really don’t care. I don’t know how long we have before he comes again, it wouldn’t matter to me if it were 10,000 years, or at least long enough to let us change our ways enough to cool the globe back down a few degrees and bring back to life the coral reefs. We have a lot of sins to own up to and confess, and a lot of righteousness to learn. I have an idea that Jesus tends to take his time.

The self-giving love of Jesus is the judgment of the world. Whenever you follow him in that love, you judge the world. And this is a judgment that does not condemn the world, but saves it. To have Jesus as your Lord will give you some success, some real success, but it will also be the cause of suffering. With Jesus as your Lord, you can expect to be misunderstood, you can expect to be doubted, you can expect to be abused, if not physically or even mentally, then socially, you may be called foolish or naive, quixotic or unrealistic, disloyal or unpatriotic, whatever.

Look, everybody suffers. Americans have to suffer too, and we ought not increase the suffering of others in order to decrease our own. To accept the suffering of the world with love is what Jesus has commanded us, and if that’s the command that we obey, then we love him too. We love him because he first loved us. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the future of the world, but I can certainly rule out a lot of options and hope for some others when I consider these two things: the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus, and how much God loves us.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

Sermon for May 22, Easter 5, by Rachel Daley

2011-05-24T09:41:00.001-04:00

Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

I’ve been a seminary graduate for less than 24 hours, but as I’ve prepared and planned and packed up my belongings, I’ve had plenty of time to think about my journey over the last few years. I’ve thought a lot about Old First, the excitement and trepidation I carried as I visited and began my involvement. I began full of vocational goals and had a plan for how to accomplish them. I was right to be afraid. Being in community, especially this community, I began to perceive that God was leading me to imagine a future that was different than what I thought I wanted.

The greatest blessing at Old First was finding that there was so much space for me. As a worshipper I experienced that there was room for my questions and space for the mysteries that transcend our understanding. I experienced a commitment that whatever we do in God’s name should not only be true, but should also be good and beautiful. As a seminarian I found a place to explore my call in freedom and in safety, receiving in turn words of encouragement and words of challenge. When I put on this robe, I still feel like a kid playing dress-up. This playful quality of my work here has been a wonderful gift, allowing me to take tentative, sometimes faltering steps toward that office called “Minister of Word and Sacrament.” As happens so often in life, I found myself on a path long before I knew why, or where it would lead me. For this and so many other gifts, I give wholehearted thanks.

But this really isn’t a story about me, nor is it really a story about you. It’s a story about an entire people and especially about the God to whom they belong. This is a God who acts in unexpected ways, and with unexpected people. A God who is sometimes distant from the obvious places but present among those who are easily overlooked. Maybe not in magnificent buildings, but among the poor and downcast. This is a God who goes before our plans and intentions and makes of us something that we did not believe possible. While we are hard at work, we realize that God is creating something else entirely. What God builds may be different than what humans want to build. What God is up to might be different than what our religious institutions are doing.

This was part of the witness of Stephen. We don’t really see this because the reading from Acts dips in only at the end of Stephen’s story. We miss the whole sequence of events leading up to his death. We glimpse this final scene: an angry mob set against Stephen, who remains spiritual and serene. Stephen is an exemplar for all who will face martyrdom or persecution because he faces his end with grace and faithfulness. Cutting the reading short leaves unanswered questions. For one: Why did Stephen die? What was his crime? He did not transgress a legal code. But he did – and quite deliberately I think – provoke some very powerful people. To hear his story, we’ll need to back up and listen also to the words that got Stephen killed.

So here’s a bit of back-story: Stephen was one of the early Christians who went around Jerusalem preaching and performing signs. He was arrested on false charges and called to defend himself. Stephen the defendant immediately sets to preaching - a sweeping, somewhat revisionist account of ancient Israelite history. Then he gives the whole thing a theological spin that attacks cherished institutions, shocking and offending his audience. Among several other contentious points, Stephen sets up a polemic against the temple built by Solomon. He argues, “the Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands” (7.48). What would be a fitting place for God to dwell, who has already shaped every stone, formed all metals and planted every tree? Surely the God who inhabits all of heaven and earth will not be contained by human works, however extravagant or skillfully constructed. Stephen’s point is the utter contrast between the works of God and of humans. Human projects cannot limit God’s presence, control God’s activity, or manage the exercise of God’s power.

But Stephen doesn’t intend this to be a teaching moment. Instead he wraps things up by recasting himself as judge. He calls his accusers faithless and disobedient; he names them as betrayers and murderers. The angry reaction isn’t really a surprise. The message had a bitter taste for Stephen’s audience. They’re not the usual hooligans you would expect to find in a bit of a skirmish outside the city limits. Stephen did not address criminals or soldiers, but a council composed of religious leaders. They are elders and priests; upstanding members of their communities. As protectors of the temple and of religious life, they do not react warmly to Stephen’s remarks.

The story spins in unexpected directions. The council was the best of human intellect and religiosity. Stephen accuses them of being frauds. By the time we drop in to glimpse Stephen’s death, the pretense of moral superiority is revealed as a sham. The judicial proceedings inexplicably gave way to mob violence and the death of Stephen. It’s a bizarre twist: maybe like a supreme court judge being caught exercising a bit of vigilante justice. These respected individuals are just ordinary people who respond to a threat with violence and anger.

The council and the temple are two symbols of human accomplishment. If God were to dwell anywhere on earth, it would certainly be within a costly, beautiful, and well-protected temple. If the wisdom of God were to be found anywhere, it would be among the members of the council: well-educated, religious, good. But the most ornate building is not able to contain the Most High God. Even the most just and most wise ruler can take the place of God who reigns from heaven.

This is a stumbling block. We’re used to the idea that God has a problem with the worst of what humans have done. God came to save the criminals, the fanatics, the broken and damaged. What are the “worst” human achievements? Maybe war, waste, racism. It’s because of all these bad things that we need God, and from all of this bad stuff that God comes to save us. God has a problem with my sin and my shadows and failures, but all the good stuff - like charitable deeds and religious devotion - those things can remain more or less intact.

The story of Stephen reveals a different truth. God rejects the best of what humans have to offer. It’s not just because of the fiascos of human history, but because our best is not enough for a perfectly righteous God. Even the great achievements in architecture: the pyramids of Egypt, China’s great wall, Machu Picchu, even these were hewn of rocks that God made. Even political and social advancements like democracy and human rights fall short. Even cherished institutions- churches, well-run schools, and centers of learning- even these are not adequate to mediate God’s presence on earth.

What humans build may not be what God is building; human plans may not be God’s plans. Here the reading from 1 Peter stands as a counterpoint to the story of Stephen. If not the temple, what will be the site of God’s presence on earth? The letter commends the churches, “Let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” The new temple is built of living stones, living, breathing people who have come to Christ and have tasted that God is good. But their role is passive. Stones themselves cannot build; they must be built. Stones are nothing until they taken in hand by an architect or an artisan. They are chosen and then cut, ground, trimmed until they are the right size and shape and can be useful for building.

1 Peter lets us in on another secret: God does not build like you might expect. What would make a stone a good candidate for a building project? Human builders will aim for strength and uniformity. A builder will covet materials that retain their strength and appearance and resist decay over time. Aesthetic qualities are important, like color, texture, and pattern, so that the many pieces will cohere into a unified whole.

God’s new project starts with unlikely materials. Christ, rejected by humans, becomes the cornerstone. This surprising pick becomes the rule for all that follows. When God builds, many of the pieces will be unremarkable. Some are not particularly strong or resilient. Many will not be beautiful. What they are, is chosen and precious in God’s sight. It is not by their properties, but by God’s choice that they are worthy of inclusion. God’s aesthetic vision is transformative, working a masterpiece out of stones that others passed over. The new temple is the entirety of those whom God gathers together. We are those stones; being joined to Christ, we are joined also to one another. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s own people.

What this means is that no one finds their way here on accident. However disjointed or ill-matched we may feel we are for one another, each has been gathered for a purpose. Even if the paint peels, cracks widen, and in spite of dissension within and opposition without, still God gathers and builds. Even if we are embarrassed by or enraged at the actions of other’s who call themselves God’s followers- none of us get to make judgments about who is in and who is out. And if the walls of the God’s house should ever crumble, it may be because we are prone to constructing walls in all the wrong places. In the Easter season, we’ve heard that Easter is not church property, that the signs are not church property. As it turns out, not even the church is church property.

What is the difference between building and being built by God? They might look indistinguishable from the outside. Being built means that our plans are always provisional, our ways of doing things always open to revision. To be built by God is continually to ask ourselves the question: How do I best align with what God is about in this world?

Maybe you first came to church thinking how God might fit in your plans. I want God to help me carry out my goals and ideals. What we encounter is something far better - that God draws all of us into a project that spans across generations and across continents…swept up in something greater than what we could accomplish or imagine.

This “chosenness” is not simply a status. It is a vocation. Whenever Peter tells the churches who they are in Christ, he also tells them what to do about it. They’re not builders, because their action is always derivative of God’s action. Rather they are commissioned as a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Christ. They proclaim the mighty acts of God who has drawn us from darkness into light.

Many offer seemingly insignificant sacrifices: sleepy prayers, homework assignments, food for families, getting out of bed in the morning, a good effort at a job you hate, swallowing hateful words. Yet God is able to build anything out of these small offerings. None of us can see what God will make of our gifts. No work of human hands can house the God of heaven and earth. But when God builds, every act performed with love is a spiritual sacrifice and a taste of God’s goodness. When God builds, even the most ordinary and humble materials become a window to God’s light.

Installation Sermon for Rev Dr Linden De Bie, May 22, at the Community Church of Douglaston (RCA)

2011-05-23T15:40:00.000-04:00

Texts for Easter 5, Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14

If I were to produce the Gospel of John as a stage play, I would make all the scenery to be temple scenery, for all three acts. The backdrops and furniture would suggest the temple for every scene of the play. I would suggest how every action of Jesus in this Gospel is a temple action, even when it happens out on a hillside, feeding five thousand; or at the cross, which is an altar of sacrifice, an altar outside the temple. I would suggest that Jesus himself is the temple, in whom God’s Glory dwells, wherever he is upon the stage; he is the tabernacle, he is the moving location where the living God is fully present to God’s people. Wherever he is, he is his Father’s House.

You know the temple of Solomon had twenty upper rooms built up against the walls of the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies. These were the chambers where the priests would go to eat their portions of the sacrifices, where they had their meals with God, where they were close to God. Well, I would use the scenery to suggest one of these rooms as the setting for our gospel for today. The upper room in which the disciples ate the Passover was a substitute temple room. On the backdrop I would mount some large painting of the visionary temple of Ezekiel, the temple of the future, which had many more such rooms, almost a hundred, all around the temple courts. That’s what Jesus refers to when he says, “In my Father’s House are many rooms, where I am going to prepare a place for you,” where you can commune with God as intimately as I do; you can be as close to God as a child with a Father.

But how shall we get there? He’s the way there. If you want to know the God of Israel as Father, he’s the way to the Father, and the truth of the Father, and the life of the Father. And you can know this now, and you’ll need to know it for your life hereon as my disciples. When he says that’s he’s the way, the truth, and the life, he’s not talking here about who gets to go to heaven when they die, he doesn’t say here, “no one gets to heaven but by me,” he’s not speaking of boundaries, he’s speaking of entrances, of access and intimacy, of opening the curtain and the outside going in and the inside going out, of getting close to God not by getting away from the world, but in the world in order to take on all the trouble and suffering and misery of the world. John 14:6 is certainly for mission, but not a mission of exclusivity, rather a mission of welcome and hospitality and healing the world.

In the chapters of John which follow, Jesus lays out how his disciples themselves will be the temple. How their community will succeed him as the location of God’s real and faithful presence in the world, how the community of believers will be a living temple in which God’s glory dwells for the salvation of the world. And for once, St. Peter paid attention, and in our epistle lesson he repeats the image which Jesus had given them that night in the upper room, and he makes it more concrete. Of necessity, because the early Christian congregations to which he wrote his epistle had no churches, no shrines, no temples, no altars, none of the ordinary places where ordinary people go to get close to the gods, to say their prayers, to make their sacrifices and enjoy them. The early Christians were considered to be atheists by their pagan neighbors. What kind of a strange religion is this gospel anyway, what can you offer us concretely where we can find your God? What locations do you offer for ordinary people to get close to God?

The location is the community of believers in its life together. Your congregation is the house of God. Your congregation is more than an association of like-minded people. In your congregations’ life together, God is really present, especially when you break bread. It is a humble sort of presence on God’s part, to be fully present in people like us who gather here, it is a humble sort of glory to be seated upon the singing of the children’s choir, and to accept the sacrifices that we make when we happen to be home on the weekend and have money to spare. But God has deemed it satisfactory to be present in the world through us. My goodness. Not only us, but certainly us, and faithfully us. Why aren’t we trembling when we come to church?

The Lord Jesus has deemed us so acceptable that he tells us, “I will do whatever you ask in my name.” Now that’s the kind of thing we like to hear. That’s what people have always wanted from their gods. They visited their temples to ask their gods for rain and sun and health and wealth and victory in war. He says it again. “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” You like to hear it, but then you reflect how often he doesn’t seem to do what you ask him, even if you ask in his name. Does he really mean this? Or should you just stop asking so as not to be disappointed?

You have called your pastor here to lead you in prayers. Your pastor is required by the Reformed Church’s constitution “to call on the name of the Lord on behalf of the whole congregation.” This is the ministry of prayer, which is no less important than the ministries of preaching and teaching and counseling and visiting and governing the church. Prayer is what goes on inside a temple, and if you together as a congregation are a living temple, then what happens among you should be a lot of prayer, and he is installed among you as a leader of your prayers. He leads the prayers among you when you gather, and he prays for you in private when he is alone. When you don’t feel like praying, he leads you anyway. When you don’t know what to ask, he teaches you. When your answer doesn’t come and your hope flags and your faith fails, he counsels you and prays on your behalf. He is responsible to help you reconcile your not getting what you ask for with the promise of Jesus here that he will do it.

(If I’m honest I confess that for professional reasons, I wish Our Lord had not promised that. I wish he had said something like, I will do just about 22% of what you ask, depending on the wars and weather. But he ups the ante, he seems to mean 100%. So when you pastor reconciles you to that I wish one of you would call me up and repeat his explanation so that I could use it too.)

You have called your pastor to be an architect. An architect of the temple that you are called to build inside this structure called the Community Church of Douglaston. He is the architect who will instruct you and show you and help you construct the living temple of your congregation. The prophet Moses gave the plans for the Tabernacle at Mount Sinai, King Solomon gave the blueprint for the Temple in Jerusalem, and the priest Ezekiel had the vision of the Temple of the future. Your pastor, by his preaching and teaching, will give your congregation the plan and the blueprint and the vision. I ask you to be receptive to his vision, and do not stone him like they did to Stephen. Do not stumble over the stones he lays by disobeying the Word of God. Receive how he shows you your temple inside this sanctuary, and in the Sunday School rooms, in the church kitchen and the parlor and the parking lot, and outside in the village, wherever you walk upon the stage of Douglaston, even in your homes. Receive his ministry, and you will discover how close is God to you.

Nine years ago I said a few words at a dinner on Wall Street, and a lawyer came up to me and said, “You know, I am a Catholic, but I have great respect for your denomination. I’m from Douglaston, and some friends of ours, not church members, had a tragic accident, and it was the pastor of the Community Church who ministered to them.” Well, I know that’s what Dr. De Bie would do too. When I heard that he might come here, I knew right away that he was God’s choice to show you and help you become what God intends for you to be. Yes, in past years you have done great work here in Douglaston, but you will do greater works than these. Listen to verse 12 of our Gospel: “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, because I am going to the Father, you will do greater works that these.”

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

Sermon for May 15, Easter 4: Wonder Bread and Wonder Girl

2011-05-15T15:02:00.000-04:00

Acts 2:42-47, Psalm 23, 1 Peter 2:19-25, John 10:1-10

On the baptism of Evelyn Elizabeth Cribbs

Our Epistle lesson, from First Peter, was particularly addressed to the slaves who belonged to the early Christian congregations. They were usually house slaves, not field slaves, and not abused as badly as our slaves in America, and they did not suffer the added cruelty of racism, but they still were slaves, and they had no right to their own lives. They could be punished by their masters with impunity, with no regard for innocence or guilt. They had no rights at all, and loving Jesus gave them not advantages but extra disadvantages. So how should they carry their suffering?

