“Called to Follow” - January 26, 2020

Matthew 4:19-20

            Before the disciples, there was Jesus.

            While Peter and Andrew were still fishing on the Sea of Galilee, while James and John were still fixing their nets, there was Jesus.

            After his birth and his early years, after the Holy Spirit descended and the voice of God came from heaven, saying,

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” [Matthew 3:17]

After he faced down the devil’s temptations in the desert, it was time to begin.  He left Nazareth, where he had worked as a carpenter, and went to the town of Capernaum where he then made his home, says Matthew, and

“From that time, Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’” [Matthew 4:17]

There were no crowds cheering for him or jeering at him.  There were no five thousand people demanding to be fed, no eager learners straining to hear his words.  The time would come when could not show his face before there were people rushing to bring the sick to him for healing, but that was not yet.  At this point, there was just Jesus, heading out into the world to find them and to proclaim the good news. 

Eventually he would ask others to help him to do that, and the gospel writers tell us how that happened.  He said to two fishermen,

“‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’  Immediately the left their nets and followed him.”  [Matthew 4:20]

Next, it was two more,

“and he called them.  Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.” [Matthew 4:21-22]

That was how it went from there on, but it began with Jesus and his announcement of the kingdom.

            In fact, everywhere Jesus went – everywhere he goes (because he cannot be limited to the past when he is alive even now) – the kingdom of heaven draws near.  When Jesus called one of his earliest followers, Nathanael, he described himself as the one whose job it is to join heaven and earth together.  He said,

“Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” [John 1:51]

Jesus does that just by being who he is.  That never changes. 

His call to his disciples is a call to follow him, not to tell him where we think he should go.  He calls his people to join him in his mission, one that he initiates.  We may think we know where he’s leading, and sometimes we are right.  A lot of the time he surprises us, however.  We may spend a lot of time and energy trying to get somewhere that just isn’t where Jesus has planned to go, in which case we are only banging our heads on the wall. 

If you look back at the early Church, the very earliest days as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, what you find is that the Lord is at work in people’s souls before his followers ever arrive on the scene and that when they do arrive their job is often to explain what is going on to people whose lives are already being turned around.  The Holy Spirit sends Phillip to a spot on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, where he meets a chariot carrying an Ethiopian official who is already reading the book of the prophet Isaiah.  Phillip offers to explain what he’s reading, and the next thing you know the man becomes the first gentile convert to Christianity [Acts 8:26-40].  Phillip helps to finish what God began.

Again, Peter has a vision that he should go and speak to a Roman centurion and when he arrives, he finds that he was expected [Acts 10].  A man named Saul persecuted Jesus’ followers and on the way to Damascus to arrest more of them he is struck blind by the brightness of Jesus’ appearance to him from heaven.  Carried to Damascus, he waits for three days without his sight, until God speaks to a man named Ananias as he prays and tells him to find Saul, then to pray for his sight to return.  Ananias, of course, says, “Do I really have to?”  The answer is, “Yes.”  So he goes where he was told, and before long Saul has changed his name to Paul and is on his way to becoming the person whose letters to churches that he founded make up a good chunk of the New Testament [Acts 9].  In each case Jesus gets there first and then says, “You can take it from here.”

Gil Rendle, who for decades has been studying what makes a church faithful and effective and what makes a church falter in its mission, shares this observation:

“Instead of constantly asking how a person or congregation can be an agent of God’s Spirit, leaders also need to ask where and how God’s Spirit is already at work – and then ask how they can get behind that work and help.  It is a challenge to functional atheism through which people have convinced themselves that they are the (only) hands and feet of God, and unless they get up and about with their own doing they believe God’s Kingdom will not advance.”[1]

In other words, it’s up to us to get with the program, not to design it. 

