Sermon for Sunday, August 1, 2010 First Baptist and Beaver Memorial Joint Service

A Person’s Life

Psalm 85; Colossians 2: 6-19; Luke 11: 1 – 13

Back when I was a young man there were ads in the back of magazines which

portrayed a good-looking young woman toying with her collar and facing the camera with a

vacant look on her face. In big letters it said something like “Get Women Through

Hypnosis.” At the bottom was a little form to fill out and send in with money to get the

program which would teach you how to get women with hypnosis.

Of course the model in the picture was instructed to have a blank look on her face

because it suggested two things. The obvious thing it implied was that hypnosis was

going to give you the power to put women into trances, like Bela Lugosi used to do. It also

gave the woman an expression which, though not very intelligent, made her look open to

new possibilities.

Of course those ads were aimed at insecure men, just like the ads for using “Dynamic

Tension” to get a physique like Charles Atlas. It was pretty embarrassing for a guy to admit

that he had responded to the ad, but one evening, as a friend and I were riding in his car,

that’s just what he did. He told me, with considerable chagrin, that he’d bought the product

which was supposed to help him learn to use hypnosis to get women. The most

humiliating part of it seemed to be that he felt he’d been cheated.

It turns out that the kind of hypnosis offered was self-hypnosis, that the whole secret

was using hypnosis to convince yourself you were attractive to women and at ease around

them. It they had told people that up front, they wouldn’t have sold very many little

booklets. The last thing people want to accept, no matter how often they hang around the

“Self-Help” section of a bookstore, is that the only way their problems are going to be

solved is if they do something to change themselves.

All those titles in the “Self-Help” section are supposed to help you help yourself,

but the reason there’s always new titles there and livings to be made in self-help advising is

that the books all by themselves don’t accomplish much. What has to happen is for the

person who reads the book to change. A person has to want to change and be willing to

change and have a way to change.

This is how I see this encounter between Jesus and the man who asks Jesus to bid

his brother divide the inheritance with him. He has the idea that getting this descendant of

David to pronounce judgment on the case is going to solve his problem, but Jesus, for

once, doesn’t meet the need of the anguished person in the crowd. This man is treated

more like one of Jesus’ opponents, whose remarks often begin a long discourse on a

better way to understand things. Jesus, apparently, can heal you and give you your

his or her mind in order for you to be happy, he won’t do that. No; it’s you–the person

there listening to him, the person Jesus has contact with- – that’s the person with whom

Jesus is going to work.

This is where I feel sorry for the man: Not because he doesn’t get from Jesus what

he requests, but because Jesus points something out to him which is painfully and

problematically true– that the power of God is used effectively to change, not other

people, but ourselves. The right way for this man to make progress with his resentment of

his brother’s possession of the inheritance is not for some unanswerable authority to

compel the brother to share it. The right way –the right way from Jesus’ perspective– for

the man to heal from the hurt he feels from what he regards as a wrong is to get a new

outlook on the whole thing. The unhappy man has to change his mind. The unhappy man

has to change his heart.

That’s just as bad as when we go to the doctor and complain about some ache or

pain and the answer isn’t that we have a bad back that the doctor has to do something

about. The answer is that we have a lack of exercise that we have to do something about.

Of course in the longer run if physical therapy and a daily routine of stretching and making

sure to take long walks solve the problem, that’s really better than taking drugs or having

surgery–but our immediate response to this kind of advice from a doctor is dismay. Oh–

we have to take care of it ourselves! For our problem to become different, we must

become different. We can’t just go on with everything the way it’s been and have an

outsider take care of whatever’s bothering us. We have to change who we are.

A Christian once wrote “The only hope of the world is a universal reformation, and

every man ought to be ambitious of being the first.” Jesus approaches this question of the

inheritance as if the only hope there is rests with the reformation of the unhappy brother. He

takes it as an opportunity to tell everyone to be on guard against desiring what someone

else has. He exploits the topic to make the point that life consists of much more than

possessions, and he tells this cautionary parable about the rich man who invested himself in

accumulating wealth, wealth that he inevitably would lose to others at his death.

Don’t you get tired of hearing that you can’t change others, you only can change

yourself? I’m sorry, but that seems to be the message from this gospel reading. The man

unhappy about the inheritance comes to Jesus expecting Jesus to change another person,

but Jesus treats the patient he has there. It’s similar to what happens when someone isn’t

happy about what’s going on in an organization. You know if you say, “Someone should

form a committee to put on a social event, to get everyone better acquainted,” you’ll be

told, “Why don’t you put on that social event?” There has to be a willing self in the picture.

The world is full of problems because of all the individual selves who inhabit the world, and

a solution always begins with a willing self. The question is whether there’s a willing self to

be found.

scapegoating which goes on all the time in public discourse. The world’s in a bad way–

there are dangers and difficulties, scandals and scares– and there is a huge industry

devoted to trying to direct our attention to some other people somewhere who can serve

as believable targets for blame. That fits right in with our lazy instinct that the way the world

should improve is for other people to have to change, and not us. But if we accepted the

truth shown by Jesus’ in this encounter– that the world only changes for us if we are willing

to change ourselves–we’d be less susceptible to the idea that the way to solve our

problems is to do something about those rich people or those poor people or those

strangers, or whoever that somebody else is. We all of us have the power every moment

to change the world by becoming different ourselves, and we all of us all our lives never

attain the power really to force another person to change from the outside.

This is why Jesus spends so much time telling people who they are. You are the

salt of the world. You are children of God. Your work is important. Your prayers have

power. Jesus can’t make people believe those things, but if people can believe those

things, they can make a difference.

That’s why Paul urges the Colossians to remember who they are. What seems

reasonable from a human perspective isn’t the whole story. Wonders and miracles have

happened to reveal the true nature of persons, and the real promise of life. Don’t be

misled, not by someone else’s estimate of who you are and what life is, nor your own

instincts about how life should work. Life works the way Christ has shown it to work– by

devoting oneself to a God who is devoted to us. That’s the message of Hosea, that

despite our failings God loves us and always has the will to restore and forgive. When we

know we are God’s, and that God is so good, it gives us the chance to be changed, and

change gives us the chance to lead the life Christ has come to provide.

When we take communion together, it’s a way of proclaiming that Christ’s is the life

that we want. It’s a way of announcing our discipleship, to share Christ’s table. We know

we need always to be reminded of our true nature and our calling, that we choose to live in

the world with confidence and contentment.

To read sermons from past years, hit the “View All” link beneath the “This Week’s Sermon”

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Sermon for Sunday, July 25, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg

Teach Us

Psalm 85; Colossians 2: 6-19; Luke 11: 1 – 13

When Bucknell University celebrated its one-hundred-fiftieth year in 1996, the pastor

of its founding church was invited to offer a prayer at an event commemorating the school’s

beginnings. This church founded the university, I was the pastor, and so I went and gave

the prayer and was able to be at the convocation. Two men from the theater department

read selected passages from the writings of the Baptists who led the effort to begin a

college in this community, and then-President Adams gave an address.