The problem extends to all of us. All of us have to carry suffering. Some of our suffering comes from doing right, when the right thing is not welcome in the world. Some of our suffering comes from doing wrong. Sometimes the difference is irrelevant, and our suffering just comes, it comes from having bodies and bones and skin and blood, and living on a watery planet with seismic activity. So much of our lives is out of our control, even if we are not slaves. The problem is for all of us.

First Peter calls us to follow Christ as an example. The Christ who was willing to go all the way to his death on the cross. We should not walk away from suffering, but enter into it with love. Because if you walk in love you will get extra suffering. Not only from the opposition of the powers of the world, which fear the law of love as a threat to their equilibrium, but because living in love will develop in you extra sensitivities, and the suffering of others will touch you too. The call of First Peter is a call to action, not passivity. But you can’t free others from suffering without having to suffer some yourself. You can’t free others from abuse without it costing you. I believe you know this, and yet you want to live this way.

But Christ is more than an example. The cross leads to the resurrection, and he lives. He’s also actively the shepherd and guardian of your souls. What First Peter means by “soul” is not some disembodied spirit, but your personality, your mind, your emotions, your breath, your life itself. He is the living guardian of all that. As your shepherd and guardian he does not spare you from suffering, but he gets you through each next valley of the shadow of death. He doesn’t say you don’t have enemies, but he sets a table before you in the presence of your enemies. Because he is our guardian, our enemies have no power to compel us not to love. Death is real, but his love is stronger than death, because he is the shepherd who has beaten death.

Last week I said that we are not given proofs of the resurrection, but signs of it. I said that a proof is the ending of a process of an argument, and it settles things, but a sign keeps things moving because it points to something else. A proof concludes and a sign suggests. You have to work a sign. The more you work a sign the more you it tells you.

Last week we saw that Our Lord designed the “breaking the bread” to be the chief sign of his resurrection. We work this sign each week in Holy Communion. I said it isn’t obvious what breaking bread might have to do with his resurrection, but the more we work the sign the more we get from it. We need to embrace the sign with our hearts and minds and our imaginations.

We have to wonder at the sign. Our Lord designed the sign to appeal to our sense of wonder. We should call it wonder bread! The sign suggests so many things. It means his broken body and his poured out blood. It means his presence among us as the true host at the table. It means that he feeds us with his risen body just as certainly as we eat the bread. It means that he pours his life into us just as certainly as we drink the cup. It is a wonder and a miracle, a small and weekly miracle. We do miracles in church. Or I should say that God does miracles among us, in the signs and wonders that we do each week by his design.

We have another wonder today, another sign of his design, and that is Holy Baptism. He told us to do it, and so we do it. He told us to do it in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, so that is what we say when we do it. It is a sign of something which God does real in us, and we work the sign by wondering at all God does in us. You are baptized just once, but as certainly as you were washed with that water, so the Holy Spirit works in you your whole life long, and you can embrace the sign of your baptism with your life, your heart, your mind and your imagination.

To our eyes it looks so simple. So un-miraculous. Just water on the skin. What people do everywhere, since time immemorial. It’s a sign so ordinary, so basic, as basic as bread. The signs make use of actions as common as eating and washing. We have to wonder at Our Lord’s design. We have to wonder at the world God made, we have to wonder at our lives, with a wonder that is not just free fantasy, but of obedience and humility, reading the signs as God designed them, working the signs to get from them the wonders of God’s love, the wonders of God’s love, a love so basic and natural that even a child can know this love.

This morning you will see that second sign. You will see me putting water on a baby. You will hear me say her name: “Evelyn Elizabeth,” and then you’ll hear me say the name of God: “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Now, she’s certainly been washed before, and called by name before, but today for the first time we will do those two very ordinary things together before the congregation, and under the name of God. So simple, but the more you see in it the more it opens up. That has to be true for Evelyn herself as well. As she opens up her life in coming years, she can open up the promise in her baptism. She can apply it to her needs in all the stages of her life, she can apply it to the calling of her life, the work she does, the words she speaks, all that her name will come to stand for in the world, for all of her life she can work the sign of her own baptism.

The Christian community is charged to give her what she needs to work that sign. For the first few years, her parents are the agents of the church, but early on the rest of us have obligations too. In just three year’s time she will be welcomed into our program we call Godly Play. She will hear the story of the Good Shepherd. She will play with that story.

We tell that story several ways. We tell it flat, with paper characters on felt, and we tell it three-dimensional, with little wooden figures, as you see right there. It’s the central story of our program, and we tell it to the children several times, and they can play with it as often as they like, in order to inspire their imaginations. So it will be with Evelyn. She will imagine herself as a sheep in the shepherd’s care. She will imagine living in the sheepfold, where the shepherd keeps her safe. She will imagine going out and coming in. She will imagine going out to pasture where the shepherd watches over her to keep her safe. She will imagine him calling her by her name, because he knows her name and likes to say her name. We will teach her this and she will play with it, and we will invite her to wonder at what all it means.

We want to help her get this deep in her. She’ll need to remember it when her sufferings come. She’ll need to remember this when she has to face a choice of doing the right thing or the easy thing, the costly choice or the safe choice, the loving choice or the self-preserving choice. I think you cannot really love your neighbor, it is too risky and difficult, unless you can believe that you have a loving shepherd and a powerful guardian into whose care you can place your life. But she can remember that she is baptized, that she belongs to him, that she’s marked with a brand on her forehead which even after it evaporates he can still see.

God will help her remember. The Holy Spirit will remind her. The Holy Spirit is the one who is most active here today, doing signs and wonders. You cannot see the Holy Spirit, not directly, but you can see the Spirit’s sign and seal. And you can see the signs of love, which is the chief work of the Spirit. All the love that you see going on here today among us is a sign which points to the love of God.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

Sermon for May 8, Easter 3, Working the Signs

2011-05-05T12:44:00.001-04:00

Acts 2:14a, 36-41, Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35

My text is from our epistle, First Peter 1:17, If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. "The time of your exile." Do you feel like an exile? A resident alien? How are you exiles? And why?

Some of you say that you like how Old First is so rooted and grounded in the history and geography of Brooklyn. The names of our members are on the streets: Polhemus Place, Boerum Place, Bergen Street, DeGraw, Hoyt, Schermerhorn, Joralemon, Hicks, Middagh, Varick, Suydam, Dikeman, Rapelye, Wyckoff, Classon, Conover, Cortelyou, Remsen, Gerritsen, Lott, Schenk, Van Brunt, Van Dyke, Van Voorhees. All these names belonged to our church, and now one of them is back. To the other five new members today, I cannot offer to name a street after you, so you’ll have to be content with a spot in Greenwood Cemetery, which is another way of being rooted and grounded in Brooklyn’s history and geography.

When the Hoyts and the Schermerhorns first settled here they were like exiles in the wilderness, but they soon became the establishment, and our church was founded as an established church, supported by taxation. When we put up this building, 120 years ago, we obviously wanted to express our sense of establishment. When we begin to raise the millions of dollars we’ll need to renovate our stained-glass windows, we’ll have to be pleasing to the establishment.

So are we establishment or exiles? If you’re a Christian, how are you an outsider and how are you at home — a resident or an alien or both? How much can you fit in to even where you are at home? The exiles addressed by St. Peter were not foreigners. Some were Jews and some were Gentiles, but they were native to where they lived. And yet they were exiles socially, politically, and economically, because of their loyalty to Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah and the Lord. The Jews among them no longer could share in their family celebrations. The Gentiles no longer could join the local festivals. The slaves among them had to fit in with their masters against their consciences, and the wives of non-believers faced a similar dilemma. All of them would be regarded by their neighbors as more or less disloyal, kill-joys, spoil-sports, worthy of discrimination and distrust.

They need encouragement. They need advice. How to navigate their lives. How in their predicament to be loving, not bitter, to be joyful, not resentful, to be generous, not defensive. How to be loyal to Jesus as Lord, and also honor the Emperor, as St. Peter advises them in chapter 2. There’s a needle to thread!

On Monday afternoon, one of you wrote me this email: “Daniel, Is it just me, or are you weirded out over all the rejoicing over bin Laden’s death? I mean, I get it – this guy is something of a modern-day Hitler – but . . . I just find it hard to be excited about anyone’s killing.” That’s the feeling, the feeling that First Peter 1:17 is getting at. “If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile.” We pray to a God who judges us no less than anybody else. So we want to live our lives in reverent fear. Not in fear as anxiety, but fear in knowing our limits, our fragility, our humility and our dependence, how much we daily need of grace and mercy. The great surprise about this reverent fear is that it results in joy and love, both counter-intuitively and counter-culturally.

The opposite is what St. Peter calls “futility”. The good thing about our predicament is that we are exiles also to futility, although we can sometimes feel like kill-joys. Futility could mean the fifteen minutes of fame. The shallow celebrations. The easy revelry. The superficial prosperity. The facile patriotism. The ideology of individualism. The economy of consumption. The idolatry of violence. We may stand outside of these.

But we do not stand outside the world. We stay within the world and for the world, because the resurrection of Jesus is both the judgment of the world and the affirmation of the world. It’s a judgment on the flesh but an affirmation of embodiment. It’s a foretaste of the future for the sake of life right now, right here and now. The resurrection is against the world and for the world, as both a judgment and a blessing, the future against the futility, the dawn against the darkness.

We are not given proofs of it, but we are given signs of it. As I said last week, the proof was given only to the apostles, in order to credit them as witnesses. To us are given signs. A proof is for a verdict and a resolution, and you can say, “That settles that.” A sign is something that points beyond itself, to get you moving there; you have to follow a sign, you have to use a sign, you have to work it. We are given signs, not proofs, of Jesus’s resurrection. The signs won’t tell you anything unless you use them, unless you work them. The more you work them, the more you get from them. One of the signs we’re given is the breaking of the bread. It isn’t obvious what this might have to do with the resurrection. Until you start using it. Until you use it more and more, and let it unfold itself to you, the more it shows you Jesus and confirms his life in you.

The signs are free for all. The signs are not church property. The other way around — they make the church. The signs are gifts of God to us. You don’t have to be a church member to enjoy them. That’s why we are indiscriminate, intentionally so. You are free to take the signs for free. But six of you are standing up today to say you want to work the signs. You want to put more into them to get more out of them. You commit to learn them and share them and take responsibility for them. You commit to the body that is broken in the bread. You commit to working God’s designs to see what they reveal.

You commit as well to our own secondary signs, the signs of our design. Like the organization of Old First, and our own particular missions and traditions and programs, which have their passing place as secondary signs of resurrection. Like the public water fountain. Like the respite shelter.

Like that painting. The Empty Tomb. That sign was commissioned by the Cortelyous and Suydams and Schenks to express what they believed. It’s remarkable. They were so Calvinist that the sanctuary they gave us has no crucifix – the only cross is faintly in that window over there – and yet they gave this lavish painting, by a Catholic Italian, a pride above place above the pulpit. Perfectly fitting in one way and contradictory in another. And a sign of Jesus’ resurrection is wonderfully offered all year round to anyone who walks into this sanctuary. You six are committing to maintain such signs, such secondary signs in all the contradictions of our culture and establishment.

The sign of the painting, the sign of the table, and the signs of your own lives. A third kind of sign, just as passing and enculturated, just as contradictory, and just there in your brokenness and how you deal with it and share it. Working the contradictions of being both a resident and an alien, of feeling both at home and in exile, and working your contradictions not in frustration but in love, that’s how you exhibit in your own life the signs of resurrection. The rest of us here are encouraged and inspired that you six want to this, and we want to bless you for it.

We need you and you need us, because you cannot work the signs on your own, not if you want to work them in love. St. Peter counsels “mutual love.” That’s a combination of all three kinds of signs, the love in your own life, the love within the organization of the church, and the love which Jesus gives us in the breaking of the bread. It’s a love regarded as unrealistic by the world, but that’s only because the world keeps failing to work it. It’s a love completely natural, it’s the love which is the primal energy of this present universe, and just as much the energy of the new creation. We work these signs together, the signs of resurrection and the signs of love. That you’re here is a sign of God’s love to all of us.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

Easter 2011: The Small Bang Theory

2011-04-23T10:03:00.000-04:00

Rembrandt's Painting of Jesus and Mary Magdalene

Acts 10:34-43, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, Colossians 3:1-4, John 20:1-18

Welcome to Easter. I am glad that you are here. Members and friends, visitors, passers-by, whatever your belief or unbelief, Christian or not or something else, you are welcome here today. Easter is public, Easter is not church property, Easter is a gift of God to all of you, so it’s good for you to be here to receive this gift.

If Easter were church property we would have done it differently. We would have been keeping vigil at the tomb so we could witness the moment of his rising and watch him actually come out. We would have brought along some impartial witnesses and even some hostile witnesses, like those who were present at his crucifixion, who could substantiate our claims. We’d have him go show himself to the opposition, not just to his followers.

His followers did witness him alive again, and ate and drank with him, but they missed his actual rising, because none of them expected it. They didn’t believe it either, not at first. So I don’t blame you if you find it hard to believe. This belief at the center of the Christian faith is maybe the hardest to believe of our beliefs. And it raises questions which we cannot fully answer.

If Easter were church property we would have arranged it to answer the questions which it raises. We would have held on to him, like Mary Magdalene wanted to, and kept him close for observation. But he kept departing, and came back only for six Sundays, until forty days after his rising he ascended bodily into heaven. What does that mean? It’s not a problem if he’s purely a spirit, but his witnesses all claim that he rose again in his body, a real body, with real physicality. Well then, where in the real universe is his body now? What is he standing on? What does he eat? Who cuts his hair?

Such impossibilities have led some theologians to suspend their belief in his bodily resurrection, like suspending the writ of habeas corpus. They say that Jesus does live on, but spiritually, not bodily. Well, that’s just Plato. We didn’t need the gospels for that. That means that God did nothing really new and different in the world, and that there was no gift, just flowers and a card.

It takes some faith to receive this gift, to choose improbabilities, to choose a different wisdom than the wisdom of the world. It also requires your imagination: for you to imagine the new world generated by his resurrection, a new kind of life, a new kind of ethic, a new kind of wisdom, a new way of loving your enemies, a new way of imagining what God wants from you and what God wants for the world, a new way of imagining your own body and your soul.

When I say imagination I don’t mean like, “just my ’magination, runnin’ away with me.” I mean as the physicist Arno Penzias imagined the Big Bang from the background radiation picked up by his telescopes, as Albert Einstein imagined the theory of relativity from looking at the town clock in Zurich, as Copernicus imagined a heliocentric universe from the same celestial evidence that gave everyone else to believe the earth was at the center, and as our dancer today imagined a resurrection both spiritual and physical, with physical strength and physical speed. I mean that kind of imagination which leaps forward from the evidence to make real advances in the world.

We may imagine the resurrection as long as we do not presume to capture it. Some of our images are better than others. The gospels correct our images as much as they inspire them. That Mary Magdalene did not recognize him at first suggests there’s something new about him, but then she recognized his voice immediately, which suggests the same vocal cords. That evening he showed his followers the same hands and feet, with holes in them. So our images have to be of his having his very same body, but somehow transformed.

We’ve been trained to imagine him up there in heaven. This seems confirmed by our epistle, Colossians 3:1, which says, “Seek the things which are above, where Christ is.” But that word “above” in the original Greek is not υπερ but ανω. Which means above, not like straight up over us, but above the horizon, upward and forward, like the dawn, like the rising of the sun. Let yourself imagine Jesus in the future, already in the future. Imagine that his appearances to his followers on those six Sundays are his coming back from the future to enter into their time and space. The future he comes back from is the new heaven and earth, the new creation, which already is, a gift of God, a Promised Land, which waits for us.

If you watch the sky, it looks so obvious that the sun is moving through it over us. Copernicus had to imagine that the sun is still, and that our earth is turning toward it. Just so let yourself imagine the new creation as already there, where Jesus is, and that our time and history are turning toward it. We are approaching it because its light and energy are drawing us to it. That’s where Jesus is, already, in his resurrected body, the firstborn of the dead, not floating in the heavens, but standing on the pavement of the New Jerusalem, eating the food of the great celestial banquet. Imagine and believe that you too, when you die, will jump there forward, to join him in the final future, and join each other too, in the company of all those who have gone on before you, from death to enter into life.