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;

            and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?”  [Micah 6:8]

            I was comparing Christmases with a friend of mine, also a pastor.  She is on staff at one of the large, almost-but-not-quite-mega-churches out in the middle of the state that has a string of services on Christmas Eve and I asked her, with all that goes on that day, which service she herself finds most meaningful.  She told me that it never shows up on the schedule.  A few years ago she went to visit one of their shut-ins the week before Christmas and saw that the woman had left her Bible open to the Christmas passages from Luke.  Next to it was a picture of a young woman taken sometime in the 1950s.  It turns out that the picture was of her daughter, who had died a few years after it was taken.  The Bible also had belonged to her.  So my friend read from that Bible before she left, finishing at the end of the shepherds’ visit where it says,

“But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” [Luke 2:19]

That’s the part where the mother is thinking about her baby, Jesus, and the meaning of his life.  They both started to cry.  But every year since then, they have started out Christmas Eve Day together in the same way.

            You follow by going where your heart shows you that Jesus has already gone.  You go where you know perfectly well he would want you to be, and you find he’s waiting there already.

[1] Gil Rendle, Quietly Courageous (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 86.

“Called to Call” - January 19, 2020

John 1:29-42

            Out in the hallway beyond the bell tower every Sunday there are people who have gift cards available for various businesses.  The church gets a small portion of the funds back and that goes to support of our Kitchen Ministry.  Some of the stores where the cards can be used also give points toward discounts on gas, so it can be a good way of stretching money that I would have spent anyway. 

            I have no trouble passing along helpful hints like that.  Much, if not most, useful information gets shared by word of mouth.  How many times have you either offered or received advice about which place makes the best cheesesteak or who does a good job with stucco?  Those are practical questions with practical answers.

Sometimes people share more serious advice with someone who doesn’t even know they need it until it’s offered.  I knew of an executive who worked at a company (now out of business) whose female employees always warned any new woman hired, “Don’t let him help you on with your coat.”  Even better advice came along later when someone else said, “We need to go to HR about this.”

There’s sort of a spectrum here.  It’s easy enough to ask about or to bring up everyday, surface sorts of issues.  It’s tricky to know if, when, and how to raise more personal matters that reveal our vulnerabilities (and we all have those).  It can be downright frightening to address anything that can go right to the heart of how we see the world or what makes us live our lives the way that we do.  Specifically I’m thinking about what it takes to share our faith.

Faith does have to be shared from person to person.  Rarely does someone think their way into it, although for some people belief can be very much connected to thinking things through logically.  Even when it is, there’s often some irrational or unexplainable nudge that underlies the search.  This week I was listening to a podcast called “Radiolab” that’s comes up weekly on National Public Radio.  The host made a comment about himself, almost as an aside, that jumped out at me.  What he said was:

“I generally move through the world with the assumption – which is – which has been proven over and over again to be true – that I don’t know how the world works.  Like, somehow I missed that day in school or something. …I’m referring to a general sense that somehow, like, Oz is out there behind the curtain pulling levers and I’m just always going to be stuck on this side, you know?”[1] 

I would say that there’s a lot in that statement that is akin to what was going on inside Andrew when he first encountered Jesus.  The fact that he had been hanging out with John the Baptist is a big hint.  John was all about telling people to prepare for the coming of somebody who would be able to put all the pieces together.  So one day when, as Jesus was walking by, Andrew and another of John’s disciples heard him say,

“Look!  Here is the Lamb of God!” [John 1:36]

or, in other words, “Here’s whom you’ve been waiting for,”

“they followed Jesus.” [John 1:37]

So, John tells Andrew, and then Andrew, who was Simon Peter’s brother [John 1:40]

“first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah.’” [John 1:41]

That was how it was then, and how it is now.  One person tells another and then that person either does or does not tell somebody else.  But if they do, that person sees for herself or himself and then either goes and tells someone what they have found, or they keep it all inside and that line of connection ends with them.  We never hear again about the man who was standing with Andrew that first day.  We do hear about Andrew again, and about Peter whom he invited to meet Jesus.  Later on in the New Testament we hear about Peter speaking to a centurion named Cornelius, and on and on and on. 