Those who labored and sacrificed in 1846 to bring to birth what became Bucknell

referred over and over to God’s will, God’s guidance, God’s intent, and God’s blessings.

The great enterprise they began and urged along was founded on faith, hope, and love,

and upon a vivid conviction of God’s leading. Starting an institution of higher education in a

community then still near the young nation’s frontier was the result of frequent and fervent

prayer.

So much language, and such impassioned language, about God, sounded a bit

dated in the late-twentieth century gathering. Views of religion vary much more in modern

times than they did in the 1840’s, and America’s culture– especially at a university– is much

more diverse than in was almost two centuries ago.

So it wasn’t surprising that President Adams gave a speech without mentioning God

once. He repeatedly mentioned the importance of the university’s mission, but hope for

fulfilling that mission no longer rested upon prayer and religious devotion. Instead, he said

over and over, it relied on the loyalty and generosity of former students. It was the alumni,

and not the Almighty, who were going to secure Bucknell’s future. This was an appropriate

emphasis in an era when college presidency had long ceased to be the province of

religious leaders, and when the work of a college president had largely become that of

fundraising.

It was also an inevitable message in a time in which the vast majority of America’s

traditional Protestants no longer were so enthusiastic about their relationship to God to live

sacrificially to support faith-based endeavors. In the late twentieth-century the kind of prayer

loosely defined as meditation had gained a great deal of credibility, and began to be

prescribed as therapeutic; but the kind of prayer pursued by Bucknell’s founders, with its

zealous pleading to a familiar God to illuminate their path and provide practical help for their

work, had come to be associated with old-fashioned and unsophisticated kinds of

Christianity. It was hard to regret that the university had come to count upon the usefulness

and reliability of money.

ordinary wealth, a handful of people no more gifted than the congregation we compose this

morning, had managed to give birth to a school and had begun to transform not only this

town but the wider world. It was recognized as a great work not because of its size, but

because it was for God, and because it was for God, people devoted themselves and

their lives to its success.

The premise of the founders of this church, who then founded Bucknell, was that this

world was part of a larger reality, and that the passing things of this world were overseen

and sometimes shaped by God to conform to a divine vision of the eventual but inevitable

triumph of God’s priorities. When people prayed and did their best to do what they

believed God desired, they were playing a small part in the master plan. Difficulty neither

surprised nor dismayed them. They were realistic enough to know that the world is full of

obstacles and events which at least temporarily extinguish hope–they knew the world was

like that both from reading the Bible and from the evidence of their own lives.

But the evidence of their own lives and the Bible likewise was that God truly exists,

and cares, and carries on a holy purpose to bless Creation. That’s the perspective of

today’s psalm. It invokes God’s deliverance of the people in the past, and then pleads for

help in the present. Any given present may indeed be a time of despair and defeat, when

the once well-established fact of divine dominion over the world and heavenly rescue of the

helpless seems no longer to hold. Faith, however, has no alternative but to insist that that’s

the way it will be again. That’s how the psalm concludes, with the assertion that God’s will

for the good of God’s people will be established, that righteousness and peace shall kiss,

that things will turn out the way God wants them.

Oh, it’s hard to talk about the effectiveness of prayer in a world in which our prayers

aren’t always answered the way we would wish. It’s not the case, as scripture sometimes

suggests, that our prayers aren’t answered only when we are asking wrongly, when we’re

being selfish, or shortsighted. I will insist–and I don’t expect God to contradict me when in

that next world the mysteries of this life become more plan–that there were prayers of mine

that would have been right to have answered, that weren’t answered. That’s the way it is,

but faith expects prayer still to serve its purpose, and experience still supports that prayer

changes things.

It’s because the world the believer knows remains a larger world than the one we

see with our eyes and touch with our bodies. God has revealed to us the reality of God’s

sovereignty and the reliability of Christ’s achievements, and so we have a broader view

and wider resources than we sometimes think. Our tendency to get caught up in the habits

and attitudes of daily living and the expectations of life in the body means that we must be

reminded, again and again, of the larger reality of which we are a part. That’s the message

from our reading from Colossians, that what seems like reasonable supposing about life

shouldn’t mislead us about who we are or what life is– that all those mystical and invisible

When Jesus’ disciples approach him and ask, “Teach us to pray, as John taught his

disciples,” they aren’t interested only in behaving religiously. They’re not just embarrassed

to feel like they aren’t religious enough in what they do, so they want to add praying to their

daily routine so they’ll seem more like disciples. No; they believe that prayer connects

them with the great invisible powers in the midst of which they live. They believe that God,

the same God who led their ancestors out of slavery by miracles and wonders, will be

more a part of their personal lives if they pray. They hope that prayer will change their

lives, because they see Jesus praying all the time and Jesus’ life is changing the world.

I started out with examples from the history of this church and I will end with a couple.

Twenty-five years ago the church had given its pastor permission to moonlight because

they felt they couldn’t pay an adequate salary, and the church was frustrated because

sharing its facility with lots of self-help groups and other ministries seemed to be taking a toll

on the building and there wasn’t any money to put things right. Someone must have been

praying–and I’m saying this because if someone isn’t praying in a church when there are

needs, then what kind of business is the church in? Someone must have been praying,

and eventually–and you’re free to think there’s no connection, that it’s just a coincidence, the

church gets a big inheritance it never expected to receive. So they can afford to do all the

things for ministry about which they once worried, including bringing back in the self-help

groups and sharing the building for the sake of community needs.

Then around fifteen years ago there was a sense within the church that First Baptist

needed some significant project to focus its work, and a task force investigated refugee

resettlement as a ministry. People met and talked and gathered information and got to the

place where the whole church was going to be invited to endorse this vision, and it stalled.

There wasn’t the unanimity people felt was needed, and it seemed to fizzle. However,

people had probably been praying that God help us help people from somewhere else

find a new life here. Again, it may have been a coincidence, but a man who lives in town

who had a rental property here encouraged a household recently relocated from overseas

to move to Lewisburg and then he encouraged them to come to this church. People will

think what they must about it, but I believe the presence in this church today of that family

and the church’s presence through the years in their lives is an answer to prayer.

The church is always in the process of becoming something else. The world doesn’t

stand still. What I ask all of you to do is to pray for this church, that God show us what God

wants us to do in 2011 and 2012 and the years coming after that. New life in a church

needs to rest upon the guidance and goals of God. It is up to us to be open to God’s

leading, and that’s why I want people to pray about it. We need to serve Lewisburg in

new ways, as the community changes, as this community changes. As a church we need to

open our hearts to God’s purpose for us, so that we can with greater confidence look

forward to our collective life in the months and years ahead, that we be doing the work God

has for us to do.

To read sermons from past years, hit the “View All” link beneath the “This Week’s Sermon”

button, and then hit the “Archives” link in the sentence at the top of the page presenting

recent sermons.

Sermon for Sunday, June 13, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg

Who Forgives Sins?