This new creation started on that first Easter Sunday, inside the old creation, a new heaven and earth, within the old heaven and earth. This new creation was a small bang, not a big bang. It was only the size of a human body. Of course, even the Big Bang began quite small. Scientists suggest that the original singularity might have been no larger than a basketball, it just got very big very fast. We don’t know for sure, because no one was there to witness it. Arno Penzias had to imagine it from the extra radiation in the universe. If we had been there maybe we could answer many questions still outstanding, like the unsolved problems of dark matter and quantum gravity. Yet we believe in the Big Bang because we trust the scientists, and if it’s true it does explain a lot The resurrection is like that. You can believe in it, you can trust its witnesses, and if doesn’t explain everything it does explain a lot. Which questions are the ones that you want answered?

Easter is not church property. The gift was such a surprise to us because we did not see it as in our interest. We keep looking for confirmation of ourselves, and this gift offers transformation. We are bothered by guilt and fear and death, and we seek to be excused and preserved and kept alive. This gift does not excuse us, it rather judges us and forgives us and sets us free for love. This gift does not preserve us but it reconciles us and set us free for joy. This gift does not keep us alive, but it is in dying that we are born into eternal life.

That life is already born in you, a very small bang inside you. It comes from the future, here into your life right now, the future you that you will be, you can start already living here right now, in this world, living by the physics and the science and the laws of that new world. Already. Maybe you can’t see it directly, but you can sense the extra radiation in your life, the reverberations of reconciliation, the hints of healing, the counter-intuitive selflessness, the unfathomed forgiveness, the unlikely love, even in all the dark matter that remains. You can live your life right now by making the choices which anticipate the future that began on Easter. You cannot generate it on your own, it is a gift of God to you, but it will give you joy.

Dearly beloved, this gift is for you. I invite you to give your life to it and seek in it your transformation. I invite you to imagine your life as an example of its evidence and to make real on your images. I invite you to seek the signs of it in the people you deal with in the world around you. And I invite you, whatever your belief or doubt, simply to receive this gift for the joy of today, to take the pleasure of God’s love for you, to accept the privilege of God’s irrepressible and unfathomable love for you.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

April 10, Lent 5, Keys of the Kingdom: Opening Your Grave

2011-04-07T16:14:00.000-04:00

Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45

Martha told Jesus that she believed that Lazarus would rise again on the last day. Martha and Mary and many Jews back then (except the Sadducees), believed in a resurrection like in Ezekiel 37. This vision of Ezekiel is the first suggestion of resurrection in the Bible, and it comes late, from the time of the Exile, when the Jews had been carried into exile by the Babylonians.

The Old Testament has no interest in the afterlife. It rejects the fixation on immortality that it saw in Egypt, with its pyramids and mummies and treasure chambers for the dead. Not once does the Torah mention the immortality of the soul and not one prophet suggests that your soul goes to heaven after you die. The Israelites believed that when your body died, your soul did too, and then nothing but a passive shadow of yourself went down to Sheol, where it wasted away until the last of your loved ones died, and then even your shadow ceased existence altogether.

The hope of Israel was not for heaven, but for the Promised Land, the land, the land, the land. Not immortality in heaven, but generations of their descendants enjoying their inheritance, sitting under the fig trees they had planted, keeping their names alive throughout the generations. Not immortality in heaven, but to live in comfort and die in peace in the literal Kingdom of God.

So the exile to Babylon was a theological catastrophe. To be removed from the Promised Land was a contradiction of their faith in God. An answer to this catastrophic contradiction was the vision of Ezekiel. The vision was a metaphor of returning to the Promised Land and the restoration of the population in the Promised Land. But the metaphor was so graphic and so powerful that it took on added meaning by the time of Mary and Martha. They believed that one day in the future, every Jew who ever lived would rise again bodily from the dead, and finally get the life that they were promised in the Promised Land. Like being born again. That’s the resurrection that Martha believed in for her brother Lazarus. Some day.

But Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Here and now, when you listen to his voice. You live right now the life you hope to live some day. The Kingdom of God is here with him, right now. Listen to him, and be born again into it right now. Lazarus was dead, but listened to him, and was born again. Like the beggar born blind. Like the woman at the well.

His voice is the key. His voice unlocks the door of the grave. But even with the door unlocked, how can a dead corpse have the energy to hear the voice of Jesus and obey it? His voice conveys the power you need to listen to his voice. His voice is the key that ignites the life it opens up. We have his voice today. We hear it every week, right here, in different voices but a single voice. Just listen to that voice and let it generate new life in you. Listen to it even silently at home. The voice will come through, to open you and to energize the new life that is in you.

For the last few weeks I have been saying that there are two of you, that you simultaneously live two lives, your old nature and your new nature, the old you dying-away and the new you coming-to-life. Your two natures are as distinct as life and death but also are inseparable as life and death. They are both in everything you think and do. Your new you has to deal with your old you all the time. Much of the virtue of your new you is precisely in how you deal with your old you. Much of the joy of your new you is in dealing with the misery of your old you.

I am inviting you to believe that there is a new you rising in you by the gift of the Holy Spirit. But the old you still remains a part of you. You can’t just discard your old nature. You know the Bible never uses the metaphor of a butterfly for being born again, as if you leave the caterpillar behind and fly away. Your old nature remains a part of you, for your new nature to deal with, to process, and to forgive. Contending with your old nature is one of the good works of your new nature. Some Christians suggest that the new life in Christ is free and pure and happy and victorious. So when you feel your old self still so much in you, you start to doubt your faith, you doubt your salvation, you doubt the promises of God. You get cast down into the depths, like Psalm 130. What’s wrong with me, that my old self is still so strong in me?

One of the chief good works of your new nature is to keep on loving your old nature, even though it has to die away. It was for love that Jesus wept. The people saw him weep and said, “See how much he loved him.” Jesus wept for the death of Lazarus even though he knew that he would raise him from the dead. Jesus loved the old life of his friend, even though it had to die.

During the ten years of my ministry here I’ve made mistakes and done dumb things and hurt some people and had conflicts I should not have had. There are people who when I see them on the sidewalk, I feel myself turn red, and I think, boy did I blow that one. My old nature clings to me, and I often myself getting wrapped up in my grief and guilt.

And then I have to listen to the voice of Jesus when he says, Come out. I have to believe in my own resurrection, already, I have to believe in the new life that is in me. My new nature has to forgive my old nature, seven times, seventy times seven times, because of God forgiving me. Not excuse myself, not justify myself, but forgive myself in Jesus’ name, to unwrap myself from the negative power of what I’ve done, and to live within the positive power of the life which God is opening up to me. I have to believe in my new life in Christ. I don’t believe in my old life, and I do grieve it, but I can love it. Not to try to keep it alive, but as I love a dying relative.

I believe that part of the power of my new nature is for loving my old nature. Not liking it, but loving it. Not indulging it, not protecting it, but staying with it, working with it, engaging it. Sometimes it’s like there is a war in you, you have a lover’s quarrel going on inside you, but you still have to love the one that you are quarreling with. Faithfully dealing with your old nature is one of most important good works that your new nature does in the world.

Here’s a take home: One of the most important good works of your new life in Christ is to love the old and dying nature that lives on in you. Some of the most important forgiving that you do is to forgive the sin and guilt that lives on in you.

The fruit of this is that as you deal with your old nature, so you will deal with other people, so you will deal with all the pain and suffering and ugliness that is out there in the world. Also this: if you love it your old nature, you can let other people help you deal with it, you can let the Christian community help you unwrap yourself. Jesus told the community to unwrap Lazarus, it’s part of the sign, it’s an image of what the community of saints must do for each other. Your new life is not your life alone, it’s in community and for community. You don’t offer the community just your best self, just your new nature, you also offer it your old nature, not to be defended and preserved, but to be touched and loved and wept for and helped to die. And in return, to have to keep on forgiving the old natures of others in the community does not prevent your believing in their new natures too.

When at last you die, what dies is your old nature. Your new nature will live on. In the mind of God the new you is already living in the new heaven and new earth. The world of time and space may take some time to get there, but the mystery of the resurrection is that, in Christ, you are already there, where there are not two of you but one of you, simple and single, in body and soul, to live with integrity and internal harmony and love. It is be the victory of love, and we have that victory already.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

April 3, Lent 4, Keys of the Kingdom: Opening Your Eyes

2011-04-04T17:07:00.004-04:00

1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9

I have good news and bad news. Well, actually it’s good news and good news. It’s all good news, it’s bad news only if you don’t take the good news as good. That’s how it is with the judgment of God. The judgment of God is always good. There is a single judgment. God does not have one judgment which is merciful and another judgment which condemns. The single judgment of God is good if you accept it, but if you refuse it, then you condemn yourself by it. When we confess that Jesus, in heaven, judges the world, it’s not that he is approving this and condemning that, rewarding this and sending down some punishment for that, like Zeus or Jupiter. The judgment of Jesus is right down here with us, it is public and open and laid out clearly for us in the gospel. The gospel is the public judgment of the world, and as we read it and hear it and respond to it, we judge ourselves by it. It’s not just for the end, it’s for everyday. It’s not a final doom, it is a daily gift. As it judges us, it opens up to us the kingdom of God. If you accept the judgment, the gate swings open, and you enter the kingdom, and you look around and you see that you were in it all the time. If you don’t accept it, it means you can not see the kingdom of God. You’ve built a wall around yourself, a shell, a dome of hardness like the hardness of your heart, a fortress, and you look out through your periscope. Your vision is sharp, but narrow, and without perspective. All you see is what you’re looking for, and you miss the signs you are not looking for. The kingdom is closed to you if you don’t want it. Why wouldn’t anybody want it? Fear of exposure? Fear of looking weak? Fear of needing help? Fear of other people disappointing you and failing you, of the community not being a community of saints? Fear of admitting how helpless you are? How hard you’ve worked to get to where you are; you protect your achievements and accomplishments, your convictions and commitments, you protect the control you think you have. So you say, “No thanks, I’m fine. I don’t need it. I’ve got it.” I hear myself say that all the time. The advantage of the beggar was that he knew he needed help. The beggar knew that he was powerless to help himself. So, as helpless as a baby, he is being born again. Like a newborn, he is learning to see the world without control of what he’s looking at. Like a newborn, things happen to him; he doesn’t do things, but he learns to see from what is done to him. We watch him gain insight and perspective, and how to read the signs. He can see his parents now. He’s always known how his parents sound and smell, but he can see them now and he learns the signs of fear upon their faces, their fear of being tossed out of the synagogue. He watches the Pharisees. Their confidence in knowing what God wants, their vision of how to get the kingdom of God to come back, the hardness of their faces, and their judgment against this sign from Jesus, a sign of healing which points away from their vision of the world. He sees the anger of the Judean elders. They fear the synagogue’s disruption. They fear the insurgency of Jesus, like the insurgency of David which Samuel ignited against King Saul. The elders have worked it between Moses and the Romans, they saw it as the best that they could get, they saw themselves as realists, and their vision of the world was pessimistic and defensive. In anger and fear they judge against the sign of a new world in their midst. The beggar is thrown out. He’s been judged and condemned. He’s gained his sight but lost his place. He’s in a crisis now. (To be born again is not all peaches and cream.) And where is Jesus in all this? Out of sight, off stage. That is how it is with Jesus, in our lives as well. Whatever he might have done for you, you cannot prove that it was him. You can argue it away, what he does for us. Especially if his doing is beyond the scope of your expectation, outside the perspective of what you’re looking for. Your periscope is focused very sharp, but you cannot see around you or behind you. The beggar is cast out, we find him out back in the alley, downcast, tempted to prefer the old familiar darkness. Jesus comes to find him. Of course he isn’t recognized, the beggar hasn’t ever seen him yet. Jesus speaks to him, but with an unexpected question. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Why that question, why that specific title for himself? From the prophecy of Daniel 7, the vision of “one like a Son of Man,” lifted up to heaven to share with God the judgment of the nations and the government of the world. What does that heavenly and global vision have to do with this poor beggar here in the alley? The beggar says, “Who is he?” Jesus says, “You’re looking at him.” The beggar says, “I believe you.” That must make sense of everything, because he worships him, and Jesus accepts it. Who does Jesus think he is? Rather an exalted view of his own identity. It looks for all the world like he’s just another Jewish rabbi in an alley in Jerusalem, but the vision we’re offered is that the Kingdom of God has come, on earth as it is in heaven, and that the beggar is in it, and he can start to see it, and he can see the world around him in terms of the Messiah, the Son of Man. The irony is that the Pharisees and the elders of the synagogue are in the Kingdom too, but they choose not to see it and they are in the dark. They have made their judgments and they will keep them. They judged who was wrong and who was right, who was the sinner and who was not, who was at fault and who can be assigned the blame. That’s the way we judge each other all the time, in order to justify our own decisions and desired actions, to justify our preferences and prejudice and how we see the world. Jesus does not judge like this. He is not interested in who sinned, the beggar or his parents. His interest is in what we do with what we see. You will say, “That depends on what I see.” And because of our inclination to see only what we’re looking for, and because we need to own up to our helplessness, we need the good news to help us see the good news. Does that sound circular? How about this: You can see the world correctly if you see it in terms of Jesus as the Son of Man. I mean that you can see the world accurately if you look at it in terms of Jesus judging it. I mean that you can regard the world with hope if you see it in terms of Jesus calling it to where he wants to take it. I mean that you cannot see the world accurately unless you look at it in terms of Jesus as the Son of Man. You have constantly to correct your vision. You have always to look for signs of Jesus in the world. One reason you come to church is to learn the signs of Jesus here in order to discern the signs of Jesus in the world. You learn to see the world as God sees it. You could see the world as dangerous and fearful; it shows itself as painful and alienating, and it touches your own pain and alienation inside you, encased within the iron chest of your anger and your fear. Your own insides tell you that your vision of the world is sharp and accurate. But if you worship Jesus as the Son of Man, like a beggar, needing help, in the wisdom of your helplessness for your own life, his judgment of the world is the judgment of you, which is the key that opens up that iron box. He reaches in, and holds your pain in his hand, and on your angry alienation he puts his spit and mud to humble you and soften you. You hold your breath, and then you give in. You couldn’t see him do it, because it was inside you, but you can feel the signs of Jesus in your life, and you can look for the signs of Jesus in the world. Even when the world is dark, you can see into it, because the light you need to see it with is shining out from your own face, not a light you need to generate yourself, but the light of Christ reflected off your face. In his light you see light. And you can find his signs in the world. You can go out into the world, as it says in Ephesians 5:10, and “find what is pleasing to the Lord.” It’s like learning to see, it’s like being born again into the world. “Wake up, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

March27, Lent 3, The Keys of the Kingdom: Opening Your Heart

2011-03-24T17:29:00.002-04:00

Note: This is from the Tiffany window at Old First. Photo by Jane Barber.

Exodus 17:1-7, Psalm 95, Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42

I spent my childhood here in Brooklyn, but I was born in Paterson, New Jersey. All my relatives lived in the Paterson suburbs. My uncle Bert lived in Prospect Park, which was Protestant and Republican, and where you got a ticket if you washed your car on Sunday. My aunt Jo lived in Midland Park — also Protestant and Republican. My aunt Betty lived in Haledon — Catholic and Democrat. The joke was that Prospect Park was Judea, Midland Park was Galilee, and Haledon was Samaria.

It was sort of fitting that my aunt Betty lived in Haledon, because she was the sister who was more or less the wild one. She was pretty, and I get the impression she was “hot”. She always had boyfriends, and not from church. My mom remembers she dated a rich guy with a convertible. And then she went and married a Catholic. She was even active as a Democrat.

And she had a key. She had a key to the Haledon spring, on Tilt Street. The boro of Haledon had a natural spring of running water, what the ancients called “living water.” This was good, because the Paterson tap water was so bad. The boro had enclosed it so that you couldn’t get at it without the special key. I don’t know who got those keys, maybe only to Democrats, but my aunt Betty had one. So my relatives would bring her their empty bottles and she’d go and fill them up, but not too often to get in trouble.

It was to the benefit of the Samaritan woman’s neighbors that a fountain started welling up in her, and Jesus had the key that opened up her heart. The fountain flows out of her when she tells the villagers to “Come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did.” But he had only said one thing about her life, just that embarrassing comment about her five ex-husbands and her current boyfriend. She had quickly diverted the conversation away from herself, and they talked theology, and about his mission, and his being the Messiah.

But that’s what seems to have opened her up. And like a geyser the whole truth of her life rose up inside her, into her own mind and soul, at least. He did not have to tell her much to tell her everything. He just used his key. Her life rose up in her, and poured out to her neighbors.