            There are, however, two conditions that effect how this kind of faith-sharing turns out.  One is whether it’s done in an appropriate way, and the other is that it’s genuine.

            By “appropriate” I mean that there are times that someone is just not in a position to hear what you might have to say.  I really do believe that coming to trust the Lord is a key part of someone addressing those things that can make them vulnerable to addiction.  But that is long-term.  When somebody is going through withdrawal, what they have is a medical situation where they need medical attention and somebody there to hold their hand through the worst moments and talk them into eating their soup when they are nauseous.  That is not the time to push someone to look into their heart and soul.

            By “appropriate” I mean that the act of sharing your own faith has to be an act of caring that centers on that other person, not on trying to make yourself feel good, or trying to come across as the person with all the answers.  You cannot somehow “fix” somebody, and just being there with them may leave you feeling totally helpless.  Faith isn’t some sort of spiritual narcan to be administered on an emergency basis because you’ve run out of other resources.

            In fact, to share your faith effectively may mean letting yourself be more helpless and more vulnerable.  That’s what I mean when I say, “genuine”.  It may mean – again, when the time is right – sharing your own story with someone and admitting that all of us are alike in having those moments of need and weakness that Jesus has somehow entered into with healing or strength, with patience or pardon.  It involves a recognition that none of us have everything all together.  We may even have seasons of our lives where we are a total mess.  (Here’s where my own style of evangelism comes in, which would be to say that if we weren’t all a mess, we wouldn’t need a Savior; and that what Jesus saves me from is mostly myself.)  Some people get that.  Some don’t.  Some people may want you to tell them your own story to verify your claim.  Some people understand their own situation well enough not to need that.

            Maybe, too, your story won’t resonate with everyone.  That’s okay.  It’s not about us anyway.  Or maybe you are part of a team whose members you haven’t even met, and what you say or do doesn’t matter as much on its own as it matters because it becomes part of a series of witnesses that someone encounters over time.  If you’re going to do what Andrew did, you’ve got to live with those “maybes”.  Like I said, there’s a good deal of vulnerability built into the process.

            A nineteenth-century Presbyterian missionary to Japan named Thomas Theron Alexander left behind him in Osaka a community of Christians that survived the wars of the twentieth century, when Christianity was suspiciously non-Japanese, and is still around today.  Within his own family, faith had dimmed for generations.  His great-grandaughter, Joanna Reed Shelton, writes how she occasionally was taken to church as a child but grew to see the world in basically secular way.  In some ways she did well.  She writes,

“… my life was occupied by college, graduate school, and a high-flying career as an international economist and trade negotiator in Washington, DC. Eventually, I became deputy secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which offers policy advice to member governments. Stationed in Paris, I was the first woman and youngest person to serve in that role.

During those years, I held religion firmly at arm’s length. When I considered its divisive impact on human affairs, as well as the hypocrisy that flourishes even among the so-called faithful, I felt it wasn’t for me.”[2]

Her position meant that her name came up when someone at the church in Osaka googled to find Rev. Alexander’s descendents to invite to an anniversary celebration. 

            Now, Presbyterian clergy are not known to be the most expressive people in the world, and men of his generation in general were very much expected to be the stiff-upper-lip type, but somewhere he confided something of his own inner life that his great-granddaughter came to know.  She went to Osaka for the anniversary and says,

“As I listened to the minister’s preaching, my gaze fell on the organist. I thought about my great-grandfather’s struggles to control his emotions during Sunday services following the sudden death of his 14-year-old daughter, Ella, who had played organ at the same church.”

Her hosts had taken her to visit the child’s grave the day before.  They had recited the Lord’s Prayer and sang “Amazing Grace”.  (I wonder how it sounds in Japanese?)

That weekend set off Dr. Shelton’s search to learn more about Rev. Alexander.  She found a lot more.