1 Kings 21: 1-21a; Galatians 2: 15-21; Luke 7: 36 – 8: 3

Behind every successful villainous man there’s a bad woman. That’s one of the

lessons of the story of Jezebel. King Ahab is peevish, selfish, and corrupted, but he

doesn’t have the courage of his lack of convictions. He wishes he could have his neighbor’s

vineyard, but the neighbor won’t sell, so Ahab is stymied. He sulks. If it occurs to him that

he could resort to murder to get his way, some part of him is unwilling to be that bold.

He turns out to be one of those weakling husbands who drive a wife crazy.

Jezebel, his wife, is disgusted by his moping around, and impatient with its cause. Once

again she’s going to have to show him the way to get things done. She arranges for

Naboth, the vineyard owner, to be charged with a crime, and has him convicted and

executed, and then seizes the property. After all, she feels, what’s the use of being an

absolute ruler if one can’t arrange to have what one wants? She’s a Lady Macbeth type,

but not so squeamish about blood on her hands.

Jezebel’s a foreign wife who has led Ahab into support of foreign religious practices

and the persecution of any Hebrew prophets who object–and they all object. Her

influence on her husband is always evil, and this matter of Naboth’s vineyard ends up being

the last straw. When she and Ahab finally are punished, it is the inevitable consequence of

heedless faithlessness.

This ties in with a dominant Old Testament motif. That theme is that kings who

support the sole worship of the God of the Covenant are a blessing to the land, and

everyone wins when they are on the throne; and conversely, that kings who permit the

worship of other gods bring calamity upon the nation. Jezebel is not only wicked in herself.

She is the worshiper of a false god, and an enemy of the true God, so she is completely at

odds with the way things are supposed to be. Her doing wrong is symptomatic of her

being wrong, and her unhappy end is not just poetic justice, but divine judgment.

Before speaking about our time’s religious anxieties about faithful leadership and

national blessing, there’s another important thing to point out. Jezebel doesn’t just seize the

property and say to its owner, “too bad.” She frames him, and liquidates him, and then,

when his rights to respect and his existence alike have been destroyed, she takes the land.

She uses the law to kill him, the way David later was to use a patriotic war to kill Uriah the

Hittite, so he could steal his wife. Rulers have power to arrange things, but they don’t dare

flaunt lawlessness. They want, when everything is said and done, to maintain the

appearance of proper results. Naboth was a bad man and forfeited everything, the fact that

the king got the vineyard is incidental. Uriah was unlucky in battle and David took

We didn’t read the David and Bathsheba story today but it parallels this story about

the vineyard, because in both cases this careful arranging, using political power, manages to

create the illusion that everything has balanced out-that a wrong has been redressed by a

right, and that is that. People are fooled–perhaps even the perpetrators fool themselves.

In both cases, however, a prophet shows up to reveal that God has not been fooled, and

that for the wrong to be made right, for the balance to be restored, somebody’s got to pay.

This notion that when something’s wrong, something’s got to give, is a basic

premise of the Bible. The Bible thinks it’s a universal human expectation–that eating of the

Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, having moral discernment, using judgment,

distinguishing right from wrong, marks us as something like God. This insight into what is

just, which is second-nature to us, is what makes us uneasy when things are too good to be

true, and what buoys our hope when things seem like they can’t possibly get worse. In our

hearts we expect that things should balance out, especially that wrong should be offset by

something which makes things right.

I mentioned religious anxiety about national leadership and God’s either blessing or

judging the nation. This Old Testament concept is adapted by people from both sides of

the political spectrum. What separates people of strong political conviction isn’t whether or

not they think the nation will be held accountable for the morality of its choices, but what

things they regard as so wrong as to invite judgment. What makes people conservative

seems to be feeling that God will punish America for sexual license and lack of personal

responsibility, and what makes people liberal seems to be feeling that God will punish

America for individual greed and institutional violence. Sometimes people say that the

religious language in so much American political pronouncement is a smokescreen, and it

certainly can be cynical. But I would argue that it’s fundamentally sincere, that Biblical religion

still has enough influence on our expectations that we see both our moral burden and God’s

corresponding hand upon us in national terms.

The framers of the Declaration of Independence felt, and took pains to show, that the

King’s rule over the colonies violated an insufferable number of customs and freedoms.

Things from their perspective were so out of balance that a violent separation and a new

beginning were necessary. If you read the Declaration past its familiar first lines you find it a

very long document detailing multiple instances of misconduct on the part of the Crown. It

makes a case for the radical choice imposed upon the Continental Congress, and shows,

yet again, that people believe that no wrong can persist without its being countered by

something which recognizes and neutralizes it. It also shows that not all political action is

undertaken for villainous motives, unlike the story we had about Jezebel–but that in all such

cases even people in power feel obligated to show that violence must be justified by

showing that it is required to offset worse circumstances.

Paul writes about justification in the portion of the letter to the Galatians which we

converts to Christianity from paganism must adopt some Jewish ritual practices in order to

get Christianity “right.” Paul’s approach, they have claimed, is misleading, and dangerous,

because it is lax. People are too free. This is a religious instinct which arises again and

again, and though it often is labeled “fundamentalism”, it’s probably better to think of it as

severity, because even religions which fundamentally repudiate earning salvation by good

behavior have their severe versions in which individual behavior becomes the key to

salvation.

This is related to the idea that some kind of balance is how things work. God’s great

kindness freely given is too good to be true–it confounds the expectation of fairness, so

people make sense of redemption by making it contingent on moral rectitude. Just like

Jezebel’s doom is a matter of just deserts, the pious person’s favor with God is a matter of

just deserts.

This is a popular notion, because we do have a sense of what’s fair, but it is not

Christianity. The gospels repeatedly deny that the righteous earn God’s approval and

sinners God’s hatred. This is made more clear by stories like today’s, in which Simon, who

is professionally good, let’s say, is contrasted with the fallen woman who shows up to

weep and cast herself on Jesus’ mercy. She is professionally bad.

The idea that things balance out, from Simon’s perspective, works like this: he thinks

he’s the right person to be in the presence of a great prophet, because he has done all that

God could expect. So he’s being rewarded. That’s fair. This woman who shows up is

bad and should continually be identified and treated as bad, because that’s fair–she does

wrong and is despised. Simon is puzzled because Jesus seems to accept the presence

and homage of this wrongdoer, instead of recoiling or pronouncing judgment, both of which

would seem like the right action-reaction thing to Simon. So Simon thinks to himself that if

Jesus really had the kind of antennae that holy men should have, he’d have this woman

figured out.

Well, Jesus does. It’s just that Jesus doesn’t see the balance thing the way Simon

does. Jesus also picks up on something else, and that is Simon’s feeling that Jesus should

judge this woman. Then Jesus offers a lesson in terms of balance to Simon. Simon didn’t

give Jesus water for his feet, but the woman provided her tears. Simon gave no kiss but

the woman kissed Jesus’ feet. Simon didn’t anoint Jesus’ head but the woman has

anointed Jesus’ feet. There are three deficits which can be charged to Simon which have

been made up by the woman.