We are not told her name. But she’s one of the five women in the Gospel of John who are a big part of the story. She, and Martha, and three Mary’s: Mary his mother, at the wedding in Cana and then at the cross; Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha, and also of Lazarus, who was raised from the dead; and Mary Magdalene, who on Easter Day met Jesus in the Garden, whom the later tradition suggests had been a prostitute, although the Bible itself never says that.

This Woman-at-the-Well seems more like Mary Magdalene than Jesus’ mother. But she is like the Virgin Mary in her giving birth to a new life that has been conceived in her by the Holy Spirit. She is a model for all of you. For you to be a Christian is for you to give birth to the new you whom the Holy Spirit has conceived in you. Yes, you are you, but you also are another you, the new you in the old you, your new nature conceived in the womb of your old nature by the Holy Spirit and being born again. Each one of you is a Virgin Mary, even if the world regards you as a Mary Magdalene or a Samaritan.

Jesus does not require that you deny your past nor does he help you to escape it. Your old nature lives on in you. But he frees you from the guilt and power of your past and from the grip of your old nature, and the Holy Spirit makes your old nature the virgin mother of your new nature. All your sin and your pain and your frustration and mistakes and loneliness and suffering are give birth to your character and your hope and your love. Not the stagnant kinds of love you thought you had to accept, but God’s love, poured into your heart and overflowing out.

She had tried to love, too much, and in her frustration she had given up, and her current man was a lover only physically. The sign of her frustration is her coming to the well alone, at noon, not sociably in the morning with the other women. She was not respectable.

This is the well of Jacob — Jacob who came as a stranger to a well and asked a woman for a drink and then it got romantic. She knows that story. And here is this strange Jewish guy who is crossing all the social boundaries, who wants to put his lips upon her jug, and she thinks, “the story of my life.” She doesn’t serve him silently, she engages him. Not done. They engage in what the social rules regarded as flirtation, and the disciples are embarrassed by. But her flagrant openness allows her to run back to her village and shamelessly tell her neighbors to “come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did.” “But we already have a good idea of everything you ever did!” How close to the old self is the new self.

Your two natures always come together and they are both in everything. They are as distinct as life and death but they also are as inseparable as life and death. Don’t look at yourself and say, “that good thing I did there was my new nature, and that bad thing there was my old nature.” There are both of you in everything, no matter which of the two is at the moment in control. So you have to believe in the new one. I said last week you have to believe both in Jesus as the Messiah and in your own new life, because the old one has the evidence. Believe in it and go with it. The villagers believed in her and went with her, they could sense new water rising up in her.

What’s the key? Is it the truth, the truth that Jesus tells about himself, as the Messiah, and the truth about herself? She only gave him a half-truth when he told her to go get her husband, but he responded with the whole truth. That’s when she diverted the conversation to theology. Jesus patiently goes with her, respecting her but still engaging her. He does not judge her to condemn her, but as he talks about his mission she can sense the judgment in his words. He talks about "spirit and truth." Energy and solidity. Vitality and fidelity. Movement and commitment. Novelty and faithfulness. These are her issues. She understands herself. She thinks, “the story of my life,” but now in hope instead of resignation. His talk about himself is what unlocks her.

I think the truth is only the teeth on the key, I think the key itself is love. He loves her. Not like other men have loved her, for her attractiveness, because she was hot, because she was loose, because they could take from her. He loves her only to give to her. He loves her only to give her back to herself. He loves her “in spirit”, with his energy, and he treats her with honor and fidelity, he loves her “in truth”. The deepest truth of all is that he loves her. People tell the truth in love, but the deepest truth is the love, the deepest truth about the world is the love of God for the world and for everyone of you within it, no matter how Jesus finds you at the well. That’s a take home: the deepest truth about yourself is the love God has for you. Whatever else you say about yourself when you talk about yourself, the deepest truth about you is the love of God for you.

So back to my aunt Betty. When I was a teenager my brother and I lived in her house for a while. We needed a place to stay, and she took us in. I came to learn her generosity, her sense of humor, her candor and her openness, how direct she was and without pretense, and how unlike everyone else in our family she was not always judging everybody all the time. I learned the other side of her. I came to love her. Later on she became of member of the very conservative church in which she had grown up, which meant she had to forgive them of all their years of judging her. She had to believe in her own life. I am so proud of her. She’s an example of what St. Paul says, that suffering produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope, and hope does not disappoint us, for God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

March 20, Lent 2; The Keys of the Kingdom: Opening the Border

2011-03-17T18:42:00.003-04:00

Genesis 12:1-4a, Psalm 121, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17

I want you to use your imagination. Imagine that on a clear day, you’re high up in the air, and you’re looking out over a great wide landscape, of farms and roads and villages and a city or two. But there you see a round valley, maybe a couple miles across, not very deep, a shallow depression in the landscape. The valley has its own towns and farms and such. Then notice there’s the circle of a wall around it, just below the rim of the valley, and the wall is just high enough to block the sight from inside of the land outside.

You zoom in closer. You notice that the wall is painted with scenery, lifelike, like a movie set, so that it doesn’t look like a wall, but like you’re looking out into the wider world. Imagine now that you were born in this valley and that you live in it. It’s all you know. You can’t see the world outside. In the wall there is a single gate. And in the gate there is an iron door. The door is locked. You cannot open it. You do not have a key. You are locked inside this valley, this depression, although you are so used to it you think it’s all the world. You have never seen the great outside, you cannot even imagine it.

The world outside is the Kingdom of God. Jesus says, “You cannot enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the spirit.” What does that mean, “born of water and the spirit?” Jesus says, “You cannot even see the Kingdom of God without being born from above?” What does that mean, “born from above”? Or does Jesus mean “born again”? His Greek words are ambiguous, they could mean “born from above,” or “born again.” Either way, what does he mean? He speaks in puzzling metaphors.

Nicodemus cannot track what Jesus means. After his third question he falls silent, like he can’t stay in the conversation. What could Jesus mean? Even for us, it takes the whole remainder of the gospel of John to track what Jesus says, because Jesus will work on these metaphors all the way through chapter 21.

I can tell you this. The Kingdom of God is right here, it’s not a far off country, which you have to journey far to go to, like Abram had to do. The Kingdom of God is not distant up in heaven or far off in the future, that you have to die first to get there. The Kingdom of God is right here, all around us, only you can’t see it from the perspective of the world, which is all closed in on itself. You can’t see it unless you are already out in it You have to enter it to see it, and you have to be born again to enter it.

Nicodemus was looking for it but he couldn’t see it. He spend his whole life working for it but he could not enter it. Nicodemus was a scholar and a politician, and a member of the council of Judea. His political party was the Pharisees, which, like most Middle Eastern political parties, was both political and theological. The Pharisees were looking for the political restoration of the Kingdom of God in Judea, and the removal of the Romans. The Pharisees believed that the Romans were in power because God was angry at the Judeans and therefore had abandoned them. The Pharisees believed that the way to get God to forgive them and come back was for every last Judean to be scrupulously righteous, which perfect righteousness would win them God’s forgiveness, and bring God back, and the Messiah would come and kick the Romans out like David did to Philistines, and take the throne David, and the Glory would come back to the Temple and the Kingdom of God would be reality.

But the political party in power was the Sadducees, and they were in the way. The Sadducees were the limousine liberals. They controlled the temple and had worked it out with the Romans. The Pharisees hated the Sadducees. So when Nicodemus saw Jesus cleanse the Temple, which is in the previous chapter of John, which was an insult to the Sadducees, Nicodemus thinks it’s time to go under cover of the night and make an alliance with this new guy.

He’s diplomatic in his opening, and Jesus comes back at him like this. “You want the Kingdom of God? You don’t even know what you’re looking at. You couldn’t even enter it, you of all people who assume you have the right to it, just by virtue of your birth. Nope, you’d have to be born all over again.” Jesus is saying that the issue is not the Sadducees or the Romans, the issue is yourself, Nicodemus. The Kingdom of God is already here, indeed, it’s sitting right across from you, only you can’t see it, the Kingdom of God is already here, only you can’t enter it, unless you deal with the issue of yourself.

So what’s the key, and what’s the gate, and what’s the wall? The wall is inside you. The border of the Kingdom of God is inside you. It’s not out there. The Kingdom of God reaches into you, but you have a wall against it, a wall that’s built of fear, like all encircling walls. So what are you afraid of? You do have much to be afraid of. If you look at the scenery on your wall, you can see what you’re afraid of. What people might do to you, based on your real experience. The dangers out there you are painfully aware of. Or how you might end up if things go on like this. The mistakes you’ve made that you might repeat, the mistakes that you are paying for.

The gate is guilt, a bastion of great strength, which we have talked about at other times. And the iron door is unbelief. And the key, the key is belief, according to John 3:15&16. But unbelief is closer and tighter and safer and easier. But your belief will open the iron door into the world, the whole world, which is your proper inheritance, according to Romans 4:13, the whole world as the territory of the Kingdom of God.

So what’s belief? What is it to believe? Well, you can believe in Jesus as the Messiah, and the kind of life he offers. Start there. And you can believe in the promises of God he offers, the promises we summarize in the Apostles Creed. We often say that we believe the Apostles Creed, but actually the Creed is a shortcut. It’s the promises of God we believe in, of which the Creed is the summary. Here’s a take home. If someone asks you, what do Christian believe in? You can say, we believe in the promises of God which Jesus has offered us. What Christians believe in is the promises of God that Jesus offers us. If you ask me what I believe, I can say that it’s not in ideas about God but promises from God which Jesus has conveyed to us. The key is belief, and the lock is the promises, and when the door swings open it lets you out to find your place in the world.

You can also believe in something about yourself. You can believe there is another you. There’s the you that lives on one side of the wall and the you that lives on the other. When you are baptized you become a dual citizen, it’s like being born again in another country, so that you are a citizen there as well. And you have to grow up into it, and it takes time. It’s not like you immigrated into it as an adult, but that you came into it like a newborn baby, and you have to learn it from the ground up like a child.

You know the old you, you know it so well, and, for all the grief you cause yourself, you love yourself. You don’t know the new you near as well, but you can believe in it, you can believe the promise that the Holy Spirit has given birth to it in you. You can live into your new self, even as your old self is still with you. And you can even love that old self, that old troubling self. You regard your old and sinful self not in hatred but in love. Because the kind of people who live out there in the Kingdom of God are people who have learned to love even the unlovely, as God so loved the world.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Lent 1, March 13: The Keys of the Kingdom: Unlocking Satan's Riddles

2011-03-10T17:37:00.002-05:00

Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 83.
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11

The serpent in the garden is not evil by nature. The serpent is innocent until we give it power, until we believe it. The serpent gives voice to the attraction of the world, to the allure of nature, to the mystique of our desires and the seduction of our potentials. Our appetites distract us from the special devotion of our species to God, our flesh diverts us from the obedience to God which comes with the special station of Homo sapiens on the earth. The voice confuses good and evil. The voice makes a riddle of our meaning in the world and of our relationship to God.

The Genesis story is always true. It’s a paradigm story, we repeat it all the time. In the Garden the voice was a serpent, today it is the good life, or economic growth, or the best for our children, whatever. It is attractive and reasonable. It never actually lies; it just never tells the whole truth. It speaks for the wisdom of the world, and for the certainties of experience, and for social science in the expertise of its small capacity. You can never answer this voice from within the world. The Genesis story is always true: from our life within the world we keep failing to solve the riddles of our existence and the riddle of good and evil. The only way to solve these riddles is from a perspective from outside the world but which still includes it, the perspective of the Kingdom of Heaven. The keys of the Kingdom unlock the riddles of good and evil in the world.

Our gospel lesson takes place just after Jesus’ baptism, just after he heard the voice from heaven call him the Son of God. That title confirmed him as the Messiah, the heir of David, the rightful King of the Jews in whose reign the Living God would come again and dwell with them. Okay, so now what? Do it like David? Like Alexander the Great? Solomon began his reign by going on retreat to a lovely place to seek the will of God. Jesus went into the desert to fast and pray. More like Moses and Elijah.

His temptations are not three easy choices. The hardest temptations are not the ones to do what’s clearly evil, but to choose the wrong good, which might be good by other rules. The devil dares him, “If you’re the Son of God, then act like it. Shouldn’t you be doing miracles? Back in the Exodus, didn’t your Father make bread in the wilderness? If you saw 5000 hungry people and you had on hand only five loaves and two fishes, wouldn’t you do a miracle?” Your followers will pray to you for help when they are suffering. Wouldn’t you use your power to help them?

Jesus is determining the policies of his Kingdom. Yes, he will do miracles but not to save himself or win his people’s loyalty. He will prove himself in the world not by breaking the laws of nature but by simple obedience, by faithfulness to the Word of God, even at great cost. Jesus’ perfection is a moral perfection—not in being a superman or invulnerable, but in his faithfulness to the Word of God. He believes that the Word of God is the moral diet of ordinary human beings. That’s the first key of his kingdom, the key that is the word of God, which opens many riddles in the world, by which we know what’s good and evil in the world, which opens the mysteries of our own lives and our experience.

But opening this riddle leads right to another. Satan says, “Oh, ‘every’ word of God? Well, how about this one: it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you.’ Live by that word, Jesus, abandon yourself to God’s incredible promises, I dare you. Why aren’t you jumping? Do you doubt the promise of your Father to rescue you?” Where is your God? Where is your faith?

The riddle uses scripture, but it’s a trick. This is not a true-to-life example of how we have to put our trust in God. It’s not for getting rescued whenever we’re in a scrape or for having a nice and easy life. To use our tie with God to play with God for a comfort of our own is “tempting God,” as Jesus calls it here. The special care of God for us is for the purpose of enhancing our mission. God’s special care for us is our incentive to risk a life of love and service, which love and service will probably lead to what, from the perspective of the world, might look like an increase in our suffering. The purpose of God’s special care for us is to get us through the suffering that comes with our mission, not to keep us comfortable.

Jesus does not accept this dare, this artificial test. But three years later, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he will pass an even harder test in this same subject. He will take the test upon the cross, he will have to enter the cold, dark door of death as if it’s his Father’s warm and loving care. He will trust in a silent and distant God without resorting to the supernatural. He will submit to all that we endure, and he will ask no miracle of God to free him from the burden of ordinary human existence. Because he has a key—the key that God’s will for us contains God’s care for us, and that God’s care for us does not exempt us from the realities of our humanity, but gets us through the realities of our humanity for the sake of our mission and to do God’s will.

Unlocking the second riddle leads you to the third. “Okay, so you’re not going to resort to any special power, you’re going to accept your limitations and be righteous within them. That means you’re going to lose. Our side has the power, we are in control. We will beat you, we will bury you. So be realistic and make your peace with the powers of the world. I’ll even make you Number Two, I’ll let you run the whole thing. You can save your people just like Joseph did in Egypt when he was Number Two. It’s Biblical. I’ll be Pharaoh, you be Joseph.”

The voice that every single politician listens to. The voice of the powers and principalities that tell you they control the world. In the Bible, the devil is not a voice from hell, he doesn’t even live in hell (that will be the place of his punishment). The devil dwells on the surface of the ground, like the serpent in the Garden, but the original innocence of the serpent has been corrupted by all the human evil since Adam.

The voice now has the pride of its misery, it has sophisticated doubt and well-developed deconstruction, it has angry ingenuity and bitter independence. It seems more real, while obedience is less glamourous, less heroic, less cool. It feels that way to me. I don’t want to be out of it with the world. I want to fit in. I want to enjoy it, I want to be included.

The third key is to worship God. To honor God and pledge to God your absolute loyalty, to confess your other loyalties and be released from them. The worship of God is not just praise, but also the of confession and absolution. This key unlocks so much. Because you have riddles in your life that Adam did not have, the riddle of your guilt, the problem we hold up high in Lent. Look, we have just read the Sermon on the Mount, and heard the teachings of Jesus, and we’ve had described the way of life that we must live inside the Kingdom of Heaven, and we recognize that we fall short, and we confess our guilt. And even by the standards of the ordinary world you feel your guilt. Your guilt and frustration can drive you to even greater doubt and unbelief than if you’d never heard of God. The voice of the serpent is most powerful when it reminds you of the truth of your guilt, as the problem you cannot solve. But it’s not the whole truth.