“I knew that if I hoped to understand what drew him into ministry in Japan, I needed to learn more about Christianity. So, for the first time, I began to read the Bible in a meaningful way, under the guidance of two devout relatives. A long-suppressed inner flame burned brighter as I read and contemplated the Scriptures. …

For the first time, I felt I understood the true meaning of faith, as hope in things unseen. I understood, too, how Jesus taught us what it means to be God’s people, loving one another as we love ourselves. Only through love can we help bring God’s kingdom to life on earth as it is in heaven. …

You might say I’m the latest convert of a man whose work clearly was not done when he died more than a century ago.”

Aren’t we all?

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[1] from Jad Abumrad, “60 Words” at https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/60-words

[2] Joanna Reed Shelton, “My Missionary Great-Grandfather Led Me to Christ” in Christianity Today (November 23, 2016).  https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/december/my-missionary-great-grandfather-led-me-to-christ.html

“An Open Call” - January 12, 2020

Acts 10:34-43

            I’ve long wanted to start a sermon this way, and now I finally have the chance:  “A rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar.  The bartender sees them and says, ‘What is this, some kind of joke?’”  Okay, so they have their little prank and walk right back out onto the street, laughing so hard that they don’t notice a truck with a brake problem is heading straight for them, and within seconds they are standing together in front of the pearly gates, having arrived as a group.  St. Peter greets them and explains what happened, but that they are each expected and welcome.  He calls three cars to carry each of them to their appointed dwelling.  The rabbi’s car arrives first and it’s a Bentley, with all the fenders and chrome polished up.  This is followed by the other two cars, which arrive at the same time, both respectable Buick sedans.  They turn to St. Peter, a little bit embarrassed to ask, but they do.  Why did the rabbi get a Bentley when they got Buicks?  Peter says, a little apologetically, “Please don’t take it wrong.  It’s no reflection on you.  It’s just that your friend has some family connections.”

            Let’s go back to the Peter who knew Jesus face-to-face.  Let’s go back to the book of Acts, where God had to send him specifically to see what was happening with a Roman centurion named Cornelius.  Cornelius

“was a devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God.” [Acts 10:2]

He felt drawn to the God of the people his army was there to watch and to control.  But he was not Jewish.  There were all sorts of cultural and professional obstacles to his conversion, like the fact that he was an officer in an army of occupation, and that conversion would require circumcision. 

In the gospels, we see Jesus respond to other people like this man.  Luke tells about another centurion who

“had a slave whom he valued highly, and who was ill and close to death.  When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave.  When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, ‘He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.’” [Luke 7:2-5]

Jesus did as he was asked.  He started over to the man’s house, but was met ahead of time by messengers from the officer who said that he didn’t need to come, just to give the order, and he knew the servant would be healed.  Jesus remarked,

“I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” [Luke 7:9]

Within the religious community, those raised to have a consciousness of God and a sense of God’s will, however imperfectly we may understand or follow, there can be an expectation of faith.  That doesn’t mean, though, that it might not be found elsewhere, where there are people whom God draws close even as they wait to discover who is behind that constant hunch or persistent desire to know the truth that sets people free. 

We must never forget that that process began when God chose one man and then his family and then the nation that they became; that one man being Abraham, to whom God made promises that were kept when he protected him in his wanderings and his people Israel, to whom God’s promises were kept when he stayed with them through their days of prosperity and their days of exile.  Part of those promises was that through them the other nations of the world would be blessed; and that was kept when Jesus was born among them, grew up and lived following the Law faithfully, and when he died his resurrection was discovered because his own followers returned to the tomb to observe the practices that Judaism dictated with respect to the dead.

What astonishes the people of the New Testament isn’t that God has been and is faithful to Israel.  What astonishes them is that the gentiles – Cornelius and his household and the rest of us – get to jump in. 