Jesus says that to challenge the scorekeeping mentality. He also does it to support

his offering of forgiveness. Forgiveness is an alternative way to restore balance.

Someone with adequately great say-so–God, or God’s representative, for instance, can

offset wrong by generously declaring that it now will no longer be held against one. That’s

the key to Christianity, and for those who know themselves to be sinners, that’s the source

of profound love for God, and undying gratitude to God.

To read sermons from past years, hit the “View All” link beneath the “This Week’s Sermon”

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Sermon for Sunday, June 6, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg

Widows’ Sons

Psalm 146; 1 Kings 17: 8-24; Luke 7: 11-17

In the sixteenth chapter of John’s gospel Jesus is encouraging his disciples to

believe that though his death will be a terrible thing for them, the results of his resurrection

and glorification will bring them joy. He tries to find a comparison that they all will understand,

for the concept of going through great pain and then forgetting it completely because of

what follows, and he chooses childbirth. He takes it for granted that his hearers understand

that the pains of labor are terrible for the mother, and also that giving birth is so wonderful

that the pain involved in childbirth is at least put into perspective, and perhaps even

forgotten.

We sometimes imagine, because infant mortality has become so relatively rare

compared with past periods of history and in comparison with other parts of the world, that

the pain, when it occurs in our midst, is proportionately greater. We suffer so much, we

know such distress and anguish, that we attribute people’s surviving the loss a hundred

years ago or thousands of miles away not to the healing available to the human spirit, but to

other generations or other culture’s becoming numb to the grief. We feel that nobody could

endure such grief over and over, and so tell ourselves that the generations who did live

through it, or the cultures still hostage to its prevalence, grew accustomed to it, and could be

philosophical about it, because of its frequent recurrence.

This is one reason it is useful to have ancient writings to take seriously. In the Old

Testament King David loses a son and takes it hard; and in the gospels Jesus takes it for

granted that everyone knows that a woman who gives birth gains such joy by bringing a

child into the world that the pains of travail are eclipsed. We may find it hard to believe that

mothers who experience the death of several of their offspring are able to find it as painful

as we find such losses, because we feel it would be unendurable, but the record of

scripture suggests that mothers twenty centuries ago felt for their infants the way mothers do

today. The warning to Mary, the mother of Jesus, near the beginning of Luke’s gospel, that

a sword would pierce her own heart in connection with what would happen to her son is true

to the experience of motherhood in general, the deep way in which a mother’s life is

involved in the life of her child.

There is another perspective which is worth questioning in connection with the stories

we have today about Elijah and Jesus raising the sons of widows and restoring them to

their mothers. Widows, as we see in the Bible story of Ruth and Naomi, and in the

provision for their help made by the early Church, were an economically vulnerable group.

There was a high probability that an adult son would take responsibility for looking after his

John to regard Jesus’ mother as his own. It is okay to point out that the young man

resurrected by Jesus at the city of Nain might have been his mother’s sole provider, but

what mother would think that was the primary reason for Jesus to pity the woman and

intervene? Is it not enough that she be pitied for losing the great love of her life, the great

focus of her effort and object of her satisfaction and pride?

I’ve been speaking of this in general terms because specifics are too painful. Suffice

to say that the connection between parent and child involves the most tender of bonds, and

when these attachments are torn apart by death, there is great suffering. It is bad enough

when children lose their parents, no matter how late in life and no matter how natural in the

course of things. It is far worse when parents lose their children, because it is always too

soon, and it always is unfair.

These are miracle stories, Elijah’s and Jesus’ raising the sons of these widows. We

live in an age disinclined to believe miracles, and generally speaking I think that is a good

thing. It is so outside the ordinary that God provides an outcome contrary to what is

reasonable to expect, that a person ought always to stick with reasonable expectation. On

the other hand, it makes sense to be open to the miraculous, because not only the

testimony of scripture but of many persons throughout history is that miracles happen.

The psalm we read today says “don’t put your trust in princes but in God,” and

points out that God is champion of the vulnerable. In our government, which is dictated by

our desires, it is our own limitations in the end which prevent our achieving a better life for

ourselves and everyone else. Human power goes only so far; and the power of God

remains, to achieve what we hardly can believe.

The two raisings of widows’ sons in the Bible prefigure the resurrection of Jesus. He

is a widow’s son himself. God’s mercy and compassion are not offered only to Mary, but

to the world. The loss of Jesus’ love, his righteousness, his mercy, his wisdom, his

willingness to suffer in order to do others’ good, would be so much for us all to bear. It

would seem as though the way Jesus encourages us to go were a dead end.

That it is not a dead end is a matter for faith. We who believe that God raised Jesus

Christ from the dead believe that all of us likewise are offered resurrection, not by virtue of

our nature, but by virtue of God’s compassion and power. We believe that we belong in

that circle of those who know the limits of this life, and the trials of mortality, just like the first

disciples Jesus called, ordinary people subject to all the vicissitudes of mortal existence–

but joined with a Lord who promises us something more. That’s the connection we

celebrate at the table of communion, where the vulnerable are supported by a Lord who

triumphs through self-sacrifice, where tokens of his life are given and received

To read sermons from past years, hit the “View All” link beneath the “This Week’s Sermon”

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.

Sermon for Sunday, May 30, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg

Sharing the Glory

Psalm 8; Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31; Romans 5: 1-5

Someone pointed out that British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who died in 1970 at

the age of 98, would have had an I.Q. of about a hundred at his death. This was a poke at

the whole idea of I.Q., which gives a ratio of physical age to mental age. Russell, who

boasted an intelligence quotient of 180 as a younger man, lived long enough that he could

hardly be considered precocious at the end. He’d finally achieved that potential the early

flourishing of which credited him with such brilliance. He might have been almost as smart at

forty-five as he was at ninety, and so close to an I.Q. of two hundred at that point–but by

the time he was ninety, if he was as smart as he should have been at ninety, his I.Q. would

have been a hundred. This observation about Russell reminds us that we begin our lives

as all potential and no achievement, and conclude our lives as all achievement and no

potential.

Nobody looks wiser than a baby. When a baby isn’t bawling or burbling, when it is

solemn, it looks as if it had the mysteries of life comprehended. Everybody’s baby strikes

one with wonder, and Garrison Keillor’s familiar joke about the children of Lake Woebegone

all being above average has its experiential truth. When Psalm Eight says, “out of the

mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence

the enemy and the avenger,” it credits the murmuring of babies with great power.

This is true to that adult intuition that there is something profound in the wonder

evident in a brand-new consciousness, and it nicely joins with the wordless witness of all

kinds of marvels fresh from God’s hand–the heavens, the moon, the stars. The Psalm

celebrates God’s majesty, God’s sovereign glory, reflected in the mysterious

purposefulness of each of Creation’s parts, and the suggestive sense-making of Creation

as a whole. It is wonderful, and what is most wonderful to the writer of the psalm is that we

human beings are established by God with such powers ourselves–not only are our infant

voices made by God into a guard against God’s foes, but our more mature capacities are

enlisted to organize and oversee all the other creatures God has made.