The whole truth is only known from the news that comes beyond the world, the good news that Jesus not only taught us but also suffered for our redemption and forgiveness. The weekly promise of the gospel is the theme of our worship, the key that unlocks this riddle to open the mystery of grace in our own lives, the mystery of Christ in our place, the mystery of lavish love, the mystery of the world that finds its meaning and its truth in the love of God which overcomes the world.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

February 27, Proper 3, "I Just Want to Do God's Will"

2011-02-24T16:51:00.005-05:00

Isaiah 49:8-16, Psalm 131, 1 Corinthians 4:1-5, Matthew 6:24-34

Why did you come here today? What do you want? I know what I want. I just want to do God’s will. More or less. Oh, and in ten years or so I’d like to have safe and secure retirement. I’d like to not worry about anything. And I’d also like to live a long life. "Longevity has its place."

What do you want? Personal health and happiness. Well-being. How do you get it? Can you guarantee a good life for yourself? A good job? Good pay? Good benefits? A good pension? Good investments? Home ownership? This is the kind of wealth that Jesus means in verse 24, what “mammon” means in the old translations. Not the wealth of the rich but ordinary people who are planning their finances to insure their security and their comfort. Of people like me.

So I am challenged by this gospel no less than I am comforted by it. As usual. It always does both simultaneously, it comforts and it challenges. It challenges my strategies for my comfort. It questions my patterns of control. How much can I really control my life? Who is in control? What of my life should I surrender my control of? And to whom? Do I dare surrender some of my control to you, the Christian community, this village in the Kingdom of Heaven, when I think I know more than you do? Do I surrender my control to God, when I can see so much evidence that while God may feed the birds of the air there are millions of people who are underfed.

“Do not worry about anything.” Telling an anxious person not to be anxious is useless. Telling a hungry person that God feeds the birds is an insult. Think how challenging this was to Jesus’ initial audience. Someone who’s got to go home after this and find some food for her kids, or cook a meal for her mother-in-law, or take out another loan to buy seed for this year’s crops.

There’s a lot of surplus in this gospel. There’s a lot left unresolved by what Jesus says. You could extend his metaphors to contradict him. You could find lots of examples to counter him and easily offer reasons to dispute him. Which would be pleasing because it would keep you in control. You protect yourself and your way of life against the challenge that Jesus offers here.

You need to consider this gospel as an invitation. Jesus invites you to come inside his kingdom. He invites you to live inside this village with its way of life. He invites you to the choice of serving God. You will accept his invitation, and then you will be tempted to think you can serve God and also keep control of your own security and comfort, but you’ll find you can’t do both, you’ll hate the one and not the other, and so to accept his invitation to live inside his kingdom means you have to look at your own wealth, your own middle class wealth, as like birdseed, and your security as like wildflowers, which flourish and are gone, and your comfort as nothing you own but as a mystery of which you are a steward, your own life as not your own but as a mystery you are a steward of. Do you want that? Can you abide that? That’s what it means to live inside this kingdom, that is the lifestyle of this village. He’s inviting you to make his Kingdom the priority of your life, the medium through which you get your other benefits, the medium of all your pleasures and your comforts and even your security.

Yes, choose it, yes, accept the invitation. You will find here glories and pleasures that are closed off to you when you seek your comfort on your own. You will find freedoms and liberties from which you are excluded when you seek your own control. All these things will be added unto you when you seek first the kingdom, and its righteousness. Not the things you wanted from on the outside, but the things you learn of from the inside, as the kingdom has its way with you, and you learn the lay the promised land, and you learn to speak its dialect, and you learn to use its currency. “Oh, these are the benefits of its citizenship. I didn’t know. But now I see.”

The old translation was better. Not “strive for the kingdom,” that’s not what the Greek word means, but “seek the kingdom,” seek it out, seek to find, like hide and seek, seek to see, to notice and discover. It’s not about striving and exertion, it’s about seeing and receiving, or finding and learning, it’s not about achieving but giving in, surrendering, coming in from the cold, coming in like an immigrant, a refugee, except that the frontier is in yourself, because this kingdom claims the whole territory of the world. The kingdom of heaven is come on earth, can you see it? Be as humble as a sparrow to receive it, and as free.

There’s a further invitation here as well. Not just to enter it, but to exhibit it. To serve it, to share it, to develop it, to flourish within it. Jesus calls us not to passivity but to activity, activity free from anxiety because it is free from our own self-control, it is free from anxiety because we acknowledge that our own lives are mysteries even to ourselves, and yet that we are stewards of the mysteries of our lives which are fully known to God, which means we can rest in his Lordship and control, and live our lives in freedom and creativity and beauty. In doing his will.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. We pray that every day. The Lord’s Prayer comes in Matthew 6, just a few verses before the gospel we read today. The Lord’s Prayer is at the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, it’s the high point that it rises to and comes down from. Our gospel lesson is an implication and application of the prayer. You can pray the prayer because your Father in heaven knows you need these things. The birds get their daily food from God, so Give us this day our daily bread. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, so that we not be anxious about anything. You can manage to live the sermon by praying the prayer.

You pray the prayer to live the sermon, because living it means depending so on God, and God invites your dependence. God tells you that if you accept the invitation to live this way, God will supply you with what you need to do it. It will not be what the world thinks you need, and you will hear voices that tempt you to those other sorts of comfort and control, but God will be with you as you pray the prayer. The Lord’s Prayer is the mountaintop of the sermon on the mount. When you pray that prayer, you can open your eyes, and look out on the promised land like Moses did, when you’re praying that prayer you can see the kingdom you are seeking.

So here’s the take home. To seek the kingdom is to do God’s will. To do God’s will is to see what God is doing and to do it too. To see God’s will is to learn the kingdom, and to learn the kingdom is to find out what God’s will is. God’s will is a whole way of life, a way of living in a village, a community of Jesus, which gives witness and healing to the community around it. To seek the kingdom is to see what God is doing and to do it too. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

[From MLK’s last speech:] “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Renewing the Chandelier

2011-02-22T13:55:00.007-05:00

Old First has this magnificent chandelier. We lowered it a couple weeks ago (a complicated process requiring steel cables, a geared windlass, and a number of ropes) in order to clean it and change the bulbs. Then we built scaffolding around it in order to reach its higher parts. Working in these pictures are Michael, Daniel, Rachel, William, and Christina. Photos are by William and Michael.

February 20, Proper 2, Gleaning, Love, and Deacons

2011-02-16T17:45:00.003-05:00

Note: This sermon speaks of two men, who because of my wife, became very important in my life. They were flawed, but yet better men than me. I loved them and they loved me, for which I will be always grateful.

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18, Psalm 119:33-40, 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23, Matthew 5:38-48

My father-in-law Phillip Takken died five years and five days ago in Hudsonville, Michigan. I loved him and he loved me, though he blamed me for his daughter liking to live in Brooklyn. His life’s work was a baby clothes factory in Grand Rapids. He wasn’t the owner, but he was the vice president in charge of production, and over thirty years he brought that factory from twenty operators to four hundred. He didn’t like labor unions, so he gave his employees better conditions and benefits than a union could bargain for. He gave jobs to Viet Nam refugees, and they worked hard for him. He got licenses from the Smurfs and Disney and the NFL and they churned out the sleepers and pajamas by the truckload. One day the owners informed him that they had sold the factory to a conglomerate. A few weeks later he was told the factory was being closed down. They had been bought to get their licenses and then be taken out of production. My father-in-law had to lay off every one of the four hundred workers he had hired over the years and close down the production he had given his life to. The owners walked away with buckets of money. My father-in-law prized loyalty, and he said, “Well, it’s all about the bottom line.”

But in the kingdom of heaven that’s not the bottom line. It’s a top line, it’s a superficial line, it’s a line in the breeze, it’s the conventional wisdom. It’s not the wisdom of God nor the law of God. The real bottom line is the love of neighbor as yourself. I don’t mean love as feeling or affection but actions and practices, even when they cost you or reduce your profits.

Jesus is not talking about charity or generosity. Those things are great, but they are voluntary. He’s talking about something obligatory. It’s obligatory not as a burden but as an attitude in tune with the very deep structures of creation as God designed it. The other mammals have the bottom lines of their appetites or their rank within the herd or their survival. But to choose against your natural appetites and your self-interest in order to love your neighbor is what makes you a human being as God designed you. That’s not charity, that’s actually in keeping with the hard realities of the world, although we keep fooling ourselves against it with our pretended wisdom of the world.

My father-in-law’s father-in-law, that is, my wife’s maternal grandfather, Gerrit Boldt, was a very successful farmer. He grew carrots on forty acres of muck in Grant, Michigan. Muck is black dirt, very fine and fragile; it’s what remains when you drain a swamp. Grandpa Boldt told us once that he was losing a foot of soil a year to erosion from the wind. He told us the main reason was that they had cut down all the trees along the edges of the fields. They had done this to make it easier to turn around their tractors and get a few more rows of crops. But when they cut down the trees they lost the birds who ate the bugs, and they had to start using lots of insecticide, which burned the soil and made it powdery and dry, and as there were no more trees to break the wind, the soil just blew away.

When Leviticus talks about not reaping to the edges of the field, it’s representing the deeper laws of existence, which we think we can ignore, but only for so long. When Leviticus talks about loving your neighbor as yourself and Jesus adds to even love your enemy, they’re telling us the deep laws of existence that we keep ignoring at our peril. The kingdom of heaven is not come on earth to lift us away from real existence, but to bring us back to reality, to get us back into harmony with the deepest structures of creation, the only source of true and lasting prosperity, the great shalom under the great and arching firmament of the sovereignty of God.

People fear that this kind of life will reduce them or disempower them. But if you work out what Jesus says about turning the other cheek, you see that it’s the opposite of that. He most certainly says to not strike back if someone strikes you first. But notice he does not say to roll over. He does not say submit. He says to offer up the other cheek. “Did you call me Roy?” To offer up the other cheek communicates something like, “I don’t believe you hit me,” which the striker might read as “I dare you to hit me again,” and he might think, “Only this time harder.” It takes the power of great self-discipline to act this way. It takes greater courage to turn the other cheek than to strike back, it takes more courage to be non-violent than violent in your resistance to abuse, and you will be tempted to listen to those voices that tell you its less realistic. But Jesus is following Leviticus to call you to the deeper structures of reality, and the long term vision, that “the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,” because it is the will of God.

You need to learn this, because you will have enemies. Especially if you live by love. Do you get that? People seem to think that Christians should have no enemies. But it’s the following of Jesus that will make you enemies. The world resists the holiness of God. But if Jesus loved his enemies who are we who wear his name to do otherwise? Do you want a miracle? Love your enemies. Do you want to work a miracle? It’s easy. Love your enemies. I believe in miracles.

Of course what he calls you to also depends on your having neighbors like yourself who in turn look out for you, who join in your cause, and join you and support you in your obedience. His ethic is not an ethic for heroic individuals, but an ethic for a community of love. It’s an ethic of holiness, because of the holiness of God, and this is the holiness which God requires of us. God says that a village in the Kingdom of Heaven is holy when we consider the fortunes of our neighbors to be essential to the fortunes of ourselves. And who is your neighbor? Well, since this Kingdom claims the whole territory of the world, that means even our enemies are our neighbors. Even your enemy belongs to God, and is therefore holy to you. It doesn’t matter how you feel about them, but what you owe them. You know that’s true, to the deepest structures of the world.

And so we have deacons in the church. They lead us in our intercessory prayers, not only for our own community, not only for the poor and the needy, but also for our enemies. And after they lead us in the offering of our prayers, they lead us in the offering of our money. They collect our money and they count it, and while they may spend most of our money on our own community, they have to make sure that the gleanings and corners of our money go the poor and the aliens, because “God is the Lord.” How large will they make the edges of our fields? How many grapes will they purposely let fall to the ground? You can support them. You can support the deacons by going the second mile with them, and by not refusing them when they beg you for your money.

Jesus got it from Leviticus, that we love our neighbors as ourselves. Yes, it means we have to love ourselves. There is great self-love implied in the command to stand up to the evils and injustice done against you, there is self-respect required in the expectation of self-discipline and self-control. But to love your neighbor as yourself also requires you to treat your neighbor with the same indulgence that you always give yourself. You know how you understand yourself in the best possible light even when you do wrong? Indulge your neighbor as you do yourself. It doesn’t mean to take your enemy’s violence lying down, but it does mean to understand your enemy as you desire to be understood.

This all means that we don’t believe that evil is built into the universe. It means we believe that evil is temporary, and passing, and should never be invested in or given more credit than it deserves. It means to believe that the victory of God is inevitable. It means we believe that we are called to holiness, not a holiness that we can earn or have to earn, indeed, we are holy even in humble repentance, because our holiness is a gift that absorb by having a holy God among us. And God promises to be among us, because God loves us.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

February 13, Proper 1, Elders Choosing Life: On the Ordination of New Elders at Old First

2011-02-12T19:56:00.006-05:00

Deuteronomy 30:14-20, Psalm 119:1-8, 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, Matthew 5:21-37

"Choose life.” Deuteronomy 30:19. Keep choosing life. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, choice after choice, judgment after judgment. By many small choices and judgments. But how do you know what to choose?

The paradigm case is Adam and Eve. God had given them a daily choice for life and not for death. Their choice was between two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They could know the difference between good and evil by trusting in God’s commandment to eat from the first and not from the second.

Not that the fruit of the second was evil or poison; it was good and lovely, and I’m sure other creatures ate it with no problem, but for Adam, God had commanded against it. And so every day Adam had to walk past that tree and choose against his natural appetites and choose for God’s commandment. He had to exercise his judgment and his trust in God, even against his natural appetite, which no other creatures have to do, and to choose against it day after day is what made him and kept him a human being. He had to keep choosing life according to the words of God.

That story is at the beginning of the Torah, the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, and at the far other end, like the other foot of a rainbow, is our lesson from Deuteronomy 30, from the very last speech that Moses gave the Children of Israel, just before they entered the Promised Land. It was for these people (and their parents) that the story of Adam and Eve was first recorded, because they will need it on this occasion. The Promised Land is their own Garden of Eden, and the Laws of Moses are an expanded version of the commandment of the trees. Every day they have to keep on choosing life by choosing to trust God and obey. And their doom will be the same as Adam’s if they make the same kind of choices.

The Children of Israel move into the Promised Land in order to “set forth a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” so to speak, because all men and women are equally in the image of God. This new nation is quite literally the Kingdom of God, the only nation in the world without a human king. Its only king is God, so this new nation is, quite literally, “thy Kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven.”

As they enter the Promised Land, God is giving them responsibility, they’re given responsibility to develop a culture and an economy. They’ll have to make many choices. They’ll have options and possibilities, and many temptations to do it like the other nations do. How will they know what to choose? Short answer: follow the instructions. Do you want God’s blessing? Follow the instructions. Don’t pray for God’s blessing if you’re not following God’s instructions. God doesn’t play games with us, God is straightforward and rather pragmatic. The blessings come from following the instructions, which for Israel, as a political unit, take the form of laws and decrees and ordinances. They describe a way of life. They are the gift of God that calls us to maturity and responsibility. There needs to be at least a little bit of Jewishness in every Christian.

The Laws of Moses left room for judgment calls. How do you apply it here, how do you apply it there, especially as the centuries wore on and the culture developed new situations that were unknown in Moses’ day. The scribes and pharisees dealt with this by ever more detailed applications—where this law counted here for this and but did not count there for that, which Jesus touched on in our gospel lesson. As if you could keep it perfectly by being scrupulous with the precise details. As if you could escape the risk of making judgment calls. Jesus has a very different strategy: he makes it a matter of your heart. Every law always counts every where; not one of them shall ever pass away. But what they count for is your conscience, and your freedom, and your love. Every law always convicts you and every law guides you and every law inspires you. For Jesus the law is the means and not the goal. The goal is life, abundant life, and the goal is love, the love of God.

What Jesus began, the Apostles continued. It was their well-considered decision that the Law of Moses was not binding on the church. What is binding on the church is the Lordship of Jesus. The way that we choose for life is by choosing for him. We cleave to him, we bind ourselves to him, we put our trust in him. We obey him, not as a letter, but as a living Lord. That kind of choosing is harder to define than doing it by the law, but it’s also more personal, and it brings us closer to God. We go so far as to bind ourselves to strong name of the Holy Trinity.

So you, yourself, as an individual believer, are wonderfully empowered and responsible. You are responsible to make judgment calls and daily choices, week after week, year after year. You have the word of God to inspire you and guide you. Not just the law, but also the prophets. And the gospels, and the epistles. Every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And all these words are made so easily available. Not in secret codes, not in priestly mysteries, but in this book, this book that children read. So many of the words in here are sweet and wonderful and as obvious as Mother Goose. So many of the words in here are challenging and daunting and as hard to understand as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But if we are patient and humble we can help each other understand them. A congregation does this when we’re a living community of Jesus.