Edgar Lee Masters wrote a series of poems called the Spoon River Anthology in which he imagines walking through the graveyard in a small town and having people speak about their lives as he passes their tombstones.  In a poem called “The Village Atheist” he hears these words:

“Ye young debaters over the doctrine

Of the soul’s immortality,

I who lie here was the village atheist,

Talkative, contentious, versed in the arguments

Of the infidels.

But through a long sickness

Coughing myself to death

I read the Upanishads and the poetry of Jesus.

And they lighted a torch of hope and intuition

And desire which the Shadow,

Leading me swiftly through the caverns of darkness,

Could not extinguish.

Listen to me, ye who live in the senses

And think through the senses only:

Immortality is not a gift,

Immortality is an achievement;

And only those who strive mightily

Shall possess it.”

Well, no.  It is a gift.  It is a gift through Jesus, who was more than a poet.  But everyone must come to that on their own, which is where the striving mightily comes in – and God bless all those who follow that path.  It’s part of God’s sense of humor that we so often have to exhaust our own efforts before we discover that salvation never comes that way, but always by God’s grace, like when Peter learns that those outside the Chosen People are also chosen.  Righteousness comes from salvation.  Salvation doesn’t come from righteousness.

            The Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung asks a good question.  He asks, “What does it mean to be truly a child of God and so truly human?”  This is, in part, how he answers:

“It means … that all our moral exertions and pious practices are inadequate to put in order our relationship with God and that no achievements of ours can merit God’s love.

It means relying completely on this Christ and believing that God wants to help in particular the abandoned, irreligious, lawbreakers, ungodly, and out of sheer friendliness puts in order our relationship with him.

It means then seeing in the dark mystery of the cross the very essence of the grace and love of that God who does not judge men in a human way according to their deeds, but simply accepts, approves, and loves them from the outset.”[1]

The gift of faith is both given and chosen.  The scriptures reveal that over and over. It is both given from outside and found inside.  That is why God’s love for all his children can be seen even in the lives of those who may themselves be unaware of the grace that they receive and at times live out.  God has always done and is still doing more than we will ever be aware of.

“Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.  You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ – he is Lord of all.” [Acts 10:34-36]

There really is so much good already there, wherever we look.  There is good where we expect, and good where we never think to find it, because Jesus Christ is Lord of all.

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[1] Hans Kung, On Being a Christian (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1984), 401.

“Access to God” - January 5, 2020

Ephesians 3:1-12

            I admit that every once in a while I will watch a courtroom-reality show, one of those where a retired judge with dreams of celebrity faces off with two parties who have been selected for the outrageousness of their offense, their mental density, and general lack of decorum.  The way I justify this waste of time is by telling myself that at least I’m not watching reruns of the Kardashians or Jerry Springer.  The sad part is that I have been in real courtrooms sometimes and have seen behavior that is not all that different.

            I found one example online[1] that took place in Grand Rapids in 2013.  A woman in the courtroom was talking on a cell phone and vaping.  The judge called her on it and had her ejected and she made a loud comment on the way out that I won’t repeat here, so the judge had her held for contempt of court.  She showed up at the hearing wearing pajamas.  She was found guilty.  Before sentencing she was given the chance to speak.  (In other words, she had an opportunity to apologize.)  What she said was, “I just thought it was totally [here I’ll change her word to ‘stupid’] that I can’t smoke my E-cigarette.  I can smoke it on the bus.  You can smoke them anywhere.”  She got five more days in jail and a $250 fine.

            I think many people would say that she got off lightly.  There was a basic disrespect embedded in her behavior that goes far beyond an incident like this one.  If you are willing to behave this way in a court of law, then what would you do where there is no one watching to enforce any kind of limits of decency?  Ask yourself: would you want to play Monopoly with someone who says she can do whatever she wants wherever she wants, whenever she wants?  Would you want to do business with her or live next door to her?