The great paradox of natural religion–the intuitive response to the beauty of sunsets

or the solemn grandeur of wilderness–is that it makes people feel small and large at the

same time. The agelessness of dawn, the immensity of mountains, the intricacy of the

flower of even the smallest plant, at once reveal us as confused and passing creatures, and,

by our being reasoning witnesses to it all, masters of this domain. God is inferred from

experience of the world, and this God of Creation is the first way we know the divine.

The way our consciousness engages the significance of Creation, the magisterial

intimate knowledge of the workings of the world. When you study religion you are

reminded not to make the mistake of anthropomorphism, not to make God in the image of

yourself or other human beings. Conceiving of God as a bearded giant with a burning eye,

supernaturally superintending Creation, is regarded as folkloric and mythic and natural, but

wrongheaded. It is inadequate, it is childish, perhaps–but it has the wisdom of all

anthropomorphism, that where we see evidence of purpose and passion, we see

something of ourselves.

The Bible personifies this combination of divine and human insight into the nature of

things as Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, and later as The Word of God Made Flesh in

the gospel of John. In both, it is a mediating and a saving source of human beings being

enabled to choose what God intends. The intelligence with which God brought everything

into being is not only to be inferred by observation and experiment, but God offers it

directly. In Proverbs it is offered to those who thirst after wisdom, by the call to become

suitors of wisdom. In John’s gospel is it offered to those who desire to become children of

God, by recognizing in Jesus Christ the One Sent by God to change the nature of

everything and everyone through resurrection.

Perhaps the motif of the Word of God which begins the gospel of John is now

taught in schools by reference to the readings we had today from Proverbs. It wasn’t

emphasized when I was a student, and I don’t know why, since the personified Wisdom of

Proverbs Eight has so much in common with the Word “without which nothing was made

that was made.” Listen again to the revelation of an active partner in creation made before

anything else and making everything else, from Proverbs eight: “I was set up as the first,

before the beginning of the earth.” “When he established the heavens I was there.”

“When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master

worker, and I was daily his delight.”

This strain of thinking in the Biblical tradition is the source of John’s theology of Jesus

as the Word which was from the Beginning. This is the link between the Creator God and

the Christian experience of Jesus as the Son. The human being Jesus of Nazareth is also

recognized as God’s timeless agent of achieving God’s purposes, and Christ’s bringing

into being a new creation through his life, death, and resurrection is seen as analogous to the

very first creation. Humanly speaking, in terms of John’s gospel, Jesus presents himself as

an emissary and an exemplar of God, but believers, upon his resurrection, recognize him

also as God made flesh.

This itself is a further revelation of the special nature of human beings. The puzzle

which mystifies and delights the author of Psalm Eight–which is how we can be part of

Creation and above Creation at the same time–is made a little clearer. God is, after all,

something like us–his creativity has its counterpart in his comprehending things in Words–

so that our own faculty for naming and the sense we make in our speaking have a true

The God who creates and the God revealed in Jesus Christ give us two of the three

traditional persons of God, two-thirds of the Trinity. The third person of the Trinity, the third

manifestation experienced by the early Church of the one God, is the Holy Spirit. Again,

just as the Word of God way of thinking about Jesus derived from what we saw in

Proverbs about wisdom, the Holy Spirit is not new. The Bible’s faith has long experience

of God’s spirit interacting with and affecting Creation.

So there is continuity with the Old Testament’s One God, even though Christian

thinking identifies three persons in the One God. Jesus is identified with the Wisdom with

which God conceives reality. The Holy Spirit is identified with the motivating energy

informing God’s works. The Spirit was at Creation along with the establishing Word, and

the Spirit shows up again and again to encourage people and guide their actions. Prophets

know the power of the Spirit, which is a deeper, more holy variation on the very breath of

God which animates human beings, according to the creation story in Genesis Two, when

God breathes Adam into life from the elements of the earth.

The Holy Spirit is not new with Christianity. It is distinguished in Christianity by being

regarded as part of a believer’s identity. Everyone who has faith in Christ has that faith in

part by gifts of the spirit, and further gifts of the spirit with which to live out that faith. Faith

itself is spiritual, and your spirit and my spirit can overcome great difficulties and achieve

great heights by the inspiration we receive from God.

What Paul has to say in Romans–about our having peace with God through faith in

Christ, and with that faith a willingness to regard our own suffering as acceptable and

constructive, relies on trust in the reality of the spirit and its power. The Holy Spirit permits

us to endure suffering, and to make of that endurance character, and with that character to

hope. The Holy Spirit enables us to regard that hope as certain and sufficient, and so not to

be disappointed–neither disappointed in our faithful attendance upon God’s deliverance,

nor disappointed in the end by God.

When Paul writes to the church at Rome about the power of faith in Christ and the

role the spirit has in making our faith real, he is not writing as a theologian as much as he is as

a believer. He has suffered, but endured, and he hopes. He regards, as we know from

another of his letters, present sufferings as nothing compared with God’s sure and

bounteous deliverance. He is a thinker, a parser of paradoxes and a player with traditions,

a rabbi by instinct as well as instruction–but he is a believer in Jesus Christ more than any

of those things. He knows that believers need encouragement, because he has needed

encouragement, and he knows that faithful living has to find a way to embrace the suffering

which is our common lot, and so he writes what he does. May the God further revealed in

Christ grant you such faith by the spirit that you yourself may live the life God gives you

graciously, counting on the wisdom and kindness of your Creator, and strengthened by

finding your own mortal powers supported by God’s breathing into you all the gifts you

need to be God’s person, through Jesus Christ Our Lord, Amen.

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Sermon for Sunday, May 23, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg

Not on My Own Authority

Acts of the Apostles 2: 1-21; Romans 8: 14-17; John 14: 8-17

When I get to the local cell phone store the woman is already serving a customer, an

older guy with gray hair and glasses. She’s explaining something to him–it seems like he is

trying to set up a new account or a new phone or something. She sets him at a table and

tells him to enter some numbers and excuses herself to come wait on me.

She is on the computer asking me questions and things, and we both overhear the

old guy in the rear of the room sounding baffled. She looks over. “What’s the matter?” she

asks, and the guy sheepishly–because he seems like a nice man and he knows it’s my

turn–admits that he can’t do this programming thing. So she calls out to him, to coach him,

and asks, “What’s your PIN?” The man looks up and says “Nineteen fifty-six.”

“Nineteen fifty-six?!” I think to myself. This old guy’s a year younger than I am. I

look at him more carefully, trying to notice how young he really looks, how relatively unlined

his face is, and another customer comes in. This is a man about our age, I’ll say now. His

hair’s thin on top but still dark, his face is deeply lined, he’s wearing glasses. She tells him

she’ll be with him soon, and she and I get through most of our business, but I still have a

few questions but think, “Hey, I sort of interrupted that other guy when I got here, and I can

wait a few minutes while she takes care of this man”–because he says it’s a billing question

and I reason that it can’t take forever. And it doesn’t take forever, but yet another man

comes in in the meantime. He’s young-looking, trim and wiry, and wears his hair just a little

long, but it’s all gray. He’s no kid either, and I don’t get a chance to see what’s going on with

him because it’s my turn again, and he is still there when I leave.