A congregation is like a village in the kingdom-of-heaven-come-on-earth. In this congregation we live together as a community of Jesus. As I said last week, by our life together we illuminate the kingdom of God for the neighborhoods around us. And how we live together depends upon our constant choices in behavior and how we treat each other. We do this organically all the time in many ways.

But sometimes we have to make judgment calls. Difficult choices. Risky choices. Some of them requiring sensitivity and confidentiality. And that’s why we have elders in our church. A board of elders, in whose spiritual sensitivity we have confidence. We appoint them and anoint them because we trust them and we trust their judgment. We empower them to make choices and judgment calls about our common behavior and our common expectations, with one eye on the Lordship of Jesus and the other eye on our witness to our part of the world.

Next week I’ll preach about our deacons. Our deacons here work very hard and the work they do is very obvious to you. Our elders here work just as hard, but much of what they do is harder to see, and it must be so, for much of what they do is done confidentially. They have to carry burdens in their consciences and their hearts. They deal with the kinds of jealousies and quarreling that we read about in the epistle, the kind of things that develop in a community as naturally as Adam’s appetite. These things are natural and deadly. And the elders have carefully to choose among them in order to choose life for this congregation.

The kingdom of heaven is not something separate way up there. In the Lordship of Jesus the kingdom of heaven is come on earth. Its territory covers everything. It blesses everything and judges everything. This is why our elders have to have daily jobs not in the church but in the world. Our elders make constant subtle choices and judgment calls on how our church can help our human lives receive the Kingdom of God and bear witness to it by our common life. The office of elder is the distinctive office of the Reformed church. Other versions of the church have pastors and deacons, but the office of elder is what makes us Reformed. Our elders have been meeting together for 356 years, as pastors have come and gone, meeting together and choosing life for this community of Jesus. All that we ask of them today is that they keep their watch of three more years, and leave the next 300 up to God. I believe that God will continue to be just as faithful to us as God has always been, because God has chosen life for us, because God loves us.

February 6, Epiphany 5: Light and Salt and Beds and Water

2011-02-02T15:25:00.004-05:00

Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20

Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world.” Old First, you are the light of Park Slope. You are not the only light, and you are not only for Park Slope, but also for Prospect Heights and Windsor Terrace, etc. You are to illuminate your part of the world. By your good works.

Last week I ended my sermon by saying that in our life together as a congregation we could help little Schuyler Orr learn to see God, and that we can help each other see God. This week I’m going one more step by saying that we can help our community see the Kingdom of God, and what is in it. We can illuminate “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” And today I want to give two very practical examples of how we can do that. Both of them are from Isaiah 58.

First, Isaiah 58:7: “Is it not to bring the homeless poor into your house.” Here is a very clear message for us at Old First, to bring the homeless poor into our house. Look, a few months ago I got a request from a local service agency called CAMBA. (Check the link.) The CAMBA agency asked me if this July and August our church could host a respite shelter for the homeless right here in this room. I think this is something it would be good for us to do, so I passed the request to our deacons, and they are now considering whether the congregation would support it.

The homeless population of New York City is now the highest it’s been since the Great Depression. Our homeless shelters are packed to their capacities. The homeless who sleep in the city’s gigantic public shelters are more likely to stay homeless than those who sleep in the small shelters run by churches and synagogues. These small shelters are being opened up again after the city tried to close them all down. But most of the small shelters shut down for the summer, and there’s a great need for beds during July and August.

A “respite shelter” is a flexible shelter of five to twenty beds that is set up at night and taken down every morning. The agency screens the guests and brings them to the church at 6 pm. The volunteers make an evening meal, and they serve it and eat it with the guests, and then the guests set up their beds and most of the volunteers go home except for a couple folks who stay on all night. At 6 am the guests wake up for coffee and they pack up their shelter into storage and they’re out by 7, with the room completely cleared for other use all day.

We’d need to recruit volunteers. I have no doubt we would find them. I’ve already had expressions of interest from other parishes and civic groups. We have the space, we have the need, and we have Isaiah 58:7: “Is it not to bring the homeless poor into your house?” We can do this. We can respond to God’s call on us. Let the deacons know that you support it. If the deacons approve it, I’ll need six people to serve with me on a steering committee to get the whole thing going.

Second, Isaiah 58:11: “You shall be like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.” I am proposing we install a public drinking-water fountain right outside the front of our church. And let me tell you why: Water is a gift of God for the life of the world; flowing water it is a powerful symbol in the Christian faith; public water is a human right; and a public water fountain can be a wonderful illumination to our community of what’s included in the kingdom of heaven come on earth.

Two years ago I read a book called Bottlemania, by Elizabeth Royte. (Check her link; she lives in Park Slope.) The book describes how public water is being privatized. In our public schools, the water fountains are being removed and replaced by vending machines which sell bottled water and give a cut of the profits back to the administration. In September of 2009 I attended a conference in South Africa and I heard stories of third world governments in the global south which were selling their public water sources to international conglomerates, and the poor no longer have the free use of it, and now they have to buy it, for which they need our foreign aid. At this conference, they said that this is an issue for the churches, because water is a gift of God.

Last spring Elizabeth Royte called me up and said, “How about a public water fountain outside Old First?” Both for the real public need of it and for the message it would represent. I said I liked it but I needed time. Last summer I went to Grand Rapids for the General Council of the World Communion of Reformed Churches (check their link), and they had a workshop on water justice and the church. I thought of Elizabeth’s idea, but it seemed like such a small thing, compared to the realities of India and Africa. But then I mentioned it to the leader of the workshop, who is a theologian from Switzerland, the home of Nestle, which owns Poland Spring. He’s a leader in what’s called the Ecumenical Water Network. (Check their link.) He told me he thought it was a very good idea and we should do it, and they wanted to be part of it: they want us to share with them the process of our doing it and any problems we might face. He said it might seem like such small thing, but it’s a very important thing to do.

We’ll involve the community. We’ll need the support of the Park Slope Civic Council, of which I am a member, and its Committee on Livable Streets. We’ll need the support of our city councilmembers, Brad Lander and Steve Levin; both of them are good friends of Old First. We’ll need to celebrate this thing, and to publicize why we are doing it, and we’ll need creative ways to use the fountain liturgically. We want it to express our faith. So, I’ll need six volunteers to work on this with me. I think I might have two already.

Beds and water. These two things are being asked of us. And Isaiah 58 is telling us to go ahead. You will ask what real difference do these things make? Well, what difference does a light make in the house? It doesn’t move the furniture, it doesn’t clean the dust, it doesn’t fix the walls. So how needs light, right? What real difference does salt make in the soup? What difference does salt make in the omelet? How small a thing is salt, how little it does, but you put it right there on the kitchen table, because it opens up the taste of everything you eat. It is the same with light, it opens up the sight of everything. We need to be salt and light, and we can do it with beds and water.

Look, Old First, you can’t change the world. You can’t even change this neighborhood. But Jesus doesn’t ask you to. He reserves that for himself, and he does it in his own way, by the power of his word and his spirit, which you must be patient with. He is the one who is perfectly in control of his kingdom, he is the one who makes his kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. That’s why you pray to him about it, because it’s in his power to do it and not in yours. You can’t build the kingdom of God, and you are not expected to. But you can certainly receive it, and share it, and be witnesses to it, and point to it, and let people know what’s in it, and by your words and your good works you show the world around you what it means and what it stands for. When you host a respite shelter, you illuminate the kingdom of heaven. When you host a public water fountain, you open up the kingdom for anyone who wants to drink of it.

A skeptic might say that things like this are meaningless, but there are two more reasons that we do them. First, as our epistle suggests, not for the approval of the wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age, but as Jesus says, for the glory of God. If these things are God’s ideas, then we do them for the glory of God. And the second reason is to enjoy them. To enjoy them. To enjoy the light as God’s light, to enjoy the salt, to enjoy the water, and even to enjoy the beds. That’s how you know it’s the kingdom of heaven, by how much joy you get from living in it.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

January 30, Epiphany 4, Who's Big in the Kingdom of Heaven

2011-01-26T16:58:00.004-05:00

Micah 6:1-8, Psalm 15, 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, Matthew 5:1-12

(And that's a picture of my favourite theologian. It's a Christian epic, you know, which is why the movies are so bad. No love of trees.)

This morning’s gospel is the beginning of the so-called Sermon on the Mount. It takes up three chapters in Matthew. It’s a compilation and digest of all the preaching that Jesus had been doing in all the village synagogues. Now he takes it outside, and addresses the population as a whole, evoking when Joshua addressed the whole population at Mount Ebal. Because the people want to know. If the kingdom is at hand, what are its laws going to be like? What’s going to be expected of us? What people will be favored in it? What kind of fish should these fishers of men bring in?

Jesus opens with this passage we call the Beatitudes. It’s almost a poem, and it has subtlety and play in it. It’s often misunderstood.

First, it’s not a list of discrete definitions of certain kinds of people. It’s a unit, to make a whole and rounded picture.

Second, it’s not about who goes to heaven after you die. It’s not an opiate for the poor, because they’ll be happy up in heaven. Jesus has been saying that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, on earth as it is in heaven, it’s already here and now with him, wherever he is.

Third, it’s not that it’s better to be poor than rich or to be meek instead of powerful. It’s that wealth and power do not have any of the results or privileges that we want wealth and power for. You know the old joke: the best thing about being rich is all the stuff you get for free. Not in this kingdom.

Fourth, it’s not that the rich and the powerful are even excluded from this kingdom, but it is that they are not the ones who have the honors and the privilege they’re used to. The rich and powerful are welcome if they take their place behind the poor and the meek. This policy is what St. Paul calls the foolishness of the cross.

Let’s take a look at the Beatitudes more closely. What the Greek word behind "blessed" means is actually "honored".

Blessed Are /// For
the poor in spirit /// >theirs is the kingdom of heaven
those who mourn /// they will get comforted
the meek /// they will inherit the land
hunger and thirst /// they will be satisfied
for righteousness

the merciful /// they will get mercy
the pure in heart /// they will see God
the peacemakers /// called children of God
those persecuted /// >theirs is the kingdom of heaven
for righteousness

Blessed Are You /// For
when persecuted /// >your reward is great in heaven
rejoice and be glad /// you share prophets’ persecution

Look at the upper two-thirds. On the right-hand side, all eight lines belong to the kingdom of heaven. These are the things that happen in the kingdom, and the signs of the kingdom coming on earth. In the kingdom of heaven, the earth will belong to the meek, not to the aggressive and powerful. Earth here has the sense of land, or property. But the meek are never owners, they are always tenants, always paying rent, always last on line. In what kind of economy do the meek inherit the property?

On the left-hand side, the phrase for righteousness is doubled, so this kingdom highly values righteousness. Righteousness divides the eight lines into four and four. The second four lines are a mirror-image of the first four lines. The poor in spirit get served by the merciful, and those who mourn get served by the pure in heart, and the meek require the intervention of the peacemakers, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will find themselves persecuted. Because this kingdom is not separate from the world, but always in the world and in tension with the world.

The poor in spirit and the mourners and the meek are those who suffer, and the merciful and pure in heart and peacemakers are those open themselves to the suffering of the world. Like Jesus himself. You can’t afford to do that if you’re competing hard, or out for number one. But the kingdom is set up to honor those who live this way, who do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with their God.

It’s impossible. I give up on righteousness and justice. No, you will be satisfied. Only this, you will be both satisfied and resisted, and even persecuted. You will discover, that as long as you live in this stage of the world, do justice and righteousness will cost you. Peacemakers end up poor in spirit and mournful. Who can dare to live this way? How much do you desire it?

Please understand that it’s not that the left side causes the right side. It’s not that your being poor in spirit will earn you the kingdom of kingdom of heaven, and that being meek makes you more worthy of your property. He’s not saying to be merciful in order to get mercy back. It isn’t cause and effect, he’s not saying what goes around comes around. What’s on the right side is a gift of God, is what God does, God is the king who makes the kingdom come, and it’s for us to receive it. The only advantage of the poor and the meek is that they have less of worldly value in the way to keep them from receiving it, and that only advantage is everything. When we are these things on the left, we are right square in the path of what God is doing in the world and are open and ready to see God in the world.

The kingdom of heaven claims the very same territory as all the nations of the world, and it has a very different set of weights and standards. We must learn to see mercy and meekness and mourning in a different way than this world does. We can learn to see these and practice, we can, and this is what we teach each other and encourage in each other.

It’s because these things are very serious that I want to end a little playfully. A group of us were talking about the Lord of the Rings. I have not seen the movies, but the books were formative in my life; I was what they called a "Tolkien freak." The great theme of the book is that evil empire of the Dark Lord Sauron was defeated not by all the powerful armies and horses and riders of the noble kingdoms of Gondor and Rohan, but by the weakness and meekness of two little Hobbits. What St. Paul calls the foolishness of the cross. Not that we should all be Hobbits. But that the ones who are honored are those whom the conventional wisdom discounts and disregards.

Schuyler Orr is going to be baptized today. Schuyler is a little person, but he is not a Hobbit. He needs to grow to his full size and the empowerment of his potential. But what we owe to Schuyler is a community that believes and models the value and the honors and the weights and standards of the kingdom of heaven, with sufficient conviction to help him face the resistance of the world for the rest of his life, and even its very subtle persecution, and not to face it with anger and resentment but with love. He can love because what he lives by is a gift. Salvation is a gift of God. He can’t earn it, he doesn’t own it, he needn’t defend it, and he can’t lose it. We live our whole lives by the grace and gift of God. Salvation is by grace through faith, not anything that we can do that we might boast of. But we can honor it in Schuyler, and we can help him to believe in it. In our life together in this congregation we can help him to see God, yes, we can help each other to see God.

January 23, Epiphany 3: On the Shore and In the Hills

2011-01-20T11:59:00.003-05:00

Isaiah 9:1-4, Psalm 27:1, 4-9, 1 Corinthians 1:10-18, Matthew 4:12-23

Jesus moved out of his home town of Nazareth, up in the hills, and rented a house down at the lakeshore, in Capernaum. Imagine Jesus in his house: in the mornings doing carpentry, making furniture for the merchants, or going out to frame houses for Gentile settlers. He makes his mid-day meal, takes a nap, and then he goes out for his walk. He loves to be out among the people. He likes to walk along the lakeshore. One afternoon he comes back from his walk with four other men. They sit down in his front room, he makes them all coffee, and they talk. More coffee, more talk. Late that night, they go back home. I wonder, how many days a week do they come back? How much do they keep fishing, in order to feed their families?

On Fridays they go with him up into the hills. Every week another synagogue, arriving at sundown, repeating the prayers with the people, socializing overnight, going to service on Saturday morning, preaching and teaching, getting invited for coffee, healing the people, then still more coffee, and then walking back downhill, and home to Capernaum.

The campaign platform was the same as John the Baptist’s. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near," but the emphasis was more on the second part. For John, you had to go down to the water and repent, to get clean and ready for the kingdom soon to come. With Jesus the kingdom has come, ready or not, and he was taking it up to the people, in their ordinary lives, and just to accept that kingdom is the same thing as repentance.

In their villages, not in Jerusalem. In Galilee, not in Judea. In the Bronx, not in Manhattan. In the north, in the region that Moses had assigned to the tribes of Zebulon and Naphtali, a region that had always been a battlefield, one army after another marching through, pillaging their crops and ravaging their women. A region of Jews in poverty, and of Gentile settlers controlling the means of production. The Jews were in depression, and they felt like exiles in their own land.

The Jewish revolutionaries, the Zealots, had their headquarters in Galilee because it was more open and less controlled than Judea. Jesus had more freedom here to develop his campaign. Had he stayed in Judea, and announced in Jerusalem that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, he would have would been arrested with John the Baptist. But Galilee was also a better venue for Jesus’ new version of the kingdom of heaven. He didn’t bring it as a kingdom of independence, but a kingdom of interaction. It’s not for ridding our life of enemies, but for loving our enemies close at hand. It’s not for isolation but engagement. It’s not for getting rid of troubles, but for dealing with our troubles. The kingdom of heaven is for the mixed-up reality of our lives.

And to join him in his campaign he didn’t call priests or scribes or soldiers, but ordinary working guys. This was not the first time that he called them. Last week we read of the first time he called them, in the Gospel of John. They were down in Judea, standing beside the Jordan River, disciples of John the Baptist. And then when John pointed out Jesus to them, they went to him, and began to follow him. Then there was a gap. John the Baptist got arrested and his campaign was dispersed. The disciples went back to Galilee to fish. And now a second time they’re called, but instead of their looking for him, he comes to find them, right in the midst of their ordinary lives. And now they have to balance their fishing with the immediacy of discipleship.