            Yes, it does happen that sometimes someone in authority gets too big for their breeches.  People do get pumped up with power and position and there are times when someone has to take them down a peg.  A courtroom is not the place for that.  There you’re not dealing simply with a person.  You’re dealing with someone who represents an idea of law and justice.  Even in a country and under a political system that insists that all people are equal before the law, or maybe especially in such a place, there is a need for people to offer that respect and for public officials to carry themselves in ways that show they also respect the office that they hold.  You don’t even address a judge by name in the courtroom.  It’s always, “Your Honor,” or “If it please the court.” 

In the days of monarchy and empire it was even more so.  Address an official or a social superior the wrong way and you could end up dead.  That is why it would have been scandalous that the letter to the Ephesians [3:12] claims that because of Jesus

“we have access to God in boldness and confidence”.

We are not just talking about a low-level magistrate here, or even a Supreme Court Justice.  We have access to the Judge of all.  We are not talking about a legislator, but about the One who created the very laws of nature and who can suspend them at will.  We are not speaking of an Empress like Queen Victoria, or a Sultan or a Shah.  This is not a mere king but the King of kings and Lord of lords.  This is the One of whom the psalmist said,

“He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord has them in derision.” [Psalm 2:4]

And you and I can go to him in boldness and confidence.

            A lot of languages have two forms of direct address.  There’s the formal and there’s the familiar.  In French I would address someone I don’t know well as vous.  If it’s a close friend I would use tu, the familiar form.  English used to have this distinction until around the middle of the seventeenth century, when we began to call everyone by the formal and polite term “you”.  However, in one area of life we continued to use the intimate words “thee” and “thou”.  That was when we prayed.  There is a kind of intimacy that is not disrespect, a boldness and confidence that can coexist with respect and honor, and that is how we can and should approach the God whom we meet in Jesus.

            Yes, it is bold of us to think that we could ever speak up in God’s presence.  It’s bold to think we would be in the presence of God at all.  Uneasiness, a sense of shame, an awareness of being totally out of place – those have all been felt by people whom God specifically chose for some great deeds.  Go back to the prophet Isaiah’s vision one day as he stood in the temple in Jerusalem, worshiping.  He says,

“I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.

And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’” [Isaiah 6:1-6]

            But we can be confident, even when we know we are being presumptuous, because we know that God actually invites us into his presence.  Isaiah’s vision continued with one of the heavenly beings, on God’s order, touching his lips with a burning coal from the altar that symbolically burned away his sins.  After that, Isaiah and God speak directly with one another.  When Jesus’ death cleaned us of our own sins, we, too, became able to enter into conversation directly with God.

            How that conversation plays out is different for everybody.  I believe that is part of what Ephesians 3:10 calls

“the wisdom of God in its rich variety”. 

Everybody, after all, has their own voice and their own way of speaking.  The same is true of prayer.  Some people are far more able to speak directly and others find it best to think out what they need to say ahead of time.  God, in turn, speaks more directly to some people than to others, and in many cases says what amounts to, “Let me get back to you about that.”  But that is part of intimacy, isn’t it?  Don’t those closest to you sometimes say they need time before they are ready to go into the most important discussions?  And don’t all of us know that there are times to bring some issues up and times to keep them for later? 

            Ultimately, what we carry away from our encounter with God matters more than what we take to it.  Richard Foster wrote in his book Celebration of Discipline:

“Prayer involves transformed passions. In prayer, real prayer, we begin to think God's thoughts after Him: to desire the things He desires, to love the things He loves, to will the things He wills.”

It’s what happens when we pray the way Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Facing arrest, torture, and death, he prayed quite bluntly.  He said,

“If it is possible, let this cup pass from me.”

That is boldness.  Then he went on,

“Nevertheless, not what I want, but what you want.” [Matthew 26:39]

That is confidence.  Let God be in charge and all will be well.  Jesus did, and it was – not only for him bur for us also.

            Thanks be to God.

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[1] https://www.versustexas.com/criminal/courtroom-etiquette/