I’ve noticed something by now. The place doesn’t have any customers who aren’t

middle-aged, at least not most of the time. The generation for whom cell phones and all that

stuff is second-nature doesn’t do business like this, they go on line–probably from their

phone–and make decisions and purchases and get the information they need. That works

for them. They speak a language of symbols and abbreviations and numbers which

doesn’t make sense to me, or to the guy born in 1956, and all the gray-haired guys who are

taking advantage of this new technology still go to a physical place and speak with a human

being face-to-face. That’s how communication happens for us. The nice lady at the cell

phone store speaks our language.

The miracle in the Pentecost story is about people from all over the world

discovering that the good news of Jesus Christ is in their language. It gets communicated to

them, it reaches them, the message makes it across that barrier of strangeness and being

foreign and they’re given the opportunity to believe.

have this wrong, but if I do, I think most people have it wrong. The people who call

themselves “Pentecostals” because they speak ecstatically in a moment of spiritual

enthusiasm seem focused on the speaking. The phenomenon of tongue-trilling and

vocalizing unintelligible torrents of sound is an authentic sign of spiritual transport, known in

Islam and other traditions as well as in Christianity, and maybe that’s what it sounded like in

the room with those disciples at the first Pentecost.

That, however, is not the miracle. The miracle of the first Pentecost is not for the

disciples and it’s not to the disciples. It’s given to the passersby who encounter the event,

and it is for them. Each of them hears, in his own language, the good news of what God has

accomplished. That’s the point of Pentecost. Pentecost is about the revelation of God in

Jesus Christ bursting the bonds of particular time, place, culture and custom and finding its

way, by God’s supernatural intervention, to a wide world of those among whom the

disciples have gathered. It’s not really about the speaking so much as it is about the

hearing. It is the hearing which God achieves, by a miracle.

We know that the sudden speaking of the disciples wasn’t a matter of this one

speaking that person’s language and the next one over speaking this person’s language,

matching speakers inside to hearers outside one-to-one. Then the miracle would be one of

focus, of each stranger’s ability to distinguish the words he understood from all the ones he

couldn’t understand. There are others present who hear what’s going on as ravings, as

babblings, as senseless excitement. Those are the people whom Peter addresses

afterward, the people who can only think that the men making that uproar are drunk.

Some of that crowd will be converted secondhand by the miracle combined with

Peter’s preaching. Those aren’t the same people, however, who immediately get the

message of salvation, and who are so astonished at hearing the good news of Jesus Christ

come to them the way it does that they ask, “How is it that each of us hears in his own

language?” How indeed? It is the power of God to overcome obstacles and defy

reasonable expectations which connects those individual souls from all over the world with

the salvation accomplished for them by God.

We don’t need to read this story and get distracted by thinking about speaking in

tongues. We need to read this story and see that what God does is take advantage of

disciples gathering together, and people with an interest in God–because all these

outsiders are interested enough in God to have made long pilgrimages to Jerusalem for a

festival–in order to bless the people who are looking for God. The disciples are even

made to look foolish–people think they have been drinking and it’s midmorning–but that

doesn’t matter. Foolish-looking disciples, disciples who aren’t making much sense in human

terms, disciples who don’t know what they’re doing–God can still use them to bless people

outside the building who want to be blessed by God.

Does that make it more clear that there’s a miracle at work? When we think of it in

together, forming a congregation to mark a holy day, does Pentecost become more

astonishing? When we gather we know it does us good. It’s good to worship God and

keep our perspective by recognizing that we aren’t the greatest power there is, and keep

up our hope because we remember that God loves us. It’s good for us to encourage one

another by showing up, and showing that it’s important to attend to God–to reinforce the

damped-down flame of faith which has sent some soul to worship, who draws strength from

the faithfulness of others at worship. That does us good.

There may even be some mystical sense in which outsiders, passersby, people at

a distance are encouraged by believers getting together to believe together. A bigger

miracle comes at Pentecost, and that is that God outgrows the old holy day and God

outgrows the old holy people and God finds a way to reach people where they need to

be reached. Believers show up and God does the rest, and to some of you that may not

sound very responsible but it gives me hope. God is responsible, after all. That’s one of

the things which we believers who show up believe.

The reading from John’s gospel is about Jesus promising the Holy Spirit to the

disciples, and that involves miracles again. Jesus’ followers will perform miracles, those

who pray in the name of Jesus will get astonishing results, and again it is a matter of

miracles, of exceptions God makes to the way things usually go. God overrides the

common pattern of creation for God’s purposes, and the part the disciples seem to have in

that is merely to be receptive to God’s spirit. In other words, the disciples in John’s gospel,

just like the disciples in the book of Acts, become the occasion for God to do something

God wants which is something the disciples couldn’t do at all on their own.

God’s spirit is at work in the world. Even Jesus, in John’s gospel, is careful to

distinguish his own efforts, his own initiative, from what God is doing. He’s doing what God

wants, saying what God wants said. He does not act on his own authority–as the leader

and model for disciples he makes it clear that God has a way for the world to be, and it is

the part of those who take Christ’s part– it is us to us disciples–to accept that God will work

through us. That doesn’t give us much control to command, but neither does it give us much

power to prevent. The gift of discipleship is humble trust, and steady effort, and the payoff

for God is sometimes–in God’s time–for miracles to occur, which witness to who God is

and what God has done. Even what Jesus says in John’s gospel, which sounds like a

guarantee that we’ll get all we want through prayer, primarily is aimed at how our surprising

and surpassing works, and our faith in prayer, testify to the goodness and greatness of

God.

We would like to control the spirit, and the popularity of Pentecostalism for some

people must have to do with the joy of being able to elicit evidence of a divine world. The

true message of Pentecost, however, is that God’s spirit goes where it will, to achieve what

God intends, and that God can use even our weakness and confusion to put the spirit to

work, provided that we continue to meet together in response to our faith in God.

To read sermons from past years, hit the “View All” link beneath the “This Week’s Sermon”

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Sermon for Sunday, May 16, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg

All One

Psalm 97, Revelation 22: 12-14; John 17: 20-26

There is an open space above this sanctuary, between the ceiling above you and

the roof. It has catwalks across it and access to the chandeliers for raising and lowering them,

and that’s the path which will take you up into the tower and steeple. There’s a long, steep

stair up to that area, behind and above the wall to my right. When you take the stairs, the

street side wall is off-white plaster, and along its top are plaster moldings, at regular

intervals, painted brown. They are part of the original interior wall of the sanctuary, and its

being where it is serves as a reminder, for the older members among us, and as news, for

the newer members, that the sanctuary of the church before its remodeling in 1963

extended further back in this direction than the sanctuary does now.