Following Jesus is not magic. It’s usually gradual, in fits and starts, with gaps and hesitations, and with doubts and disappointments. It happened in stages that Peter and Andrew became disciples. That’s how we experience it. Following Jesus is rarely a sudden simple thing or one nice gradual evolution. You get an experience where you really take notice of God, which feels like a call. And then there is a gap, and you wonder if it was real, and if anything has really changed. Then you have another experience that takes you further, and you feel called again. Now God is asking more of you, a greater measure of devotion, God is calling on you to do something which may cost you, and you have to put down what you’re doing, and make new room in your life to keep on going where Jesus is calling. And when you think you’ve got it down, there’s more.

Jesus calls them on the lakeshore—not in the desert nor in Jerusalem. My favorite place on the planet is a rocky lakeshore up in Canada. In the summer I love to get up at dawn and just sit there for a couple hours. The lakeshore is a boundary, a limit, yet it’s not a wall, it’s an open boundary, the lake is open wide before me, and I can enter into it. And the lake is always right there all the time I’m doing whatever I’m doing on shore.

That’s what discipleship feels like to me, that’s what repentance feels like, not like putting yourself through fire or through torture, not punishing yourself, but like living along the lake, living along the boundary between two worlds, two realms of existence. The one realm is the one we’re born into and we’re used to it, where we can make our own way, thank you very much, where we don’t have to follow anybody. You make your bed, you cook your meals, you do the dishes. The other realm of existence is right there, always with you, as close as heaven is to earth, but it’s wide open, and I’m drawn to it but I’m unsure in it. When I look at this world I"m used to from within the air of heaven, the very same world becomes a different world, a strange world, in which all of my certainties are made uncertain, where all my confidence must be humility, where I need a leader and a guide, someone I can trust. And he says, "Follow me."

That’s very open-ended. I’d like to know first where he’s going. Why not just tell me where we’re going, give me the directions, and I’ll go straight there on my own? And why not just tell me what I have to repent of? I don’t mind repenting, just tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll say I’m sorry, and I won’t do that again. But Jesus doesn’t stand up in the synagogues of Galilee to say, "This is wrong, these thirty-seven things are wrong." If Jesus did that we could keep a list and check it off. He doesn’t tell us precisely what we have to repent of, he just says, "Repent," and then he says, "Follow me." He leaves it very open-ended.

Discipleship, repentance, the coming of the kingdom. These are all aspects of a single package. The kingdom is what Jesus brings, and to receive it is repentance, and to explore it is discipleship. The kingdom is what Jesus brings, and to receive it is repentance, and to explore it is discipleship. So then what is required of us?

On the one hand, everything is on the table, The boundary runs through all things. There are not some parts of life which are in the kingdom of God and other parts which are exempt. Every action, every possession, every relationship, every issue, every interest, every dollar, everything about you, everything you think or hope or say, it all belongs to the kingdom of God. The call is fully comprehensive. You must be ready to put anything down right now, from your plans to your possessions. In nothing are you self-sufficient, in nothing are you fully competent, in everything you need instruction, in everything you need healing, in everything you need forgiveness, and for everything you need repentance. Repentance as an attitude, not a self-evaluation or a listing of rights and wrongs you’ve done, but repentance as an attitude of full reception.

On the other hand, there is no stress to this. It is total but it is light. There is no pressure to this. Look how easy Jesus takes it. Look he patiently he campaigns, how much time he takes, how much room he gives. How just a little is a sign and seal of a whole new world. There is no pressure because the kingdom has already come, we don’t have to earn it or build it but receive it. You explore it by enjoying it. This is a kingdom where the law is love and the power is joy.

Eagle's Wings: From a John Donne sermon

2011-01-19T16:51:00.003-05:00

This was just sent to me be a parishioner, and I love it:

Eagle's Wings. ". . . So are those words which are spoken of God himself, appliable to his Ministers, that first, The Eagle stirreth up her nest, The Preacher stirres and moves, and agitates the holy affections of the Congregation, that they slumber not in a senselesnesse of that which is said.

"The Eagle stirreth up her nest, and then as it is added there, She fluttereth over her young; The Preacher makes a holy noise in the conscience of the Congregation, and when hee hath awakened them, by stirring the nest, hee casts some claps of thunder, some intimidations, in denouncing the judgments of God, and he flings open the gates of Heaven, that they may heare, and look up, and see a man sent by God, with power to infuse his feare upon them;

"So she fluttereth over her young; but then, as it followes there, She spreadeth abroad her wings; she over shadowes them, she enwraps them, she armes them with her wings, so as that no other terror, no other fluttering but that which comes from her, can come upon them;

". . . And so the Minister hath the wings of an Eagle, that every soule in the Congregation may see as much as hee sees, that is, a particular interest in all the mercies of God, and the merits of Christ."

January 16: Epiphany 2, The Lamb and the Dove (for Christina Taylor Green)

2011-01-12T17:31:00.003-05:00

Isaiah 49:1-7, Psalm 40:1-11, 1 Corinthians 1:1-9, John 1:29-42

We had our consistory meeting on Monday night. The consistory is the governing body of the church, the elders and deacons and myself. I’m always a little nervous before these meetings, because I am accountable to them, and I felt unusually vulnerable because we were discussing my salary, and also because I needed to retract some information I had given them the month before. But it was a very good meeting, and at the end we all felt very positive. We had many things to celebrate, because last year was a banner year for Old First. We want to share these things with you at our congregational meeting next week after church.

On Tuesday morning, as is my habit, I got up at 6 am to keep working on this sermon, studying the lections, trying to listen for a word from God for me to communicate to you today. At 8 am I took a break for breakfast, and turned on NPR, and I heard the latest report on the shootings in Tucson, and suddenly I found myself weeping, weeping for the congresswoman, and the judge, and the other victims, and for Christina, the little nine-year-old girl, weeping for our nation, and grieving our violence and our indulgence of our violence. I am usually inured to this, I try to be professional, but maybe I was still vulnerable from the night before.

"O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. O Lamb of God who takest the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace." Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, misere nobis. For many centuries the church has been singing this and praying this, especially when we face our violence and fear and misery, and the damage we do to each other and to the world.

"Behold the Lamb of God." John the Baptist was the first to say it. He was the first to identify the Messiah as the Lamb of God. Where did he get that from? That’s not what they wanted from the Messiah. They wanted a lion, a victor, a leader, not a lamb. Lambs get sacrificed, lambs get eaten, lambs are victims, lambs are like little nine-year-old girls.

I think I know where he got it from. He testifies that he saw the dove come on Jesus. He reports that he saw the Holy Spirit come down on the Messiah like a dove. That’s not what he expected. He was expecting the Holy Spirit to come down on him like fire. There were prophecies of this. The fire of holiness, the fire of power and judgment and purgation. And what the people will have wanted was an eagle, a properly royal bird, the symbol of power, like the Roman eagle, carried by the legions in their power and their victory. Eagles and lions, the symbols of kings.

The dove is a Biblical symbol of two things. In the story of Noah’s Ark, the dove is the sign of the judgment over, the healing of the world, of restoration and reconciliation and peace. In the law of Moses, the dove was a poor person’s sacrifice. If you could not afford a lamb you could substitute a dove. When the dove came down on Jesus, John the Baptist saw these things.

The baptism of Jesus is reported in all four gospels, but as usual, John reports it in a way that differs from the other three. He reports it after the fact, in terms of what John the Baptist had to say about it afterward. The Gospel of John assumes we know the other three, just as the history plays of Shakespeare assume that you already know the history. And what it reports is a moment in the conversion of John the Baptist, how his expectations of the Messiah were converted, and what he saw in Jesus even converted his interpretations of the prophecies that drove him. Having seen the dove, he began to see the Lion of Judah as the Lamb of God. Who takest away, not the enemies of Israel, as King David would have done, but the sins of the world. That kind of peace.

But lambs are sacrificed, like the Passover lamb. Well, his sacrificial death will be the instrument of liberation and salvation, though not from slavery to Pharaoh and the Egyptians, or from oppression by Herod and the Romans, but from the sins of the world. The sins of oppressors, the sins of enslavers, the sins of assassins, the sins of 22-year-old paranoid losers with guns, the sins of terrorists and politicians, and our own sins, our sins against our loved ones and our friends and even against ourselves. He takes away those sins. That is the policy and program of his kingdom, for he is a king, he is the Messiah. The kingdom of the Messiah brings many benefits in its healing and peace and reconciliation, but the very first article of the constitution of his kingdom is to take away the sins of the world.

It is for another occasion for us to discuss the theological mechanism of the atonement, by which his sacrificial death accomplishes the removal of our sins before the face of God. But it is for us today to commit to take away each other’s sins, because we are citizens of his kingdom and the first article of his constitution is a law for us. He has taken away the sins of the world, then how can we hold our sins against each other? Together we confess our sins here every week, in the prayer of confession, and then together we sing the kyrie, Lord have mercy upon us, and then when we hear the absolution of our sins, and then we pass the peace to each other. It is required of us. It is the coming of the kingdom that we do. Because he is the lamb of God, we are doves to each other. We pass to each other the peace of Christ, a peace that is greater than our own, and yet as citizens we rise to it each week. You let your dove take wing. You rise to your belief that each other’s sins have been taken away by the Lamb of God.

When Simon, the brother of Andrew, came to see Jesus, Jesus told him, You are Peter. That is who you are. When St. Paul addressed the congregation in Corinth, confused and contentious and conflicted as that congregation was, he called them saints, sanctified, full of grace, enriched in every way, not lacking in any spiritual gift. That is who you are, Old First. On the face of it you are a strange and peculiar collection of individuals who have come here for who knows what and who knows why, but do you know who you are? You were called collectively to be God’s servant, and God’s call came to you through whatever who knows what or why that brought you here. You are a community within the kingdom of the Messiah, a beloved community, in the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., you are beloved of God, in order that you might love each other and love the world, even its violence and misery and fear.

It is too light a thing, Old First, that you should speak peace just to each other every week. It is too light a thing that you should do church just for each other and your loved ones and yourselves. God has given you as a light to the nations. To your nation. To your community. It’s because of what happened in Tucson that’s it’s so important what you do here. The peace you practice here, the sacrifices of love that you offer each other in the name of Christ, this is the light to the nations.

The very first words that Jesus says in the Gospel of John are very simple. He says, "What are you looking for?" Two men say, "Where are you staying?" He answers, "Come and see." Where are you abiding? How can I be close to you? How can I feel close to God? Where can I go that I can feel God’s presence in my life? Where can I experience your kingdom coming? What are you looking for? I want my sins to be taken away. I want to be able to let go of the sins of others. I want there to be some relief and resolution to my weeping when I hear the news. I want to have something to celebrate with other people. Yes, yes, you are right to want these things. It is God’s Spirit in you that inspires your wanting them. And in your coming here together each week to find these things you will see these very things come to be. Because the Lord is faithful and has chosen you. I give thanks because of the grace of God that has been given to you.

January 9, First after Epiphany: The Baptism of the King

2011-01-07T16:51:00.002-05:00

Isaiah 42:1-9, Psalm 29, Acts 10:34-43, Matthew 3:13-17

Continuing the series: "Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven."

The Kingdom of God has citizens, which are all those who have been baptized. When you got baptized you got dual citizenship—of whatever nationality you are, and of the kingdom of God. Their territories overlap, and you have to work out the relative claims of each. One of the purposes of our congregation is that we help each other with the claims which the kingdom makes on us, to be "a community capable of forming people with virtues sufficient to witness to God’s truth in the world." (Hauerwas)

Jesus will get rather specific about those claims in the Sermon on the Mount, which we’ll be looking at in February. But today we look at the person of Jesus himself, because he is the source of the claims, and it’s loyalty to him and devotion to him that motivates us to carry out his claims. Living under his Lordship is very fulfilling, but it’s also challenging, and his claims call us to service and sacrifice, or put us in compromising situations, or call us to places of vulnerability and to costly actions of love. So my take-home for you today is only this: the image of Jesus, the image of the king, the image of the one whom we call Lord.

The baptism of Jesus must have been a powerful experience for him. Especially when he heard the voice from heaven as he came up from the water. It confirmed him, it encouraged him, it settled some things for him. It was real information when he heard the voice say, "This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well-pleased." No doubt he needed to hear that.

Yes, Jesus was fully God and fully human. Yes, we can confess that he was "God from God, light from light, true God from true God, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made." But whether he knew that for the first thirty years of his life is a different matter. He did not walk around thinking he was God. He didn’t have some special direct line to heaven inside his head. No, because his Incarnation meant he emptied himself.

He emptied himself. This is the doctrine of the kenosis, from the Greek word for "empty," which the New Testament teaches, especially in Philippians 2. He emptied himself of his godly attributes, such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. He accepted the limitations of the human mind and body. Remember that Jesus is not the elevation of humanity to divinity, but the humbling of divinity into humanity for the sake of saving humanity.

Yes, he knew he was anointed. He knew the story of his conception and his birth, and what the angels had told his mother and his father and the shepherds, what the magi had given them, and why they had fled to Egypt. He knew he was the Messiah, he knew he was the Son of God, but in the Old Testament meaning of that title, for a king of the House of David. He knew the scriptures spoke of him, and the scriptures powerfully spoke to him. How clearly he understood them, and found himself within them. He spent a good twenty years meditating on them and developing his understanding.

What sort of Messiah should he be? Like David, leading armies? Like Elijah, with fiery judgment? Like Elisha, with healing and peace? The prophecies offered him alternatives. The prophecies that inspired his cousin John the Baptist spoke of wind and fire, that the Messiah should come like a firestorm of destruction and purgation. Other prophecies spoke of gentleness and compassion, like Isaiah 42. All of them spoke of justice and righteousness, but what form should that justice take? That Jesus got baptized, to John’s surprise, implies that he takes the purgation upon himself, and the risk of his own destruction, that he takes the judgment upon himself. Where did he get that from?

Jesus had to learn from the scriptures no less than we do. The Bible was his line to heaven. That’s how his Father talked to him, to help him find himself, and what his mission was, and how to be God’s servant, and what God’s servant would do. He learned from the scripture how to act on God’s behalf. He had to keep asking himself, "What would God do? Let me do what God would do." And in his doing it, it was God doing it, as his apostles came to see after his destruction and resurrection, and also that what he did had such virtue and power for the salvation of the world because he was choosing what God would do from within the weakness and limitations of his humanity instead of from the power of his divinity, because he had emptied himself and yet still chose what God would do.

He was in such solidarity with us that of course he asked to be baptized as well. And here we see, for the first time this Gospel, the power of his conviction, because when his cousin would have refused him, he says calmly and with quiet authority, "Let it be done now." Ah, there was his power. His power was in his conviction and commitment.

Don’t think that having such power of conviction and commitment makes you less needy for some confirmation. Don’t think he doesn’t need just as much support as anyone else, if not more. So having acted on his conviction and commitment, it must have meant so much to him to hear that voice from heaven. The first time in his life, the voice of God to him. He had never seen an angel, like his mother, he had never had those dreams like his father and he had no memory of the star. Up till now it was all on scripture and inspiration. At last he hears the voice, the first time in his life. And it answers his conviction with God’s confidence, and his commitment with God’s commitment back to him. How often over the next three years he needed to remember that. I am the Beloved. God is well pleased with me. I can be the servant in whom the Lord delights. I can do what God would do. I can keep it up.

He will be tempted constantly to be a king like David, and he could cite prophecies to back him up, and needless to say, that approach always seems so more realistic. But he has to fix his soul on those prophecies like Isaiah 42, and be a king of mercy and healing and peace. That will be draining and exhausting. That requires you to be so open and so vulnerable, that requires you to take each person individually, case by case, every bruised reed, every dimly burning wick, and that’s challenging, it takes so much out of you. It takes far less out of you to be like David.

And yet he is a king. It’s not that his claims are less. It’s that his strategy to gain them is so different. It’s not that he has lower expectations. Oh, no, the claims of the Kingdom of God are vast and all-inclusive. The Kingdom of God is not just that part of the world that people call the spiritual part or the religious part. As Peter said, "He is Lord of all." From the Biblical point of view, the whole of our lives is subject to the Kingdom of God, from matters individual to matters international, from issues emotional to issues economical, from personal piety to practical politics. There is no wall of separation between personal justification and social justice. But how shall that Kingdom be empowered? Through teaching, and witness, and love. By the example of its king, we do it how Jesus did it, how God does it. The character of the king is the constitution of the kingdom.