There are lots of survivals into the present of things connected with a past reality

which no longer exists except as a lingering trace. Many of us have scars which mark where

we once were injured but have healed. We use expressions which refer to what once was

commonplace but which no longer obtains, like “lock, stock, and barrel” meaning a totality,

based on the type of gun used a century and a half ago. In the home in which I grew up

there was a plate fixed to the wall where a stove pipe once had entered a chimney. We

don’t take much notice of any of these things, the vestiges of old construction or the halfforgotten

origins of common sayings, because they have continued into the present in

ways which don’t draw attention to themselves.

Scripture doesn’t only influence experience, and shape history, but itself has been

influenced by experience, and has a history. We usually read devotionally. The most

important thing said by today’s psalm is that there is no other being as mighty as God, and

that God will prevail over anything which might present itself as opposed to God. From

that broad assertion we, who live in the presence both of God and of evils of all kinds, can

trust God to overcome what is wrong. Psalms are not written to be history, but to be

illuminated by God’s Spirit for the benefit of faithful hearts. That’s the reward of faithful

reading.

Psalms still have a history. Today’s psalm reveals a stage of reflecting upon God

midway between the folk-tale depiction of the God who strolled around Eden, surprised to

notice, when he bumped into them, that Adam and Eve were dressed, and the exalted and

ethereal God we meet in the New Testament. The New Testament God has been freed

by the Divine’s incarnation in Jesus Christ to have an essence beyond mortal

comprehension, and is hinted at by assertions like “God is love” or “God is Spirit and Truth.”

More to the point, for this sermon, is the fact that the New Testament God is the only God

principalities”–by which Paul encompasses all spiritual realities which may also exist–there

is no other God at all. The commandment to have no other Gods before the God of the

Biblical tradition has to take on a poetic sense, and idolatry has to be understood as a

matter of misplaced faith, because by the time the New Testament is written, Judaism has

settled on monotheism as a core belief.

Today’s psalm shows us this was not always the case. The God of the devout Jew

is a great king above all gods. By the time of Isaiah the prophet the gods of foreign

peoples will be dismissed as no more than the statues representing them, and Isaiah will

ridicule the idea that people worship man-made objects. When Psalm 97 is written,

however, the way God is conceived is that there is no better God than the God of the

Jews, and the Jews’ God is, in a way probably not realized by other peoples, the chief of

all the deities that there are. Other gods as spiritual beings, however, are regarded as real,

if inferior and forbidden.

Most of us know that polytheism is a system of having lots of gods, and

monotheism is the belief that there is only one God. What we meet in Psalm 97, the

instance of our God’s being thoroughly more important, powerful, and effective than all the

other gods that there are, is called henotheism. Other gods haven’t faded away entirely,

which will happen with monotheism–they just have become inadequate rivals or

superfluous servants of the Most High God.

Jewish religion differs from other ancient faiths in that it doesn’t think of time as circular.

The logic of time beginning at a point in the past and continuing forward is implicit in what I’m

saying about how God is presented at different points in the development of our faith. We

regard it as progress that people outgrew thinking about God walking around or worrying

about heaven being invaded by a really high tower, and came to know God in more

sophisticated ways.

Jewish faith, perhaps because of its prejudices about the linear nature of time, lends

itself to attention to the past and the future. It is historical, and in its history it tries to grasp

and project its future. God becomes a God of promises, who eventually delivers on

promises, and each instance of salvation becomes a new basis for hope.

It is not surprising, given the Bible’s notion of time, that the form our Bible has come

to take is that it has a beginning and an ending. It doesn’t just have a beginning and ending

because books must start and conclude somehow. Genesis is about the origin of

everything, and Revelation is about the end of everything, and they frame between them

all the poetry, prophecy, history and theology of the Bible. The logic of the way the

Christian Bible is laid out is that however literally or figuratively you take it, Genesis

introduces the world we all live in, and however literally or figuratively you take it, Revelation

introduces the world we all have before us. God makes a moral judgment about Creation

at the start, and the final fate of everything likewise is in terms of good and evil being

I referred to other ancient religions conceiving reality as circular. The recurrence of the

seasons and the predictable pattern of so many parts of life encouraged them to think of

repetition as paramount, and variety as incidental. Life looked like a wheel, and its rolling

from the past into the future was seen as one long progress through many little cycles, with

death not a final end, but one more part of the pattern, to be repeated again in reincarnation.

We are familiar with that model of how the divine and human interact from faiths like

Hinduism and Buddhism, and we think of those as in some sense rival religions. I don’t

mean in terms of there being many adherents of them to disagree with us, but in terms of

the whole model of reality represented by that tradition. Creation as an endless round of

repeated realities is a very different take on experience than creation as a finite progress

from one stage to another.

You may know that in these Eastern traditions a goal is to escape the cycle, and one

can do this by such a degree of spiritual enlightenment that one partakes entirely of the holy

spiritual milieu in the midst of which souls continually recycle through their destinies. That’s a

way to break out of the unending alternation of lives, and unite with the divine.

I’m aware that this kind of talk is hard to follow, and I apologize. What I want to say is

that we have a religion which instinctively expects to develop into something better, and

we know we’ve done that because monotheism is more true than its predecessors. The

way improvement comes is for God to act, and introduce new versions of chosen peoples

and promised lands, each instance encompassing greater numbers and more perfect

places–so that all the peoples of the earth, at the end, have the possibility of a blissful

home with God, whether conceived as heaven on earth or in some kind of post-Judgment

Day future.

Whether that’s how you think about it or not, that’s the logic of this religion of ours.

But we share with the eastern faiths, with traditions like Hinduism, a weariness of the

between-time. In their case it’s because life tends to return to the starting point and go

through its old patterns. In our case it’s because God’s decisive deliverance can tend to

become long ago in the past and seem far away in the future. In both cases the problem is

now. How do we live with God when we have not yet achieved our ultimate end, when

we’re still on our way, whether we think of that way as a line toward the future or a turn of the

wheel? What do we do with our spiritual hunger, and our hope to be worthy of God, in the

midst of this life which now is ours?

That’s the business of Jesus’ prayer for the disciples which we have in today’s

gospel. Jesus prays that disciples can be part of him, as he is part of God, already. It is not

a matter of escaping a trajectory or arriving at an end– it is a way of solving the problem of

being neither here nor there by becoming different wherever we are–becoming connected

intimately in the spirit to the source of our lives. Being one with Christ is a deliverance from

the tyranny of time, and since it is Christ’s prayer for us, we all may hope for moments of

on us, but that we may breathe each moment with God living within us and giving us life

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Sermon for Sunday, May 9, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg

By This

Psalm 148, Acts of the Apostles 11: 1-18; John 13: 31-35

This was told to me as a true story by someone I trust, so I’ll tell it. Back some

years, when racism was reinforced by the local culture of large areas of the United States, a

Protestant church down south had decided to challenge itself to exceptional effort in its

international mission support. It committed itself to funding a school in Africa, and was

enthusiastic in its promotion of the project. A man who had been an outstanding student of

the school had an opportunity to visit America, and the church began to prepare to

welcome him and celebrate the school and its influence with him. You know where this story

is going–the people on the U. S. side of things had different information and expectations

about timing and arrangements than the African had, so that he arrived weeks before

anyone knew to look for him, and found the church, and went in on a Sunday morning to join

in the worship. This was in an era when persons with African ancestry weren’t welcome in

that church, and so the people who greeted him explained that he would be happier

attending a different church service.