The Lord Jesus is a Lord who is most gentle and peaceful in his claims. That does not mean that he claims less, nor that he will compromise in how he prosecutes his claims, and in what he permits his servants and his citizens. All of our efforts in his name must be like his. Gentle and peaceful and joyful, and always with the goal of love. That’s why we do this church. That’s why we organize religion. To help and support each other in our citizenship and our allegiance and our loyalty, and to love in each other the image of this Jesus whom we worship.

January 2, Epiphany, The Magi and Three Kings

2011-01-02T09:52:00.003-05:00

Isaiah 60:1-6, 26, Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14, Ephesians 3:1-12, Matthew 2:1-12

For the wise men to take a different road home was not so easy. The only way to go east was back through Jerusalem. So they had to go a very long way around, southwest down the desert road towards Egypt, but stopping at Gaza and turning north on the coastal road to Lebanon, and then over to Damascus and then back east. It meant a couple extra weeks of travel.

The post-Biblical tradition has made kings of them, from the overlay of passages like Isaiah 60:3 and Psalm 72:10-11. But Matthew calls them magi. Magi were astrologers who worked for kings. So they couldn’t have done this without some level of royal endorsement. They did not follow the star across the desert. They had seen it at its rising, and by their arts they will have deduced its Judean significance. But then it did move on ahead of them for the five-mile trip to the house in Bethlehem.

It was a thoroughly miraculous phenomenon, so it’s vain to try to identify this star in terms of known astronomy. No doubt Matthew saw it as an angel who took an astral form in order to call these pagan astrologers. So much was God willing to do to show that the Messiah of Israel was not for Israel only, but also the hope of the Gentiles and the desire of the nations.

The tradition imagines there were three of them, but Matthew doesn’t count them. But there were three kings: Herod, Jesus, and God. King Herod in Jerusalem, the infant Messiah in Bethlehem, and God in heaven, the Great King of the Universe, the Melech ha olam. At issue in the story is which of the first two kings has the backing of the third. The magi, as professional astrologers, can recognize that heaven backs the infant in Bethlehem. Herod has only the backing of Rome, but that will do as far as he’s concerned. The story might have been different had the wise men come from the West, bringing with them some sort of Roman recognition. Herod might have been more patient and political, and the chief priests and scribes might have gone to Bethlehem to pay their homage too.

The chief priests and scribes are forbidden by the Law of Moses to give any credence to astrology. So they cannot act on what the magi said. They can only wait and see. They do hate Herod, but they have made their deals with him, and a Messiah at this time would be lots of trouble, both from Herod and the Romans. For his part, Herod has no compunctions about astrology. He believes the magi enough to act on what they say, with his typical brutality, as we saw last week.

He has reason to. His royalty was theologically illegitimate, not being of the House of David. His father, Antipater, was a local official who had sided with the Romans when they conquered Judea, and was rewarded with a governorship. When Herod succeeded him, he got the Roman Senate to elevate him as king of the Judeans. It served the Romans to treat this troublesome territory as a protectorate instead of a province. As a separate kingdom, Herod could take the heat for everything. And also, the Judeans could maintain their religion without it being given recognition under Roman law. As long as everyone behaved and knew their place, and respected the iron reality behind the fictions and facades. But the magi offer a fact to challenge the fiction, and a new reality to threaten the facade. All Jerusalem is troubled by the news. If the Messiah acts like David, all bets are off.

The magi act innocent of all of this, although I can’t imagine they weren’t suspicious of Herod. Maybe that’s why they didn’t go to him first, but made their inquiries out in public. And then when he met them secretly and told them to report back to him, they can’t have fully trusted him. So I’m guessing that their dream served to settle the options they were already mulling over, just like the dream that Joseph had had, when he learned of Mary’s pregnancy.

The magi were overwhelmed with joy to do what they had come to do. They expressed their recognition of the new king by prostrating themselves before him. Their giving of gifts was typical of a royal recognition. What did they expect of him? That he would be another king of kings, like Alexander the Great? The world in those days was full of such hopes and expectations and, yes, pretensions.

There is one phrase that is repeated three times in this story. Verse 2: For we have observed his star at its rising, and we have come to pay him homage. Verse 8: When you have found him, bring me word, that I may go and pay him homage. Verse 11: On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage. What does that mean, "to pay him homage"? Honor? Allegiance? Even worship, as in the old translations?

When you meet the Queen of England you’re supposed to bow or curtsy. In the old days you went way down. How far down did the magi go? Our translation is too weak when it says "they knelt down." The Greek verb in verse 11 means they went all the way down, prostrate, head on the floor, like a Muslim at prayer. Why so far down? Because this infant was a son of heaven. They probably did not worship him as a god, but they did believe that heaven was with him.

"Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven." Every week we pray for that. According to Matthew these magi saw it, in the person of the child. And Matthew invites us to believe that heaven was backing this infant king, not only, but fully invested in him. That the King of Heaven was not only taking his side, against all pretenders, but fully taking on his flesh, dwelling in him. We are invited to recognize him as two kings in one, the king of Judea and the high king of heaven, we are invited to pledge him allegiance as royalty, but also to worship him as God.

This sermon is the third in a series I’m calling, "Thy Kingdom Come." It’s what the Gospel of Matthew is all about, that the Kingdom of heaven has come on earth in this Messiah, that the Kingdom of God is invested in the Lordship of Jesus of Nazareth. And further, that this very Jewish thing is of profound significance for us who are Gentiles, for all the nations of the world, and as the magi saw, and as Ephesians says, for all the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

　
To recognize his lordship is necessary for our living out his teaching. For us to carry out his ethics requires us to worship him. Matthew is the gospel in which Jesus is so much the teacher and the rabbi. "The kingdom of heaven is like this, the kingdom of heaven is like that." It’s in Matthew that we get the Sermon on the Mount, and the Beatitudes. It’s in Matthew that Jesus is most ethical. It’s the Jesus of Matthew that everyone appeals to, be they religious or not, when they honor Jesus’s teaching as a way to make the world a better place.

But if you follow Jesus’ teaching, it can get you in trouble with the world. Just ask Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It get even get you killed. Just ask St. Peter and all the other martyrs of the early church. To live according to the kingdom of God puts you in tension with the world and maybe at risk. If King Herod had tried to be a righteous king, say following the language of Psalm 72, he could not have forced enough taxation to satisfy the Romans, and they might have looked for another puppet. To follow the ethics of Jesus requires you walk a different way, not always the short way or the easy way. Because of the challenge of his teaching and his ethics, in order to stay with him you have to gamble on his deep identity, that this rabbi is a king, that this teacher is the Lord.

Yes, to follow him as teacher you really have to worship him as Lord. And despite the risk and tension with the world, despite the challenge of this road through life, you will find that the payback is very great, you will find it fulfilling, you will find that you can offer up your gifts to God and to the world, and, like the magi, you will find it both quiet and joyful.

Copyright © 2011, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

December 26, Christmas 1: Two Kings in One Kingdom

2010-12-24T18:13:00.003-05:00

Isaiah 63:7-9, Psalm 148, Hebrews 2:10-18, Matthew 2:13-23

Luke reports the nativity in terms of Caesar Augustus, and Matthew reports it in terms of King Herod. Luke calibrates his report with facts which can be verified in the records of the Roman Empire, while Matthew reports things which cannot be verified by any external source.

There is no report of the Slaughter of the Innocents in the historical record. Well, that begs the question, by excluding the Gospel of Matthew from the historical record. But Matthew wrote his gospel to be part of the historical record, no less than Julius Caesar did with his Gallic Wars. Oh yes, Matthew had an interest, but so did Caesar. Historians rely on the records of the Roman Empire and the annals of its puppets like King Herod, but these always represent an interest, so these records not mentioning of the Slaughter of the Innocents is not unforeseeable. It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to keep an official record of, nor was it even noteworthy. It’s the kind of thing King Herod did to keep himself in power. He was a noble thug. And as long as he served the interests of the Empire, the Romans turned a blind eye to all of his cruelties.

Who in history has ever recorded the slaughters of innocents? During the height of our war in Iraq we kept no public record of civilian casualties. Not that we were so cruel or hypocritical—we are just typical. A life along the boundaries of our systems is less valuable than a life at the center. You expect less in the colonies. It is the ordinary way of empires. The point of having military power is to keep the collateral damage away from home. If a slaughter of innocents had happened in a Roman colony to Roman citizens, then we’d have seen it in the official records.
　
How many children were killed? In a village the size of Bethlehem? All the boy babies under two, when families were large but child mortality was so high? Maybe thirty? How many children were killed last week in some country somewhere at the fringe of our economic system? Just a couple miles from here, in East New York, how many school age children are looking at the sale of drugs? Twenty? Sixty? A hundred? I don’t know. I doubt anyone of us here has any idea how many children our system considers expendable.

All of these examples are complex, none of these stories are black and white. We don’t have to assume that King Herod, in his own mind, might not have honestly agreed with the song of the angels, "Peace on earth, good will to humankind." But to keep the peace and some semblance of good will within his very troubled little kingdom, he felt he had to do what he had to do to keep control and to maintain his dynasty, even to having one of his own sons murdered in order to clear the way for another. So what’s a few undernourished kids, half of whom would never make it to adulthood anyway?

But this particular slaughter was put into history by Matthew because Jesus was his teacher, who himself will have been told of it by Joseph, to explain why he had grown up in Egypt (and why we can assume that Jesus was able to converse in Greek). That slaughter of some innocents will have been special to Jesus, not because it was so bad, for many have been far worse, but because it was on his account. Did he have survivor’s guilt? Is that part of the suffering which is mentioned by the Epistle to the Hebrews? Not that he was guilty, but that he took our guilt upon himself. That is why he became a human being: the Incarnation was not for the exaltation of humanity but for its perfection through the suffering of divinity. I wonder how much this history was always in the back of Jesus’ mind. The novelist Kazanzakis supposed that even on the cross he was remembering it. It certainly was part of what informed him as the Messiah.

We have in this story a struggle between two kings. Not two kingdoms, but a single kingdom, and with two kings. Which one is the usurper? Which one is the rightful king? Not necessarily the one who has the power or the monopoly on violence. King Herod was quite happy to have a heavenly king as long as there were two kingdoms between them—a kingdom on earth for himself and the kingdom of heaven for God. King Herod probably believed in God, and he certainly spent lavishly on the temple, and God could do whatever heavenly things God did while he did whatever worldly things he needed to do. King Herod probably prayed, but he would not have liked the Lord’s Prayer: "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Give to God what is God’s, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and keep for Herod what Herod has to keep. That way everybody’s happy.

"Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven." Aye, there’s the rub, as I said the other night. That’s why Herod wants to take him out. Herod probably believed this baby was the rightful king, but that had not deterred him from killing his own son. Rightful king or not, this baby was bloody inconvenient. It’s always inconvenient when the kingdom of heaven comes on earth. Even for us, for all of us, powerful or powerless, innocent or guilty, it certainly puts us in a time of trial, and forces the issue of our temptations. You can do like King Herod, and try to dispose of the inconvenience, or like Joseph, you can embrace the inconvenience for the sake of the hope that is set before you.

The kingdom of God has its capital in heaven and its territory is, redundantly, the earth, disputed territory though it be. We feel like we live along its boundaries, at the fringes of the sovereignty and power of God. How great should our expectations be? It is possibly safer and certainly more convenient for us to live our lives as in two kingdoms instead of one. It may be that the powers in charge are usurpers, but when they oppose the rightful rule of God, how much power does God have to save us? Does it mean we’re on the run, like Joseph and Mary? Is that what it means to seek the kingdom of God? To be in flight? To be exiles in the world? Is that what I want for myself? For my kids? For my career? Lead us not into temptation.

I’m setting up these questions without an easy answer. The answer takes a while, it takes the whole gospel account of Matthew, which we will be unfolding here the next few months. My sermon series for the next few months is "Thy kingdom come." It’s because the coming of the kingdom is so central to Matthew’s gospel that we get this bad news story so quickly upon the good news of Jesus’ birth. But, as the epistle explains, the reality of the bad news is the material cause of the good news. A shadow proves the shining of a light. King Herod knew what was up. But he couldn’t imagine where Jesus would take it. Not with an imagination inspired by fear.
Yes, to be loyal to this rightful king must put you at risk with the seated powers of the world, effective and respected as they may be. Yes, against the logic of their ideologies you may feel like your belief is nothing better than a sequence of your dreams, like Joseph’s. But then you get external confirmations, like from the magi. You want to believe two things, but you yield to the belief in one. It’s a matter of trusting what you hope and feel is true.

Which king is acting out of love? Which king takes the suffering upon himself? Both of the royal families in this story have reasons to fear, but which of the two families passes the fear along to others, and which is the one which puts its whole trust in God’s protection? For all his wealth, Herod believes in a world that is far less generous than Joseph does. For all his power, Herod has far less hope than Joseph does. We support each other here in choosing for hope and generosity, and we support each other in choosing for the love of Jesus Christ.

Copyright © 2010, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Christmas Eve 2010: Our Yearning For God's Turning

2010-12-22T16:00:00.002-05:00

I welcome you here tonight. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, whatever your belief or unbelief or even curiosity, welcome! We are glad that you are here.

Both Judaism and Christianity are distinctive among the world’s religions by their belief in a God who makes promises, and in the promises God makes. For Jews, the promises are focused on the eternal distinction and obligation of their people, and on the promised land. For Christians, the promises are focused on Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the savior of the world.

The promises of God are not mere ideas. They promise real interventions in history, they aim at facts on the ground and the revival of souls and the resurrection of bodies. This God is a promise maker. But is this God a promise keeper?

There’s the rub. Does this God deliver? That is the pivot of belief. Not just that there is a God, or that God is good, but that God will be faithful.

If you make promises you have to follow through by making your choices and decisions in the direction of your promises. To keep your promises requires you to have some minimal control of your future, say, the future of your bank account, or of your property, or of your business. You have to be able to make your choices count towards your commitments. If this God we’re talking about is a God of promises, then this God is not merely some ideal force or the spiritual energy of the universe, but a someone who has desires and intentions and acts on them, a someone who makes choices and decisions, indeed, a someone who loves. This God is an "I" but not an ego, a lover without an id and a ruler without a superego, this is the great I-am who is the I-for-thou. This is the God who turns towards us. This is the God who keeps turning towards us even when we turn away.

In a few moments we will read nine lessons from scripture. They go from the promises made by the prophets to the promises kept in the gospels, promises kept with the Incarnation of God for your salvation and the salvation of the world. These nine lessons review the turning of God towards us. Why us? Who do we think we are? Such foolish creatures, such destructive animals, workers of such misery in the world. And yet God turns towards us, and at some cost to God’s self.

The God of promises is a God who pays for those promises at great cost to God’s self, a cost which is foreshown in the second lesson tonight, the sacrifice of his own son, a cost far greater than our own sorrow and repentance. Such is the power of God’s desiring. Even in our choosing of darkness this God keeps bringing light.

You chose to come here tonight, you chose for light within the darkness. You too have some desire. You are here tonight because you want to hear again the story of the Incarnation and to feel in the music the emotions of the story. You carry the yearning of humanity for the turning of God towards us. You hear the yearning and the turning in the promises to Abraham and the prophecies of Isaiah. You can feel it in the next hymn we will sing, "O come, O come, Emmanuel. O come, desire of nations." We desire God, we desire God-with-us, we long for the turning of God to the world.

Our yearning stems from our losses and our frustration and our misery, from our grieving and our sorrow and our repentance. But even if we were not sinners we would desire God. It is what we’re made for. Our yearning comes also from what is good in us, from our successes and our glories, at least when our glories are the glories of joy and love. We desire the light not only from being in darkness but also for the light itself. "His life was the light of humankind." We are made for the light. We are created to have this longing, we are designed for this desire. That these will be fulfilled is the promise of the infant in the manger, the fact on the ground which offers the desire of heaven. The great fulfillment is the gift of God’s own self, which is offered for your acceptance already here tonight.

Whatever your level of desire or belief, your choice to come here tonight was the right one. You knew there was something here for you tonight. I welcome you to it. The gift is free, the joy is free, the love is unconditional. Thank you for coming. I thank our musicians for singing and playing, I thank our lectors for reading, and I thank God for having this whole idea. God bless you all.

Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Meeter, All Rights Reserved.