See, in the abstract, this man was a brother in Christ who was being elevated, by

their efforts and their Christian sharing, to a deeper understanding of the world and richer

opportunities in it. Face to face, however, he looked like people to whom they felt obliged

to condescend, and the inspiring notion of foreign good deeds ran afoul of the unnoticed

routine of a daily life which ran counter to the principles of Christ.

Well, whether that story is exactly accurate–and it can’t be, since I’m relating it from

memory, anyway, but the gist is right–I’ll tell you something I am sure is true. I know it is

true that every church which sends money to support a missionary somewhere else trusts

the person on that end to put the money to good use for God’s purposes. That missionsupporting

church feels good about its contribution, and all its thinking about the people in

that mission field comes from what it knows about God. They accept that all those unseen

and unknown strangers are persons of value who are being blessed by a closer

acquaintance with the gospel being made real to them through preaching or the witness

implicit in medical care or teaching or development efforts. In other words, there is a concern

for the well being of the stranger far away, and acceptance of the need to ask oneself to

make an effort to benefit that person, though no benefit to self could be expected in return.

Nobody from abroad has to show up to reveal that those principles don’t hold within

the little church itself. This person isn’t on good terms with that person because of a tactless

comment overheard at a church dinner; that person has an uncomfortable relationship with

this other person due to a difference which surfaced in a business meeting. That one’s

decision hurt this one’s feelings, the effort of those two to mend fences didn’t entirely

got settled, this sibling resents that sibling’s apparently favored status.

Not that any of it has to be a big deal. We live, all our lives, with petty annoyances

and small criticisms. The passage of time alone suffices to mend ruptured relationships well

enough that people may at first be civil and eventually be cheerful together again. My

point is, however, that the imagined beneficiary of our Christian charity a thousand miles

away never challenges us the way the person does who sits with us in the sanctuary, and

the measure of self-sacrifice which we make contributing to the relief of faceless victims of

floods and earthquakes is not half so demanding as our efforts to be patient, helpful, and

nonjudgmental with regard to the needier people whom God has introduced into the pattern

of our everyday lives.

In John’s gospel Jesus addresses a problem his disciples will have with his

transformation from a human leader looking them in the eye into an eternal leader

experienced through the spirit. All the sense of companionship and ordinary sympathy and

ongoing human engagement which Jesus of Nazareth has been providing will remain

available in a spiritualized form after resurrection, but the disciples will go on living in the

world of flesh-and-blood. For flesh-and-blood partners on the pilgrimage of life, for visibly

responsive companionship to signal interest and understanding, to offer encouragement

and usefully to question, they will henceforth have each other. In the absence of each

disciple being upheld and affected by the love of a Jesus able to put an arm around them,

they now will put their arms around each other.

Jesus commands them to love one another. We don’t usually regard love as

something able to be commanded, or something we can provide on demand. That’s why

this solution Jesus offers to his going away from his disciples often strikes us as a problem

rather than as a benefit. We, who at least some of the time don’t do a good job of loving

the people we really do love, the people who really do mean the most to us–find it

daunting to believe that we are required to love people whose claim on us consists entirely

in also having committed themselves to Christ.

And that’s not like fine print, like suddenly we’re going to say “Oh, yes, anyone who

really is committed to Christ–who’s all about self-sacrifice and service and love and

forgiveness and all that I’m willing to love”, and point out that the ordinary, everyday fellow

believers we may know don’t fully qualify, so we can continue to respond to them exactly

as our everyday instincts instruct. No; we are to extend the same benefit of the doubt

about their status of discipleship that Christ, in his mercy and incarnational insight, gives us.

That person who prays by my side, Christ requires me to love. That may not be reflected

in my emotional reactions. I may not be smitten with the person. My actions, however,

must show that I value that other person and intend by God’s help to do them as much

good as possible, including demonstrating that interest in their well-being by paying kind

attention to them.

whom we may not know than to love those near at hand because I wanted to anticipate the

objection that God wants us to love all persons equally. Reminding ourselves that the

apostle, for example, said that insofar as it was within our power we were to do good to all,

and especially to those of the household of faith–in other words, loving everyone but

especially making sure to love our fellow believers–might seem to undermine the duty to

love all persons. I think this merely acknowledges that, as it is more demanding to love

those in church with us than those more distant, we must make the greater effort. We would

do well to have as benign and devoutly-inspired attitude toward our fellow worshiper as we

have toward the anonymous recipient of our overseas mission dollars.

Jesus’ command to us disciples to love our fellow disciples, and by the powerful

testimony of managing to love the people we live with, to demonstrate our discipleship to

Christ, may seem to run counter to the aim of universal benevolence. That’s why it’s useful

to have this teaching joined to the psalm and to the episode from the book of Acts, both of

which have to do with extending to the world the call to worship God.

The psalm celebrates how every creature, from an angel to a plant, shares in the

universal adoration of its maker. Somewhere below the category of natural phenomena

and vegetation we learn that foreign kings and foreigners also give praise to God, and that’s

a reminder that there is an element of willfulness and wrong-headedness possible with

human beings of which the rest of Creation is innocent. Even with that, we get to everyone

in the psalm. Everyone comes around to acknowledge the authority of God.

The incident from Acts combines the themes of the whole world’s belonging to God

and the requirement that disciples take shared experience as a compelling motive to stand

by other persons, no matter who they are, who trust in the gospel. The apostle Peter,

contrary to his instincts and expectations, eventually is coerced by God’s leading into

making disciples of a household of non Jews. “Gentiles” is the category of “everyone else”

in the world, when it comes to a relationship with God. So it’s not just surprising that it’s

whatever tribe and language represented by Cornelius, the Roman officer and the origins

of his retainers and slaves and relatives by marriage–who have been admitted to Christian

discipleship. They represent the whole world, potentially.

Why do the other apostles accept what Peter has done? It’s not because of the

authority of Peter. It’s because the household of Cornelius gives every sign of having

come to belief the same way the Jewish Christians did. “So God has made the promise of

new life available even to Gentiles!” they say, and because these people now are, in fact,

their fellow disciples, they are forced to accept them. On one level, the Bible’s belief is that

all creatures do, in fact, share in the worship of the One True God. On another level, our faith

believes that, because God does love everyone, and desires to give fullness of life to all,

we need to share discipleship with others. Once people believe, then we must count on

God’s spirit and our own humility and perfectibility to help us to love them most of all,

because Christ requires us, who live with them in this world, to be there for them.

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